I love summer time! I just got back from vacation. I love to go to the beach. Our family is not going to make it to the beach this year, but we did go swimming a lot on our vacation. I wonder what your favorite summer activities are. Not just for vacation, but even just around home, in your free time? What do you love about the summer?
One of the things I love going to outdoor concerts, and play that silly game where we toss around a beach ball, so I thought for fun we would re-create that right here in the Village Commons. It’s summer, right? So why not do something crazy?
So we played "Wade in the Water" and played with a beach ball, right there, in the middle of our worship celebration, right there in the Village Commons (a few coffee mugs got jostled, but no causalities). From time to time we stopped the music a few times and when the music stopped, the person holding the ball, (or hitting the ball) had to tell us one thing we love to do in the summer. We got great responses, camping, going to flea markets, swimming, going to concerts, etc.
I’m glad to be back with you. I was out of town for 12 days, mostly vacation. Becca will tell you a little bit of it was “church stuff.” We went to this Christian festival of music and art and justice called the “Wild Goose Festival” down in North Carolina. Kelly Rye and her husband Jamie were there too, along with about 1500 other people, camping! I did a workshop about church planting in urban settings with progressives. I heard some great speakers talk about how they live out their faith in the world. I met some interesting folks, and had some fun conversations.
There were many young adults at this event. It was so exciting seeing so many young people there talking about the environment, and poverty and other justice issues. People talked about following Jesus and changing the world. There were lots of folks who grew up evangelical and have now become more progressive in their theology. Do you remember those TV evangelists Jim and Tammy Bakker? Their son Jay Bakker is now an amazing young tattoo covered preacher in NYC with a passion for people who are living on the streets. He preaches in a bar, not a former bar like ours. His story was inspiring. I met others who are excited about planting progressive churches like we are here at The Village. And I spent time with friends, my friend Joy Wallis who I met back in 1985 when I had a year of study in England. Becca and I camped with my friend Karyn Wiseman with whom I have been friends since I was 15 years old.
I don’t know about you, but one of the ways I fill my spiritual well, is to be with old friends who have known me for a long time. We tell old stories. We compare notes about raising pre-teens. We encourage one another. It helps restore my soul to spend time with friends who have been with me through thick and thin. We connect on the phone or on Facebook, but face to face is the best. I don’t really need to go to exotic places for summer vacation. Visiting dear friends and reconnecting seems to be enough for me, to center myself, fill my well for another season of work.
After the Wild Goose Festival, Becca and I took a mother-daughter road trip. We had a few days to kill and a few miles to cross because there was a family wedding the next weekend in NYC. She had a goal of trying to swim every day. We visited friends in Durham, and she went swimming in their neighborhood pool. Then we visited friends from Toledo who had moved to a Maryland suburb of DC. Their new house has a pool so she went swimming there two days. We went in to the city of DC one day to do some site seeing, but it was REALLY hot, so we did a little people watching, and then went to visit a friend who lives in a high rise condo with a small pool on the rooftop. You get the theme here, right? Becca, like her mom, gets rejuvenated by water.
Then we went to NYC, where Kurt, Jamie and my mom met us for the big summer family wedding. Sadly, the hotel where we stayed in Brooklyn had no pool. The kids did not quite understand that we could not afford a hotel in NYC with a pool! But we had a great time in NYC, visiting the Statue of Liberty, the biggest toy store in the world on Times Square, and being with our family for the wedding festivities.
The kids had not seen one of their cousins in several years; Jamie did not even remember his cousin Sara. Family is important to us, so it was important for us to spend time with the cousins who are literally spread from coast to coast. Being with family, fills my well too. It gives us all a sense of belonging. I want my kids to have that sense of family. It’s important.
I came home rested and ready to get back to work. I saw lots of people I love. I got some time away from The Village, a needed to break to ponder some things, got some advice from friends who love the Village & support us from afar, and consider some next steps as we move forward. It was just what a vacation is supposed to be.
It was SABBATH. My 12 days away, was part of the truth of what I like to call “Sabbath Summer.” It’s that change of pace – that refueling – that thing we plan to do to keep our lives in balance. You see, we can’t wait until we need a break to take a break. We have to plan these little breaks, these vacations, these days off, these week-end get aways, these spa days, days trips, whatever, it takes for you. We have to set a schedule for ourselves, that sets balance in our lives. Because you see, if we do not SCHEDULE some balance, then our lives will spiral out of control.
We will get sick, or have accidents. Some folks, you know, are accident prone, and it’s often folks who do not know how to keep their lives in balance. They (or we, because I have been there at times) don’t keep our lives in a manageable rhythm, and so our bodies either get sick, or we have accidents. SOMETHING HAPPENS to slow us down (e.g. Kurt had to take a few days off due to overdoing it for a Village event).
