Proverbs 30:5-9

Psalm 119:97-104

Luke 9:1-6

“Enough”.

What does it “feel” like to have enough?

We heard a prayer for “enough” today in the first reading from Proverbs:

7 Two things I ask of you;
    deny them not to me before I die:
8 Remove far from me falsehood and lying;
    give me neither poverty nor riches;
    feed me with the food that is needful for me,
9 lest I be full and deny you
    and say, “Who is the Lord?”
or lest I be poor and steal
    and profane the name of my God.

It is a good prayer! If you have too much, then you get a fat head, and say “Who is the Lord? Maybe I am!” Whereas if you have too little, you may driven to theft just to survive, and this reflects poorly on the One who bled and died for you. To have enough, just so and no more, seems a good place to be. But what it feel like to have enough?

In our Gospel reading we heard Jesus sending out the disciples to do some on-the-job ministry training. He gave them work to do, and the authority to do it. He also instructed them on their working conditions – and I think the trade unions might have had something to say about this bit (v. 3b):

“Take nothing for your journey, no staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money; and do not have two tunics.”

Our Lord has given his disciples enough already. He has given them “power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases” (v. 1b). What more could they need? If they had all that power and authority as well as a bunch of luxuries, where do you think their souls might focus on? Using their power and authority for the good of others? Or the luxuries that their job afforded them? And so what does it “feel” like to have enough? How can we enjoy that same feeling?

If we were to have kept going further in our first reading we would have heard about a leech who has two daughters: “Give, and Give”. That is to say, there is a sense that not feeling like you have enough is to be like a leech that just sits on the skin constantly sucking out blood and getting fatter and fatter and still crying out for more.

Our current career-led culture seems much the same. Wake up, go to work, come home and buy a bunch of stuff, sleep, wake up again – and then retire and do nothing all day. When thinking of a way of describing this, it is hard not to think of a small rodent on a treadmill, until it gets so old it just falls off and lies in the sawdust.

The way of wisdom, by contrast, is to follow God’s Law (as we heard in the poetry of today’s Psalm), that which is sweeter than honey in the mouth. And I think something we don’t do very well when it comes to following God’s Law is to rest.

Rest is commanded explicitly, but it is also a great theme of God’s work in creation and redemption. Rest is the key to experiencing the “feeling” of enough. Consider when God created the world and everything in it: on the seventh day we read he “rested”. Or in Psalm 95, the song about coming out of the wilderness and into the Promised Land, with the final stanza where it compares it to “entering into God’s rest”. Or our Lord, after he had done the great work of redemption of suffering the punishment for our sins on the cross so that we may be forgiven, rested in the tomb before his resurrection.

I think this is where we find the feeling of enough. Activity must be followed by rest. Rest gives us time to think back on things. It allows our experiences to settle into our brains and our souls. Rest gives us the physical restoration as well as the spiritual restoration we need to keep going.

I do not think this cycle of activity and rest is like the career-led treadmill. It is more like the tide coming in and out. We move – the tide comes in. We rest – the tide goes out. Gentle and rolling.

And so I would encourage you to look for times of proper rest. It takes effort. You need to set aside time in your life to do it. And you need to actually commit to it when it happens. It doesn’t need to be extra sleep (but it can be). It just needs to be time you set aside where you can let your soul exhale, and chew on your recent experiences. And when you do, you will hopefully discover that feeling of having enough.