Here comes the summer

I don’t know what images the word summer conjures up for you. Maybe you see the classic advertising image of lots of beautiful people in bikinis and swimming trunks on a beach, playing volleyball or elegantly draped over a folding chair. I’ve always wanted to know where that beach actually is, because I’ve never found it. And they can all play volleyball in slow motion, have you noticed?

 

Or perhaps you think back to your school days, particularly in primary school, when the summer was absolutely endless. Do you remember that? An entire life could happen to you over those six weeks. I mean there was even enough time for me to get bored, so even if you didn’t want to admit it it was a bit of a relief to go back to school in the end. I look back at that and I must admit I’m rather jealous of myself.

 

Of course, the association of summer and holidays is a very recent one. Even the generation of our grandparents and great-grandparents didn’t really know about week-long holidays. Or even of week-ends that lasted more than a day. Unless they were very rich, part of the aristocracy or the big factory bosses, time off work was restricted to the holy days, the days set aside in the Christian calendar for particular Christian celebrations, such as Sunday worship or the day of Pentecost, where the Christian community remembers the day the Holy Spirit turned up for the first time in a really powerful way, just after Jesus rose from the dead.

 

In fact, it is only due to these Christian holy days that we now know of the concept of time set aside to rest from our work. In the early to mid-nineteenth century, factories started to appear for the first time that produced goods like shoes and spoons in huge numbers. Factory owners wanted their machines to run for as long as possible since turning the machines on and off cost a lot of effort and money. So, they made working days longer and longer, until most people worked 12 to 14 hours a day, 6 days a week. The only days that even the factory bosses could not touch were the holy days.

 

The importance of the holy days as day free of work was only overturned during the First World War. At the time, it was agreed that the factories which produced weapons and bullets for the soldiers at the front couldn’t lie idle for an entire day each week. So that was when shift work was invented. The work-force was divided into groups that came in one after the other over a 24 hour period to work the machines, and these shifts continued even over Sundays. In exchange, workers got all their free days clumped together in one chunk, the beginning of our holidays. This new pattern of working soon spread to other factories, and after the war ended, it just kept going.

 

Why is this important? Well, the introduction of shift work has meant that rest has become increasingly difficult to come by.

 

On the one hand, shift work began to blur the boundaries between work and rest. Once it was accepted that work hours could be flexible, work started to invade more and more of our leisure time.

 

This blurring is even worse today. If you have internet access at home, work e-mails can reach you even on your evenings or days off. If you have a mobile phone, your boss can ring you at 9:30 in the evening to ask a really important question – about staplers. With wireless internet and global mobile phone coverage, you can be sitting on a beach in Bali, and still get phone-calls and e-mail messages from your boss. About staplers. There is no place left where your work can not follow you. It is one of life’s many ironies that today, in our so very advanced society, we actually have fewer proper holidays than our fore-fathers did.

 

On the other hand, shift work and extended working hours have destroyed our communities. It used to be the case that on holy days, absolutely everybody in your village, your neighbourhood, had time off at the same time. So, you had nothing better to do than to hang out with each other, talk, gossip, play games, get into fist-fights and so on and so on. Today, it is highly unlikely that you will have time off at the same time as the people you share a street with. If you want to know how isolated you can become when you work shifts, ask people who have to work shifts, like Vicky and Lawrence King, or Steve and Cindy Greeff. It is very difficult to build relationship with people if you are working every time they are free, and you are free only when everybody else is at work.

 

Now, this blurring of work and rest even invades weekly worship. Many of you are very active in helping to run all the activities we present on a Sunday, and that is great. The problem is that Sundays are becoming just another work day for many of us. You get asked to help a bit setting out the chairs or maybe lend a hand with the coffee and tea, and before you know it, you only come here on a Sunday to do something, to work.

 

Now, you may ask why that matters, right? So what if we have less time to rest, we work hard, we play hard, we make loads of money. What is wrong with that?

 

Well, there is plenty of evidence that shows that taking time off work to rest actually makes us more productive. If you take time to rest, to recuperate, then you work much better when you return to work than if you never take time off. But I find that argument really depressing, actually. Is the point of taking time off work really only that I can work harder after I’ve taken time off? Is my life really reduced to that – work and time to recuperate so that I can work harder?

 

Fortunately for me and for us, there is a different vision for life and for rest, and the two visions actually go hand in hand. We can find that vision in the Bible. We find part of that vision in the book of the Bible called the Book of Exodus. It records the history of the nation of Israel at the time when God frees them from slavery in Egypt, a time when there was absolutely no rest for the Israelites, and leads them out into the desert. During that time, God gave the Israelites a set of commandments that they were meant to live by. The purpose of those commandments is not, as many people have suggested, to prevent the Israelites from having any fun, but the purpose is to ensure that they live the best life that is possible on earth.

 

The most famous list of commandments are the ten commandments, ten fundamental rules to live by without which life becomes meaningless. You will find this list at the beginning of Exodus 20. The 4^th commandment of the ten is the following:

 

 

God commands his people to rest. One day a week should be set aside completely from anything resembling work. Not we, or our family, or even those who serve us, or even the people who are strangers in our community and who are therefore not really required to live by our religious commands, should be expected to do any work at all.

And the reason God gives for this command is interesting. He doesn’t say that we should set time aside to be more holy ourselves. You may have heard this before. The command to keep the Sabbath holy is often translated as: “You must keep Sundays separate from the rest of the week so you can go to church and pray earnestly for forgiveness and be reminded just how much of a worm you really are!” God doesn’t actually say that at all. He says we should rest simply because he also rested.

