Holidays
On this Sunday we are in the middle of our summer holidays. It’s good to know that we still use such a deeply religious word ‘holy days’ to describe this period of fun and relaxation!
The idea of a holy rest goes very deep in the Bible. In fact it goes back to the time of our creation itself. The seventh day, the sabbath day is not a kind of ‘divine day off’, but it is the day when the creation reaches its goal, when work passes into worship.
And in the New Testament this sabbath rest is the next best thing to heaven itself.
It is a day for being what we were made for rather than for doing what we have to do.
This is a rather elevated understanding of how we see our rest periods, our Sunday, our holiday, our leisure time, but elevated or not it’s certainly worth thinking about in those terms.
Our life must be a mixture of activity and reflection. Of speaking & proclaiming and silence & listening; of giving and re-fuelling; excitement and cooling off. It is good to remind ourselves of this right in the middle of this ‘holy’ season.
Bernhard Schunemann
16 August 2026
