Upending Empire By Taking A Nap

Sermon For Mantua Center Christian Church, Mantua, Ohio

Sunday May 7, 2023 

Scriptures: Exodus 5:4-11 & Mark 2:23-28

By The Rev. Allen V. Harris (he/him/his)

Regional Pastor & President, Christian Church in Ohio

Preaching on the lands of the Erie, Kaskaskia, and Mississauga peoples.

On several occasions I have heard our General Minister and President, the Rev. Teresa Hord Owens, refer to a movement called “The Nap Ministry,” and upon her recommendation began following it on the social media site Instagram.  According to its website, “The Nap Ministry was founded in 2016 by Tricia Hersey and is an organization that examines the liberating power of naps.”  They go on to describe their purpose by declaring, “We believe rest is a form of resistance and name sleep deprivation as a racial and social justice issue.”¹  

Rest as a form of resistance is nothing new but, sadly, it is just as revolutionary now as it ever was.  Our biblical text for today from the epic story of the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, their wandering in the wilderness of Sinai, to their arrival in Canaan, a land flowing with milk and honey, has at its core, the truth that “rest is a form of resistance.”  In it we find Moses and his brother Aaron going to Pharaoh trying to negotiate just a little time off for their people, enslaved by the Egyptians.  All they want is a day to get away from the backbreaking work to worship their God.  Pharaoh, perhaps sensing a plan to escape, not only refuses, but decides to make the Israelites work harder by removing a key component from the production line of the bricks they are making for his massive building program.  Without straw, they cannot make the bricks and they are now forced to go into the desert around them and scrounge for straw.  

To make matters worse, the production quota remains the same, making it utterly impossible for the bricks to be made as fast as Pharaoh demands.  To add insult to injury, Pharaoh builds in a proforma performance review that he passes down through the taskmasters and supervisors: Why can’t they keep production up?  Well, they’re just lazy.  How many of us have felt the folks who supervise us, those in the corporate office, make harder demands and completely unattainable goals when we are already exhausted to the depths of our souls?

In fact, this unholy push for more work and production and the human suffering it causes will manifest itself in one of the most compelling moments of divine law when Moses reveals the fourth commandment inscribed on the tablets is a mandate to rest on the sabbath just as God did in the act of creation:

Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. 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 work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.(Exodus 20:8-10a, 11b)

Hebrew Scripture scholar and author, Walter Brueggemann, has written extensively about these passages and about Sabbath rest.  He makes the case that Pharaoh’s demand for more and harder work from the enslaved peoples, born of his fear that his creature comforts will be compromised and out of his unadulterated racism, is symbolic for leaders throughout history who demand the same and from whom the peoples need to be liberated.  Brueggemann declares, “As long as we live in the regime of some Pharaoh, we will never make enough bricks!”²

But an important distinction this brilliant scholar makes is that it is not simply hard work that makes us weary like the enslaved Israelites were weary, but something more.  “It is rather,” he writes, “living a life that is against the grain of our true creatureliness, living a ministry that is against the grain of our true vocation, being placed in a false position so that our day-to-day operation requires us to contradict what we know best about ourselves and what we love most about our life as children of God.  Exhaustion comes from the demand that we be, in some measure, other than we truly are, such an alienation requires too much energy to navigate.”³

And this resonates across the millennia and into every profession or life’s work we have ever done, doesn’t it?  You have known that feeling, surely, of living a life “against the grain of your true creatureliness” or of “your true vocation?”  I know I have!  And yes, the church can and has been a taskmaster of Pharaonic proportions.  Brueggemann names this, whether in the church’s demands of those who serve in it as volunteers or paid staff, or in its cooperation and collusion with the powers in the world that oppress and enslave others.  “The church… is pharaonic in its silencing… [which] gives us a visa to the realm of death.  We die a little every day in silence because we know better, and yet we dare not speak.”⁴

I want to make the case that the sabbatical that you have provided your pastor is a part of the solution to the problem of Pharaoh’s demand for “more bricks with less straw.”  I am painfully aware that this is a dicey connection to make, and I know that the vast majority of local churches don’t understand or appreciate sabbaticals as well as Mantua Christian Church does – and some even are dead-set against it – but the case must be made and I as Regional Minister am the best one to make it.  

My position is that if the Church, which has as a fundamental value the concept of sabbath rest, cannot be in the forefront of proclaiming rest as sacred and naps as a form of resistance to injustice then we have failed our divine duty to be a place of counterculture holy work and should close up shop immediately.  But you, my beloved Mantua Center Christian Church, at least “gets” sabbath rest enough to have offered your pastor sacred time away for a sabbatical.

