When You’re Weary

Sermon

A few months ago, I started seeing references to something called “the nap ministry.” I made assumptions about what it was – an encouragement for folks to take naps. What I wonderful thing, I thought, as someone who is a big believer in naps. But as often happens with our beliefs, be they in naps or God, I like tend to like the idea of naps rather than the practice themselves.

As I read the Isaiah passage for this week, the note of Israel’s weariness struck me as sounding a bit like our status quo. A few weeks ago in his sermon, Gregg talked about being tired. Everyone I know is tired – physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

The people of ancient Israel might understand our weariness. In this part of the book of Isaiah, the prophet addresses the people whose homeland has been erased. The wealthy elites have been taken to Babylon to live in exile. The poor and marginalized have been left in a land that has been ransacked and ravaged, and they now live by scraping out whatever existence they can. All of them are exhausted.

If you’ve ever lived in a place where you barely speak the language, you know how tiring it is to try to understand and be understood.

If you’ve ever been away from home – whatever you consider home – not being in your usual place of comfort and livelihood can wear you down.

If you’ve been through trauma, like the conquering of your small nation by a superpower, your body holds all the stress of fear and anger and grief. Your responses slow down, and the residual trauma takes a toll on your health so that you simply cannot function normally.

If you’ve ever suffered with no relief in sight, you start to wonder if God has given up on you, if God cares about you. Maybe you even wonder if God is punishing you for some known or unknown sin.

All that played into the weariness of the people of ancient Israel who lived during the Babylonian exile. They assumed that their exhaustion was a direct result of God’s punishment of them for their faithlessness.

I think we understand. I bet if I asked you (and I might do that in the sermon talk-back), you could easily name ten things that you are tired of. I’m tired of not seeing you all in person. I’m tired of people not taking this pandemic seriously, not wearing masks as a statement of freedom. I’m tired of the silence coming out of the school down the street. I’m tired of Zoom. I’m tired of random acts of destruction. I’m tired of all the yelling about whatever that never leads to anything. I’m tired of preaching to a camera way up in the balcony. I’m tired of making dinner every night. I’m tired of not seeing my mom and my brothers and sister.

I know there are parents who are exhausted from being not only chief cooks and bottle washers but teachers and activity directors and coaches and therapists; some of them are even tired of being with their kids 24/7. They love them, of course, but they need a break.

I know there are those who are tired of being alone, cooped up in their home without the usual sociability of the coffee shop or grocery store or movie theatre or church. I’ve had some very lonely periods in my life when I thought I might die from isolation. The walls start to close in, and sometimes the last person I want to be left with is myself.

I know there are people who cannot bear one more experience of racist hate, be it something they see on the news or something that happens to them. Four hundred years of denigration because of the color of one’s skin grinds away at the soul.

So we are weary, wondering if we will ever know refreshment and energy and wholeness again. At the same time, to express weariness, at least for me, feels like I’m complaining, I’m being a baby, I need to man up, as it were, put my big-girl shoes on, and deal.

Not so fast, my friends. If there is a message from Isaiah, it is in an acceptance of our weariness. If Jesus’ invitation to all who are weary and in need of rest is sincere, then we admit that he means us. Instead of fighting our exhaustion, what would it mean if we gave in to it?

One commentator on Isaiah says this. “It is a difficult but essential discipline to learn how rightly to assess our degree of weariness and exhaustion in the walk of faith. Sometimes these twins are directly responsible for our inability to hear God, and for misunderstanding how God is actively at work. The final appeal of Isaiah 40 (vv.27-31) acknowledges that Israel is convicted by a sense that God has abandoned her and no longer understands her way. God addresses this charge not by insisting Israel is wrong, that God has not disregarded her rights, but by strengthening and encouraging Israel and by insisting that weakness and powerlessness are never roadblocks to God’s grace, while their opposites surely are.” (Christopher Seitz, New Interpreter’s Commentary, p. 346)

Or put another way, as the author of Black Liturgies, Cole Arthur Riley, writes,

“And maybe
to be tired
to be emotional
is to be weak.
Who says
weakness can’t
be beautiful?
Go in dignity
to lie down and feel.” (Black Liturgies)

When we finally admit to ourselves that we cannot revive ourselves, we allow room for God to come in and do that very thing. That’s where the Nap Ministry comes in.

While the Nap Ministry does encourage people to take naps, there’s more to it. As the organization describes itself, “The Nap Ministry was founded in 2016 by Tricia Hersey and is an organization that examines the liberating power of naps. We engage with the power of performance art, site-specific installations, and community organizing to install sacred and safe spaces for the community to rest together. We facilitate immersive workshops and curate performance art that examines rest as a radical tool for community healing. We believe rest is a form of resistance and name sleep deprivation as a racial and social justice issue.” (thenapministry.com)

On the seventh day, God rested. So must we, whether we are exhausted because we are doing too much or because life has been throwing too many cream pies in our faces.

Because there are two facets to our exhaustion. The first is overwork, fueled by our sense that our value is directly related to our productivity. If we’re exhausted, we must be pretty important, right? The second facet is that our exhaustion comes from forces outside of us – a pandemic, cries for racial justice, an economy that rewards the rich and punishes the poor, isolation.

What if our value has nothing to do with our productivity? What if our value has nothing to do with our weakness? What if our value, in the eyes of God and in the eyes of each other, is simply a matter of grace?

What if to our weariness, God says, I will restore you.
What if to our isolation, God says, I will be with you.
What if to our grief, God says, I will comfort you.
What if to our fear, God says, I will protect you.
And what if we say that to each other?

That’s the call, I think: to remind each other that God provides for us what we cannot provide for ourselves and that God calls us to care for each other to the best of our imperfect ability.

And so, my friends, take comfort in your naps and in all that you do to rest. God will refresh us, encourage us, heal us, renew us. Trust in that.

To the glory of God.

Amen.