Sabbath, is sort of the old, religious term. The new-fangled term for it is “self care.” Hmm… It’s funny. God created “self care” right there from the beginning of creation. In our text for today, (Leviticus 25:1-12 for those of you who are following along from afar) we read not about the seven days of creation and the seventh day being a day of rest, but we hear about a longer term view of this rhythm of Sabbath.
God spoke to Moses at Mount Sinai: "Speak to the People of Israel. Tell them, When you enter the land which I am going to give you, the land will observe a Sabbath to God. Sow your fields, prune your vineyards, and take in your harvests for six years. But the seventh year the land will take a Sabbath of complete and total rest, a Sabbath to God; you will not sow your fields or prune your vineyards. Don't reap what grows of itself; don't harvest the grapes of your untended vines. The land gets a year of complete and total rest. But you can eat from what the land volunteers during the Sabbath year—you and your men and women servants, your hired hands, and the foreigners who live in the country, and, of course, also your livestock and the wild animals in the land can eat from it. Whatever the land volunteers of itself can be eaten (Leviticus 25:1-12).
Even the land gets to rest!
Now that is a comprehensive plan for Sabbath. Here is why Sabbath is so important. We have to plan ahead for rest. We have to plan ahead for time to be still and put ourselves in God’s hands.
We human beings, you see, are prone to think that we are in control. Sabbath is a time to rest, and to remember that we are not in control. When you don’t plant seeds in the ground, you have to just rely on what naturally comes up from the ground, then you have to trust God, don’t you? You have to rely on God to give you food.
If we, could find a way not to work, one year out of seven, and just trust God to provide for our needs, wouldn’t that be amazing? Of course, for most of us, our lives are too complicated for that. We have way too many on-going financial obligations, to just take a year off work. Some professions, like university professors, and actually pastors, have some provisions, for a sabbatical from work every seven years, but it’s rare.
But wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could live out this biblical imperative and just rest from our labors one year out of seven and really just trust God to meet our material needs? That’s an ideal that is a pretty far reach for most of us. But here is something we can do.
We can still find Sabbath days. We can plan a rhythm to our lives, so that our spiritual wells can be filled. We can take our days off from work. We can take our vacation days, and use them, to rest. Not just to do more work, to shop, or make more money, but to have fun and do whatever it takes to restore our souls.
My former brother in law Larry, dazzled the oil company he was working for many years ago, by creating a planned maintenance program for the drilling rigs, for American companies in other countries. Until Larry became the person in charge of maintenance this is what they would do - they would run the drilling rigs, some off-shore platforms, and some on land, in this other countries like Peru. When something would break, they would have to order a part, usually from another country, and it would take a few days to get the rig up and running. That was lost days of production and lost money. Larry came in and had one of those new-fangled computers. He set up a schedule for replacing parts before they wore out. Sort of like you do scheduled maintenance on your car with your brakes and your tires. So the rigs never broke down. The executives in the office thought Larry was a genius! (We love Larry, but he thinks of himself as a good old boy from Texas, who listens to wisdom).
This is what God wants us to do with our spiritual lives. Take care of ourselves before we fall apart. You see, when a tragedy comes, if our spiritual well is empty, then it is too late to try to fill it up. You can’t start praying, after your partner comes to you and says: “I want a divorce,” or after the doctor says: “You have cancer.” We have to have an on-going maintenance program for our souls, so that when the crisis comes, we are not on our last ounce of spiritual oxygen. When I came back from vacation this week, to face the fact that we don’t really have any musicians lined up for most of the rest of the summer, I took it in stride. I was feeling pretty run down before vacation, but I came back ready to change the world with our ministry at The Village. I have been calling musicians all week. Mary (Shapiro our friend from Washington, DC) even called me while I was on vacation and ASKED if she could come here and play!
From the very beginning, God created a world with the rhythm of Sabbath rest. Jesus modeled this rhythm in his life and work. There are so many stories of him taking a break from the crowd to go to the other side of the lake to rest and pray. There are also great stories of him sitting by the well to talk to a woman or going to the home of Mary and Martha for a visit, much like I visited my friends this summer. I imagine Jesus sitting and talking to a friend like he had all the time in the world, not in a rush like most of us are when we are in work mode, but more in a Sabbath vacation mode, just sitting and chatting, and lingering over a second cup of coffee. He didn’t have a wrist watch or a smart phone or Ipad with calendars and alarms.
Our Sabbath Summer here at The Village is an invitation to stop and take a breath. We have a retreat next Saturday which is an invitation to stop for a few hours, in Swan Creek, to catch some Glimpses of God. The world is full of opportunities for us to claim our Sabbath. I hope you will. Sabbath is God’s gift to us. I hope we will all find ways to receive this gift of Sabbath.
Come join us next Saturday (please sign up if you can by contacting the church) to get a little of this Sabbath rest. If not, think about joining us, or another faith community like ours, and learn how to get that peace and rejuvenation from God.
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