“Where’s Your Head At?”

As we continue to experience the Word of the Lord together, Let us Pray. Make us still, O God, so that we can feel your presence among us. We are busy, so calm us, and in doing so, open our eyes to see you right beside us, and within us. Use this time to further your purposes. Fill our minds and our hearts with your Holy Spirit. Speak Lord, your servants are listening. If these words are not Your Word, may they be forgotten and come to naught. But if they be Thy Word, may they adhere to our hearts, forever transforming us from glory into glory, into the creatures you would have us be, Thou who art our Rock and Redeemer, Amen.

Open your ears and your hearts to hear The Word of the Lord. Romans 8.6-11. The Grass withers, the Flower falls, but the Word of the Lord endures forever…Thanks be to God.

Did your summer fly by as fast as mine did? By summer I don’t mean the time contained between the Summer Solstice on June 22 to the Autumnal Equinox on September 21. I mean that time when things slow down, the kids are out of school, and people go in and out of town for vacation, and life just seems to take on a different pace. I remember early May thinking that summer was coming and that I would have opportunities to catch up a little on reading and other work from which I had fallen behind, and get some time to relax and reflect, to enjoy the blessings of life, and to experience that rare experience when I can be still and know that God is in control, that life is a gift, and that I do not have to carry the weight of the world on my shoulders.

But the kids are back in school, life is picking back up, church planning is beginning for fall, and for Advent and Christmas, and before you know it, I will look back and wonder just where 2005 the whole year went. I promised myself that I would get some down time, and instead I find myself wondering, just where did the time go? I had such good intentions. What happened to my well laid out plans?

I’ll tell you what happened, life happened. The everyday, regular demands of life happened. We needed to have a healthy dinner most every night, with vegetables that Kayla would eat, and that does not include every vegetable under the sun and I’m talking to you Brussel sprouts. Which means we needed to shop. We needed to keep Murphy’s schedule. We needed to work, me at my job and Melissa at hers. We needed to get both Kayla and Murphy some outside or exercise / play time every day, because that is important. And that’s just the everyday stuff. Where is there room in that for quiet? I’m not being rhetorical, I’d like to know? And then add the big things of life and of summer. The big things take time too. We needed to go to Montreat, and send me to Kentucky, and go to Pennsylvania for a baptism, and to celebrate my mother in law’s birthday (I’ve been sworn to secrecy not to tell you that she just turned 70). You’ll tell her that I kept the secret, right. So, I can look back at time gone by and know exactly where it went and exactly why I didn’t have a chance at following my best laid plans.

You and I don’t know the practice of Sabbath as well as our ancestors of the tradition, the ancestors we read about in the Bible. If I were to say to you that we need to reclaim rest, that we need to regain the day of Sabbath, that would sound great. Until you look at your life, and realize that the kids have to get to soccer, and to ballet, and to a host of things. Heck, you can find many of those things on our calendar every Sunday. 4:00, youth bells. 5:00, youth choir. 6:00 Youth group. And you’ve got to get three squares on your table too, whether or not Brussle Sprouts are invited. You’ve got to go to work, or to meetings, or to places where you volunteer your time. And these are great things, but they require thought, and work, and attention.

So, the idea of Sabbath as we have held it in our heads, as we remember the golden days of yore gone by, is not congruent with today’s world. Heck, just last year I preached to you and asked you to find a way to Sabbath, to find rest. How many of you have kept up that practice? How many of you started it?

We need to find ways to understand Sabbath that are achievable in today’s world, in our practical lives today. We don’t have whole days, heck, even whole afternoons, on a week in, week out basis, that we can use to reflect upon the Lord. What are we going to do about that? How can we still achieve the closeness of God that comes through Sabbath and that type of reflection?

Don’t think it is important? Look at yourself, look at your friends, can’t you see a defined need for peace? I once knew a young woman who found that a simple song, one that was finding some regular airplay on the radio, was a trigger to bring a sense of peace. So, when we were in the car together, if the song came on, she’d turn it up, yelling out, “Quiet, this song brings me peace!” Even things that bring us peace don’t bring anything that lasts.

