We began worship on Sunday, December 16, by reading Matthew 2:18: A voice was heard in Ramah wailing and loud

lamentations. Rachel weeping for her children, she refused to be consoled because they are no more. We then read the names and ages of the dead of Friday morning. We concluded by singing the hymn text of Carolyn Winfrey Gillette sung to the tune Herzliebster Jesu by Johann Crueger from the 17th Century. God, we have heard it, sounding in the silence: News of the children lost to this world's violence. Children of promise! Then without a warning, Loved ones are mourning. Jesus, you came to bear our human sorrow; You came to give us hope for each tomorrow. You are our life, Lord God's own love revealing. We need your healing! Heal us from giving weapons any glory; Help us, O Prince of Peace, to hear your story; Help us resist the evil all around here; May love abound here! By your own Spirit, give your church a clear voice; In this world's violence, help us make a new choice. Help us to witness to the joy your peace brings, Until your world sings!1 The Sermon: Rest. Joshua 23:1-16 Hebrews 4:1-16

On Thursday I was on a roll on my sermon preparation. The biblical theme of rest was on my mind. Much of it rolled easily out of my word processor but I wasnt finished. So I decided to take it home along with some commentaries to work on it some more. Life impinged. Choir rehearsal that night. Breakfast with my friend Kenny Friday morning with conversation about golf, ministry and sermon preparation. Back home by 10. At that point, the horror on Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut streamed across my computer desktop. Another Black Friday. I wondered about Sunday morning. I decided to preach as I had planned, however, I made changes below which I think are obvious.
1
1999 by Carolyn Winfrey Gillette. All rights reserved. I believe this was composed after the school shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. 1

Jesus said, Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.2 At the beginning of the 336 page prayer that has come down to us as The Confessions, St. Augustine speaks of restlessness and rest: Man is one of your creatures, Lord, and his instinct is to praise you. He bears about him the mark of death, the sign of his own sin to remind him that you thwart the proud (Psalm 145:3). But still, since he is a part of your creation, he wishes to praise you. The thought of you stirs him so deeply that he cannot be content unless he praises you, because you made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you.3 Near the conclusion of this long prayer, Augustine prays, O Lord God, grant us peace, for all that we have is your gift. Grant us the peace of repose, the peace of the Sabbath, the peace which has no evening.4 At the beginning of the Old Testament reading the writer tells us the Lord had given rest to Israel from all their enemies all around, to the people of Israel. But keeping that rest from all the enemies around them was conditional on the obedience of the people so Joshua warns them: If you transgress the covenant of the Lord your God, which he enjoined on you, and go and serve other gods and bow down to them, then the anger of the Lord will be kindled against you, and you shall perish quickly from the good land that he has given to you.5 The letter to the Hebrews twice directly quotes Psalm 95, in which we sang of rest and in the NRSV part of it reads, For forty years I loathed that generation and said, They are a people whose hearts go astray, and they do not regard my ways. Therefore in my anger I swore, They shall not enter my rest.6 The letter to the Hebrews, speaking of a time more oppressive and even more violent than our own, reads: Therefore, while the promise of entering his rest is still open, let us take care that
2 3 4 5 6
Matthew 11:28-230 St. Augustine, Confessions translated by R. S. Pine-Coffin, 1961, Penguin Books, p. 21. Ibid., p. 346. Joshua 23:16 Psalm 95:10-11

