Sabbath Stories

Mark 2:23-3:6; Deuteronomy 5:12-15

June 3, 2017

What do you do to make yourself feel at peace? Rested? Reinvigorated? Centered?

We’re substituting some personal stories for the traditional time of confession in these early days of the season of Pentecost for several reasons:

One, it’s sometimes good to twist our rituals free from traditional foundations to enliven the rituals and our worship.

Two, it’s almost always good to share stories because that’s how we build relationships, and a community is only as strong as the relationships that bind it.

Three, stories are also part of our confession. That is to say, we speak deep truths about ourselves through the stories we tell of our lives. Our lives speak our truth, and confession is nothing more than telling the truth about ourselves. So, in fact, we haven’t “ditched the confession” at all.

So, this morning, I invite you to think about that first question I posed: what do you do to make yourself feel at peace? Rested? Reinvigorated? Centered?

It may be that it’s something different for each of those, or one thing that captures it all. If it’s different things, pick one. As Dan plays a brief meditation, I invite you to think about this practice and ask yourself, “how is this prayer for me?”

I want to share a poem with you that spoke to me as I was thinking about this conversation. I think it spoke to me because I know that many folks are so steeped in the old Protestant work ethic that sometime we have a hard time embracing practice that feels unproductive. This poem is called Camas Lilies. It was written by Lynn Ungar:

Consider the lilies of the field,
the blue banks of camas opening
into acres of sky along the road.
Would the longing to lie down
and be washed by that beauty
abate if you knew their usefulness,
how the natives ground their bulbs
for flour, how the settlers’ hogs
uprooted them, grunting in gleeful
oblivion as the flowers fell?
And you—what of your rushed
and useful life? Imagine setting it all down—
papers, plans, appointments, everything—
leaving only a note: “Gone
to the fields to be lovely. Be back
when I’m through with blooming.”
Even now, unneeded and uneaten,
the camas lilies gaze out above the grass
from their tender blue eyes.
Even in sleep your life will shine.
Make no mistake. Of course
your work will always matter.
Yet Solomon in all his glory
was not arrayed like one of these.

Of course your work will matter … and yet. Consider the lilies who neither toil nor spin. Beauty, perhaps, is enough. Perhaps just considering beauty is enough without even the work of creating it. I don’t know. There’s still so much to sort out.

I sorted much of this service out last Thursday morning during a short run. Running is a practice that leaves me feeling at peace, reinvigorated, and centered, if not rested. Personally, I think bodies in motion are beautiful to behold. Thus, there is some sense in which running is going to the fields to be lovely. Running is prayer for me sometimes, and sometimes it’s just running.

It’s prayer for me when I am intentional about making it so. Those times I will leave the iPod at home and set out with nothing but the sound of my own breathe and whatever noises intrude along the trail. Those times I run with the intention of connecting with the Spirit, of listening for that still, small voice, and of working out whatever needs working out in order to engage the world with the fullness of whatever gifts I may bring.

Running is Sabbath time for me.

I forget that far more often than I care to admit. I forget it because I don’t actually enjoy running. Oh, I do like how I feel when I quit running. But in all the thousands of miles I have run in my life I can probably count a total of maybe 50 when I felt, while actually running, any deep joy in the activity itself.

However, running remains, after all these years, the single best way for me to feel energized and to keep depression’s dark shadow from my door. I cannot do what I feel called to do in the world without energy and the emotional inclination to engage the wider world – which is the opposite of depression for me.

That is what Sabbath is for: preparing us and enabling us to use what gifts we have for the sake of the wider world. We engage Sabbath practices in order to engage the powers and principalities when they lose track of children, when they fail to promote the general welfare of all persons, when they mock and obstruct the notion of justice itself.

That’s the point that Jesus is trying to make when the religious authorities attack him for healing a person on the Sabbath. It’s the same point he made in the Sermon on the Mount about prayer.

We don’t practice religious rituals for the sake of the ritual or for the sake of some sense of individual piety. We practice them because they reinvigorate us – literally, they give us life. That life has purpose, and the text from Mark makes that purpose clear, as well: healing, wholeness, the good of humankind.

If ritual or practice ceases to do this, it’s time for some a change. If ritual or practice gets in the way of this, it’s time for a reformation.

I’m sure that the ritual of coming to table sometimes feel like deep prayer and sometimes feels like an empty rite. I invite you into it today, open to the possibility that this table can be for you and for others a site of healing, wholeness, and the good of humankind.

Like the Sabbath, this we were not made for the table, the table was made for us – all of us. And that’s who’s invited to sup here: all of us.