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Hello and welcome to mochi monastery. mochi monastery is a Christian ministry providing spiritual care and guidance to unmarried single men.
I’m Brother Kris, the chaplain for mochi monastery, and I’ll be giving this week’s message for our virtual chapel.
Today’s message is titled “the middle way of work”.
introduction
America is a country and a people drawn to extremes. I think most people would agree with the idea that Americans are not known to take a moderate, steady, middle-of-the-road approach to much of anything. It’s often one extreme or the other: far left or far right in politics. Morbidly obese Americans on the one hand, steroids-abusing Americans on the other. Open borders for a few years, followed by mass deportations for a few years.
I believe the unhealthy relationship of most Americans to leisure and productivity is where we can really see this American tendency to embrace unhealthy extremes. On the one hand, you’ve got some Americans so lazy, unmotivated, and un-ambitious, that they’ll sit around playing video games and watching anime or Netflix and scrolling social media all day, getting fat and depressed and spiraling down in shame, self-hatred, and resentment. On the other hand, you’ve got other Americans working themselves to an early grave, abusing their mind and bodies in the pursuit of maximizing their wealth and worldly success at the expense of their souls.
But Jesus points us to a better way when it comes to work: a much healthier way that is neither slothful nor over-ambitious. In pace with God’s rhythms, life-giving rather than life-draining. Today we’ll cover why both excess leisure and excess work are two extremes to avoid, and how through Jesus we can find a middle way when it comes to work.
So let’s start with leisure, and discuss why excess leisure is not good.
- excess leisure is not good
Let’s start with a famous passage from Proverbs 6 about the ant (quick note that for these chapel messages, unless stated otherwise, I’ll be reading from the NRSVue):
Proverbs 6:6-11
Go to the ant, you lazybones; consider its ways and be wise. Without having any chief or officer or ruler, it prepares its food in summer and gathers its sustenance in harvest. How long will you lie there, O lazybones? When will you rise from your sleep? A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come upon you like a robber, and want, like an armed warrior.
We live in a society that tempts us towards excess leisure like never before. Modern technology, such as the Apple iPhone, enables us to spend every waking moment constantly stimulated by low-effort, unedifying leisure activities like scrolling social media, binging Netflix, going down YouTube rabbit holes, etc.
But Proverbs 6 makes clear the danger of excess leisure: failing to work leads to poverty and scarcity. And in addition to the tangible, physical cost of laziness, there is the spiritual cost of being unproductive and excessively lazy: a spiritually and emotionally impoverished life, never feeling the satisfaction of achieving or accomplishing anything, never experiencing the joy of giving back to society. In the context of following Jesus, such lazy people never serve in the Kingdom or participate in the work of God, and miss out on all the blessings that come with being actively engaged with God’s redemption of humanity and restoration of the earth.
This is pretty common sense, practical wisdom that should not be news to anyone, so I won’t belabor the point. I want to focus on why people have become lazy and slothful, why they fail to embrace their brief time on this earth to be productive and fruitful.
And keeping in mind that this is a virtual chapel for unmarried single men, I will point out that a lot of guys without a relationship or family, especially younger guys, who tend to fall into this category of excess leisure. There are a lot of men are drifting in society today, lacking direction and purpose.
Now there are some big reasons for that, which we can cover in future chapel messages: the lack of family to provide and have responsibility for, the depression and lack of self-worth that comes with singleness in our relationship-status-obsessed culture and churches, and so on. Those are some big elephants we can tackle in the future.
But taking a bigger picture view, I think another big reason for the drifting, for the lack of motivation to work, is that we’ve lost the fundamental concept of why we work and strive to be productive in this world. It’s not just to collect paychecks to buy stuff and gain social status and gratify our base desires. We are not mere consumption machines, despite a global economic system that seems to steer us in that direction.
In fact, you can see work and labor as fundamental functions of human beings from the outset of our creation:
Genesis 1:28
God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”
Be fruitful. Fill, subdue and have dominion (govern and be good stewards of the earth). These are God’s first words to humanity. Clearly, it takes work and an active role on our part to fulfill this most primal command from God. Humans were designed by God to be productive creatures upon the earth, governing it and caring for it with wisdom for His honor and glory.
