We are a small Episcopal Church on the banks of the Rappahannock in Port Royal, Virginia. We acknowledge that we gather on the traditional land of the first people of Port Royal, the Nandtaughtacund, and we respect and honor with gratitude the land itself, the legacy of the ancestors, and the life of the Rappahannock Tribe. Our mission statement is to do God’s Will in all that we do.

The Gift of Rest

The sermon from this Sunday in 2015 (July 19) considers the the tired weary disciples.

“Rest seems to be in short supply these days. All of those things and people that demand our time can be like thieves that steal our lives away from us. We have too much to do and we’ve convinced ourselves that we have to cram even more into our already packed days.”

“And like the disciples, we can get so busy thinking about how “I did this and I did that” and even telling God how much we’ve done for God that we forget that God sent us out to start with and what we’ve gotten done is through God’s grace and strength, not our own.

“And as a result of any or all of these things, we don’t rest and we get worn out and discouraged or maybe even depressed and hopeless.

“Meanwhile, Jesus seems to have plenty of energy…My guess is that Jesus had all that boundless energy because he knew how to rest in God, and a side effect of that sort of rest is to be constantly restored and renewed by God.”

“So I’m betting that Jesus knew and must have loved Psalm 23. In fact, Mark tells us that Jesus had compassion for the great crowd who needed so much because they were like sheep without a shepherd, an image straight out of the psalm. And so he cared for them—as a shepherd cares for his sheep.

“Psalm 23 must have reminded Jesus of how God was loving and caring for him as he walked this earth; how God loved and cared for him as he at last walked through that lonesome valley, that valley of the shadow of death that only he could walk on his way to the cross…”The deeper promise of the psalm, though, is that God has been available to us all along and that God is waiting and longing to lead us gently into rest.”

The sermon considers Ronald Rolheiser… Rolheiser says in his essay “Praying through a Crisis” that “prayer is a focus on God, not ourselves…and when we pray in a crisis we must force ourselves to focus upon God or Jesus…resisting entirely the urge to relate that encounter immediately to our wounded experience” (page 130).

“The twenty-third psalm is the perfect description of what Rolheiser describes as being held by the mother. It’s about resting in God, about being content simply to be with God, to be held, fed and led by God, and ultimately to know nothing but God’s goodness and mercy.

“Just as it did for Jesus, the 23rd Psalm holds our promises from God as well.Those promises are revival, fearlessness, comfort, abundance, goodness, mercy, and resurrection energy–not just when we take our last breath, but right here and right now.”