Sept 21, 2008 - "Good Work and a Sabbath's Rest"

Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Louisville, Kentucky

Pentecost 19
September 21, 2008
W. Gregory Pope

SERIES: The New Monasticism
GOOD WORK AND A SABBATH’S REST

Exodus 16:2-15; Psalm 105:1-6, 37-45; Philippians 1:21-30; Matthew 20:1-16

It’s been a turbulent week in Louisville. One week ago we gathered in this place not knowing that a storm was brewing outside that would significantly affect our lives for the rest of the week; a storm that continues to affect many of us even still. Mary Oakley said except for the indoor plumbing, it felt like her childhood. On a lesser note, the turbulence continues to build at Valhalla as the U.S. tries to hold on for a Ryder Cup victory. And the baseball world says goodbye tonight to perhaps its greatest sanctuary, Yankee Stadium.

Of much more significant note, it has been a turbulent week on Wall Street. This is a storm that has been brewing for some time. Warnings have been sounded from many corners. The storm is still raging and we are uncertain of the effects and what the recovery will look like and when it will be.

Storms of nature and economics have a way of reminding us what really matters and where our security truly lies. Monastic spirituality can do the same, drawing us away from the false securities and superficialities and craziness of our age, calling us to the wise living of our days.

The prophet Jeremiah says,” Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls” (6:16). Are you a weary soul looking for rest? Jeremiah calls us to search the ancient paths.

That is what we are doing these days as we consider a 1500 year old spirituality shaped by the monastic rule of St. Benedict, a rule which is heavily informed by a 4000 year old biblical spirituality.

The Benedictine motto that rules monasteries is the Latin phrase ora et labora (to pray and to work). The goal is to create a healthy rhythm of prayer and work, study and service for the purpose of spiritual transformation. In a few weeks we are going to look in depth at monastic prayer. Today I want to look at shaping a healthy rhythm of work and rest in our lives.

Exodus 16

Our scripture lesson this morning illustrates this for us in a story of divine provision, human work, and a Sabbath’s rest.

The Israelites were complaining about having nothing to eat. There was no electricity in the wilderness. All the food in the fridge had gone bad. And the spoiled children that they were, they just knew they were going to die of starvation and discomfort.

So God told Moses to tell the people that daily manna would be provided. Their job was to go out each day and do what was necessary to gather it. On the sixth day there would be enough manna for two days which they were to gather in order to rest on the Sabbath.

Simple plan. Work six days. Rest on the seventh. God will provide.

Now this simple plan only works when greed is kept in check, when desires do not lead us into debt, and when companies care more about their employees than their stockholders. Unjust social systems sometimes force unhealthy living through overwork and poverty wages. There are outside forces that make a healthy balanced life of work and rest extremely difficult.

However, for most of us, the responsibility for a healthy lifestyle falls on us. We are responsible to do good work and take a Sabbath’s rest.

If you are a student, perhaps you will want to think about your responsibility to balance school work with ipod/MySpace time. Even as a child or teenager, you can work on developing a healthy, balanced lifestyle that very few adults illustrate for you.

Work

The Rule of Benedict calls us to good work. He says: Idleness is the enemy of the soul. Therefore, the community members should have specified periods for manual labor as well as for prayerful reading. When they live by the labor of their hands, as our ancestors and apostles did, then they are really monks. Refrain from too much eating and sleeping, and from laziness. [1]

Benedict stressed the dignity of work for all, both the wealthy and the indigent. In his day, this was a revolutionary idea. Those born into noble homes expected servants to manage the annoying minutiae of their lives, but in Benedict’s monasteries, everyone tilled the fields, watered the crops, harvested the corn, weeded the gardens, worked in the kitchen, and served others in a variety of ways. [2]

The monastery had no slaves, modeled not on the secular world but on the servant ministry to which Jesus called his disciples (John 13). Tasks were rotated, and monks undertook the work in a spirit of humility for the well-being of the whole community. [3]

Everyone in the monastery did everything. And it was good work for the well-being of the whole community, which included serving the needy. Benedict says: Relieve the lot of the poor, clothe the naked, visit the sick, bury the dead, go to help the troubled, and console the sorrowing.

