Let the Dream Breathe
Fruitfulness, Part 9:
Let the Dream Breathe
June 16, 2024
Pastor Mike
Leviticus 25:1-7
Two months ago, I began this preaching series on fruitfulness by asking each of you to consider how and where and for whom God was calling you to bear fruit. The fruits we’re called to offer are good works, and a good work is one that manifests Christ in the world: his lowliness, his sacrificial love, his healing and justice and mercy. In Ephesians, Paul say that “we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Eph. 2:10). If, every day, we are allowing God to mold us a bit more, we can be confident that the good works – the fruit – will come. God prepares the way, and God makes us fit.
That makes it sound easy, but it is not easy. Just as Jesus had to pass through the wilderness of temptation and the garden of agony in order to perfect that prayer, “Yet not what I want, but what You want,” so it is for us: learning to pray “Thy will be done” is the project of a lifetime. To be God’s handiwork means that God must reshape us, reform us. It takes courage, humility, and patience for us to open up to God a bit more every day and discern the purposes set aside just for us, rather than the ones we’d naturally choose for ourselves.
Over the past several weeks we’ve explored some of the challenges that we face in the fruitful life: Fear of our smallness; discontentment with our time and our place. Possessiveness. Premature judgement. To round out this section of the series, I want to face the fear at the root of so many of the other fears, this basic fear of letting God in in the first place.
This fear, strangely, rears its head not so much at the beginning of things but in the middle, after we are well underway. And that is because we often begin a job, a marriage, a spiritual journey, or a project from a place of hope or delight. We get a taste for fruitfulness, and we feel the possibilities and the power of it. But over time we fall into habits, into patterns of productivity.
We overidentify with the field and the fruit, thinking success depends upon us, and we begin to break our backs in and out of season to keep things growing. We white-knuckle it. Exhaustion and resentment start to grow, but we struggle to see it. We think this is what love looks like. We think this is the price of the good fruit. Managing everything alone.
Managing. Everything. Alone.
What I’m trying to say is that we can get addicted to fruitfulness; we can step into our various callings with earnest and end up in a situation, years later, in which we are never taking a break, because we’ve forgotten that God is the one who gives the growth (1 Cor. 3:6).
Walter Brueggemann – biblical scholar, theologian, preacher – once wrote, “Sabbath sets a boundary to our best, most intense efforts to manage life…”[1] Sabbath is God’s answer to this difficulty we have with releasing things into God’s hands. Sabbath requires that we let go and step back in order to rest and to be freed from compulsion. Sabbath is God’s way of helping us remember that everything we have and everything we’re called to is a gift from God, rooted in his grace not in our own teeth-gritting effort. Sabbath lets the field breath, the calling breathe, the dream breathe. Sabbath gives God room to come in and bless us with new perspective and vision and calm.
The Sabbath laws are recorded in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy, and each version of them is a little different. In all of them, there is a law about the Sabbath day: every seventh day the Israelites were commanded to rest from all work. No cooking, no plowing or harvesting, no mending, no building; and, importantly, no forcing anyone else to do these things for you. Sabbath extended to the whole community, landowners, homeowners, hired workers, slaves, animals, land.
The Sabbath day was set aside for rest and worship and joyful fellowship. It has its roots in the Creation story, which tells of God creating the world in six days and then resting on the seventh day. The promise was that God could be encountered just as much in rest as in work; when we let go of management and being managed, we find that God is there in the space that’s been opened, waiting for us, enjoying us.
So, there’s a Sabbath day, and then there’s a Sabbatical year. After working for six full years, the Israelites were commanded to take a whole year off from agricultural production. No sowing, pruning, gathering. They had to leave their fields and plows and barns and threshing floors alone. And they could not force anyone else to work for them while they were resting.
Think about that, a whole year without the usual labor. And not just for you but for your entire community. The whole system of production ceases. In that openness and rest, what might spring up? Think about how that would change the character of years one through six, how in year one you’d enter back into work rested and rejuvenated and in years five or six you’d be tired, but you’d know that a great peace was about to receive you into it.