So we should be hard-working and productive as human beings during our time on this earth. Unmarried single men need to embrace this summons to be productive, which comes from living with direction and purpose. And the direction and purpose for each man in the context of his own life can be discovered by following Jesus, by resetting and refocusing ourselves on Christ as the center of our lives, and through Him finding our primary mission and purpose in the world.
So the extreme of excess leisure, of laziness, ultimately stems from a disordered soul. What about the other extreme, of engaging in excess work beyond our natural limitations?
- excess work is also not good
We live in a workaholic culture that glorifies the grind in pursuit of the American dream. It’s seen as a virtue to work well over 40, 50, even 60 hours a week, and to never take a day off is to get a day ahead of the competition. To break your internal governor and surpass your limits. The idea of limitations are seen as mental, signs of weakness, a lack of will to compete and win in the ruthless economic marketplace of modern America.
While this might be the American way, it’s not God’s way, and it’s not very wise:
Genesis 2:2-3
On the sixth day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation.
We see here that Sabbath is a fixed rhythm to our reality, woven into the fabric of creation, and we neglect it at our peril. Lack of rest, of Sabbath, leads to various health issues, stress, mental breakdowns, burnout. Heck, even a shortened life span. There was a study that showed that 7th Day Adventists live longer than most people. What’s their secret? Well, they’re the Christian group that’s famous for a zealous practice of regular weekly sabbath.
To be honest, such strict adherence to the Sabbath isn’t that farfetched of an idea. After all, it’s a direct command from God, right in the 10 Commandments:
Exodus 20:8-11
Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it.
When you think about it: if God Himself rested on the seventh day, who are we to think that we don’t need to?
So we all know we need to Sabbath. Our bodies are telling us, the Bible is telling us, everything within and without is flashing the red lights to take a break and relax. But easier said than done.
Because it’s not just the overly ambitious who are drawn to overwork, but everyday Americans, and perhaps many people listening right now. The stats tell a story that shouldn’t surprise anyone in this rest-starved culture: a quarter of a million American employees haven’t taken a vacation in the last year. 65% live paycheck to paycheck.
And it’s hard to blame them, with all the responsibilities many families need to juggle: career, kids, church duties, PTA meetings, kids’ extracurricular activities, social life, etc.
Of course, there may be unmarried men (or women) listening to this who may not have a family — this is mochi monastery, after all. So the added stress and pressure from marriage and children aren’t there, but times are tough economically, and many unmarried singles are struggling to stay afloat just the same, especially if they’re in the working class, trying to get by working long hours and doing side gigs and odd jobs to survive paycheck-to-paycheck.
Sabbath and rest can seem like luxuries to those of us swamped under various responsibilities and burdens, but it’s in those times especially that you need to create space in your life to stop, to be still, and to invite God in your life. God is often the first to go when the schedule is overbooked, when your life is crammed to the brim with things that need to get done, when it should be the opposite.
Now I’m going to be blunt. I am willing to bet stressed/busy people find time to watch Netflix and YouTube, scroll through Instagram or Tick Tock or other social media apps, and use that to de-stress. No judgment, I do that too, I’ve got to cut back like everyone else. It’s not to say that you should never, ever engage in these activities. But I’m willing to bet for most of us, we spend way more time on these activities than we should. And the time we spend doing those things cuts into better ways to de-stress, better ways to refresh and restore ourselves.
Who feels refreshed and renewed after hours down a YouTube rabbit hole, after swiping through dozens of Instagram reels or doomscrolling the news? I know I don’t. The true key to refreshment, to restoration, to sabbath from the overwork, is connection to and rest in God.
How do we do that? How do we connect with God, how do we find rest in Him? We develop that connection and discover that rest through Christ. Just like with laziness, overwork and stress are ultimately also issues of a disordered soul that have taken on too much. And it’s when we reset and re-center on Jesus, restoring proper order to our soul, that we can truly find rest in Him.
