Rest in God - Sermon Transcript

Good morning, friends.

It is good to see each and every one of you.

If you're a guest this morning, welcome.

I'm delighted that you're here worshiping with us.

In fact, I do hope you come back and worship with us again in the future.

My name is Mitchell.

I am the senior minister here, and I want to offer us just a sort of thought experiment real quick.

Don't look at your phone.

 But I want you to think about how much battery you have on your phone right now.

Just ponder it.

How much battery do you have on your phone?

Okay, now look at your phone and see how close you were.

My guess would be that we're within 10% of knowing exactly at any time how much power

 or battery our phone has, and we've been sort of trained to think this way because when our phone hits 20%, it lets us know, right?

 We put it into like low power mode or we dim the screen or we close a bunch of apps that have been open for way too long.

And when that warning pops up, we can kind of feel it in our chest and we start rationing all of our resources, all of the battery that we can because our phone is vital to our existence.

 And some of us have even turned our car around to go get the phone charger that we left on the kitchen counter because we can't live without our phone.

We will not let that thing die.

Our bodies, physical bodies, our souls, our lives are not that different.

In fact, our bodies send us warnings all the time.

 The headache that you have that just won't go away.

The short temper you may have with the people that we love the most.

Lying awake at two in the morning running through the to-do list for tomorrow.

Our souls also send these sort of warnings.

The quiet sense that we are just going through the motions.

 That we are present everywhere and nowhere at the same time and most of us just can sort of swipe the warning away and we keep going, don't we?

 Because somewhere along the way, we decided that rest is somehow optional.

Rest is the leftovers.

It's what we get after the plate is clean, and the plate is never clean, and there is always one more email, one more load of laundry, one more thing someone needs from us.

So rest becomes whatever scraps are left at the end of the day.

And

 If we're really honest, at 10 o'clock at night, those scraps usually look like a screen.

We take better care of our phones than we do ourselves.

And this is why I wanted us to spend three weeks on rest.

Last week we talked about, on All Saints Sunday, we talked about rest in the middle of grief.

 that we can and should find rest in the midst of our grief.

Next week, we'll talk about rest as something that we share together, something we owe one another, and something that we owe the world around us.

But this morning, our text is deeply personal.

 It invites us to see ourselves as God created us to be, not as machines to be charged so we can get back to work, but as people who are made to rest in God.

 And our text this morning comes from the Psalms, and I'll confess, I don't preach from the Psalms nearly as often as I should.

So let me say just a brief word about them.

The Psalms are essentially the prayer book of God's people.

They're the prayer book of Israel, 150 songs, prayers gathered over centuries.

 They were sung in the temple.

They were prayed in exile.

They are carried by people who had lost nearly everything.

And what makes them so remarkable is that they are not, they are not theology that is written about God.

They are prayers spoken to God.

Some of them are full of joy.

 Some of them are filled with deep pain and sadness and grief.

Some of them are remarkably angry.

It's honestly a little shocking how angry some of the Psalms can be.

But what I love about the book of Psalms is that it gives us permission to bring our whole selves to God.

We don't have to clean ourselves up.

We don't have to say things just right.

 We get to be our full authentic self in our prayer life with God.

And so Psalm 46, this Psalm in particular belongs to a group of Psalms that scholars call the Songs of Zion.

And honestly, they were written out of existential dread.

So they may feel very familiar.

 Essentially, they're prayers and hymns that came out of a community that was vulnerable, surrounded by empires far more powerful than they were.

And today's psalm may sound familiar.

It was turned into a hymn by Martin Luther titled, A Mighty Fortress is Our God.

And I'm grateful that today we get to turn to Psalm 46.

So Psalm 46, I'll be reading the whole thing.

Don't worry, it's not very long.

 The psalm starts, God is our refuge and our strength, a very present help in trouble.

Therefore, we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea, though its waters roar in foam, though the mountains tremble with its tumult.

There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the Most High.

 God is in the midst of the city.

It shall not be moved.

God will help it when the morning dawns.

The nations are in uproar, the psalmist says.

The kingdom's totter.

He utters his voice.

The earth melts.

 The Lord of hosts is with us.

The God of Jacob, the God of Jacob is our refuge.

Come behold the works of the Lord.

See what desolations he has brought on the earth.

He makes war cease to the end of the earth.

He breaks the bow, shatters the spear.

He burns the shields with fire.

Be still and know that I am God.

