Rest

 

Without a doubt, my favourite day of the week is Friday. My day off, when I am not available to work.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my vocation—seeking to attend to God and the lived experience of my neighbours and wider currents in society (how we relate to one another) and culture (the artefacts we create to express ourselves and what matters to us, to explore and engage with the big questions of life and the challenges we face) and attempting to articulate what I hear.

But it is rest that makes it all worthwhile.

The need for rest is enshrined in the Ten Words (also known as the Ten Commandments), which form a constitution for a new society. These words are given twice, in Exodus 20:1-17 and Deuteronomy 5:6-21. They are essentially the same on both occasions, the exception being the word concerning a day of rest in every seven.

In Exodus 20:8-11, this word is rooted in creation, in the lived experience of God, who, having established harmony in six creative acts, rested on the seventh day, in order to delight in what he saw. Rest, like, work, is a creative act. The fruit of work, not only mine but the contribution of every other element, from the tiny beetle that sparkles like a jewel in the sun, to that of my fellow humans.

In Deuteronomy 5:12-15, this same word is rooted in deliverance from slavery, in the lived experience of the people being brought into being by God, drawing the necessary conditions for life to flourish out from the chaos that threatens to overwhelm life. In other words, this is a continuation of the so-called creation narrative, of the rhythms first established ‘in the beginning,’ in Genesis 1.

The Hebrews in Egypt were not like the race-based chattel slaves of more recent times. Their experience was comparable to that of their Egyptian neighbours, who were also slaves of Pharaoh; and the Hebrews themselves had slaves. It is an experience much more comparable to being an employee today, which can be under positive or negative conditions; but regular, dependable rest was absent, as it is for so many today.

Rest enables me to re-set. To look back and take delight on all that has been good. To know that there are limits on all that is deeply frustrating, on work that remains outstanding, because work is ongoing. Therefore, rest resists the lie that we must get it all done before we can rest. Or the lie that our identity and value is found solely in our work, in our economic contribution, rather than in being human in this world, a creature with a whole creation to enjoy. And rest confronts the lie that it all depends on me, that I am some kind of saviour. Rest invites me to enjoy a whole other creative act in the company of God and of my neighbours.

I love Fridays. Lying in my hammock, reading a novel. Or sitting on the sofa, watching a box set, with Jo. Perhaps going for a walk. Almost always, these days, a run in the early evening, with friends. Good food. A bottle of wine.

 

Ten of Ten

Lent is traditionally a season of contemplating the Ten Commandments, or words of life. How many of them can you call to mind? Here’s the tenth:

You shall not covet your neighbour’s house; you shall not covet your neighbour’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbour.

Exodus 20:17

Comparison is the thief of joy. Yours, and theirs. The inability to be happy for another’s blessings, or thankful for your own.

Social media thrives on covetousness. It is your duty to present an enviable life. Shiny. With the dust of the wilderness filtered out.

But that dust is the stuff of life. That dust is you. Dust, that has been blessed, with relationship, to know partnership in life’s struggles, to create society, to care for creation. The secret to contentment is ... having been set free from envy.

And there is a disturbing presence here, though, to be fair, it has already turned up in the fourth word: [your neighbour’s] male or female slave. Are these not a people set free from slavery? Why, then, is the expectation that they have slaves? Is this simply a turning of the tables, a re-shuffling of injustice, not a transformation of society? Is this god no better, morally, than the rest?

Ambiguity is the condition of life, between the house of slavery and the land of promise. We never get to sign-off the words of life — job done! They turn us over when we make such claim. So do not covet the house, the society, that seems to have it made. They still have work to do (and rest to enter into on the way) as much as you.

Where is your ambiguity?

Nine of Ten

Lent is traditionally a season of contemplating the Ten Commandments, or words of life. How many of them can you call to mind? Here’s the ninth:

You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour.

Exodus 20:16

Fake news, we call it now. Bare-faced lies, they used to be called. Words of death, not life. A lynch-mob of syllables, falling over one another in their lust for blood. But, oh! What juicy bones, bursting with marrow to slurp and suck, and wipe from our jowls with the back of the hand.

When you want to control slaves, you tell them a false witness, of who they are, over and over and over again.

This is, in fact, so common place, that to hear a true witness it must be spoken again and again for a lifetime. But a lifetime is what we have. For we have been set free, and this god is in no hurry to get us home. We are a pilgrim people, and the journey on the Way is what transforms us.