The monastic life calls us to engage in good work without being overworked. There is to be a rhythm of work and rest.

But we do not always embrace healthy rhythms of work and rest.

One reason has to do with what has been previously mentioned: unjust social and economic structures that force seven day work weeks for poverty wages, and these structures must be challenged.

There is also the way in which many of us allow our work to define everything about us. It is our status in the world and the rewards are often more clearly visible through promotion and position and pay, whereas with other ways of being in the world - spouse, parent, child, volunteer - the rewards are not so clearly visible.

If you read the business magazines you get the impression that if you work only forty hours a week, you will never get ahead. If you read the next article, you discover that those who work seventy hours a week are called names like “workaholic.” And in our society that’s considered a badge of honor. We often call ourselves workaholics with a hidden sense of pride.

But when we overwork it wears us down and it wears down our family and others with whom we share life together.

We work ourselves to death because workaholics are our cultural heroes. And we want to be heroes. Workaholics get the promotions and the praise. We don’t pass out rewards for practicing a healthy rhythm of work and rest. We idolize the American way of life which is in many ways a sick society with misplaced priorities.

A large part of our sickness as a society is the preeminent place we give to work. The idolization of work I think does more to contribute to the breakdown of the family than anything else. We would like to atribute our problems to other factors and other groups of people, but I think the problem lies elsewhere. The drive toward efficiency and productivity is a great enemy of the spiritual life.

Perhaps some of us need to ask ourselves the question: Have I been frenetically pushing the limits, rushing from one place to another, taking on too many responsibilities because I favor rewards for my busy-ness?

Often you will find within the workaholic a person who uses their work as a sort of “anti-sanctuary,” an alternative busy place to go to avoid the difficult task of looking into one’s own soul. [4] If we stay busy, we think to ourselves, we can hide the secret fears and failures of other parts of our lives.

Work is not what defines the Benedictine. Work is important. But work never comes first. The monastic does not exist for work. What defines the Benedictine monk and what defined Christ and what must define us as followers of Christ is a single-minded search for God. Creative and productive work are simply meant to enhance the world and sustain us while we grow into God.

In our culture we tend to value work solely as a means of making money. Benedict tells us to see our work as an opportunity to serve those around us and make the world a better place. Work is to be connected to our spiritual life. Work is made sacred when it is centered in a prayerful life. Good work is not based on efficiency, productivity, and profit. Good work is work that enables us to love God and neighbor best. Good work does not bring harm to creation or to the lives of others. Good work is holy work.

The monks at Gethsemani here in Kentucky have for generations been known for their cheeses. One monk quipped that in order to make their cheese-selling holy, they would need to open a franchise near Bethlehem and call it “Cheeses of Nazareth.”

One of the gifts of monastic spirituality is to call us away from the centrality and idolization of work. Robert Benson writes, “Perhaps we need to remember that the work we do is not the center of the universe. (But rather) the work that we do is to be done in the service of the Center of the Universe.” [5]

In the Middle Ages a traveler asked three hard-at-work stone masons what they were doing. The first said, “I am sanding down the block of marble.” The second said, “I am preparing a foundation.” The third said, “I am building a cathedral.” Remembering the greater cause of why we are doing what we do is one of life’s more demanding difficulties.

Benedictine spirituality calls us to something so much more difficult than hard work. And that is a healthy rhythm of work and prayer and rest.

Rest

The Rule of Benedict calls us to good work . . . and a Sabbath’s rest. Included in this rest is silence and stillness and prayer.

If Robert Benson is right and our work is not the center of the universe, we are free to rest from our labors. To be monks and nuns in the world is to make space for rest. If God can rest from creation on the seventh day, so can we. For one day a week, the world can go on without us. And for periods of time throughout every day, we need to go on without the world. We need rest. Monks and nuns have bed times. And they observe them religiously, literally. Bedtime is a spiritual event.

The mere presence of a monastery stands tall as a counter-cultural symbol, a reminder of alternative ways of living centered in something other than productivity. The church as a monastery should stand as a counter-cultural symbol against distraction and busyness, and teach the world to take care of the life God has given us.

