Work. Rest. Pray.

I just came back from an iconography workshop. Every year, for almost the last thirty years, about two dozen people gather at a retreat house near Scranton, Pennsylvania, to learn a little more about this ancient form of religious art whose roots are in the eastern Orthodox churches. An icon expresses a religious truth artistically. The idea of an icon is that it is a window to heaven not because it is realistic but because it points beyond itself to God’s reality behind it. Many aspects of the icon are highly stylized from how Jesus and the saints are portrayed to how color, light and line are used. In some circles, the iconographer is said to “write” an icon—not paint or create one—because they are communicating something about the logos, Jesus.

So when an iconographer writes an icon, she or he is to be steeped in prayer. Every line, every stroke of the brush is to be a prayer—at least that’s the ideal. Certainly God can communicate through an icon reproduced by a printing press, but either way, if the person viewing an icon can allow it to be a window to the divine, a first step in their praying, then it certainly helps that the artist is also steeped in prayer.

This creates a tension: a tension between spirit and action. Between “doing” and “being.” There is a tension between doing it “right” and focusing on the prayer. Last week, I shared the room with people who have wonderful ‘hands’ and well-tuned ‘eyes.’ They work with a precision and clarity that I only dream about.  I really want to be like these people when I grow up! We all strive to be technically better iconographers. But when the conversation in the room begins to get too technical, when people are beginning to spend too much time “futzing” over getting one little line just so, when then tension rises because we aren’t “good enough”, I find that Father Peter, our teacher these last three decades, has this way of turning up the music—maybe a Taize chant or one by Orthodox monks or something that brings us back to the center.

The process I’ve learned over the years goes something like this:  Paint (or “Work”). Rest. Pray.

And since the workshop is also a retreat at set intervals, we’d stop painting and gather to pray. The music we listened to as we worked was also prayer. We were working hard, our goal was to master some skills around color and line and to come home with an icon…and our goal was also to pray and be open to the presence of God.

Work. Rest. Pray.

Jesus was doing that for his disciples. One definition of the Church that I like is that “we learn and do the work of Jesus.” In today’s Gospel, we hear how Jesus’ friends and apprentices did just that. They were sent out in pairs to heal the sick, proclaim Good News. They were learning from Jesus. Now they were doing the work of Jesus for the first time.

And… wow! They came back chattering about their experience: audiences hung on their every word; demons jumped out of possessed people at their command; sick people were made well. They were pumped, excited, and they wanted more! So what does Jesus do?

Does he give them a workshop on how to hone their skills?

Does he raise the quota of how many sick people are to be healed and how many people are to hear them preach?

Nope. Instead, he calls them to take some time alone to pray.

Now the work did not go away. People followed them wherever they went, because the need was that great! But Jesus insisted: Work. Rest. Pray.

It turns out that a healthy spiritual life – and an effective ministry and a vital congregation—consists of periods of activity and periods of rest. We need both in order to be healthy, whole, and—yes—happy Christians.

God calls us to do certain things: care for the sick, serve the poor, feed the hungry, speak truth to power and good news to the oppressed.

God also calls us to rest: to learn from God’s word, spend time in prayer, love God with our whole heart, mind, and strength. To be fed sacramentally.

A healthy, maturing Christian life is found in an oscillation, the balance between activity and rest.

And the fulcrum between that movement between activity and rest is faithfulness. God doesn’t want us to be busy just to be busy. God wants us to be faithful!

The reason Jesus calls us to pray is that God wants us to be faithful! And that means lining up everything we do, our sleeping and our waking, our work and our play, and all our relationships, around our attentiveness to God.

Have you ever seen or ridden on a see-saw? A see-saw is nothing more than a lever, with two weights on either end, in most cases two kids. And they go up and down, up and down. How high and how fast depends on how the two kids work together and how well balanced they are. But a see-saw, as with any lever, won’t work without a fulcrum. Otherwise, it’s just a board with two bored kids aboard.

In the Christian life, we leverage God’s grace, multiply God’s blessings, see how God’s love can really work in the world by our application of our effort (on the one hand) and the depth of our prayer (on the other). But the fulcrum, the thing that really makes the see-saw or any lever work, is our faithfulness.

The apostles were sent out in pairs not only to extend Jesus’ work, but to increase their faithfulness. What drew people to Jesus and his apostles was not the power of their miracles but the depth of their faithfulness; the hunger that the disciples met in the folks they encountered was a hunger for faithfulness.

The fulcrum, the balancing point, between our activity and our rest is our faithfulness.

Remember that old joke? The one that goes “Jesus is coming! Look busy!” It reminds us that we Christian leaders are tempted to think that the only happy Church is a busy Church, and that the only really valuable Christian is a busy Christian. It is not God who tempts us to think that God only really loves us when we are busy.

God loves us. That’s a given. And what God desires for us is not busy-ness but faithfulness.

Do you want to know the first sign that your spiritual life is out of balance? When just the thought of coming to church makes you feel tired. Or when the only reason you can justify setting aside a few hours on a Sunday morning is because you have a job.

When we cannot carve out a block of time to just be, to listen, to read scripture, to think, to pray, then we are too busy. When we cannot come into this space without taking time to pray or at least sit in silence but instead get caught up in whatever “to-do” list we carry around, then we are too busy, too distracted. In short, we are out of balance.

Now that doesn’t mean that we don’t have work to do. Why just last week, at that Iconography retreat, the cook got sick and couldn’t be there, so we all had to step up and pitch in. None of us starved and we all learned something from practical acts of service like washing the tables or cooking up main dishes on short notice. This is a lesson the monastic tradition teaches us: ora et labora which means “prayer and work.” Our work is prayer. And prayer is our work.

The Christian Life is filled with moments of activity and moments of rest. We need both. Ora et labora.

That means learning how to be present to be here now. It will means learning how not to get so focused on our “to do” lists that we lose touch with the part that needs to pray, to sit, to listen.

Make no mistake: I love a busy church! I love a congregation that’s involved! I love a congregation that makes a tangible difference in the community! I love a church that gives its very best—and not second best—to God!

And give our very best means choosing to be a faithful church not just a busy church!

The point of all the committees, all the giving, all the sign ups and all the activity, is so that we—and anyone in the community-- can come here and find the space to pray. And if “all” a person does is come into the community and “just” pray… “just” give themselves to God even for a few minutes… then you have done your work well!

What makes the Church different from a social club, a charitable organization, a non-profit, or even a business is not how busy we are, how slick or how entertaining, or how relevant we are. We can’t beat the culture on those terms anyway. And that’s okay because they cannot offer what people really hunger for.

What makes the Church the Church is how faithful we are. Our world is deeply hungry and the Church is uniquely positioned—divinely positioned—to meet spiritual hunger. People long for hope, meaning, companionship, direction, purpose and love—people are hungry for faithfulness.

And the fulcrum between activity and rest is faithfulness.

What I learn every year when I go to the iconography retreat is that we work hard, learn a skill, stretch ourselves—and we also stop and pray, and we listen for God, in order to cultivate what God really wants from us: faithfulness. And over the years I’ve discovered that when every paint stroke, every line drawn, is a prayer. And this is the beginning of learning how to be present to God in the here and now, in the fulcrum between activity and rest.

So remember: Work. Rest. Pray. Ora et labora.

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Scripture for Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, Year B, July 21, 2024.

Website for Grace Church, Tampa Palms, Florida