Let Our Rest Be a Resurrectio

Genesis 1:1-2:4a and Excerpts from Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto by Tricia Hersey

May 31, 2026

Rev. Nicole M. Lamarche

Thank you for being here, thank you for the privilege of your time, thank you for choosing community.

I invite you now as you are so moved to take some deeper breaths with me, breathing in peace, that we can open our hearts, so we can hear whatever we need to today.

Hear this prayer from Psalm 19. God of many names and expressions, help us to take in whatever we need to, may the words my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, our Rock, and our Redeemer. Amen.

Sitting in a barber shop in Italy, Liz is delighting on a sweet treat commenting on how she feels guilty because all she has done in Rome is learn a bit of Italian and eat. When a man getting a shave, turns his chair around and through a thick Italian accent responds in English with, “You feel guilty because you are American… you don’t know how to enjoy yourself! It’s true, Americans know entertainment, but don’t know pleasure.” “Listen to me! You want to know your problem! Americans you work too hard, you get burned out, and then come home and spend your whole weekend in your pajamas in front of the TV…but you don’t know pleasure, you have to be told you have earned it…” Then the men in the barber shop went on to tell her of the concept of dolce far niente, it means the sweetness of doing nothing. This is a scene from the movie Eat, Pray, Love, all about the spiritual journey of Elizabeth Gilbert. But I love this scene because it perfectly captures how work-oriented American culture really is and at least for me personally, it took me exploring other parts of the world to really, fully understand this.

We are how we are for a variety of reasons, including the lack of social safety nets that require many to work multiple jobs or too many hours for many American demographics, as well as our roots in what is called the Protestant work ethic, the philosophies of many of those who came here to build a different kind of nation state that were grounded in hard work and resisted the monarchies of Old Europe where upward mobility was impossible. They wanted to build something else.

But in a moment that is revealing that technological innovations don’t necessarily mean less work for us, or that we are given more security for us humans, it feels important to critically examine some of the assumptions about what is being presented to us as healthy and normal. 

Working all the time is not praiseworthy, at least not in our tradition. As we just heard, in this ancient myth in the book of Genesis, God takes chaos and turns into good, offering a pattern, a flow, a place for each thing, and then pausing, of speaking something into existence and then retreating, of creating the conditions for the creatures to start to thrive and then going into night and then a whole day of rest.

A mentor of mine once said that we are most like God when we are creating. So maybe also we are most like God when we are resting, when we are honoring the place for night and day, for the cycle of balance.

Spiritually speaking, one could argue that having at least one day off from labor is as essential as not killing people. That might seem like a funny way to say it. But they are both listed in the Ten Commandments. And yet corporations are not required to allow this, being permitted to schedule people just under fulltime so benefits are denied, created odd scheduling or last minute changes so no good routine can be created. These practices are legal. There are no federal laws, and few state laws, requiring paid holidays or paid family leave. I am grateful for what Colorado has made possible in recent years. And still overall, culturally, in this country we have set things up so that we have to live to work, rather than work to live. We set up judgments based on the kind of work people do, assigning value to certain kinds of work. 

So it feels important to say, in this fast paced time, in this do all you must, earn all you can, work to keep up kind of moment, in which we are living, I wonder if in some of the places where we are withered or down or feeling dead, the answer might not be more, but less, perhaps the answer for many of us is, rest. In some parts of our lives, whether it be our health challenges, or our spiritual blocks, or our lack of imagination, what if in some places, the way to resurrection is rest? When we stop, we are better able to feel, see, taste, and smell the power of life. Instead of being annoyed at the person who cut me off, I wonder what is going on with them. 

Rest allows us to remain grounded able to react as we want to, instead of responding to all that comes at us in this moment. I want to encourage you all to guard your nightly rest, your weekly rest, your seasonal rest, and the bigger cyclical rests, like I had in 2024 and Jackie will have this fall. These are grounded in our religious conviction of being connected to the flow of our days, with a place for each of the creatures and role for the moon and the sun. In our book study, we were reminded that we worship on Sun-day! Part of the answer to reconnecting with the Earth is honoring the cycles.

I hope you find time to rest, whatever that looks like for you- doing nothing, reading a book, getting lost in our garden, with our fingers in the dirt. Part of why we need rest is so that we never get too disconnected from the fact that we are each here, for a really short time, in the timespan of the cosmos. We cannot miss the beauty! Slow down. Look at the mountains. Look at the bunnies. Hear the crow greeting! 

Maybe you heard Pope Leo’s words this week. He said, “We must help young people reclaim silence, the ability to ask questions, the depth of relationship, openness to transcendence…the soul’s voice is not a shout, but a whisper.” In my experience, it is often not until I slow down, that I can really hear.

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What if there is something delicious, something sacred for us in dolce far niente? What if making space for the sweetness of doing nothing will get us through? May rest be a resurrection for you.

Beloved of God, may we reclaim rest as holy. May rest be our resurrection! As we heard, “May the portal of rest be our refuge. May we go there often!”

Dolce far niente. May it be so. Amen.