Rest Your Way Through

So as we transition to a short framing message, I really want to encourage all of us, including me, to spend just a moment settling into our bodies: whether that means stretching, sitting up straighter, shaking it out, or just being aware of this Divine instrument that we have; that we are.

We're at a time of continuing to deepen in darkness. In fact the shortest day of the year, the time between sunrise and sunset, will be next Monday, the 20th of December, and then the light will begin to return. This is also the time that many people celebrate as Advent, a time of preparation and waiting. If you were here during the last worship, you heard me talk about the unveiling, a sort of lifting of the veil, a revealing of God's presence in the world along with God's hopes for a kind of radical freedom for all of us. 

Since that time, and even before that time, I've been sitting with a couple of voices, and just listening to them talk to me and talk with each other, and watching how these two seemingly unlikely conversation partners - as very different sorts of humans - have been weaving together a cloth. And so this morning I'd like to share some of those conversation threads with you.

The first is this Hebrew Scriptures scholar. His name is Walter Brueggemann, and at this point he is an Emeritus professor at Columbia Seminary in Ohio. He literally wrote the book on Hebrew Scripture that I used in my seminary study. But it's not that tome that I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is the way that he lifts up prophetic imagination, especially the role of the prophet, to discomfort us from the siren song of Empire along with the ways that we naturally collude with the systems of Empire. The prophet's role is to remind us that fundamental to God's creation is God's abundance, and the promise of what is called Shalom, which is an overarching, abiding peace and provision. It was there in the Garden and shows up throughout the Hebrew Scriptures. It's the promise of Manna in the desert, which we have access to, if we don't hoard it and store it up. That impulse of hoarding and storing, that notion of scarcity, is one that comes from Empire. We see it in the movement of Pharaoh, who says "I want to control and to have everything." It is not an impulse from God, but it seems to be baked into all of the systems around us. This sense of scarcity and drive for acquisition is based on fear  - not abundance. 

One of the things that Brueggemann says about Advent is that it's an opportunity for us to slow down and wait  as we prepare for the remembrance of the bodily intrusion of God in our world. Of God's Godself coming into the world. And depending on your Christology, (which is a fancy word for how you think about the divinity of Jesus) it might mean that Jesus is a fully human and fully divine being that came into the world. Or you might think of it in a kind of more Quaker way:  that with Jesus, the seed of God in him grew so completely, that that Seed of Christ took over and co-inhabited the human person who was Jesus. However you tell that story, the ministry of Jesus showed us a wholly different way outside of Empire, one that up-ended Empire. Brueggemann goes on to – rightly I think – name the ways that systems of White Supremacy and capitalism collude in modern times with Empire, and that the functioning of those systems necessitate that some human beings have to be disposable. This is not the system of God. 

So that's one voice. 

The other voice that I have been listening to, and really loving, is a woman named Tricia Hersey. She was an African-American Divinity student at Emory University in Atlanta who found herself crumbling under the crush of graduate study, the hustle of making ends meet, and trying to parent. Her body began to fall apart in that period of extreme exhaustion. She made the decision that she was going to push back against those demands of graduate school: the presumption of overwork, the structures that she was inside. She let herself rest and heal. She showed up for class, but she didn't do the one thousand pages of reading that she was expected to do every week. She rested. She found, or uncovered paradoxically, that she actually started doing better in school when she wasn't exhausted, and when she was letting herself rest. Being an artist, she interrogated this outcome by creating performance pieces, which she called the Nap Ministry. She curated public spaces, where she set up relaxing landscapes and invited people to come and sleep, and people would come to these spaces and wake up crying because they hadn't really had a full rest in such a long time, ...they were so moved by this ministry. 

So she began to dig and interrogate even more a culture that requires us to be exhausted. She came to name Capitalism "grind culture," and to see the ways in which we are exhausted by being caught up in the twin systems of capitalism and White Supremacy. As a Black woman she knew in her body that women, and Black people, are even more exhausted. She began to do research in the library, to uncover that the roots of capitalism are entwined in the roots of human enslavement, and ways that the development of that institution was an effort to turn human beings into machines of profit. And today, she says that everyone on the planet, including the planet itself, is suffering under the legacy of these systems. She goes on to talk about the ways in which Black liberation is a balm for humanity. That this message is for everyone who is suffering from the ways of White Supremacy and capitalism.

That liberation of everyone is based on pushing back on what she calls "grind culture," giving ourselves space for dreaming, for imagining, for being. To see that the Divinity that inhabits us is not dependent on production, or being productive, or checking off a to-do list. Everything we need for our own freedom, she says (and she has found) is inside us. But to find it, we need to slow down and rest.

In that I hear echoes of our Quaker forebears, and contemporary Quakers: listening to Inner Teacher will tell you whose you are. I hear echoes of the Gospel: the Kingdom of God is within you, and once you come to know yourselves you will become known as the children of the living God. Brueggemann reminds us that the gifts of life are given by a generous God, and the story of the Gospel of abundance is the story of our relationship with this generous God. Trisha Hersey tells us that resting is about getting back to our truest Advent unveiling, our truest selves. This seems to me to be the work of this time, of these long stretches of darkness. It seems perfect for us to slow down and rest (if you live in a place, where roads are icy) if you can't go anywhere. It's a perfect time to say no, I can't do that extra thing. 

One thing that Tricia Hersey lifts up, that I think stretches beyond this period of darkness and winter and Advent, is that this work of disentangling us ourselves from the systems of capitalism and White Supremacy is really slow. We need, she says, to continue to “rest our way through it.” We need to form communities of collaboration and encouragement as we begin to do the work of healing and unmaking the ways in which we  toxically connected to these systems. 

And so I wonder if there is for us a message from these two voices, in this time of Advent, of waiting and resting, of listening deeply, that we can carry not just in this time of winter as we anticipate the return of the light - but into the rest of our lives? This work of building a community that untangles itself from these systems, that untangles itself from grind culture, and encourages each of us to get to know the Divine beings that we are - to celebrate the divine being that You are.