Sermon for the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I’ve increasingly thought that I need to take a break from social media, and one of the reasons is that I get riled up by “hot takes” and the reduction of complicated issues to “memes.” I suppose something like this problem has been around for longer than Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and the like; we used to call them “soundbites.” These oversimplified propositions and slogans do seem to propagate so much more quickly online, though. The one that irked me this last week though was a quote from the Franciscan priest and popular writer about spirituality, Richard Rohr. Fr. Rohr has a big following, and I’m sure he’s a good, well-meaning man, but I’ve just never been a fan of his work. (Admitting that publicly in some circles is like saying you don’t like motherhood and apple pie, so I try not to rag on the man very often.)

Anyway, the “soundbite” that’s been circulating recently online, over a photo of Rohr, is his quote “Jesus never said ‘worship me’, but he often said ‘follow me.’” Now, this may be technically true, it gives the wrong impression of our Lord, who made it perfectly clear for those who would reflect on the whole of his words recorded in the Gospels that he revealed himself to be the eternal Son of God the Father, the second person of the Trinity, and thus is only fitting that he should receive our heartfelt worship.

I think this matters a great deal, because the impression one gets from this “meme theology” is that our emulation of Jesus’ morality, not our reliance on the love of God in Christ, is what saves us. In other words, you better earn your way into heaven by good works. I know I’m a broken record on this score, but the one thing I’ll never be ashamed of repeating ad nauseam is this one point. The Law kills and the Gospel saves. We can and should try to be better, to follow Jesus’ perfect moral example, but if that’s where our trust lies, we are in trouble, because none of us is really all that great at being good.

I say all of this to try to make some sense of a tension which is present in today’s Gospel. We learned that Jesus and the disciples didn’t even have time to eat because they were so busy with sick, hungry, needy people. So, they try to get away and have a time of respite by crossing the Sea of Galilee and getting away from the crowds. But when they get to the other side, the people there recognized who Jesus and his disciples were and rushed up with their own needs just as they had on the other side of the lake. The Gospel doesn’t say that Jesus and his disciples had a cup of tea and took a nap before getting on with it, and we can only assume that they continued their ministry as before. Tired and hungry, they tended to others who were tired and hungry without tending to their own needs. “What would Jesus do?” He’d sacrifice his time of respite whenever the any need presented itself.

Jesus could do this, and some heroic saints like the apostles did it as well, at least for a time, but for most of us such a schedule would lead to ineffectiveness at best and resentment at worst, our attempt at perfection ironically making us even less morally commendable. I would not be able to do the needful tasks set before me in my ministry if I didn’t eat at relatively normal times, and sleep relatively regular hours, and take time simply to be alone and pray in the presence of God. If I didn’t take time to do these things, I’d eventually get cranky and the work that I do for the church would be slapdash and inconsistent.

The same would be true for any of you, unless there is a real certifiable “capital ‘S’” Saint in the congregation this morning. Most of us would be sorely remiss if we didn’t take time to recharge our batteries, as it were, and God not only understands but insists on this.

We heard it in the psalm, which many of us know better in the King James translation:

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:

He leadeth me beside the still waters.

He restoreth my soul.

Rest and restoration is something God intends for us, and which He gives us. We usually hear this psalm at funerals, and indeed death is the final means by which we attain rest and rejuvenation, albeit in eager expectation of the Resurrection. But this is not primarily a psalm about death. It is, rather, a psalm about life, the Christian life wherein we find periods of rest in God between the periods in which we furiously wage the glorious battle for the Kingdom.

Thus, the Christian life is one of balance. We are certainly not permitted to live a life of sloth and complete comfort. But neither does the Christian life entail that we labor for the Kingdom to the point of exhaustion and, to use a hopelessly contemporary term, “burnout”.

Yet our whole culture militates against this balance. Or, rather, I should say cultures, because there are, it seems to me, two diametrically opposed views of human activity to which significant portions of our society adhere, both of which miss the mark.

On the one hand, we have the “Protestant Work Ethic” a heresy which defined the American psyche for generations. In a nutshell, this worldview holds that we’ll stay out of trouble if we keep extraordinarily busy. We’re less prone to sins of the flesh if we work eighteen hours a day and sleep lightly the other six.

On the other hand, we have the hedonist approach, which has taken hold of much of society in the last fifty years or so. By hedonist I don’t necessarily mean sexual hedonism, though that fits under the umbrella, as it were. The technical meaning of hedonism is the glorification of any lifestyle predicated principally on self-gratification, whether vulgar or apparently lofty. So, sitting in a bathtub all day eating donuts and drinking cognac is one form of hedonism, and doing nothing with one’s life besides personally enriching leisure activities like reading dusty books and exercising is another form of hedonism.

Anyway, the “Protestant Work Ethic” and hedonism are two sides of the same heretical coin. Like so many heresies, the Christian view is found in the via media, the middle way. Just as the old Christological heresies, which held that Christ was either only God or only man, were resolved by a middle way of affirming both truths, so too do these modern heresies find their orthodoxy somewhere in the middle. We must come to balance work and play to be healthy people, and we must balance the good works enjoined by our Christian commitment with prayer and rest to be healthy Christians. Christian monasticism has struck this balance perfectly in its programmatic scheduling of time for work, prayer, and study; but we who live in the world can find this balance too if we make a prayerful assessment of our own lives, and develop what is called a rule of life: a plan for how to balance work and play and prayer and study and so forth.

In the end, we may be sure that the Christian life is one in which activity and contemplation both play a role. The Christian life requires rest if the work we are to do is to be done. Ultimately this rest is found in God and our times of recreation (or re-creation) are sanctified by God and held in His hands. Indeed, to rest at all is to rest in God in a profound and wonderful way. And so, let us ever pray the prayer of St. Augustine, who said, “our hearts are restless, O Lord, until they find their rest in thee.”

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.