2 Samuel 7:1-3; Mark 6:30,31

 What  we need rest from

What are you tired of? Please don’t say: ”you.” What do you need a break from?  From what do you need to rest?  We kind of figure rest means a good night’s sleep, an afternoon in a hammock or as the British say:”a good lie in.”  But if you are minister and people are going to come and hear you speak, that isn’t much of a message.  The lectionary readings made me scratch my head this week , but at the same time they clearly pointed in the direction of the theme of rest.  As we are approaching mid-summer, this would seem like a good topic.  Now if you think about anything for a while, you will often find out that there are some deeper layers to a topic, even if it happens to be something as simplistic as “rest.”

In 2 Samuel God has given the people of Israel rest from their enemies.  Things are going so well it seems that the people give their king a house of cedar to live in.   In a moment of fair-mindedness the king wonders:” but where is God going to rest?  I am in a nice house of cedar, God is a tent with the ark of the covenant.”  It is an almost cartoonish conversation that follows.   It is almost as if God says:”I appreciate the sentiment, but I do not need anything like that. “ In the Gospel of Mark Jesus tells the disciples that they a rest, a rest from the work of healing and preaching they are doing.  But that plan goes quickly out the door, because needy crowds are moving on in on them.  So we’ve gotten some clues, friends.  There’s rest from enemies and rest from people that need us.  But how do we apply that ourselves?  I’m sure all of us have some people that aren’t particularly fond of us, which is of course, regrettable, but not always avoidable.  But enemies is a big word.  Also we don’t face the kind of needs Jesus was facing, simply because we don’t have those kind of skills and track record of service as he had.

However,  if we dig a little deeper, perhaps there is some common denominator in this need for rest.  Maybe it is expectations that we need a rest from, stifling, oppressive expectations.  Perhaps people grow less fond of us because we do not meet the expectations they have for us.  Maybe we don’t use the words we are supposed to.  Maybe we don’t  help in the way we are expected to.  Maybe we haven’t given what people expected.  In the recent novel “The Diver’s Clothes Lay empty” (New York: Harper/Collins ECCO, 2015) by a Northern California woman named Vendela Vida a woman has just landed in Casablanca. She has just been the surrogate mother for the child of her prettier twin sister who repays her by running of her husband as well as the child she has just given birth to. Okay, I know it’s a stretch. Novels often are, and sometimes I wasn’t sure the writer had actually been to Casablanca.  Anyway, her backpack with her credit cards and passport are stolen.  The police chief then gives her another American woman’s passport and backpack.

How do you explain that to the passport section of the American Consulate. So she doesn’t and she finds herself being a stand-in for a famous American actress.  The story is gripping because it is written in the second person all through.  The main character is “you,” not”he” or “she” throughout.  So this tourist is trying to find a rest from her Florida life, but finds the opposite.  It is a constant roller coaster of decisions, many of them bad ones.  But she does get a rest from expectations.  She gets away from being the woman people expect her to be. And whenever she threatens to fall into meeting expectations, she messes up and goes the other direction. She is a woman with shifting identities and names, free but adrift.

But then it’s weird isn’t it, friends?  Like many things in life, we are torn.  We are torn between being in a place “where everybody knows your name and they’re always glad you came” as the  theme song of the series cheers goes and on the other hand going where nobody knows your name; a place where nobody expect anything.

But you know that is not where it stops.  It continues.  It’s not just people’s expectations of us that press in us, but it is also our expectations of ourselves.   Not only that it, but is our expectations of other which when not satisfied cause great distress.  Beyond that it is our expectations of the world and of life and our expectations of God Who somehow has not delivered the life we wished for.  To top it all of there are the expectations we think God has for us.  Yes, let’s face it a lot of us have our own house of cedar we think we should build for God but never finish.

So, friends, you want a rest, then toss aside some of the expectations piled up around your life.  Believe me, you will never be able to get away from them.  That only happens in novels. But we can begin trying to manage them, be aware of whether they are helpful and learn to trust other people more.  That is what a place like this is partly for: to let you be a person without the world’s expectations and where you can trust others to do their part.  And let us be heartened by the words in 2 Samuel when he reminds us that God is always ready to work for us in our lives, never resting.  Thanks be to God. Amen.