 I am exalted among the nations.

I am exalted in the earth.

The Lord of hosts is with us.

The God of Jacob is our refuge.

For the word of God in scripture, for the word of God among us, and for the word of God within us.

Thanks be to God.

Will you pray with me?

 May the words of my mouth, the meditations of all of our hearts be pleasing and acceptable to you, O God, our rock and our redeemer, the one who holds the world steady when we cannot.

Amen.

Be still.

Be still and know that I am God.

 It's a familiar chorus.

I mean, maybe we don't know the origin.

Psalm 46, you do now.

But we know the verse because we stitch it onto pillows or put it onto coffee mugs.

We put it over the beach photo with the sunset next to our live, laugh, love farmhouse prints.

And we tend to hear it as a gentle invitation to just take a breath, relax.

Relax.

 Light a candle.

It's biblical spa day.

But this verse actually doesn't show up in the midst of tranquility as we read.

It isn't a quiet psalm.

The earth is changing.

The mountains are falling into the sea.

The waters are roaring.

The nations are in uproar.

The kingdoms are tottering.

And right before our verse, God is breaking bows.

He's shattering spears and burning shields in the fire.

This is not a spa.

 apocalypse, and the word we translate as be still in Hebrew, harpu, it comes from a root that means to let go, to let go, to sink down, to go slack.

It's the word you would use for hands that fall open after they're being clenched.

In 2 Samuel, when a king hears devastating news,

 The text says his hands went limp.

It's the same root word there.

It happens to your grip when you finally stop holding on.

So when you hear the word be still, think about letting go.

So when God speaks in verse 10, in the middle of all that chaos, after the weapons are broken, maybe the better translation isn't be still at all.

Maybe it's something more like this.

Let go, drop it.

 Open your hands.

Which means the question the psalm asks us isn't really how do I relax?

It's not a thought exercise on how to chill out and know God.

Maybe the better question is, what am I holding on to like a weapon?

Because here's the thing, the verse has two halves.

 be still, and know that I am God.

And I think most of us have gotten pretty good at a cheap version of the first half while skipping the second half entirely.

Because think about what we actually do when we finally stop.

The kids are in bed.

 The dishes, they're done, or they're soaking.

I'm a big fan, big believer in soaking the skillet.

Thing needs to soak overnight.

We sink into the couch, and what's in our hands?

Our phone, the remote,

 Maybe a glass of wine.

We open one app.

Then another.

And then another.

We watch just one more episode.

And then the next one starts on its own.

It's magic.

Like five seconds later, the next episode is starting.

And we just let it go.

And we look up.

And what time is it?

It's midnight.

And we're more tired...

 as we get up from the couch than we did when we first sat down.

It feels like rest.

 We're not moving, we're horizontal, but it isn't rest, it's numbing.

And numbing isn't the same thing as letting go.

When we numb, we don't actually open our hands, we just set one more thing down long enough to pick up another thing.

The grip is still there, we've only changed what we're holding.

And doctors will tell you that going under anesthesia is not the same thing as sleeping.

 Of course, you lose consciousness and time disappears, but you don't wake up restored the way you do after a good night of sleep.

You most likely wake up sore.

Your body was quiet, but it wasn't resting.

I wonder if that is what so much of our rest has become, anesthesia.

A way to stop feeling for a few hours.

 Brene Brown has pointed out that we can't selectively numb either.

When we numb the anxiety, the exhaustion, and the grief, we also are numbing the joy, the wonder, and the connection right along with it.

There is no difference there.

We go still, but we don't know anything.

We aren't present to God, and we aren't even present to ourselves, much less those in the room.

 And if there ever was a sermon, friends, I'm preaching to myself.

This is it.

Because last week, Eli pulled me aside after our weekly family dinner in front of the TV.

We watch a family show together.

Survivor.

I'm sure that's common.

Survivor.

 And Eli, she looked at me and she said, you aren't here.

You're on your phone constantly.

You're short-tempered.

You're fidgety.

You need to go for a walk.

And it's true.

She's 100% right.

95% of the time, she's 100% right.

 And I've been carrying some stress.

Some of it's the seasonal rhythms of church work, you know, stewardship and stuff.

Fill out your pledge card.

But there's also denominational strife.

Some of it is that I've also though tricked myself into thinking that I can be present and preoccupied at the same time.

I can be with my family and on my phone.

I can be engaged in listening and quick to respond.

