The Rest of God

by Mark Buchanan

  The Samaritan woman said to Jesus when he offered her living water, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water” (John 4:15). I say to Jesus, “Sir, give me this work so that I won’t get tired and have to keep toiling at things that exhaust me.”

  That work is to do what God wants. Most days, the work I do— preaching, teaching, writing, exhorting—is exactly that. I believe, with deepest conviction, that this is the work God sent me to do and to finish, and I’m a glutton for it. It feeds my craving. It fills my inmost places. I may go into it weary, hungry, thirsty, but I come out replenished. I cannot number the times I have stood up to speak so empty I’m sure I’ll fall over, only to finish ready to slay a thousand Philistines with no more than an ass’s jawbone. I begin in weakness and end in strength. I discover all over again that this is exactly what God loves: to make his power perfect in our weakness, to show up in splendor when we show up in faithfulness, obedient but inadequate, trusting but inept, with nothing in our hands but our need for him.

  “You feed them,” he tells us, when we have hardly enough even to feed ourselves. We give what we have anyway and find afterward that everyone has had his fill. There are even basketfuls remaining.

  Sabbath helps reorient us to our work. It is an opportunity to step back far enough from what we do to look at it objectively and ask, Is this what I was sent to do? Am I on course?

  Is this my food?

  Maybe an episode from King David’s life brings this most clearly into light.

  It’s late in David’s reign. He’s accomplished many things: subdued Israel’s enemies, extended her borders, amassed great wealth, built a palace, brought the ark to Jerusalem. And he’s failed too. Bathsheba, once Uriah’s wife, is now his wife, but at great cost. There are children who have died and children who’ve gone wayward and children whom he’s banished. There are wives who are estranged. There are friends who have become, over time, something else: rivals, toadies, parasites, necessary evils.

  And then one day, the worst thing of all happens: his son Absalom revolts. Absalom has long nursed royal ambitions and has long been frustrated by his father, David’s, refusal to see him. Years earlier, Absalom, angered by his father’s inaction, had taken a matter of family honor into his own hands. David had exiled him for his audacity. Later, under the persuasion of his advisers, David allowed Absalom back into Jerusalem, but not back into his presence. The face-to-face encounter was slow in coming.

  Somewhere in there, Absalom grows bitter. Somewhere, he sets his sights, not on intimacy with his father, but on something else: deposing him.

  So he gathers an army, declares himself king, and lays siege to Jerusalem. David is completely unprepared. He simply beats a hasty retreat, evacuating Jerusalem. Absalom walks in unopposed. As a sign of his conquest over and contempt for his father, and as a seal on his rebellion, he sleeps with David’s harem on the palace rooftop, for all the world to see.

  And David walks away. He doesn’t ride. He is not carried. He walks, unshod and bereft. “David continued up the Mount of Olives, weeping as he went; his head was covered and he was barefoot” (2 Sam. 15:30). As he goes, an old enemy appears. Shimei, one of Saul’s kin, bitter from years of grudge bearing, comes out to watch David and his ragtag entourage. Shimei’s rancor erupts and spews, and he starts hurling rocks, dirt, curses down on king and company. One of David’s henchmen offers to lop off Shimei’s head, but David restrains him: “If he is cursing because the LORD said to him, ‘Curse David,’ who can ask, ‘Why do you do this?’ . . . Leave him alone; let him curse, for the LORD has told him to” (2 Sam. 16:10–11).

  “So David and his men continued along the road while Shimei was going along the hillside opposite him, cursing as he went and throwing stones at him and showering him with dirt.” Then this: “The king and all the people with him arrived at their destination exhausted. And there he refreshed himself ” (2 Sam. 16:13–14).

  They arrive exhausted. But David refreshes himself—the word in Hebrew is nephesh. It is a word related to both breath and soul. Literally, David breathes his soul back to wholeness. He restores the inmost places.