That thing you believe about yourself, who told you that?

And what were their motives? Freedom or control?

Eight of Ten

Lent is traditionally a season of contemplating the Ten Commandments, or words of life. How many of them can you call to mind? Here’s the eighth:

You shall not steal.

Exodus 20:15

I once went to a church supplier to purchase some ash ahead of Ash Wednesday. The seller informed me that priests and vicars were always being caught trying to steal ash, deflecting the attention of whoever was behind the counter towards some other item they might or might not actually be interested in buying. It was, he told me, a dog (collar) eat dog (collar) world at that time of year.

Theft is driven by a fear of not having enough. Of there being a lack, and of needing to not be found wanting. It is a very understandable fear of slaves — and all the more-so of slaves who are descended from Joseph, the hero who saved the whole world from famine and yet whose memory, at least for the Egyptians, had been swallowed whole by the intervening years, as insatiably hungry as the grave. It is a fear that haunts us to this day, not least vicars woken in the night by feverish nightmares of Ashen humiliation.

But you do not have to steal from your fellow former slaves now that you have been set free by this god, whom they are already, falteringly, beginning to discover to be their Provider. There is enough for all, for today.

What do you fear will run out?

Seven of Ten

Lent is traditionally a season of contemplating the Ten Commandments, or words of life. How many of them can you call to mind? Here’s the seventh:

You shall not commit adultery.

Exodus 20:14

What’s the big deal about sex between consenting adults, regardless of existing commitments? It’s only sex. No-one needs to find out. No-one needs to get hurt.

Except that adultery is never only about sex, is always found out (if not confronted) and someone — in all likelihood, everyone involved — has already been hurt, and will only be hurt even more.

That said, the point is not primarily about what you do with your genitals, so much as what what you do with your genitals — the life-producing organs — says about the life you are continuing to produce. Are you faithful? And, as this is in fact a marriage-treaty between a god and a people, is this god faithful? Yes, indeed — to a thousand generations!

Are you faithful — in all your relationships?

Six of Ten

Lent is traditionally a season of contemplating the Ten Commandments, or words of life. How many of them can you call to mind? Here’s the sixth:

You shall not murder.

Exodus 20:13

Over and again, it is found to be the sixth Commandment — just two words in the Hebrew — that is most readily called to mind. In part, this is surely because it is the most visceral (and, for all that the King James Version, Thou shalt not kill, has colonised our imaginations, it is murder, extra-judicial killing, that is prohibited here). In part, it is also because murder is always the consequence of fear of being found out to have broken another Commandment — seven, eight, ten — or anger or envy at discovering that someone close to us has done so; and the subsequent attempt to hide tracks, to deflect suspicion — not only by the murderer, but also by key witnesses who do not wish to be exposed in relation to their own transgressions — trespasses onto the ninth life-giving word.

You shall not murder, then, lies at the very heart of a web of violations — and, conversely, freedoms. Little wonder that crime fiction, most often the investigation of a homicide, is so perennially popular an exploration of human nature.

Jesus said, to belittle someone is to break this Commandment. For to belittle someone is to cause them to die, inside: it is murder, or at least attempted murder, of the spirit, the inner person. And the spirit can be crushed, can be bound, unjustly — extra-judicially — in a cellar.

Murder, in all its forms, interrupts, disrupts, freedom. Yet it holds itself out to us as being the very means to that end. It is, as such, an idol (see the second word), the image of a false god (of whom Moses himself had to be disabused).

Who do you fantasise being dead?

What do you hope this death will achieve for you?

Five of Ten

Lent is traditionally a season of contemplating the Ten Commandments, or words of life. How many of them can you call to mind? Here’s the fifth:

Honour your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.

Exodus 20:12

It is worth remembering that these words are spoken to a generation of adults who have just escaped from generational slavery lasting several hundred years. In other words, for many of them, their father and mother never lived to see the freedom they have just stepped into. True, never had to do the hard work of forging a new society, a whole new way of being in the world. But these former slaves were only where they were because the parents had passed on the dream of the god of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, the dream their parents had handed on to them, having in their turn been entrusted with it by their parents, and so on and on back through centuries. Promises, and a story, held close even though everything about the world around them told them that it wasn’t true.

