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September 16 - October 3, 2019
God loves and delights in the people in the pews around me and dares me to find beauty in them. To love his people on earth is to see Christ in them, to live among them, to receive together Word and sacrament.
The church is an eternal body, an international organism, an institution made of every tribe, tongue, and nation (Rev 7:9). But we enter that giant reality of Christ’s church through the small realities of our week—as
It is no accident that the psalmist enjoins us to taste and see that the Lord is good—not simply to reason or confess that God is good, but to taste it. My body, this tea, and the quiet twilight are teaching me God’s goodness through my senses. I’m tasting, hearing, feeling, seeing, and smelling that God is good.
Pleasure is our deep human response to an encounter with beauty and goodness. In these moments of pleasure—of delight, enjoyment, awe, and revelry—we respond to God impulsively with our very bodies: “Yes, we agree! Your creation is very good.”
Coffee is born of extravagance, an extravagant God who formed an extravagant people, who formed a craft out of the pleasures of roasted beans and frothed milk.
A culture formed by the gospel will honor good and right enjoyment, celebration, and sensuousness.
When we enjoy God’s creation, we reflect God himself. God does not stoically pronounce creation “good,” like a disinterested manager checking off a quality checklist so he can clock out early. God delights in the perfect acoustics of ocean waves, swoons over the subtle intensity of dark chocolate, and glories in robins’ eggs and peacock calls.
We have to taste and see that God is good if we are ever going to really believe it.
Christian worship trains us to recognize and respond to beauty. We learn to embrace the pleasures of being human and of human culture. Our God-given, innate thirst for enjoyment and sensuousness is directed toward the one who alone can quench it, the God who we were made to enjoy forever.
it takes strength to enjoy the world, and we must exercise a kind of muscle to revel and delight. If we neglect exercising that muscle—if we never savor a lazy afternoon, if we must always be cleaning out the fridge or volunteering at church or clocking in more hours—we’ll forget how to notice beauty and we’ll miss the unmistakable reality of goodness that pleasure trains us to see.
Being curators of beauty, pleasure, and delight is therefore an intrinsic part of our mission, a mission that recognizes the reality that truth is beautiful. 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.
The truth is, I’m far more likely to give up sleep for entertainment than I am for prayer. When I turn on Hulu late at night I don’t consciously think, “I value this episode of Parks and Rec more than my family, prayer, and my own body.” But my habits reveal and shape what I love and what I value, whether I care to admit it or not.
“Unless the LORD watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain. It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives to his beloved sleep” (Ps 127:1-2). It is God who watches over our city and who ultimately determines our safety. God has called us his beloved and he is faithful to provide for and protect his people, so we can savor his good gift of rest.
It took me years to realize that our time of gathered worship on Sunday morning and our Sunday afternoon naps are interrelated. Rest is not simply a physical need—it is not only our brains and muscles and eyelids that must learn habits of rest. We need holistic rest—physical, psychological, and spiritual.
In Jewish culture, days begin in the evening with the setting of the sun. (We see this in Genesis 1 with the repetition of “And there was evening and there was morning.”) The day begins with rest. We start by settling down and going to sleep.
Though the day begins in darkness, God is still at work, growing crops, healing wounds, giving rest, protecting, guarding, mending, redeeming.15 We drop out of consciousness, but the Holy Spirit remains at work.
Thus embracing sleep is not only a confession of our limits; it is also a joyful confession of God’s limitless care for us. For Christians, the act of ceasing and relaxing into sleep is an act of reliance on God.
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.
God wants to give us not just lives of holiness and prayer but also of sufficient rest. And perhaps a key step toward a life of prayer and holiness is simply receiving the gift of a good night’s sleep.
Our Guard and Guide has called us “beloved,” and gives his beloved sleep.