  If ever there was a man clearly called, it was David. David stands with Abraham, with Nehemiah, with Paul, with Jesus himself, as one whom God raised up for a great kingdom work. From childhood, David lived with a vivid awareness that God had chosen him to be king over Israel and to be a man after God’s own heart. It was a call David relished. It was work because of which he could hardly sleep at night for eagerness to wake and get back to it. It was his food, to do the will of the One who sent him and to finish his work.

  But today, with a son usurping him and an old enemy taunting him, he must wonder. Today, his exhaustion must be deeper, and much different, from the tiredness he felt in the old days when he rode in from the battlefield, triumphant again, and hardly had strength left to remove his greaves, pull off his jerkin. That was a good weariness, a weariness full of hope. It was satisfying, teeming already with the seeds of renewal. Those days, he was tired in his work. Today, he must be tired of it. Today, his exhaustion is of a different order. It is a bleakness. A desolation. A death.

  Men past forty

  Wake at nights,

  Look out at city lights, and wonder:

  Why is life so long,

  And where did I take the wrong turn?3

  David must be having one of those days that all of us have, even those of us who believe most deeply that what we are doing is what God sent us to do. A day when we ask, When did I take the wrong turn? What happened to me? Where did that young man, so alive with faith, so unswerving and unflinching, who never backed off, never second-guessed, never lost heart—where did he go? David must be having a day when he holds up the work his hands have made and asks, Is this it? Is this what I bled and wept and strove and lost friends to accomplish? Is this all there is?

  And yet David refreshes himself. He revives his soul.

  He takes Sabbath. He finds the rest of God.

  And out of that refreshment—breathing in, breathing out— David remembers his first love. David recovers his call. He rises up. He returns to Jerusalem. He defeats his enemies. He resumes his kingship. He leads Israel until his dying day. “And David shepherded them with integrity of heart; / with skillful hands he led them” (Ps. 78:72).

  Centuries later, the apostle Peter spoke this epitaph over the king: “For when David had served God’s purpose in his own generation, he fell asleep” (Acts 13:36, emphasis mine).

  Somewhere in there, he got hungry again.

  SABBATH LITURGY:

  Staying Hungry

  In Jesus’s parable of the great banquet, it is puzzling why those who first accepted an invitation to the king’s feast turned it down the day the meal was actually served. Some of those invited must have lived a stone’s throw from the king’s palace. All that food—bread baking, meat roasting, confections boiling. The sweetness and spiciness of all those aromas must have mixed and danced like swallows on the air. It must have tantalized the townsfolk for days, made them weak at the knees, light in the head, watery in the mouth. Food prepared is harder to resist than food promised.

  But the day of the banquet arrives, and they don’t come. Something must have sated them in the meantime.

  The story harkens back, in an upside-down way, to Esau’s selling his birthright to his brother, Jacob. Esau is so hungry (hungry enough to die, he claims) he trades an irreplaceable heirloom—his status as firstborn, and all the privilege it imparts—for a bowl of stew, a “mess of pottage.” Esau throws away treasure for dumplings. In Jesus’s story, people do the opposite. They forfeit what is precious by their refusal to come eat. They sell their birthright for an empty bowl.

  Both are stories of misplaced hunger. Both are about appetites gone awry. They are about failing to stay hungry for the right things, until the right moment.

  In the Bible, food is food—a gift of the earth that
makes our bones strong and straight, that lends joy to our gatherings—but it is also a picture of something else: the way God fills and nourishes us. Sometimes our feasting expresses this, and sometimes it eclipses it. Sometimes our abundant meals reflect God’s abundance. Other times, all our eating dulls us and lulls us into forgetting him altogether.

  In the movie The Snow Walker, Charlie Halliday is an arrogant and bigoted pilot who takes a bribe of walrus tusks to transport a sick Inuit girl to Yellowknife. On the way he crashes his plane in a wild expanse of muskeg and tundra. He has few provisions—a case of Coke, a few tins of beans, a can or two of gelatinous ham. But the girl, Kanaalaq, knows how to live off the land: to wait all day to snare a single muskrat, to skewer fish with an improvised harpoon, to set up an elaborate system of decoys to trick caribou into running in circles. Early in their plight, Kanaalaq catches a fish and offers it to Charlie. He pushes it away in disgust. She bites into its raw flesh, and he looks at her with revulsion. “Get out of here. If you want to eat like an animal, go ahead. But don’t do it in front of me.”

