God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners.
Soren Kierkegaard


Texts:

Psalm 51:1-12

Isaiah 30:15-18

Hebrews 4:1-13

The texts for today center on rest. I'm not sure we understand what rest, or Sabbath, for that matter, are in our society today.  So often, we think of rest as being something to which we are entitled, something which requires another person to work in order that we don't have to.  We work obscene numbers of hours per week throughout the year, neglecting our families and the relationships around us in order that we might take a 2-week vacation to Disney World or Hawaii or wherever so that we can spend time with our families.

Our relationship to rest is as unhealthy as our relationship to work.  We engage in pseudo-contests to see how we stack up against our neighbor, implicitly assuming that if we have rested less and worked more, we have won.  Rather than protecting the rest of our neighbors and those around us (check out Deuteronomy 6:14-15), we threaten it.  

Why bring all of this up?  Our unhealthy relationship to what it is to rest and what it is to work prevent us from understanding what God is asking of us when God asks us to rest in the shadow of her wings.  "In returning and rest, you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.  But you refused, and said, "No! We will flee upon horses" - therefore you shall flee!"  This is shaped and informed by the stanza immediately preceding it: "Because you reject this word and put your trust in oppression and deceit, and rely on them..."

Trusting our own ends, trusting our own means, trusting our abilities to work, we become focused upon our selves to the exclusion of our neighbor.  We forget that we have been created in and for relationship. We forget that we have been given these gifts of relationship here and now.  We have been commanded to rest, and we have refused.  We have been invited to rest, and we have turned away.  Trying to demonstrate that we have earned our rest, we neglect it for the gift that it is.

Entering into God's rest is to live as a recipient, to live as gracious, to live as one who understands rest not as something to which we are entitled, something for which we work, but something that comes unbidden and invites us to see what has been in front of us all along: Christ in the face of our neighbor.