Why does God rest?
It seems like a silly thing for the
God of the universe to do. God is infinite. God created it all… spoke and there
it was. God is perfectly energetic. Clearly, God doesn’t need to rest. Since God is the utmost, the ultimate, the
holiest—the outer perfection toward which humanity is striving, we might assume
that God is also a perfect worker, a perfect controller of destinies, a perfect
worker bee…
But God rested.
God didn’t need to rest. It’s not
like God gets tired. It’s not like God couldn’t do whatever God pleased to
meddle with creation. It’s not like God didn’t have plenty of work to do. And
yet… on the seventh day God rested.
God spent six days speaking things
into existence, and it could be six days or years or six billion years—doesn’t
matter in the slightest—but it does matter that God rested. God took his foot
off the accelerator and said, “Here. Why don’t you take a drive?”
That’s either the most brilliant or
the most dumbfounding moment in history. God let us decide things for ourselves.
Imagine a world where God decided
not to stop and not to rest; a world where God kept things completely under
control. We might still be here… but freedom? There would be none of it. Pain
and suffering? No, not that either. But neither would there be love or joy.
Contentment, perhaps, but joy? Nah, you need freedom for joy. You need sorrow
for joy. If God never rested then there would be none of that. Life would be
about us being the worker bees in turn—serving God, not knowing a thing else.
Instead, we were set loose with this terrible, wonderful thing called freedom,
and here we are. God rested because God loved us enough to let us mess
everything up.
That is parenting, really. And it’s
rough. But God did it first.
So, today is Rally Sunday and the
service is packed full of so much stuff I’m not going to say much today. I’m
going to give it a rest. I figure if it’s good enough for the God of the
universe it’s good enough for me. Some of you may need a rest, too. You may
feel like there’s no time for it, especially now that the fall is here. Others
of you may rest too much and you might need a kick in the pants, but I’m not talking
to you. Most of you need more rest than you give yourselves. If it was good
enough for God it is good enough for you.
So, as we get into the busy-ness of
everything, today I just want to sit with the creation story and ponder what it
means that God took a break. Then, I’m going to do the same.
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