October 6, 2024
The Rev. Megan Collins
A special Sunday with music from the Maitland Symphony Orchestra, the Titan Show Choir and the Chancel Choir
We are so grateful to have these talented musicians with us here today. What a gift to be able to worship together and experience this morning of music together. The people up here this morning have spent years perfecting their skills, and we are grateful they are sharing this with us.
My personal musical journey was pretty short lived. When I was young, I took a few years of piano lessons. It was in a small studio in the Altamonte Mall. The lessons were in these tiny rooms with a single chair and an upright piano, with carpet lining the walls to mute the sound. My teacher had a cassette tape deck on top of the piano to record the lesson so I could listen again throughout the week (which I did not). In the first year I learned how to hold my hands and to sit up straight at the piano. I found middle C and learned to remember the notes using phrases like “Empty garbage before dad flips.” EGBDF. Then I moved onto scales, which I hated, and playing songs, which I loved.
But then my teacher introduced something new, these tricky little guys called “rests.” Our musicians here and in the congregation know that a rest indicates a certain period of time when you stop playing your instrument, or stop singing, and, well, rest. There isn’t just one rest, there are different rests to indicate different periods of time.
I’ll be honest with you. I didn’t like the rests.
I liked playing the notes. Some notes were quiet, some were loud, you could play them with feeling. But the rests - they were boring. I would get impatient, just sitting there counting quietly to myself. So . . . I just didn’t use them. I would keep playing, going right past them. Which, as you can imagine, was not something my piano teacher appreciated.
To me, the rest was the absence of music, the absence of playing, so it didn’t serve a purpose. But, as good musicians will tell you, that’s not true. Good musicians play the rest, they don’t skip over it. The rest becomes as important a part of the music as the notes.
One musician told me “if you don’t play the rest, you aren’t playing the music.”
We are in this sermon series here at the church called Odyssey. In it we are looking at our past, present and future in our lives, all through the lens of faith. We spent three weeks looking at our past, and then last week Dave started us on this middle section of the series where we talk about our present. Today, I’d like to talk about the importance of playing the rest in our present, in our everyday. It’s not just in music that a balance of work or play and rest is important. You need a balance of work and rest in your life. Just like If you don’t play the rest, you aren’t playing the music, if you don’t play the rest in your life, you aren’t really living it, at least not in the fullness that God wants for you. It’s also not just about you, and we’ll talk more about that in a minute.
I know that’s not news to you. You know you need rest in your life. You’ve seen the same articles I have about the importance of sleep, or how we should slow down or turn off our phones more or make more time to get away. Are you doing it? Do you feel like your life has balance? Are you able to be fully present because you have that balance of work and rest?
Me neither.
First I’d like to talk to those of us who are bad at pausing when we see a rest, those of us who just want to keep playing the notes, usually as fast as we can while also doing three other things at the same time. Maybe you are someone who carries a lot of responsibility. You have a really full schedule at work, or you have a lot of classes at school. or your day is full running with your kids or your grandkids. Maybe you retired and suddenly realized your days are suddenly fuller now than when you worked full time. You know that some of this craziness you have taken on yourself - you just keep adding things to your plate. Some of it you can’t control. Some of you have to work a lot to pay your bills, or you have a toddler and it’s hard to explain to them that sometimes you need a minute.
I know you don’t always have the time you need to really rest, especially not a long time to rest. A long, whole measure of rest? Forget it. But stay with me. There’s this moment in the gospel of Mark. The apostles, who were the people who were sent out by Jesus to do ministry, have all come back to talk to him. They are gathered around him and listing off all the things they had done, all they had accomplished. Jesus, listen to everything we did. And the passage says:
Mark 6:30-32 30 The apostles gathered around Jesus, and told him all that they had done and taught. 31He said to them, ‘Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.’ For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. 32And they went away in the boat to a deserted place by themselves.”
They had been working so hard, doing such important things. So Jesus takes them away from the people and the needs and the responsibilities, in a boat to a deserted place, to rest, for a minute. This is what rest can look like. For those of you whose lives are really full with really important things, it’s taking a moment to step away, from everyone, and everything, even though it’s important, to rest.
You may not have a boat to disappear on. Or if you do, you probably don’t have a lot of time to go out on the boat anyway because you are too busy working, so you could pay for the boat. But this can look like scheduling just five minutes between meetings to sit quietly in your office and breathe. It can look like letting your kids watch ten more minutes of cartoons and instead of frantically checking email, just sitting quietly and being still. It can look like sitting in your car for five minutes before you get out to go onto the next thing.
