Willow Creek Association - ServiceBuilder May 2007

Restless Leisure
It’s summer, and a good time to start. By which I mean, to stop. But as earth warms and sky shimmers, what’s needed is something besides the pursuit of mere leisure. What’s needed is Sabbath. My definition of Sabbath is simple: Imitating God in order to remember we’re not God. God was the first Sabbath-keeper, the first to step back from his work and simply relish in it without making more of it or brooding over it. And he invites us to go and do likewise. Leisure, on the other hand, is rest without God. We neither imitate God in our leisure nor remember we’re not him. That’s why so much of our leisure, whatever else it may be, is seldom restful. It’s seldom reposeful. It’s often as tiring as our work. Indeed, the very word we’ve chosen to describe our seasons of leisure reflects this: vacation. Meaning, to vacate, evacuate, create a vacuum. Vacations are not about being present and full. They’re about being absent and empty. So the re-pose and the repose I speak of is not mere leisure, not just an extended time at the lake cottage or more barbecues on the sun deck. Such things are fine, but such things can easily become a mere vacating, where the one thing needed is the one thing missing: God-centeredness. Sabbath is not just rest. Sabbath is reclining with Jesus.

Who Runs the World?
I wrote a book on Sabbath a few years ago. The book’s called The Rest of God: Restoring Your Soul by Restoring Sabbath. I was at pains, writing it, to avoid two things: a Pharisaical legalism, where the glory of Sabbath gets ground down to a dust-pile of rules; and a post-modernist vagueness, where the practicality of Sabbath gets lost amidst BLOG-like musings. Along the way I made several discoveries, both theological and personal, but this was the keystone: Sabbath-keeping is rooted in, and gives rise to, a conviction that God is sovereign. Either God is in control, or he’s not. If he’s not – if I am, or you are, or George Bush is, or the UN and the World Bank are – then who can rest? We ought to be worried, and very very busy. If matters are in the hands of anyone other than God (or in no one’s hands), then there is no rest, not just for the wicked, but for the righteous, too. There’s just no rest altogether. The only sensible pose in such a world is wariness and fretfulness and Mad Hatter franticness. Run , Rabbit, run, and watch your back, and sleep with one eye open, and keep one hand on your sword. If God be not God. But if God be God, then there’s time enough. If God be God, then in repentance and rest is our salvation, in quietness and trust is our strength (Is. 30:15). Philip Malancthon once said to his friend Martin Luther, “Today, Martin, you and I will discuss God’s governance of the universe,” to which Luther replied, “No, Philip. Today you and I are going fishing, and we’ll leave the governance of the universe to God.”

Poems, Axheads, and Flint Knives
But let’s get practical. How do we practice the sovereign presence of God, and learn to leave the governance of the universe to him? Here’s a few ideas.

Write a poem.
I’m not kidding. Poetry forces attentiveness – watching, listening, reflecting - which forces a slowing down. In this, it’s akin to prayer. Paul says in Romans that we can know the sovereign nature of God – “his eternal power and divine nature” – simply by paying attention to “what has been made” (Ro. 1:20). The man who rushes through an art gallery will never learn to appreciate the artist’s genius; likewise, the man who never stops to behold a leaf blade or a child’s ear will never delight in God as maker and ruler of creation. Such beholding goes deeper and further when we shape it into psalm or song or poem. So writing a poem (it doesn’t have to be a good one, and no one else besides you has to see it) is a lovely Sabbath practice, a way of “being still and knowing” God (Psalm 46:10).