The church as a monastery provides a refuge for people living busy lives, those caught up in the distractions of this noisy, confusing, and disordered world. It is a sanctuary, a place of peace and calm, where the ways of the world do not follow. [6]

To quote Benson again: “Perhaps the answer for all of us who are weary is to do less and not more. To walk slower rather than faster. To be more present to this day than we are to tomorrow. To just stand there sometimes rather than just do something.” [7]

“Be so still inside that you can listen at every moment to what life is offering you,” says Brother David Steidl-Rast. [8]

We must take time for silence and solitude, rest and reflection. The Rule is built around silence and we ignore Benedict’s call to silence and stillness at the peril of our spiritual lives.

We live in a world in which we are encouraged to multitask. We eat fast food, expect overnight delivery, and sign up for instant messaging. We get too little sleep, have too many commitments and too much on our plate most days and weeks. So we look for books that can help us pray our way to powerful Christian living in ten minutes a day, and we wonder why we are often left feeling somehow devoid of God’s presence in our lives. [9]

If the way in which I live does not have some silence and solitude and stillness and rest, then there is only one person to blame in the end. There is only one person who can, in fact, get me to do less and not more, to stop moving and be still, to slow done instead of speed up. And I am that person. [10]

There is within us all a longing for a deep connection to the silence, to the “great Solitude at the Center of All Things,” as Merton once called it. It is in returning and rest that we shall be saved, says the psalmist. But we must stop and sit down and be silent. For in the rest, I began to see things a bit more clearly and to be drawn a little more powerfully back into the life of work and community and prayer that has been given me to live. [11]

Conclusion: Time / Restlessness

There is about many of us a restless and anxious distraction that characterizes our lives. Part of the restlessness is built-in. St. Augustine prayed, “O Lord, you have made us for Thy self, and we are restless until we rest in Thee.” Part of the restlessness is God-given. Part of our restlessness will always be with us.

This divine inner restlessness should, at times, direct us outward toward others and toward a purpose beyond ourselves, doing something with our lives that matters in the world.

But the restlessness that harms our souls is not put to rest by staying busy; it is by living an integrated life of work and rest, prayer and service, a life centered in contemplation, a life that seeks an intimate union with God.

There comes a point when our restlessness should direct us inward. Rather than driving us outward, hoping to satisfy our unrest with more activity, more people, more work, more entertainment, more distraction, we must allow our restlessness to lead us beside still waters and to lay us down in green pastures and to restore our souls in the quiet presence of God.

A healthy spiritual life that you find embodied in most monastic communities is the desire to be an “active contemplative,” to live a life shaped by the rhythm of work and prayer, service and silence. Living such a life is a test of the maturity of a person’s spirituality.

It has been said that the task of life is to keep your world in order. To seriously follow the spiritual journey, particularly amid our world’s busyness, we must learn to guard the preciousness of time by savoring the beauty of prayer and reflection, work and rest. Life in God is about the nourishment of our souls, bodies, and minds. And it’s about living in the context of a community that supports us in our common goals.

We are called to be examples of a saner lifestyle, creating a schedule that honors our spiritual life, consecrating time to a higher purpose than productivity and consumption. Our goal is spiritual transformation.

So honor the life you’ve given by doing good work and practicing a Sabbath’s rest. Amen.

_______________________________

1. St. Benedict, The Rule of St. Benedict, ed. Timothy Fry, Vintage Spiritual Classics, 1998, ch. 48
2. Carmen Butcher Acevedo, Man of Blessing: A Life of St. Benedict, 84
3. Elizabeth Canham, Heart Whispers: Benedictine Wisdom For Today, Abingdon, 1999, 91
4. Abbot Christopher Jamison, Finding Sanctuary: Monastic Steps for Everyday Life, Liturgical Press, 2006, 19, 21
5. Robert Benson, A Good Life: Benedict’s Guide to Everyday Joy, Paraclete Press, 2004, 68-69
6. Wayne Teasdale, A Monk in the World, New World Library, 2002, xxv
7. Benson, 68
8. As quoted in Esther de Waal, Living With Contradiction: An Introduction to Benedictine Spirituality, Morehouse, 1998, 79
9. Benson, 24
10. Ibid., 37
11. Ibid., 42-43