But, as always there is also more to it than that. Because the idea of rest is taken up again in other contexts. The very next book of the Bible, known as Leviticus, contains a longer list of commandments from God, which really is just an extension and explanation of the original ten commandments. And in chapter 25 of that book, God returns to the idea of rest.

 

At the beginning of that chapter, God says that his people are not only to rest every seventh day, but that they should also rest every seventh year. No sowing, no reaping, no work whatsoever in fact for an entire year. Can you imagine modern society doing that?

 

But he doesn’t stop there. He goes on to say the following:

 

 

I find that an amazing vision. Every 50^th year is meant to be a jubilee year, a year of joy and feasting and of freedom. God goes on to command that in the Jubilee year, all slaves are to be set free, everyone who has debt is to be freed of their debt and so on. So, the jubilee year becomes a year set aside completely to coming together in joy and feasting, and to wiping the slate clean for everyone.

 

To me, that is one of the best images of heaven that the Bible contains. Heaven is a place where we come together in joy and feasting, and where everyone’s slate is wiped absolutely clean.

 

I think it is this echoing of heaven that reveals the real meaning of the day of rest. We should not set aside a day for rest so that we can work harder the following day, though that is a useful side-effect. Nor should we set aside a day for rest so that we can remember God and how sinful we are and how much we need God’s forgiveness. We should be aware of God all the time. We are meant to rest and to enjoy spending time together because that gives us a brief glimpse of heaven, a brief glimpse of what life really is about.

 

That day of rest puts all the other days of our lives into the right perspective. It reminds us that the world and everything in it belongs to God. And it reminds us that God created us and created our world to live in harmony with him and with each other, and to enjoy the world and to enjoy each other’s company.

 

Once again, as seems to be the case with most of my talks, I find myself very un-ready to talk about rest. The last few weeks have been probably the least restful I’ve had since before my son was born. I’ve been suffering with allergies, Birgit is still a bit ill, we’re both stressed out and worried because I can’t find work. We’re questioning whether God has any plan for us whatsoever, and what the point was of the past few years and of us coming to England. I haven’t slept properly for days, and I only just finished this talk on Saturday afternoon. So, I have almost no rest whatsoever in my heart. What then is the point of a day of rest?

 

Jesus himself takes up the idea of rest. In one of his sermons he says the following:

 

 

Come to me all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. I don’t know about you, but to me that sounds like a very good idea at the moment.

If only there wasn’t that annoying bit about the yoke that we are supposed to take upon us. Surely, taking on a yoke is hard work?

 

Well, again, we can find an explanation of what Jesus meant in another, later book of the Bible, the book known as the Letter to the Hebrews. The title “Hebrews” is essentially an invention because no-one really knows who actually wrote it, or who they wrote it to. But it seems to be a letter of advice to the Christian community as a whole. In chapter 4 of that book we read the following:

 

 

We who believe enter that rest. Faith is essential to rest. And it is that faith that is the yoke Jesus asks us to take upon us.

 

Now, what faith does he mean? Well, I’d suggest that it is the belief that God will care for us, no matter what our lives might look like right at the moment. It is the kind of faith that allows Peter, one of the original followers of Jesus, to sleep soundly on the night before he is due to be executed, because he knows that whatever will happen next, God has him in his hands.

 

Without faith, there is no rest. We can take as much time off from work as we like, but the worry about our future and the stress of not knowing how we will cope will remain with us, whether we’re on a beach in Bali or in a little council flat in Belle Isle. If we have faith, if we truly believe that God has us in his hands and that nothing can harm us, rest becomes possible in the most stressful of times, even when we face death and the end of everything we think is important. And that faith is a yoke, because we don’t always feel like that. Actually, we very often feel like God has nothing in his hands, least of all our lives or our world.

 

The truth is that God does have us in his hands, and that in his hands, we can find rest.

 

Now, there is a small coda to this talk. As you probably know, this is the last weekly worship we will hold until the beginning of September. There will be no Sunday meetings in August. Now, in part that is because quite a lot of us will be away over August, so that if we did have weekly worship, hardly anyone would turn up. And those of us who did turn up would be so busy setting up and doing all the other things it takes to have a meeting like this that we wouldn’t have time to actually worship.

 

But, more importantly, we are taking the whole of August off as our mini-version of the Sabbath year that God first commanded in Exodus. It is not just a month where we stop working, but it is a month where we get together in different ways, to enjoy spending time together. Taking this month off serves as a concrete reminder for us that church isn’t this meeting or this place, weekly worship and everything that goes with it. The church is us, you and me, the people who come together out of a common love for Jesus, and the relationships that we build with each other.

 

So, over the next month, seek out the people you see around you now. Invite them round for food or coffee or just a bit of a chat. Don’t just invite people you know. Invite people you don’t know yet. Let everyone know about what you are doing by putting the details on the web-site, so that other people can join in with you in whatever it is you are doing. If you are at a loss for something to do, look at the web-site, call people up.

 

We need to remember that Jesus did not say that people will know that we are his disciples by going to this building every Sunday where we sing songs and listen to vaguely interesting talks and drink coffee. He said that people will know that we are his disciples by the love we have for each other. Use this August as time set aside to build our connection with each other, and to deepen our love for one another. The more we do that, the more we will have a glimpse of heaven.