Dwell in the company of those who can make Axheads float.
An Elisha story, terse and cryptic, is narrated in 2 Kings 6. Elisha heads up a school of the prophets, who undertake, by their own hands, a building campaign. In the course of hewing wood at river’s edge, one of the men loses an iron axhead. “Oh, my lord,” he exclaims, “it was borrowed!” I see in this story a reverse image of Jesus’ parable about the man who wilfully, defiantly, buries his talent, his “borrowed” thing, and returns it unused. In the Elisha story, the “borrowed” thing gets buried in the using of it. This happens, I think, more often than the other. For every fool who buries his talent, there must be ten faithful servants who lose theirs by using it: the singer who sings herself silent, the teacher who teaches himself dry, the caregiver who cares until she’s numb. Oh, my lord, it was borrowed! Now what? In this story, Elisha - “the man of God” (v.6) - cuts a stick, tosses it in the water, and the axhead pops to the surface. Strange. Yet maybe not. That unnamed man dwells in the company of those who, by some holy alchemy, can make leaden things buoyant. Much of our week is spent using our gift to the point of fatigue, until it gets loose in the socket, dull at the edge, and very very heavy. And then, oops, it just flies off the handle, hits the muddy water, and sinks out of sight. Lost. And unless we dwell in the company of those who, by their closeness to God, by their compassion for us, can make heavy things buoyant, it might just stay lost. It is worth noting here that Jesus, to the dismay of the religious leaders, thought Sabbath an ideal day for being this kind of community – those who lift stumble-prone oxen out of pits, who restore withered hands to wholeness, who make blind eyes bright, who unbend bent backs. It’s a good Sabbath practice to dwell in such company.

Get circumcised beneath Jericho’s shadow.
God has a fistful of strange battle tactics – ordering Moses to stand all day and night with his hands aloft, making Jehoshaphat’s choir go before his infantry, stripping Gideon’s militia down to an unarmed raiding party. Maybe the strangest tactic, though, is his counsel to Joshua just prior to invading Jericho: take a flint knife and circumcise all the warriors (see Jos. 5:1-9). Okay. So what you’re saying is, in view of the battle line, I’m to reduce my fiercest soldiers to a colony of limping, groaning invalids? You know, God, should news of this reach the Canaanite kings, they could send a band of school boys and grandmothers and put us to rout? God orders it anyhow, saying he’s rolling back “the reproach of Egypt” (Joshua 5:9). Among other things, that must mean God intends to reform the slave mentality Israel acquired under the rule of taskmasters. The world of slaves is narrow and precarious. Trust no one. Rely only on yourself. Watch your back. Keep your head down. Keep your mouth shut. Repeat: Trust no one. But now Israel must learn a different way: Trust God completely. Depend fully on him. Keep your head high. Watch and see. Rely utterly on the Almighty. Sing God’s praises. Repeat: Trust God completely. But that will need an object lesson to drive it home. Try this: circumcise all the fighters, and make them lie down in the presence of their enemies. Make them be still, and know God is God. What has this to do with Sabbath and summer? Simply this: we don’t really learn to trust God until we trust him at the edge of Jericho. When life is comfortable, safe, easy, abounding in good things, our faith is sometimes no more than a will-o’-the-wisp. It’s when finances are shaky, health is uncertain, the church is in conflict, our business is sputtering – it’s then that faith shows its mettle. Some of you are camping so close to Jericho this summer, you won’t even enjoy a moment of it for all the anxiety you feel. Is that how God would have it? Maybe don’t just do something, stand there. Or, better: recline with Jesus. It made Lazarus dangerous enough.

Writing Psalm 23
Maybe all this comes together most vividly in the life of King David. Ever wonder when David wrote Psalm 23? What was the occasion? I have a theory: the day his son Absalom overthrew the kingdom. It’s a wild guess, to be sure. But there are two clues, one in the Psalm, one in the account of Absalom’s overthrow and David’s evacuation, that David turned that evacuation into Sabbath.

The clue in Psalm 23 is verse 5:
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.

In the presence of enemies, with an insurrectionist son sitting on his throne and a bitter old rival throwing curses and dirt on his head (see 2 Sam. 16:5ff), could David have reflected back to those early days of shepherding and remembered that, even here, especially here, in the valley of the shadow of death, God watches and protects, and puts goodness on his tail, and leads him finally to something far better than an earthly palace: the very house of God?

The clue in the account of the overthrow is 2 Samuel 16:14:
The king and all the people with him arrived at their destination exhausted. And there he refreshed himself.

And there he refreshed himself. This was arguably the worse day David ever had. But in the throes of it, he didn’t simply collapse. He refreshed himself. The word in Hebrew for refreshed is nephesh. It has another meaning: the soul. Literally, David restored his soul (see Psalm 23:3). David, I think, did more than take a shower, put on fresh clothes, barbecue a steak, play a game of pool. David, I think, practiced the sovereignty of God. And maybe, just maybe, he wrote a poem. And left the governance of the universe to God.

For more information on Mark, his books, and his church visit www.markbuchanan.net and www.newlifechurch.bc.ca

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