Come away to a deserted place and rest a while

May I speak in the name of the One God, Speaker, Word and Breath. Amen

I’ve heard today's gospel reading described as a white bread sandwich with the tasty filling removed! Those with keen ears may have noticed that in-between Jesus having compassion for the crowd, and then jumping out of a boat we didn’t know he was in, we should have had 2 of Jesus’ most famous miracles; the feeding of the 5000 and walking on water.

The miraculous is removed and we’re left with the ordinary (well, we do have a bit of healing at the end, but a basic level healing of the sick I suppose is pretty routine for Jesus and the 12 by this point).

There’s plenty of stories which get repeated year upon year as we jump from Gospel to Gospel, getting each of the evangelists’ take on the life of Jesus, but its another 2 years before these miracles appear again in the cycle of Sunday readings. What are those who devised the cycle urging us to concentrate on here?

I’d like to take a quick poll of the congregation, and I’d like you to be honest. Who is tired? Who is feeling weary, or beyond weary. Hands up, don’t be shy….

Yeah….me too! I think about 75% of adulting is saying “I’m tired”. If you come across a fellow adult who isn’t weary it almost feels suspicious! I do try and make a conscious effort in church to not say I’m tired but I fail every time.

I don’t ever want to give the impression of a world-weary priest who’s always busy and doesn’t have time for my St Michael’s family but I’ve utterly failed at that because people thinking I’m super busy is pretty much 80% of my conversations. So I come to apologise for that as I’m not sure, if we look at our reading from Jeremiah, if that’s the way a good shepherd should be leading their flock. But it is the reality in the ordinariness of our lives.

Jesus recognises this in the disciples. He sees their weariness and leads them, or at least tries to lead them, to a place of rest. They’d had no down time, no time to eat and he knew they needed to take some time to recover if they were going to be of any use in ministering to others. Unfortunately, they didn’t get the opportunity for rest as the crowds found them, but the important take away is that recognition that rest was needed, not just for the disciples but for Jesus too. This isn’t the only time we see Jesus seeking rest away from the crowds so he can quiet his mind and truly feel rested, prayerful and connected to God.

We concentrate so often on Jesus as Word, as Christ, as our miraculous God incarnate, but I love to contemplate human, fleshy Jesus, and flesh, our bodies, become tired, and overwhelmed.

Self-care has become an important term in our modern world and within my work as a nurse and chaplain recognising burnout or compassion fatigue in my colleagues is a key skill.

We can’t be compassionate practitioners or ministers if we don’t first care for our own needs. Part of my work is helping others to recognise what they need to care for themselves.

If we develop these skills early in our careers, we’re far more likely to develop resilience and positive coping strategies, leading to longer, happier careers and an increased sense of care-satisfaction. If any of you have been tended to by a health professional with compassion fatigue, or a burnt-out priest, it’s not a positive experience.

Hopefully some of you have read my introduction to this month’s newsletter, where I wrote about Sabbath and Sabbatical.

If we go back all the way make to the creation story, Humans were created on the 6^th day, and then we immediately are given the Sabbath day, we haven’t even done anything yet! God has woven Sabbath rest into creation and yet we are so bad at listening to God and to our own bodies on this matter.

And as humankind loves to create rules and structure we’ve made our Sabbath day into something where we do more. This is what Renita Weems has to say about Sabbath:

Once upon a time Sunday was a special day, a holy day, a day different from the other six days of the week…. This was a time when people like those I grew up with still believed that it was enough to spend six days a week trying to eke out a living, …

fretting over the future, despairing over whether life would ever get better for [us]. Six days of worrying were enough. The Sabbath was the Lord’s Day, a momentary cease-fire in our ongoing struggle to survive and an opportunity to surrender ourselves to the rest only God offered. Come Sunday, we set aside our worries about the mundane and renewed our love affair with eternity…. 

Sunday held out to us the promise that we might enter our tiny rough-hewn sanctuary and find sanctity and blessing from a week of loss and indignities. Remembering the Sabbath where I grew up involved delighting oneself for a full twenty-four hours, ultimately in good company, with fine clothes and choice meals.

 The Sabbath allowed us to mend our tattered lives and restore dignity to our souls. We rested by removing ourselves from the mundane sphere of secular toil and giving ourselves over fully to the divine dimension…We sang, waved, cried, shouted, and when we felt led to do so, danced as a way of restoring dignity to our bodies as well. We used our bodies to help celebrate God’s gift of the Sabbath. For the Sabbath meant more than withdrawal from labor and activity. It meant to consciously enter into a realm of tranquility and praise. 

Sunday was set aside to recultivate the soul’s appreciation for beauty, truth, love, and eternity.The Lord’s Day allows us to bring our souls, our emotions, our senses, our vision, and even our bodies back to God so that God might remember our tattered, broken selves and put our priorities back in order.. 

 

Incredibly powerful stuff. It shows us that Jesus-focused rest is far from ordinary or mundane, it’s a miracle within itself. A miracle where our very souls are healed.

But we’re realists, we know sometimes our experiences of worship can be transformative and transcendental, but that’s probably rare.

So I invite you to contemplate Weems’ words and discern for yourselves where you might carve out that sabbath experience in your own lives, where we can fully be with God in a restful and restorative way, because I believe if we can do this, and do it regularly, it can be transformative as we go out into the world, going about our lives, as Christ Followers and God seekers. I’m more than happy to talk to anyone about this, how we can try to find those sacred moments is the whirlwind of our lives.

This now brings us back to shepherds and flocks, Jesus recognising our need for rest and Huw’s looming sabbatical.

Hopefully some of what I’ve said this morning goes some way to explain why a sabbatical is needed, in order for a shepherd to be able to continue to lead their flock in a fruitful way. It’s a time, as Weems writes, of surrender and offering, a time when a priest can give themselves fully over to God,

to be renewed within their very soul, to be able to have the tools to continue to serve and minister as God intends.

As we contemplate Huw’s upcoming Sabbath time, I invite you to pray with me now.

Holy God, life giver, lover of souls, creator of all that is and all that will be, we give thanks for Huw and for the opportunity which Sabbatical offers. May he be rested and renewed by your Spirit in his mind, body and soul, and return to us filled with your love, light and grace.

We pray for ourselves, for our whole community, that we too may find Sabbath renewal and with it see more clearly your purpose for our lives, growing an ever-deeper love for you, your world, and its people.

In name of Jesus,

Amen.