none of you should seem to have failed to reach it. For indeed the good news came to us just as to them; but the message they heard did not benefit them, because they were not united by faith with those who listened. For we who have believed enter that rest, just as God has said, As in my anger I swore, They shall not enter my rest, though his works were finished at the foundation of the world. For in one place it speaks about the seventh day as follows, And God rested on the seventh day from all his works. And again in this place it says, They shall not enter my rest. Since therefore it remains open for some to enter it, and those who formerly received the good news failed to enter because of disobedience, again he sets a certain daytoday saying through David much later, in the words already quoted, Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts. For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not speak later about another day. So then, a sabbath rest still remains for the people of God; for those who enter Gods rest also cease from their labors as God did from his. Let us therefore make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one may fall through such disobedience as theirs.7 So, here we have a connection from Hebrews to Joshua, to the commandments, to trust in God for provision in the wilderness, to a rooting of rest in the very creation of the universe for God rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done.8 It makes one wonder. Why did God rest? Was God tired from all the laboring of Creation? Walter Bruggemann comments here, [The Lord] on the seventh day was either spent and needed restthus vulnerableor was serenely situated in creation and able to be at ease. Either way, [the Lords conduct] on the seventh day is in contrast to the world of pharaoh, in which there is no rest but only feverish productivity. 9 I think you may be getting the picture of the many meanings of rest. Rest from war. Rest from labor. Rest from restlessness. Rather than try to think up a one-size-fits-all definition of biblical rest let us thank God that we have been given a multi-faceted understanding. The biblical writers think of rest in many ways. The Fourth Commandment is Remember the sabbath day to keep it holy. In Deuteronomy it is more fully explained and gives reasons: Observe the sabbath day and keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any workyou, or your son or your daughter, or your male or female slave, or your ox or your donkey, or any of
7 8 9
Hebrews 4:1-11 Genesis 2:2 Theology of the Old Testament, p. 184 3

your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day.10 Two things: 1. It refers to an earlier command about the gathering of food in the wilderness and the Gods provision that one only gathers for six days, one does not gather on the seventh, one trusts God for enough and indeed in the story God provides enough on the 6th day so that one may rest as God rested on the 7th day, further it was test of the peoples trust that enough would be provided. We pray for enough whenever we repeat the Lords Prayer, Give us this day our daily bread. It is a petition for rest. Bruggeman also suggests that this commandment as given in Deuteronomy not only looks to proper worship but to just social relationships by setting limits to the acquisitive capacity of members of the communitythe capacity to seize and confiscate by power or cunning what is necessary to the life of the neighbor. The commands require that the legitimacy (entitlement?) of other members of the community sets a limit on the autonomous capacity of any member of the community to take what another must have in order to live.[It is] a defense of the weak against the rapacious capacity of the strong.11 The roots of the labor movement pressing against the rapacious capacity of the strong toward the norm of the 5 day work week of 8 hours a day are in the admonition to rest and rest involves trust in the notion that God will provide all that we need for our daily bread. That is consistent with the Old Testament concept of rest. Its a good thing. Its the healthy way to live. Trusting in the Lord and his care. It is faith, based on Gods promises, that you can stop and rest for a while, that everything doesnt depend on you and your frenzied activity. God is in charge. But thinking more about this past Friday, do we not all need rest? We need rest from violence, we need rest from fear, we need rest from the terrors and the arrows and bullets that fly by day, from pestilence that walks in the darkness or the destruction that wastes at noon.12 It will not solve the problem of evil that grasps the human heart, but we do have the means to make it less so. As I understand criminal law there are three things that coalesce in order that there be a crime, motive, means and opportunity. Motives are those uncontrollable matters of the human heart, but means and opportunity are more or less under our control. Motive and means led Adam Lanza to seek the opportunity to kill. His mother legally owned the guns he used illegally. If there
00 11 22
Deuteronomy 5:12-16 Ibid. An allusion to Psalm 91.

had been no means to do so, his mother would still be alive and the carnage averted. Without the means It would not have happened. If we want to change that we must have moral and political will. I found it ironic that on Thursday the Michigan legislature rushed through a bill that would make it legal for people to carry hand guns in schools and churches. When I heard about that I was tempted to put on our sign in front of the Kirk This is a Hand Guns Free Zone. [At this point many in the congregation applauded.] If that is what you believe it should be I urge you to write Governor Snyder and tell him to not sign that ill considered legislation. (I called it idiocy on Facebook.) Along with one of my online friends, a colleague in California, I am sick and tired of us not having the moral and political intellect and will to do what we can to make for fewer tragedies. It can be done. We know how to do it, but let us do it in a sensible way that does not impinge on the rights of gun owners in our midst who act responsibly. God give us that will, to do that and do it soon. Then maybe we will enter that rest promised long ago.