Devotional Messages

DEVOTIONAL MESSAGE

Exodus 20:8-11 – Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy.  Six days you shall labor and do all your work.  But the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns.  For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it. (NRSV)

One of the ways the Bible teaches us to keep track of time is by counting our days of rest.  Every seventh day, the tradition insisted, you need to stop, to rest, to be still.  This tradition was expanded into other measurements – things that happened every seventh year, or the “year of Jubilee” that happened every 50 years when debts were forgiven.

As I was considering which scripture to use for this last devotional message before my seven-week leave, I thought about how I sang the words “I’m glad to go; I cannot tell a lie. I flit, I float, I fleetly flee, I fly” (from “So Long, Farewell”) at our Christmas program just before my “recent” sabbatical.  And then I remembered that was in 2017, which was almost ten years ago.  I’m not going to beat myself up for losing track of time, since there was a highly discombobulating global pandemic in the intervening years.  But it could be that we’d be better off if I’d been doing this a little more regularly.

I do know that when I do things that feel too much like “work” on Mondays (my regular, for-sure day off), it throws off my sense of what day it is for the rest of the week.  Rest is important.  God knows this about us.  It seems to me that God tells us that the sabbath is holy and we should take it easy every seven days, not mostly because God did, but because God understands how much we need that, and how unlikely we are to believe we need it.

While I’m gone, there won’t be as many meetings.  And there won’t be as many activities going on.  So I encourage you to spend some time in these next few weeks reflecting on how you can cultivate a rhythm of rest in your life, in such a way that it helps calibrate the rest of your time.  It is hard when there are so many demands on our time, so many little tasks to take care of, and people to tend to.  But maybe you can find at least a regular half-day that can be your breathing space, your re-set, your moment to remember that you are held in the arms of God.  Maybe it’s a weeknight when you commit to picking up dinner on the way home and then doing nothing but eating and resting for the rest of the night.

I am deeply aware of how privileged I am to be taking (the second-half of) my third sabbatical of my 24+ years of ministry.  I have colleagues who have never had this sacred gift of rest.  Because I’ve done this before, I know that it will inspire me to adjust my habits to ensure there is space and time for being human when I return to work.  But I also know that those adjustments are hard to hold onto after a while.  There is a reason the recommended schedule for sabbaticals is 3 months every 5 years.  It’s the same reason we come to church for worship every seven days: we need the re-set, because there is a lot working against us living at a human pace.

So thank you for this time!  And I pray it can be a blessing for you too.