  But soon Charlie is starving to death, and Kanaalaq feeds him, at first by her own hands. Initially he is wary, tasting the food she offers with prim caution. But soon he learns to savor it, devour it. In one amazing scene, the two cut strands of raw meat from the thigh of a freshly killed caribou and swallow it down like candy.

  It is a tableau of Communion. Charlie has acquired an appetite for real flesh. This is no longer about eating out of boredom, craving, or gluttony. He is no longer fussy or squeamish. This is about basic survival.

  My food is to do the will of the one who sent me. One thing Jesus did in the Eucharist was to connect, in a vivid and simple way, eating with obedience and worship. He joined earth with heaven, bread with manna, flesh with Spirit. He linked physical hunger with spiritual hunger. He reminded us that every bite is also a prayer.

  Do you eat this way? I have two suggestions for this Sabbath Liturgy. The first is that you receive your very next meal—breakfast, lunch, dinner, whatever—as a gift from both heaven and earth. Partake of it with thankfulness and simplicity, eating just enough to fill you, then stopping. Nourish your spirit and your body together. Try to do this whenever you eat and drink.

  The other suggestion is that your next Sabbath meal be a feast: a time of enjoying the sheer bounty of God and his creation. Maybe, if you don’t do this already, invite others to join you. Overdo it a bit. Delight in the utter extravagance of God, who does exceeding, abundantly more than all we ask or imagine.

  In John 21, the risen Christ, repeating an earlier lesson with his disciples, instructs fishermen in their trade. They have fished all night and caught nothing. “Try casting your net on the other side of the boat,” Jesus calls to them from the lakeshore. They do, and the nets fill. Peter recognizes that it’s Jesus on the beach, and he jumps in and swims to shore. Soon they all arrive, lugging the nets, hauling the fish. Then this: they “saw a fire of burning coals there with fish on it, and some bread” (v. 9).

  Jesus always has food we know nothing about.

  But he’s willing to share.

  TWELVE

  LISTEN:

  Stopping to Hear God

  An odd thing happens after you’ve written a book or two: people start to mistake you for someone who’s wise. People from far away, people you’ve never met—they are sure you have something to say. They have never heard or seen you. You could be tall, shaggy, rumble-voiced, sagacious as Treebeard. You could be squat and jut-boned and leering and devious like Rumpelstiltskin. You might be oily or rusty, grim or comical, poetic or didactic, shy or brash. Your voice could be low and slow and easy on the ears, like Garrison Keillor’s, or shrill and breathless and jangly on the nerves, like Edith Bunker’s. They don’t know if you hold yourself statue-still behind the podium or pace the stage like a man awaiting a life-altering verdict. They know nothing about you, except that you’ve written a book or two.

  They invite you anyhow. They ask you to come, sight unseen, at their expense and speak to crowds of people. It’s an amazing feat of trust.

  And you go, and everyone is exceptionally generous. A few people are even borderline fawning, astonished, they are, to meet you in the flesh. This feels awkward, and secretly gratifying, like some long-sought vindication over some long-nursed grudge. A few times it’s happened that I’m meeting with a group of strangers over a meal and I start to speak, to offer an opinion on some matter or another, and suddenly a vast hush falls over the group. It is the silence of riveted attention, absorbed listening.

  It’s a wondrous thing. It’s like in those movies where some dancer, long mocked or ignored, steps onto the floor, dressed to kill. A ripple of shock goes through the audience. Is it . . . Umberto? We didn’t know he was so darkly handsome, so muscular, so masterful, so powerful. The music surges, and the guy uncorks. He’s a whirling dervish, a Tasmanian devil, a spectacle of athleticism and elegance. All the other dancers stop and move to the edge of the dance floor, clearing the way for him. They watch, at first with envy or scorn, but soon with astonishment. They’re spellbound. Except for one person, the dancer’s once triumphant and taunting rival. He is mortified. He slinks off, though no one really notices.