So when we are lazy and underworked, or when we are stressed and overworked, we need Jesus. He is the answer to the riddle of the extremes between excess leisure and excess work. Because it is through Jesus we find a third way, a middle way, which we will cover now:
- the middle way of work (Christ-centered, Christ-anchored work)
In contrast to the extremes that human beings naturally drift to, between excess laziness and excess work, Jesus Himself offers a third way, a middle way of work. And for anyone thinking of Buddhism when I say middle way, yes this is a similar idea. But in a Christian context, we believe that through Christ we can be empowered to discern and truly live out that middle way. Because He modeled for us how to live that middle way, and we can also walk that path when we take on His yoke.
Taking on Jesus’ yoke is a phrase that may be familiar to many Christians. It comes from a famous passage in the Gospel of Matthew:
Matthew 11:28-30
Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
So what does it mean to take on Jesus’ yoke?
I read a book recently called The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer, and he does a good job of breaking it down:
“A yoke was a common idiom in the first century for a rabbi’s way of reading the Torah. But it was also more: it was his set of teachings on how to be human. His way to shoulder the … weight of life—marriage, divorce, prayer, money, sex, conflict resolution, government—all of it. … A yoke is how you shoulder a load.”
To take on a rabbi’s yoke is to be his disciple or apprentice, to follow his teachings and model your life after him. So followers of Jesus, of His way, have taken on His yoke, modeling our lives after Him, taking on His lifestyle. To become more like Him in how we act, how we think, how we live.
So how did Jesus deal with the sorts of pressures we deal with? After all, He had a busy ministry, with a lot of pressures and burdens of everyday life we carry, and just like anyone today had to find a way to balance work and rest.
So how did Jesus deal with stress, with the busyness of everyday life? We see that Jesus did it through what us followers of His way typically call the “spiritual disciplines”. Here are a few examples:
- Prayer and Solitude (Lk 5:16 “he would slip away to deserted places to pray”)
- Fasting (Mt 4:2 “He fasted forty days and forty nights”)
- Going to church (Lk 4:16 “He went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, as was his custom”)
- Reading the Bible (Lk 2:47 “All who heard him were amazed at his understanding” story of when Jesus was 12, showed that He already read and knew the Torah [Hebrew Bible] well)
- Service (Mk 10:45 “For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve”)
It’s the regular practice of these spiritual disciplines, these daily spiritual rhythms, modeled by Christ Himself, that centers us, that provides the natural calibration to discern the middle way in our lives. We can live without the despair that leads to laziness, and without the stress that comes from overworking ourselves.
Listen to how Eugene Peterson translated that earlier passage from Matthew 11 in The Message:
“Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”
Does that sound like a good deal to you? To those of you who are unproductive, lazy and listness in life, seeking a good burden to carry to be of use to the world? To those who are stressed and overworked, burdened by loads that feel too heavy to carry?
Jesus has an answer, a third way, the middle way: the grace-filled way that’s anchored and centered in Him. And we can live out this third way by following His example, practicing the spiritual disciplines, learning and living by the unforced rhythms of grace. In this grace-filled approach to work, neither under-productive nor over-productive, we find the right balance, find joy in the midst of our work, and life a well-balanced, fruitful life for the glory of God.
conclusion
Spiritual formation is a term that followers of the Way have used to describe this process of learning the unforced rhythms of grace. At mochi monastery, we want to teach and encourage unmarried single men in particular to embrace the process of spiritual formation.
Unmarried single men, lacking the responsibilities of a family to raise, and the involvement in their local community that comes with it, have more free time and energy to devote to God and be shaped by Him in this season of life. It’s a great opportunity for the unmarried to grow in Christlikeness while enjoying the abundant life He has to offer.
In the future, we will have a Discord channel led by Brother Phil to guide unmarried men in this spiritual formation process. And we will have chapel messages in the future to provide further teaching on spiritual formation.
But that’s it for this chapel message. We hope to continue to encourage and edify unmarried single men, and anyone else visiting our virtual chapel, helping everyone live out the Way of Jesus in future chapel messages. You can subscribe to make sure you don’t miss out.
Thanks for tuning in to mochi monastery. If you want to support our ministry, you can leave a 5 star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whatever podcast app you’re using to listen. For more information or to contact us, you can visit us at mochimonastery.org or check out our Instagram at @mochimonastery
Until next time, this has been Chaplain Kris, see you next time.