They did not grow out of their story, and now, they would enter into the land God had promised to give to Abraham’s descendants. They would work that soil, and, when the time came, be buried in that soil, their personal dust returning to their communal dust.

Except that they wouldn’t. Moses, and essentially all of the adults who left Egypt, would die in the wilderness before they ever reached the Promised Land. Why? Because they didn’t honour their father and mother. Didn’t continue to hold the promises, to love the story, of this god and his people. While the bones of long-dead Joseph were carried ‘home’ to the land, the living were less faithful.

Their children came into the promise. And there, in the land, if they wanted to live in it and enjoy it for generations, they would need to keep faith with their fathers and mothers, with Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rachel, Jacob and his wives ... and with their own parents, despite their failure. Living with disappointment, learning to forgive, honouring our heritage without becoming captive to it, releasing our predecessors and our heroes from impossible standards and learning to trace God’s faithfulness through the at times messy reality of human history. These are the lessons that will enable us to live long in the land that Yahweh is giving us — and to share it, living peaceably alongside whoever else he may see fit to give it to also.

What dreams, unfulfilled, did your parents (biological, adoptive, or communal) hand down to you?

What ghosts do you need to lay to rest?

What long-dry bones do you need to call to new life?

Four of Ten

Lent is traditionally a season of contemplating the Ten Commandments, or words of life. How many of them can you call to mind? Here’s the fourth:

Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. For six days you shall labour 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 20:8-11

The thing that people say to me more than anything else is, “I’m sure you’re busy at the moment.” Every single moment. Because that is the conspiracy of our times. The conspiracy of slavery. We all need to be busy — “the devil makes work for idle hands, you know!” — this is not true, by the way: the devil provokes our hands to constant distraction when we do not embrace a rhythm of stillness, of rest. We all need to be busy, to feel important, to justify our existence. Who the hell needs to justify their existence? That God has created me is all the justification I need.

Jesus, when asked, summarised the Commandments as teaching us how to love: how to love God, and ourselves, and others. And all of the Commandments relate to all of these — our lives are deeply interconnected — but the focus varies: the focus of the first three Commandments is on how we love God; the focus of Commandments five to ten is on how we love others; and the focus of the fourth Commandment is on how we love ourselves. To a people freshly liberated from slavery, God says, live into your no longer being a slave by enjoying rest. Follow my lead: work, as an expression of creativity and to bring the world into harmony, and, every seventh day, down tools. Pause. Reflect. Look back at what you have done, look around at what I have given, and enjoy it.

I work. At times it is a joy, and at times it is deeply painful. At times it feels as if something good is accomplished, and at times it is frustrating. I work, but — and in the present climate, this has become part of my work — I resist being busy with every fibre of my being.

And I have been given the gift of a stipend, the provision of a roof over my head and the means to put food on the table, in order that I do not have to be busy, but, in a world full of busy people, might have time to sit with the infirm and the elderly or see the world from the eye-height of a child. But it is still a challenge.

Once, not so long ago, when our society was shaped by the Commandments, whole communities would take their rest together. Shipyard fortnight, the annual holiday was known locally, where I live now. In these days of 24/7 retail and zero-hours contracts — all presented as greater flexibility — of bills that require the juggling of several poorly-paid jobs to meet them, our rest has become so atomised that it doesn’t feel worth taking. We are no longer human, we are economic units (taking a short-term view, at that). Machines, switched off when not being used.

Modelling rest, and recreation, in community with others — and, in as much as we are able, empowering others to enter into times of rest, including the security of having work to take up again — is just about the most subversive thing you can possibly do in England in 2020. Especially when it crosses divides that have been erected between young and old, richer and poorer, indigenous and immigrant communities, and human aspiration with care for the world in which we live.

Work has become an idol (see the second life-giving word), a cruel taskmaster in a competition against others for limited resources. It has become an arena of injustice. The god who made all things, and blessed them with re-generativity, says, “Come to me, all who are weighed down; and I will train you in the rhythms of work and rest.”

When did you last still your inner being for long enough to feel the wonder of life?

Three of Ten

Lent is traditionally a season of contemplating the Ten Commandments, or words of life. How many of them can you call to mind? Here’s the third:

You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name.