Let me offer this as one of many solutions. Don’t look for it. Let it look for you. Two brothers made a pact. You see, when they were young, their parents proudly displayed on the mantle over the fireplace a priceless black and white photo of the whole family. The two brothers were young in the photo, 4 and 6. It was Christmas time, and the scene you would swear, was straight out of a Normal Rockwell painting. But the oldest brother in the picture was 18. After a bad falling out at a later Christmas holiday, the family woke up, and to their surprise, they found a note where the picture had been. It told of the safe deposit box where the picture was held, but not of the key to open the safe deposit box was. Years later, the boys decided they would move heaven and earth, literally, to find the key, and retrieve the picture. They traveled, all the way across the big blue, to their long lost brother’s house. They begged to know where the key was. After that failed, they ransacked the house when the brother was out. When that didn’t work, they traveled back home, and began to look around the apartment complex where their brother had been staying at the time the photo went missing. The police will make you stop nosing around and pulling up shrubs if the property isn’t yours. They tried everything they could think up, every angle that their brother might have tried. They gave up. About 2 ½ years later, the one brother came to the other, with a key. “What’s that?” “You know what it is.” “No way, where did you find it.” “Well, I was moving a rock in mom and dad’s backyard, the one that I always hit with the lawnmower when its my turn to take care of the yard, and there it was, right under that rock.” “Do you think that’s the key?” And the brother pulled out a large manila envelope, “I’ve already been to the bank. Let’s go see mom and dad.”

Sometimes in our looking for peace and contentment as found in the presence of God, our search itself throws us off. Looking for Sabbath, looking for rest and refreshment can be the same way, sometimes. If you think, like I sometimes do, that you can find what you need in Sabbath by looking for new and exciting ways to carve out time, to search for it, you may find yourself more exhausted in your search, and that you might have done more harm than good. Maybe you and I could learn to let God’s Spirit work in us, without our constant trying harder. Maybe we could find those moments where we realize that God is at work in us, through us, and that it is not our doing that enables the Holy Spirit within us.

Maybe that is the difference to being in the flesh or in the spirit. To give up the idea that we can, through our will, through our flesh or denial therein, make ourselves more holy, or more aware of God’s presence, that is a hard lay down. It means we find our selves and our souls filled with peace and God’s Spirit through grace, a gift. It means we need to receive, not achieve. Set your minds on the Spirit, sisters and brothers, instead of the flesh. Focus on the goodness of God that is all around you, that is within you, not on how you can achieve anything; not the good life, not closeness with God, not on anything you, read flesh, can do. Instead set your mind on what God can do, and does. Do you see the subtle, yet incredibly significant difference between the two?

“But wait a minute,” I hear one of you saying. In the corner, I can hear it. Can you hear it with me? “When Jesus started his ministry,” it’s quiet, but its there, “to make sure he was filled with the Spirit, didn’t he take the initiative and go out into the desert for 40 days. And through his grit and determination he fasted, and then was able to resist temptation.” First off, we’re not Jesus. I may not know all of you so well that I know your favorite book, or movie, or style of music, but I do know this. Not one of you in here is Jesus. Not one. But second off, you’ve got it wrong in the first place. Both accounts of the 40 days in Matthew and Luke show that Jesus didn’t go into the wilderness on his own account. He was driven there, by the Holy Spirit. Matthew 4, verse 1,  he was led up there by the Spirit. He was led up. Passive verb used, not active. And Luke, also chapter 4 verse 1, “Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit…was led by the Spirit into the wild.” Was led. Passive verb. Jesus didn’t seek out the wilderness, he was led there, by the Holy Spirit.

Brothers and sisters, beloved children of God, Saints whose citizenship is in heaven, future angels, if we aren’t Jesus, and even Jesus didn’t actively seek out to be filled, but did only what the Spirit told him, why do we feel like we need to help God out? Why can’t we just wait patently for the Lord, who fills us with good things?

Now, I’ve given you a break today. I haven’t told you to carve out any time. I haven’t made you do anything. In fact, it’s just the opposite. I’ve told you to do nothing, save set your mind on the spirit, and let the peace of God find you. I’ve really made it easier on you. I haven’t asked you to change anything you do, to add anything to your busy schedules. It’s only the way you set and run your life. My only desire for us is that we all change our mode of being. That’s all. Not something you do, just the way you approach your whole life. Set your mind on the Spirit, don’t try to achieve the presence of God, just receive it. Amen.