  That’s what this feels like, this moment when people fall silent and listen. When you have an audience.

  Only I want to stop and tell them they’re making a grave error: I’m a stand-in for the real hero. I’m the custodian, come to sweep the floor for his arrival. Me, I’m stumble-prone. I trip sometimes just walking. I get tangled in my own shoelaces. No, you’ve mixed me up with someone else. Please, go back to what you were doing.

  But not always. Sometimes I experience something quite the opposite: a sudden expansiveness, a primitive hunger, a craving for more and more and more. Yes, I want to say, now you see. Finally . . . I’m seized by the urge to grab the microphone, preen in the spotlight, bask in the applause. I want the moment to go on and on.

  But afterward, sitting on the edge of my bed in a slightly musty hotel room, or wedged into a narrow seat in the economy coach section of an airplane, with the sleeping stranger beside me tilting precariously my way, I always return to the same thought: If people stop to listen to you, Mark, to whom are you stopping to listen?

  All our authority is derived. Either God gives us words, or we are only giving opinions. Either God vouches for us, or our credentials are forged. If anyone ever stops to listen to you or me, this had better be solidly in place: Our speaking comes out of our listening. What we say comes out of what we hear. We have to be people who listen, day and night, to God. Our utterances ought to be as Jesus’s were: an echoing of the Father, an imitation of him. They ought to be a holy ventriloquism, a sacred pantomime. Peter puts it this way: “If anyone speaks, he should do it as one speaking the very words of God” (1 Pet. 4:11). That verse should be paired with Jesus’s statement: “He who has ears, let him hear.”

  But there are so many voices. And there is such little time to listen, to truly listen: to winnow and test it all, to heed and reflect and respond. Carl Sandburg, in his biography of Abraham Lincoln, describes Lincoln’s childhood this way: “In wilderness loneliness he companioned with trees, with the faces of open sky and weather in changing seasons, with that individual one-man instrument, the ax. Silence found him for her own. In the making of him, the element of silence was immense.”1

  In the making of him, the element of silence was immense.

  What makes me? What makes you? What are the elements that shape us? For certain, there has not been enough silence in my life. Silence is the condition for true listening. But I have too little of it. Silence came visiting and found me already occupied. The element of silence is for me scanty and thin. My existence is a welter of noise.

  Henri Nouwen noted that the root of the word absurd is the Latin word for “deaf,” surdus.2 Absurdness is deafness, where the voice that speaks truth in love, that wounds to heal, that gives clear guidance
amidst many false enticements—that voice is lost in the cacophony. We cannot hear it. We are deaf to it. For lack of silence, our lives are absurd. “I confess my sins,” poet and farmer Wendell Berry says,

  that I have not been happy

  enough, considering my good luck;

  have listened to too much noise;

  have been inattentive to wonders;

  have lusted after praise.3

  I confess my sins: I have done these things also.

  When I was a boy, five years old, my father took my brother and me fishing in the Kanaskis, a “wilderness loneliness” of serpentine streams, icy cold, and endless birch forests. The trees there were a lacework of greens in summer, a quiltwork of yellows in fall, a bonework of whites in winter.

  It rained almost the entire time. We huddled beneath ponchos glazed dark with rainwater, and my hands were so stiff from cold that I kept having to ask my father to thread my hook with a worm. I can see his face now as he leans close, the beads of rain on his glasses a thousand tiny eyes, each a perfect mirror of that vast, damp grayness all around us.

  I remember my dad dousing our sputtering fire with gasoline. The gasoline poured out from the jerry can, hit the smoldering wood, and flared. A rope of fire shot back up into the can’s spigot, and the whole thing burst into a fireball. My father stood there a moment juggling it, like a man performing a circus stunt, and then he hurled it all, flame and can, into the river. It gasped and sent up a plume of mauve smoke and white steam. At first he cussed, but afterward he looked sheepish.

  I remember my brother and I caught a possum. It played dead so effectively—its body limp and stiff both, its eyes squinted shut—that it fooled us completely, even though our father told us this was its single ploy, its one defense. Even though he told us not to be fooled.