You don’t have to wait until you have time to full measure rest. Start with quarter note rest. Work it in.
I know you have more to do. While Jesus and the apostles were out on the boat, taking a minute to rest - the crowds saw them sail away and took off on foot to the shore where the boat was headed. As soon as the apostles and Jesus pulled the boat onto shore, the crowds were there waiting for them, and they were hungry. (Those of you with kids will instantly get this - as soon as you come into the room, someone needs a snack). Jesus and the apostles, after having taken time to rest, get back to work, and they feed 5000 people. It doesn’t have to be 8 hours to count. Start with a few minutes.
You can rest. I promise.
The world will keep spinning.
God will keep working.
Remember a couple of weeks ago Exodus 14:14: "The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to keep still." God will do, if you can just keep still.
It isn’t really all up to you. While you rest, God works.
That is one important purpose rest serves for you. It reminds you (and me, really me) that it really isn’t all up to you to fix. All the people. All the problems. It reminds you that God really is going to take care of it. It reminds you that your worth is not about what you produce, what you accomplish, that you are enough, even when you are being still because of God’s love for you.
Let’s take a moment right now. Take a deep breath and listen to this passage
Matthew 11:28-30 ‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.’
You have to play the rest. Here’s why - it’s not just about you. Rest isn’t just about your personal well being and faith. That's important but it’s more than that. Rest is a responsibility you carry for the other people in your life. Look at Exodus 20:8-11
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 Lordyour 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.
If you don’t rest, the people entrusted to you can’t rest either.
If you’re the boss, and you are a workaholic, the people who work for you will be too.
If you are a parent or a spouse or a partner, and you never rest, the people in your home will feel like they can’t either. Here’s how you know you might be a part of the problem for other people in your life. If you come into a room, and people have clearly jumped up from taking a break to look very busy and productive because they heard you coming, you might need to rest more, so they can rest.
For our orchestra and choirs up here today, for it to work, everyone has to obey the rests in their own music. If the flutes just ignore the rest and play through them, it messes it up for everyone.
Rest isn’t just about you.
It’s about demonstrating the freedom to rest to other people, especially the people entrusted to you.
Some of you, and me, we need to add rest into the music of our lives, for your health, for your faith, and for the people who look to you.
But then there are a few others of you, who may have gone too far the other way. You have gotten so settled into the rest that you forgot you have more notes to play. You are happy to watch other people play the music, to carry the burden. Maybe you were playing but then you took a break. The music started to slide off the stand. You set down your instrument. You started to think “it’s not my problem, Tthat doesn’t effect me, they’ll take care of it, I don’t have anything to contribute.”
But every player here has a part to do
You have a part to play. The apostles didn’t get to float off in that boat to the Bahamas, never to work again. No one gets to just rest indefinitely. The balance of our lives is work and rest, playing and pausing. You have a role to play. You have a responsibility to carry.
If you have found yourself sneaking into the audience, it’s time to get back to work.
One more thing before we stop.
Some of you are waiting on God to stop sitting at a silent rest and play something. Maybe you are waiting on God, right now. You are looking for God to move, waiting for God to speak, holding out for God to do something, and it seems like God’s not paying attention. Maybe God’s asleep at the wheel. It’s so hard to be patient. It seems like God has been playing the rest for the whole song.
Both of my kids are more musical than I am. They both went through the band program in middle school, and my older son played all the way through high school too. We went to a lot of band concerts over the years, and I was always fascinated by the percussion section. There was this group of students in the far back of the stage. While everyone else was sitting, to play their instruments, they were moving. They were walking quickly but silently around in the back, setting up one percussion instrument or another, moving their music from one spot to the next. Then they would finally get into place, this time holding a triangle in the air, silent, waiting as the music moved forward. They were playing the rest, measure after measure. Then, at just the right time, they would hit the triangle. In the audience we couldn't hear the preparations as they made them, we couldn’t see the rests in their music. All we could see was, at just the right time, they played the note that was needed.
Sometimes we are tempted to interpret God’s silence as God’s inaction. It seems like God is just resting, day after day after day, while we work and wait and long for an answer. But perhaps it’s just that God is like that triangle player, moving in ways we can’t really see, preparing things in ways we can’t know, playing the rests, waiting, silently, until the time is right, then giving us exactly the note that we need.
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