I would like to affirm your decision and perhaps make the case for other congregations to follow suit by linking the ancient story of Moses standing up to Pharaoh and the current practice of providing sabbaticals to pastors, and I will use the story of Jesus and his disciples in Mark 2 as a bridge.  

In this text we learn that Jesus and his disciples were going through a grainfield and were plucking grain, apparently on the sabbath.  When the religious leaders confronted him and accused them of breaking the fourth commandment, Jesus referenced a story about King David breaking religious rules for a higher purpose.  Jesus then declares, in a proclamation that rings throughout history, ““The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath; so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.”

In this moment, all religious leaders and the church universal are put on notice.  We must be on guard for every occasion when we make “the way things are” or “the way things are supposed to be done” more important than “the way things need to be done here and now” and “the way things ought to be done for the future”  If the purpose of the original sabbath commandment was to confront the powers and principalities which had become comfortable with the enslavement of human beings for wealth and comfort, then we ought not to focus on the details of twelve men picking grain on a certain day, but on transforming systems to create just and equitable ways of living in this world.

Likewise, we absolutely have to confront the all-too-common perception that sabbaticals are really just extended paid vacation for our pastors.  This is outrageous and completely out of touch with the realities of full-time ministry in the church of the 21^st century!  I hearken back to Brueggemann’s statement that weariness is not about working too hard but working against the grain of our creatureliness and vocation.  After years of serving a congregation, in the radically shifting environment of both the institutional church and the world around us, things change – DRAMATICALLY!  Pastors, who are called to serve in the most intimate, responsive, relevant way through their pastoral care, teaching and preaching, administration, planning and visioning, often find themselves working at odds with themselves, the congregation they serve, and the world around them.  This is as understandable as it is natural.  It just happens.

Therefore Sabbaticals provide a chance for clergy to reset, recalibrate, reconsider their vocation and the life of the community they serve rather than just give up and quit.  And, if it is a true and good sabbatical, they will return as a renewed pastor!  Likewise, sabbaticals provide congregations with the same opportunity to reset, recalibrate, reconsider their mission and the pastor who serves them rather than just fire them.  And, if it is a true and good sabbatical, the congregation will welcome the return of their pastor as a renewed congregation!  Think of sabbaticals as an extended nap for both the congregation and the pastor!  I have been gifted with sabbaticals in both of the congregations I have served as well as my previous Regional Ministry and in all of them I came back a completely renewed pastor, with new ideas, skills, hopes and dreams, and energy.  And my congregations were different and refreshed as well!

And if pastoral/congregational sabbaticals were absolutely needed in 2019, then they are unequivocally needed in 2023.  Much has been written about the incredible toll that the last few years have taken on clergy, whether serving as chaplains, in educational settings, or certainly in local congregations.  The Barna Institute released a report, “Pastors Share Top Reasons They’ve Considered Quitting Ministry in the Past Year.” Melissa Florer-Bixler wrote, “Why Pastors Are Joining the Great Resignation.”  Tish Harrison Warren wrote in the New York Times, “Why Pastors are Burning Out.”  Elizabeth Felicetti wrote and article, “My Church Doesn’t Know What to Do Anymore.”  Matt Spoden wrote about how local pastors were reflecting on growing pastoral shortage.  In article after article it has been made clear that an already alarming trend towards pastoral burnout and disenchantment with the church was amplified, exacerbated, and hastened by the COVID-19 pandemic, the political divisions of our nation and world, and the failure of the church to respond to the pressing issues of racial injustice and inequity, climate change, and protecting the most vulnerable in our midst.

And I daresay just as many articles could be written about how lay leaders are experiencing the same burnout and disenchantment.

Please hear me.  I don’t want to make clergy and congregational sabbaticals a panacea.  But I do think they are a singularly powerful act of resistance in the face of the forces of exhaustion and disillusionment facing our communities of faith in this moment in history.  Bravo for engaging in this sabbatical!  But it will only work if we want and will it to work.  You have to see this sabbatical as yours as well as your pastor’s, and not overwork yourselves during this time.  You must absolutely leave your pastor alone and let him heal, dream new dreams, spend time reconnecting with his family, and simply ponder his creatureliness and his vocation.  Maybe each of you can do those very same things.

And the number one thing I think we all should do?  Take more naps.  ;-}

Amen

¹ Tricia Hersey, The Nap Ministry can be explored more online at: https://thenapministry.wordpress.com/about/

² Walter Brueggemann, Mandate To Difference: An Invitation To The Contemporary Church, Westminster John Knox, Louisville, Kentucky, 2007, in the chapter “The Sabbath Voice Of The Evangel,” p. 43

³ Ibid, p. 42

⁴ Ibid, p. 43