 And I know like deep down the real rest, the kind that this psalm is talking about often doesn't feel restful at first.

Sometimes it actually feels like just more work because when you actually open your hands, when you put

 The phone in the other room and you sit in the quiet, something happens.

Everything you've been holding off comes rushing in.

The worries about your kid or the conversation you've been avoiding or the grief that you haven't had time for.

The question of whether your life is pointed in the right direction you hoped it would be.

The noise was doing a job.

It was keeping all of that at arm's length.

 That's why stillness, I think, can feel so threatening because it isn't empty.

It's crowded with everything that we've been running from.

The true leisure isn't idleness then at all.

It's rather a kind of receptivity.

 An open posture toward the world and toward God and receptivity is hard for people like us.

We know how to achieve.

We know how to manage.

We know how to grip.

We know how to hold on tight.

We do not always know how to receive.

This is exactly why this psalm doesn't stop at be still.

It keeps going.

Be still and know that I am God.

 Stillness on its own can be terrifying.

Silence on its own can feel like falling.

It can feel like failing.

The psalm isn't asking us to drop everything and stare into the void.

It's asking us to let go so that we can be met.

So that we can have an encounter with the divine.

 To empty our hands so there is room for someone else to fill them.

The point of stillness then isn't stillness.

The point is presence.

Knowing that God is God.

It may be just as important knowing that we are not.

 Which brings us to the good news this morning, and it's really found in two lines that are repeated in this psalm.

The Lord of hosts is with us.

The God of Jacob is our refuge.

Of all the names, though, that the psalmist could have chosen, of all the heroes of Israel's story, this psalm calls God the God of Jacob, not the God of Abraham.

 the man of faith, not the God of Moses, the deliverer, the God of Jacob.

And do you remember Jacob?

It's okay if you don't.

He came out of his womb grabbing his brother's heel.

 His very name carries that image, the one who is grasping.

He spent most of his life holding on, grabbing his brother's birthright, grabbing his father's blessing, working angles and making deals and trying to secure a future he didn't trust anyone else to give him.

 Feels like me most days, honestly.

And then one night by the river, he wrestles with God until dawn.

And even then, even with his hip knocked out of joint, Jacob says, I will not let you go unless you bless me.

 Jacob still can't let go.

And here's where we see God's grace at work.

God blesses him anyway.

God gives Jacob a new name.

Not because Jacob finally got it right.

 Not because Jacob learned how to rest.

God claims Jacob while he is still grasping onto things.

God claims Jacob while he is still holding on with both hands clenched.

 That is the God this psalm says is our refuge.

Not the God of the people who have it all together.

Not the God of the people who have mastered their Sabbath practice and never check their email after 6 p.m.

The God of Jacob.

The God of grippers.

The God of the white knuckled.

The God of the anxious.

The God of the ones who are teetering between stress and

 and addiction.

Which means that rest is not one more thing you have to be good at.

It isn't performative.

 It isn't another item on the list that you can fail to accomplish.

Because if we look at the Psalm again, we see that the earth is still changing.

The mountains are still shaking.

The nations are still in uproar.

The Psalm never promises that that chaos is going to go away.

What it does promise is that God is in the midst of all of that.

God is in the midst of the city and it shall not be moved.

God will help it when the morning dawns.

You can be shaken because...

 God is not shaken.

You can be still because, friends, God is not still.

God is at work breaking bows and shattering spears and bringing wars to an end and holding together what we never could hold together.

And that is the invitation that this

 This claim is being made in Psalm 46.

That is the invitation.

You can, in fact, let go because you were never the one.

You were never the one holding it all together.

You weren't, regardless of how much you think you are.

You are not holding it all together.

There is only one who holds it all together, and that is the God of Jacob.

 So this week, maybe in a quiet moment, maybe at a red light, or maybe laying on the couch re-watching Gilmore Girls, or lying awake at two in the morning reaching for the phone, I want you to try something.

I'm not gonna ask you to just turn it off and start meditating for 45 minutes a day.

I just want you to try one thing.

I want you to notice when you're in the midst of this, when you're lying on the couch, or you're feeling anxious, or you're at the red light, notice what you're doing with your hands.

What are you doing with your hands?

 Notice what you're holding and ask yourself one question.

What would it feel like to put it down?

To open your hands and to discover that you were never holding everything together to begin with.

Be still.

Be still and know

 that God is God.

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Amen.