The 11th Sunday after Pentecost_Proper 16C
Good morning! What a delight it is for me to be with you here, in the ‘jewel of the Delta,’ on my first Sunday in the Diocese of Arkansas as Canon to the Ordinary! Your hospitality is legendary, and I have already enjoyed a good dose of it in my short time here with y’all, so thank you for that warm welcome!
It was the summer of 2022, and it had been a hard season in my ministry. My parish and I had navigated the global pandemic together, and as we were coming out of Covid, our beloved 40 year-old parish administrator died suddenly of a pulmonary embolism. And I kept going. What else was I going to do? But I was so very weary and heartbroken. I began to feel like Bilbo Baggins describes in the Tolkien book The Fellowship of the Ring: “…thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”
I spoke to our wardens and then to the vestry, and we determined that both I and our associate rector needed to go ahead and take some sabbatical time about a year earlier than planned, in different configurations. That summer of 2022, sabbatical or intentional sabbath saved me. Now, I recognize the privilege in being able to take a sabbatical, and the generous gift of time and resources that it represented from my parish; it was also a tangible offering of their care for me, which I deeply appreciated.
I didn’t have many plans for my sabbatical except to travel for three weeks in Europe with our family after our daughter’s high school graduation, and to be fully present for our son’s surgery and recovery from spinal fusion surgery for scoliosis.
And by sheer accident right before my sabbatical, I ran across a poet named Ross Gay who had just written a book of short essays titled The Book of Delights. Gay had decided on his birthday to daily for the next year about something that had delighted him; and so The Book of Delights is almost 365 brief essays that chronicle his delight over the course of a year—from one birthday to the next. In the preface, Gay writes about how he established some rules around this project: to try to write daily about delight, to write quickly and by hand. He writes, “The rules made it a discipline for me. A practice. Spend time thinking and writing about delight every day.”
He continues, “It didn’t take me long to learn that the discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar. Or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study. A month or two into this project delights were calling to me: Write about me! Write about me! Because it is rude not to acknowledge your delights, I’d tell them that though they might not become essayettes, they were still important, and I was grateful to them. Which is to say, I felt my life to be more full of delight. Not without sorrow or fear or pain or loss. But more full of delight. I also learned this year that my delight grows-much like love and joy-when I share it.” i
When I went on sabbatical, Ross Gay and his notion of delight became my companions. And what all of that taught me is that like many things, the practice of delight is a practice that is intrinsic to us as humans, and it is also a cultivated practice. Just think about it. Most children practice delight abundantly, naturally. But over the course of our growing up, delight can get crowded out of our lives by other concerns or our busy-ness. So, most of us as adults have to intentionally practice and cultivate delight. And in that season of my life, cultivating and practicing my delight was God’s gift of healing for me and my weary spirit and broken heart.
Imagine my delight to discover in this Sunday’s propers that delight and sabbath keeping are interwoven in both the reading from Isaiah and even to some extent in the gospel reading from Luke.
In our reading from Isaiah, we find ourselves in the part of this lengthy book that scholars refer to as “Third Isaiah” which means that the people of Israel have been taken into captivity in Babylon; they have dwelled in Babylon, as foreigners and captives, for a couple of generations, and then they have been set free to return home to pick up the pieces of their lives. This part of the book that we hear today gives us glimpses of how the prophet and people are wrestling with coming home again and restoring some of the essential practices of their faith and their identity. Today’s passage reminds God’s people of the importance of the practice of justice, of taking care of the vulnerable among them, as a part of what it means to be in relationship with God and each other. And it is all connected with the keeping of the sabbath. Listen to a snippet of it again:
“If you refrain from trampling the sabbath,
from pursuing your own interests on my holy day;
if you call the sabbath a delight
and the holy day of the Lord honorable;
if you honor it, not going your own ways,
serving your own interests, or pursuing your own affairs;
then you shall take delight in the Lord,
and I will make you ride upon the heights of the earth;
I will feed you with the heritage of your ancestor Jacob,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”
I love how Isaiah shows the connection between sabbath keeping as a way of taking delight in relationship with God and also in each other! This notion of delight is essential to the keeping of sabbath for God’s people because sabbath at its very creation becomes for God a way to delight in all that God has created, and as God’s people, we are invited into this dance that God dances between creation and sabbath and delight.
The gift of sabbath is also a gift of freedom as God restores the sabbath to the children of Israel once God frees them from slavery in Egypt.
At the heart of the connection between sabbath and delight is compassion. We see this in both the Isaiah reading in the encouragement to God’s people to pay attention to the needs of others as well as the gospel reading: when Jesus sees a woman in need of healing, has compassion on her and proclaims that she has been set free, and then heals her. Jesus sees the woman in the synagogue because he is open and attentive to what is going on around him; it’s the invitation of Isaiah, of how to look at and be open to the world as a part of relationship with God that can offer us healing, rest, and restoration.
This summer, as I was in the midst of some intentional sabbath time between leaving my former church in Savannah and beginning my work here in the diocese with y’all, I came across a quote by the Irish priest and poet and theologian John O’Donohue that was another lens for me to look at these practices of delight and keeping sabbath in my own life. This is from his book titled Beauty: Invisible Embrace.
He writes, “At the heart of things is a secret law of balance and when our approach is respectful, sensitive and worthy, gifts of healing, challenge and creativity open to us. A gracious approach is the key that unlocks the treasure of the encounter. The way we are present to each other is frequently superficial. In many areas of our lives the rich potential of friendship and love remains out of our reach because we push toward ‘connection.’ When we deaden our own depths, we cannot strike a resonance in those we meet or in the work we do.”
He continues, “A reverence of approach awakens depth and enables us to be truly present where we are. When we approach with reverence great things decide to approach us. Our real life comes to the surface and its light awakens the concealed beauty of all things. When we walk on the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us.” He concludes, “The rushed heart and the arrogant mind lack the gentleness and patience to enter that embrace. Beauty is mysterious, a slow presence who waits for the ready, expectant heart.” ii
It’s all interconnected, isn’t it? Keeping sabbath, practicing delight, embracing a reverent approach to others and to ourselves, which helps us engage our compassion for others and for ourselves.
So, this week, your invitation is to cultivate the practice of delight, of looking at the world and the people around you with reverence and compassion. Each day this week, I encourage you to be intentional in naming in your prayers, writing about, or even taking a picture of one thing that you find delight in, and you also might spend some time reflecting on how you encounter delight in this church and in this community.
i. Gay, Ross. The Book of Delights. Algonquin: 2019, pp xi-xii.
ii. O’Donohue, John. Beauty: Invisible Embrace. Shared on the John O’Donohue Facebook page on August 9, 2025.
