This time of year a bug hits me and I have to put stuff up. There is a need in me to prepare for the days ahead. Last Monday I canned applesauce and baked pie pumpkins for a pumpkin pie. I understand this to be for me a time of preparation for the quiet and reflective days of winter when a blanket of snow covers the ground and I move inside for a bit of Sabbath time. Does this happen to you? How do you get ready for quieter Sabbath days?

Sabbath is critical to our survival as a species – I am more and more convinced of this as we spin round frantically trying to respond to every phone call, every urgent appeal for our time. Our sacred texts and our Jewish heritage remind us of this need to let it be for a bit in important ways. In an early teaching in Mark Jesus concludes the lesson with words about the Sabbath. The Sabbath was made for the good of human beings; they were not made for the Sabbath. The Sabbath is ours as a gift from God to remind us to stop – to rest – to pay attention right now in this moment to ourselves and to loved ones who need a rest as badly as we do. Author Wayne Muller writes this in his book Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal and Delight in Our Busy Lives:

Sabbath is not dependent upon our readiness to stop. We do not stop when we are finished. We do not stop when we complete our phone calls, finish our project, get through this stack of messages, or get out this report that is due tomorrow. We stop because it is time to stop.

Sabbath requires surrender. If we only stop when we are finished with all our work, we will never stop - because our work is never completely done. With ev­ery accomplishment there arises a new responsibility. Every swept floor invites another sweeping, every child bathed in­vites another bathing. When all life moves in such cycles, what is ever finished? The sun goes round, the moon goes round, the tides and seasons go round, people are born and die, and when are we finished? If we refuse rest until we are finished, we will never rest until we die. Sabbath dissolves the artificial urgency of our days, because it liberates us from the need to be finished.

The old, wise Sabbath says: Stop now. As the sun touches the horizon, take the hand off the plow, put down the phone, let the pen rest on the paper, turn off the computer, leave the mop in the bucket and the car in the drive. There is no room for negotiation, no time to be seduced by the urgency of our responsibilities. We stop because there are forces larger than we that take care of the universe, and while our efforts are important, necessary, and useful, they are not (nor are we) indispensable. The galaxy will somehow manage without us for this hour, this day, and so we are invited - nay, com­manded - to relax, and enjoy our relative unimportance, our humble place at the table in a very large world. The deep wisdom embedded in creation will take care of things for a while.

So let us let it be for awhile. Advent is just around the corner – the beginning of a new church year – a time of quiet preparation for the birth of new life and hope. We have been busy at Trinity over these past months and there is work ahead yet to be uncovered and made clear, We will accomplish the tasks set out for us – we will hear God speaking to us still again and we will respond. But for just these moments let us breathe together and laugh together and enjoy the abundance that is ours from a loving, creative God, Muller remembers his friend Henri Nouwen who was…

a fiercely astute observer of our worried, overfilled lives. Henri insisted that the noise of our lives made us deaf, unable to hear when we are called, or from which direction. Henri said our lives have become ab­surd—because in the word absurd we find the Latin word surdus, which means deaf. In our spiritual life we need to listen to the God who constantly speaks but whom we seldom hear in our hurried deafness.

On the other hand, Henri was fond of reminding me that the word obedient comes from the Latin word audire, which means “to listen.” Henri believed that a spiritual life was a pilgrimage from absurdity to obedience – from deafness to listening. If we surrender fully into Sabbath time, we can slowly move from a life so filled with noisy worries that we are deaf to the gifts and blessings of our life, to a life in which we can listen to God, all the Buddhas and saints and sages and messengers who seek to guide and teach us. The world seduces us with an artificial urgency that re­quires us to respond without listening to what is most deeply true. In Sabbath time, we cultivate a sense of eternity where we truly rest, and feel how all things can wait, and turn them gently in hand until we feel their shape and know truth of them.

May God bless the days that lie ahead of us with times of Sabbath movement from absurdity to obedience – from deafness to listening. Take time to rest, and eat, and drink, and be refreshed. And in the gentle rhythm of that refreshment, listen to the sound the heart makes as it speaks the quiet truth of what is needed. May we and all of creation come in these Sabbath moments and days to know deeply how treasured and beloved we are. Amen.