Exodus 20:7

We might no longer believe in Baal and Yamm and Mot, in Zeus and Poseidon and Hades, even in Yahweh, but we all still invoke our gods. If you don’t believe me, pick up a newspaper, listen to a politician speak, scroll through social media. We all invoke our Great Liberators and our Demonic Forces — and, viewed from different sides, one man’s hope is another woman’s enemy.

Recently, US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke out against the weaponizing of the Bible to push bigotry and discrimination. And at the heart of the matter, don’t make wrongful use of Yahweh’s name, in many ways shorthand for his character. Don’t claim that God is on the side of everyone who agrees with you, and opposed to everyone with whom you disagree. Don’t withhold the hope of freedom to others, not on the terms of your understanding but on the terms of Yahweh’s enduring record of setting people free.

Yahweh will set free whoever calls on his name. And he’ll set them free from the thing they need to be set free from, not the thing I think they need to be set free from.

In what way might you be misrepresenting God?

Two of Ten

Lent is traditionally a season of contemplating the Ten Commandments, or words of life. How many of them can you call to mind? Here’s the second:

You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.

Exodus 20:4-6

The ancient world was compartmentalised, with realms of the gods, the humans, the monsters, the dead, along with spheres of activity or role within each realm. It was quite a complex administrative structure, filled with gods major (often with jurisdiction over a particular realm) and minor, many with local variations in their iteration. And wherever you found yourself in the world, or whatever activity you were engaged in, it was provident to seek — and seek to keep — the goodwill of the relevant deity. This list is pretty much endless.

This god, Yahweh, cuts through all of that, laying claim to every realm and activity. For his credentials, refer to his recent activity in saving a people from the Egyptian pantheon of gods who had held them captive. Where this god lives to set captives free, other gods seek to take captives. Once set free, don’t let yourself be enslaved again.

True, this god constrains, where necessary. This god sets limits on your freedom, where you exercise your freedom in such a way as to impinge upon the freedom of others. If you choose to use your freedom to keep other people in captivity, you will, eventually, provoke this god to act. As the Egyptians had done. But his steadfast love for those he has freed extends immeasurably far beyond the initial act of liberation.

Our own world is no less compartmentalised than that of the ancients, no less complex. Count the -isms. Beneath a veneer of wealth, it is no less insecure; and, no less driven. Who even has time to enjoy the gift of earth and sea and sky, the precious span of life shared with those we love?

Who or what are you hoping will keep setting you free?

How will you use that freedom, in relation to others?

One of Ten

Lent is traditionally a season of contemplating the Ten Commandments, or words of life. How many of them can you call to mind? Here’s the first:

Then God spoke all these words: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.

Exodus 20:1-3

One of the things about being a vicar, at once fascinating and frustrating, is that people don’t know where they stand in relation to me. They’re forever asking, ‘What should I call you?’ There are formal titles, culturally prescribed — I am the Revd Dr Andrew Dowsett, or Mr Dowsett (but not Mr Andrew Dowsett, nor again Revd Dr Dowsett) — but my name is Andrew. When people ask, ‘What should I call you?’ I answer, ‘Call me Andrew.’ ‘Father Andrew?’ ‘Just, Andrew.’

When God says, ‘I am the Lord ...’ God is actually given this god’s personal name — it is YHWH, or Yahweh — but this was considered to holy to be uttered, and so finds itself hidden behind some formal title put there in its place, when in fact this god comes looking to be known, personally. This god spoke, and said, I am a particular god, my name is Yahweh, and I brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of generational slavery.

Why? Because this is what this god does.

This is the god who freed Abraham from the need to be safe, to become father of descendants as numerous as the sand on the seashore, that liminal strip between the land (symbol of Yahweh’s promises) and the sea (symbol of chaos and rebellion against Yahweh).

This is the god who freed Isaac from the need to compare himself to others, which is the thief of joy.

This is the god who freed Jacob from the need to win, to constrain others, to have the last word, so he might speak first words, releasing others into their destiny.

This is the god who freed Joseph from the need to be special, that all peoples might have enough for life.

This is the god who freed Joseph’s brothers from famine, of grain, yes, and of love, to father a nation.

This is the god who freed Moses from murder, from three attempts on his life (by royal edict, as a new-born and in adulthood; and in a terrifying encounter with YHWH himself) and from the burden of having, himself, become a murderer, to point the people to choose life.

Because this is what this god does, through all generations. And, because every one of us is captive to something, from which we cannot free ourselves, this is the god to know.

What holds you captive?