On Rest and Why It's So Hard

A sermon on Mark 6:30-34, 53-56.

[for an audio recording of this sermon, click here. Photo by Tony Tran on Unsplash.com]

When my youngest son was little, before we knew about the things that make his brain work a bit differently than neurotypical kids, I assumed that the common wisdom about kids tiring themselves out was accurate.

We would be in a social situation with other families, and all of our kids would be running around, amped up on sugar and excitement, contributing to a base decibel level edging close to hearing-damage range, and I would physically feel my social battery draining.

Then, another parents would say, “At least they will all be easy to get to sleep tonight!”

And everyone would laugh and agree. And I would think, “Man, I hope so!”

And then that night, when Maddox and I were heading into hour two of what was supposed to be an “easy” bedtime …

and he was flopping around so vigorously on his big boy bed that it looked like he thought he was training to be the world’s smallest sumo wrestler…

and I was so exhausted that I just wanted to sit down on the floor and cry…

I would inevitably get to the point of just moaning at him, “Maddox! You need to sleep.”

To which he would inevitably respond, “I can’t sleep, Momo! I has too much energy in my body!”

And the thing is… we were both right.

He did need sleep (as did his poor mama). Young children need rest, especially after overstimulation.

But what I did not understand at the time was the way that his neuro-spicy brain responds to overstimulation.

While my social battery would drain in the frenetic party atmosphere, Maddox’s would charge… and charge…and charge…until he was a vibrating ball of energy that genuinely could not just turn off without first discharging all of the excess.

That was the image that popped into my brain this week when I read Debie Thomas’s description of the opening scene of today’s gospel story. She writes about the disciples’ return from their first foray into independent ministry,

“We see them on fire, bursting with thrilling stories of the healings, exorcisms, and effective evangelistic campaigns they’ve pulled off on their own for the first time. They are wired. Excited. Caffeinated. Ready. In their minds, what they need is their next project from Jesus. Their next divine mission. In their minds, the crowds are waiting, and it’s time to go.

But Jesus disagrees. When the disciples see energy, Jesus sees overstimulation. Where the disciples see a tightly packed schedule, Jesus sees a poor sense of balance and rhythm. Where the disciples see invincibility, Jesus sees need. The need to debrief and reflect. The need to eat, pray, play, and sleep. The need to learn the art of solitude.”[1]

If I’m honest, when I have read this scene in the past I have never before seen the disciples the way that Debie Thomas describes them.

I have always read the account of Jesus calling his disciples to rest and assumed that rest must be what they were longing for (because it is what I am usually longing for).

And then I have read on about the interruptions that followed and assumed that the disciples must have felt frustrated, maybe even resentful, that Jesus would tell them to “come away and rest” and then not ensure that they had the opportunity, because when needy people showed up at the deserted place Jesus had compassion on the crowds, rather than on his exhausted disciples.

But Thomas’s description, and the memories it triggered of my poor, exhausted, overstimulated son, have me realizing that the story we have here is more complicated than the story I have always assumed… and it is also more true.

Because very rarely is rest simple.

If it were, we would get the rest we need.

We would organize our schedules to allow for a full, uninterrupted 8-hours a night.

And when our heads laid down on our pillows we would ease into sleep rather than tossing and turning trying to get our brains to turn off, or waking at 3 am to negotiate fruitlessly with our anxieties.

And we wouldn’t feel guilty for saying “no” when our plates are already full, or when we see another need to add to the endless list of things we wish we could fix but that is just too much!

It if were as simple as just resting when we need to, that’s what we would do.

But it is not that simple.

For one thing, we have intense cultural pressures to contend with.

The so-called “Protestant work ethic” dug its fingers into the American psyche right from the start, and we have never yet managed to disentangle the association between moral superiority and workaholism.

Tiredness is a uniform that we are only supposed to discard for short periods of time, usually on vacations, that require us to double-up on either side.

And speaking of vacations… you know that safety spiel you get on airplanes about putting on your own oxygen mask before helping others… have you ever once seen an action movie hero do that?

Of course not… they rip their masks off to go do hero things… because heroes are not supposed to need to breathe, apparently, much less rest!

And we want to be the heroes in our stories.

And even if we can somehow manage to manage to resist the persistent, demanding messages about good people needing to work themselves to the point of exhaustion and saying “yes” to every request we can possibly manage…

There’s the reality of how much genuinely needs to get done!

That’s the challenge in our gospel today.

Jesus saw that his disciples needed a rest, but then he also saw the people “like sheep without a shepherd,” and he couldn’t just turn them away because he and his friends were tired.

So, he begins to teach them.

And (in the verses we skipped over), when the people start to get hungry, he tells his disciples – you know, the ones who have been so busy that that have “had no leisure even to eat – to feed the crowds.

And, yes, Jesus performs the miracle to turn a few loaves and fish into a feast to feed 5,000, but the disciples did the distribution and the clean-up.

Because the need was real. It was urgent.

And the reality of being part of Jesus’s ministry in a needy world is that sometimes an urgent need will confront us even when we are tired and hungry.

Sometimes, for all that we cultivate healthy boundaries and work-life-spirit balance… we can’t just say “not it!” because it matters too much.

And then, there’s the other part of the story that is skipped in our lectionary reading.

After the miraculous feeding has been distributed and the leftovers collected… Jesus again tells his disciples to take a break.

He puts them in a boat and tells them to cross over to the other side of the sea while he goes up on the mountain to pray.

It turns out to not be much of a rest for the poor disciples (who, by this time, I think, are over the high of successful ministry) because they are rowing against the wind… struggling… all night long.

And in the early morning, Jesus comes by walking on the water.

And the disciples lost it!

They started screaming. They thought he was a ghost. They were mentally and physically exhausted and this was just too much.

Jesus told them not to be afraid, and got in the boat, and the wind immediately calmed.

And, finally, there was a pause. A legitimate chance to rest.

No clamoring crowds.

No fighting wind.

No unfed stomachs.

And the gospel tells us, “His disciples were so baffled they were beside themselves.” (Mark 6:51)

I do not blame them.

Because I have been there. I have been in that emotional space of overload, and exhaustion, and such familiarity with anxious tension that even when the spinning stops, and I can take a moment to rest… I cannot rest.

My mind cannot slow down. My emotions cannot recalibrate. I’m so used to go, go, go that trying to stop gives me vertigo.

When it comes to needing rest, this barrier might be the hardest one to overcome.

Because it’s about brain chemistry and adaptive patterns.

When we overcharge our emotional batteries we cannot just turn them off at the drop of a hat. There’s too much energy.

And I actually find that reassuring.

Because it means the struggle to rest is not a moral failing, just like it is not a simple matter of making time for rest.

We do not just need more discipline or more will-power.

We do not just need better time management skills or the right nighttime routine.

We need healing of all the injuries to our minds, bodies, and spirits that legitimately interfere with rest.

And the good news of the gospel is that Jesus is a healer.

The final scene in today’s gospel happens on the other side of the lake…

where the crowds swell again as soon as the boat lands,