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August 5 - August 13, 2022
These moments of loveliness—good tea, bare trees, and soft shadows—are church bells. In my dimness, they jolt me to attention, and remind me that Christ is in our midst. His song of truth, sung by his people all over the world, echoes down my ordinary street, spilling even into my living room.
There is a profound connection between the sleep we get in our beds each night and the sacramental rest we know each Sunday in our gathered worship. Both gathered worship and our sleep habits profess our loves, our trusts, and our limits. Both involve discipline and ritual. Both require that we cease relying on our own effort and activity and lean on God for his sufficiency. Both expose our vulnerability. Both restore.
Our need for sleep reveals that we have limits. We are unable to defend ourselves, to keep ourselves safe, to master the world around us. Sleep exposes reality. We are frail and weak. We need a guide and a guard.
Our powerful need for sleep is a reminder that we are finite. God is the only one who never slumbers nor sleeps.
Our bodily limits are our chief daily reminder that we are but dust. We inhabit a frail, vulnerable humanity. And we hate being reminded.
Mark Galli has said, “The strength of the evangelical movement is its activism; the weakness of the evangelical movement is its activism.”11
When our zealous activism is coupled with a culture of frenzy and grandiosity, the aim of our Christian life can become a list of goals, initiatives, meetings, conferences, and activities that leave us exhausted.
This affects our worship together. We are prone to embrace a faith that is full of adrenaline, excitement, and activity. But we have to learn together to approach a Savior who invites the weary to come to him for rest.
Eugene Peterson says, “The Hebrew evening/morning sequence conditions us to the rhythms of grace. We go to sleep and God begins his work.”14
Thus embracing sleep is not only a confession of our limits; it is also a joyful confession of God’s limitless care
for us.
the act of ceasing and relaxing into sleep is an act o...
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As believers we can relish sleep as not only necessary but as an embodied response to the truth of Scripture: we are finite, weak creatures who are abundantly cared for by our strong and loving Creator.
One of my favorite moments in the Gospels is when Jesus conks out in the back of a boat in the middle of a storm. His sleep was theological, in that it displayed an unwavering trust in his Father. But let’s not forget that it was also an ordinary example of a tired man taking a nap.
In Scripture, in the incarnation, and in the church, we learn that grace comes to us through the tangible, earthy world, through the hours of an average day. The gift of rest comes to us through ritual and routine. Unearned and abundant, it comes in repetition, in the learning of a habit, in the liturgy of the day.
At the end of every day, we lie in our beds. Even the most ordinary of days has shaped us—imperceptibly but truly. By a grace we do not control, we yield to sleep. We rest. Our muscles release. Our jaw slacks. We are exposed and weak. We drift out of consciousness. Yet we are still held fast. Our Guard and Guide has called us “beloved,” and gives his beloved sleep.
