Sabbath
/“Restore our fortunes, O Lord, like the watercourses of the Negeb.”
Dear WRC,
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ!
This next month is going to be… interesting. I wrote to you a few months ago to announce that the consistory had blessed my application for a Clergy Revitalization Grant that our denomination was offering through a generous grant from the Lilly Foundation. I had been awarded a grant and the accompanying three weeks for that time of revitalization. Well, those three weeks are here. Starting on July 11, I’m going to stop doing and be for three weeks.
I’m approaching this time as both excited and nervous. The excitement seems more obvious. This is an incredible opportunity and gift as well as something that I need to care for my mind, body, and soul in order to return and help care for yours. But I’m also nervous. I'm nervous because I've never done anything like this and have no idea what to expect. I am also nervous because I want so much to happen, but trying to force it is precisely the way in which to thwart its happening.
The truth is that, like so much else in the Christian life, I can’t make happen what needs to happen. I can’t generate intimacy with God and force an awareness of God’s presence. I can’t renew my soul. I can’t manufacture rest and restoration. The Gospel is not a self-help manual with 10 steps to self-actualization. This is not the realm of pulling yourself up by your boot straps. What needs to be done is what God alone can do. Jesus used a really helpful metaphor in John 15: “I am the vine and you are the branches…apart from me you can do nothing.” We can’t make the fruit grow. We are not in control of our spiritual lives.
But there is one role in all this that is ours, the most important verb in John 15: abide. We abide in the vine, in Jesus. Abiding means giving up any illusion that we are the captains of our souls, that we are in charge of things. It involves surrender to the will of the vine and the vinegrower.
Spiritual Disciplines or Practices seem to be all the rage in some parts of the Church these days, but my fear is that they are being taken up as techniques to control and improve our spiritual lives, instead of what they are: a means of surrender, of abiding in the vine. My teacher and mentor, Tim Brown, once described practicing the Disciplines as digging irrigation ditches. We can’t force the rain to fall, but we can work the soil of our heart so that when it does, that rain doesn’t just flow over us but waters our souls and produces a harvest.
With all that in mind, I’m trying to enter into these three weeks in order to sabbath: to cease. To stop working and striving and all my anxious attempts to be in control and instead to surrender. To patiently attend to God and trust that at some point the rains will fall.
WHAT AM I ACTUALLY GOING TO BE DOING?
I’ve been working with a spiritual director over these last couple months to give some shape to this time and to how I will be entering into silence and prayer during these weeks. I’ll meet with him again on day one to start things off with time in prayer together and doing our best to listen together to what God is doing in me. From there, I’ll head off on a four-day silent retreat at Holy Cross Monastery in West Park, NY. Week two will include another appointment for spiritual direction and five nights in a little cabin on Lake Champlain just north of Burlington with Sam. We’ve only been away from the kids together for one night in five years and are looking forward to some space to be together, to pay attention to our relationship, and to rediscover some habits of prayer together (special props to Esther who is coming to watch the kids!). Week three is largely unplanned. We’ll all be together, likely here in Wyckoff, and the goal will be to rest and continue to make space to listen to and be with God. I’ll meet with my spiritual director again this last week.
The rhythm of the whole thing moves from the center out and is like a giant reboot button for all my most important relationships. I’m beginning with God alone in prayer and silence, then spending time with Sam, then the kids, and in the fourth week back to work and to this community. All along the way trying to saturate each of those spheres with prayer and with an awareness of the presence of God.
While I’m off doing this, I want to invite you into three things. First, practice sabbath, too! From the very beginning of creation God has invited us into the rhythm of work and rest. In six days, God created the heavens and the earth and on the seventh day God rested. Over this next month, how is God inviting you to stop? To surrender? Where are you convinced that you are absolutely necessary and that things would fall apart without you? How could you step away, not entirely, just one day every seven to practice wonder, delight, and the fear-of-the-Lord?
Second, don’t contact me. Haha. Seriously, though, one of the requirements for the grant is he church’s committing not to contact the pastor during their time away. If anything comes up during that time there are Elders and others standing by to offer pastoral care. There will be a pastor on-call at all times, too. Reach out to the church office if you need anything. I can’t wait to catch up with you when I return on Aug. 1.
Third, pray! Please pray for me, for Sam, for Owen and Hannah. Pray for God’s blessing on this time. Pray for restoration. Pray for God’s presence and faithfulness to be known. Pray!
I’m still not sure what this month is going to be like, but I believe that the discernment and the preparations were faithful, so I am entering into it patiently expectant to see what God will do.
In Christ,
Pastor Andy