Think of a whole year for restoring your strength, then throwing yourself into things that delight you, then beginning to entertain daydreams about your work and seeing possibilities float through your mind that you hadn’t been able to see when you were so in it, so close to it.
You’d look out at your field and realize that it’ll be stronger for having this rest. And whether you were the landowner or the employee, you’d be opting into a situation of shared dependence, dependence on the daily bread God had promised to provide even in the midst of a great rest from labor.
Israel first received these Sabbath laws while they were journeying in the wilderness. In the wilderness, they had to live day by day trusting God for their basic needs. Every morning when they woke up, heavenly bread called manna was sprinkled on the ground for them to gather. And Moses told the people that they were allowed to gather just enough for that day, according to their family’s needs. Anything gathered above and beyond would get maggots in it. But if you gathered just what you needed, there was always enough.
Even this life of daily dependence in the wilderness was structured around Sabbath. On the sixth day, the people were allowed to gather twice as much as on the other days, because on the seventh day, the Sabbath, the manna would not come. The seventh day was not for gathering and baking but for resting. Even in the wilderness, when they were taking life one day at a time, the people were pressed to take this extra step and break from routine, trusting even more profoundly.
Here's God’s question for us this morning: When’s the last time you took your hands off your field? Wherever those energies for fruitfulness are being concentrated in your life, when’s the last time you took your hands off, stopped tinkering, managing, laboring? When’s the last time you took a break so that God could come in and have a say? When’s the last time you let your calling – the dream itself – catch its breath and feel safe and strong again?
God does not require your constant back-breaking labor. God made you. God prepared a field for you. God is “able, through his mighty power at work within us, to accomplish infinitely more than we might ask or think” (Eph. 3:20), but only if we let God’s power in. To the extent that we never rest, we diminish the possibilities for our fruitfulness. This is the paradox. We can go only as far as what we can think up or dream up or ask for, whereas God can bring into the picture that which we don’t even know to ask for, realities so far beyond what our minds can dream up.
The truth is that if you never take your hands off the field – for an hour, a day, a season – you will exhaust yourself, and you will exhaust the people around you, and you will risk even exhausting your gift. If you are working in your field but you’ve come to resent it; if you are sowing and plowing and harvesting without any joy or curiosity; if you’ve become selfish or possessive in way that closes you off to divine or human input, then you need a Sabbath, you need a boundary, you need to step back.
As I said before, the Sabbath laws were part of a social contract. They were given to a whole community, a whole nation, not just to certain individuals. To me, this means that when it comes to resting from our fields, to removing our hands so that God, whose handiwork we are, can do the primary molding and shaping, we in the Church need to hold one another accountable.
If Sabbath rest is good for each of us, and for the people around us, and for the very things we’re working toward, then you ought to be able to say to someone else, “Hey, you haven’t made space for your own rest like we agreed to. You’re bleeding yourself dry; you’ve lost the joy here; you’re dragging down the people around you; you’re missing the forest for the trees; you’re acting like it all depends on you, like you’re the cornerstone. It’s time you took your hands off.” And you ought to be able to hear and receive that word from someone else.
The New Testament tells us in many places that we are Christ’s Body, and that each of us is a member of that body, with a unique calling, a particular contribution to make. But to be healthy, a body needs rest – the rest of physical sleep, the rest of deep prayer. And we are Christ’s body. Did he not slip away from the crowds to pray in secret? Did he not sleep in the boat unconcerned while the storm raged?
Psalm 127:2 says that “God gives sleep to his beloved” (Ps. 127:2), and the writer of Hebrews tells us that “a Sabbath rest still remains for the people of God, for those who enter God’s rest also rest from their labors as God did from his” (Hebrews 4:9-10).
As we seek to be fruitful, to do the good works that God has prepared for us, may we learn that taking our hands off our field from time to time is not an expression of failure but of faith.
In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.
[1] Walter Brueggeman, The Land: Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith, Overtures to Biblical Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Pres, 1977), 63.