May 17, 2026 - Seventh Sunday of Easter: The Holy Quotidian: Sabbath Slumber

May 17, 2026  Seventh Sunday of Easter
Ladue Chapel Presbyterian Church
Mark 4:35-40, Matthew 11:28-30, Psalm 127:1-2
“The Holy Quotidian: Sabbath Slumber”
Douglas T. King

Most of my evenings end reading in my study.  I can never read a single book at a time so there are usually three or four books stacked on the wide windowsill by my old mission style rocking chair.  I slip back and forth among the books scribbling and underlining along the way.  As the evening rolls along I can sense my comprehension slipping and I know bedtime is nearing.  The clarity for my bedtime comes from down the hall, where my cat, Sassparilla the Singing Gorilla, will be sitting and staring at me telling me the time has come.

Unfortunately, I am not one of those people that climbs into bed and drifts off to sleep. My head on the pillow most likely corresponds with my head filling with minutia and worry. There is no better time to fret than when I am attempting to sleep.  To distract myself I will put on Turner Classic Movies and attempt to doze off to whatever the black and white film of the evening may be.  It does not often work.  All of this is to say that I am the worst person to speak to how we should recognize slumber as sabbath.  But since I’m in the pulpit with a robe on, you are going to need to settle for me nonetheless.  

In our gospel lesson this morning we hear of a most extreme example of sleeping.  We find the disciples with stormy chaos all around them, a reminder that the sea is a metaphor for chaos in the Bible. They are justifiably panicked.  Jesus is asleep at the wheel in the back of their boat.  The disciples' panic expresses itself in an outcry that is part a call for help and part a judgment, “Teacher do you not care that we are perishing?” I would have been screaming right along with them.  

When Jesus does awake, everything changes in a moment.  He casts out the chaos, “Be silent!  Be still!”  The disciples’ pleading prayer is answered.  And then Jesus asks a question that in my opinion is out of bounds.  “Why are you afraid?  Have you still no faith?” If a group of people, including fisherman who know the water, are afraid of drowning, the fear seems completely justified.  The final twist of this text is that their fear only grows with the calmed chaos.  They are more afraid of being in the presence of such remarkable power than they were of the storm.  But that is a sermon topic for another day.

The question before us this morning is why did Jesus fall asleep.  First of all, a little context is illuminating.  He has spent the entire day teaching before a very large crowd. Lest we forget, Jesus was human.  He was as vulnerable to exhaustion as we are.  This is a concrete reminder of just how close God has chosen to be with us.  And there is a second reason Jesus may be asleep in the boat as chaos rages all around them.  He is teaching the disciples that even in the midst of chaos we need to put our trust in God’s presence.

In this fourth sermon in our series on the “Holy Quotidian” we are considering how our relationship to sleep can reveal the holy.  Ever since the invention of the light bulb, sleep has been on the retreat.  There is always more we can be doing late into the evening; more remote work on our computers; more housework; more television; more endless scrolling on our phones.  And for some of us it is not a matter of not trying to get enough sleep, we just cannot get ourselves to sleep.  “In 2013 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared, ‘Insufficient Sleep Is a Public Health Problem.’” (Warren, p. 145)  

Insufficient sleep, and the devaluing of sleep is also a theological problem.  Obviously, if we cannot sleep due to some physical reason that speaks for itself.  But our reluctance and/or inability to sleep reveal something about our spiritual health.  At first hearing this may sound incongruous.  What do our sleeping habits possibly have to do with our relationship with the divine?  Well, first of all they tell us something about ourselves.  When we hear of folks bragging about how little sleep they need they are also telling us something about the sense of their personal power.  The limits that apply to others do not apply to me.  When we slip into sleep we are allowing our deep vulnerability to be revealed.  There we lay, completely incapable of defending ourselves, solving any major problems, or achieving any worldly goals.  We might even be snoring or drooling a little on our pillows.  We are hardly at our most powerful or most attractive.  When we sleep, we reveal just how mortal and limited we truly are.  

When I cannot fall asleep it is often because I am too anxious about a myriad of concerns, all my worries about the world and about my life.  How am I ever possibly going to fix everything?  What I do not do is recite the words from psalm one hundred and twenty-seven that I just read. “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the Lord guards the city, the guard keeps watch in vain.  It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil, for he gives sleep to his beloved.” These words, of course, are not telling us to eschew deep concern for the world or that we are not called to work hard in our lives. These words remind us that we are not God.  And there is a God in our lives who loves and watches over us, oftentimes in ways beyond our understanding.

Tish Harrison Warren notes that “In Jewish culture, days begin in the evening with the setting of the sun. (We see this in Genesis 1 with the repetition of ‘And there was evening and there was morning.’)  The day begins with rest…Eugene Peterson says, ‘The Hebrew evening/morning sequence conditions us to the rhythms of grace.  We go to sleep and God begins God’s work.’” (Warren, pp. 150-151)  Here is the reality it is so hard for us to grasp, God’s grace precedes anything we will ever do.  We are never the first movers, even in our very own lives.  All that we do is in response to God’s loving grace present in our lives.  The question for us is whether we recognize this or not.
 
In First Thessalonians we are told to “pray without ceasing” or in some translations “pray always.”  The author Henri Nouwen has an interesting take on this.  “Nouwen tells us that the literal translation of the words ‘pray always’ is ‘come to rest.’  Nouwen does not overlook the reality that life can be hard and complicated.  All those things that keep us up at night are real concerns.  He writes that the rest he speaks of “has little to do with the absence of conflict or pain.  It is a rest in God in the midst of a very intense daily struggle.” (Norris, p. 6)  

When Jesus is in the back of that boat asleep, the chaotic storm around him and his disciples is very real.  But he also knows that God’s abiding presence is just as real and far more powerful.  When we surrender to sleep at the end of the day there are no guarantees that the anxieties and concerns we are laying down will disappear in the morning.  The guarantee we are given is expressed eloquently in Paul’s letter to the church in Rome. “Who will separate us from the love of Christ?  Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?...No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.  For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Laying aside the worries of the day and climbing into bed to go to sleep can be a sacramental act; an opportunity to recognize and welcome God’s transforming grace bearing our burdens with us.  Resting well can be an act of faith and an offer of prayer to the divine.

Thanks be to God.  Amen.  
                 
Norris, Kathleen, Acedia and Me, Riverhead Book, New York, 2008.
Warren, Tish Harrison, liturgy of the ordinary, IVP Books, Illinois, 2016.