O Sabbath rest by Galilee

Dear Lord and Father of mankind, forgive our foolish ways;

Reclothe us in our rightful mind, in purer lives Thy service find,

In deeper reverence, praise.

When I visited Israel in 2008, I discovered that the various places I visited required different levels of using my imagination to connect with how that place was "back then." In some places, there a huge gap between how it is now and how it was then; the Church of the Holy Sepulchre presented one of the biggest challenges. (I hope to blog about my experience there soon.) In other places, the gap is smaller, because those places haven't changed much in the past 2000 years. The Sea of Galilee was one of my favorite places in Israel because it had the smallest gap of any place that we visited - so small that it melts away once you are out on the water, feeling the waves lapping at the side of the boat, feeling the wind and watching the gulls play on its drafts. The captain of our boat was a Jewish man who came to Sea of Galilee to work on a boat and ended up coming to believe that Jesus was the Messiah after, as he put it, sensing the spirit of Jesus on the water.

The hymns that mention the Sea of Galilee tend to speak of it in a very romanticized and idealized way. In preparation for our trip, we are reading an excellent book by NT Wright called "The Way of the Lord", which I would highly recommend to any Christian, whether they are preparing for a trip to the Holy Land, or whether they want to imaginatively walk where Jesus walked without leaving their armchair. In his chapter on Galilee, Bishop Wright warns against a quaint idealism about Galilee, favored by the Victorians, which casts Galilee as simply a quiet, lovely place with gently sloping hillsides and a tranquil lake for fishing. Galilee is beautiful, but it is a real place. As the Gospel shows us, living in a beautiful place does not exempt people from dealing with sickness and hunger and occupation by a foreign power.

O Sabbath rest by Galilee, O calm of hills above,
Where Jesus knelt to share with Thee the silence of eternity,
Interpreted by love!

The hymn Dear Lord and Father of Mankind speaks of the Sea of Galilee as a particularly peaceful place where Jesus sought rest in his Father's presence, but it also acknowledges our all too human tendency to forget our need for Sabbath rest. I love this hymn because it speaks so eloquently of how in the busyness of our lives we so easily err and stray from God's rest like lost sheep; how we follow too much the desires and devices of our own hearts, and will be restless until we find our rest in God.

Drop Thy still dews of quietness,
Till all our strivings cease;

Take from our souls the strain and stress,
And let our ordered lives confess
The beauty of Thy peace.

Breathe through the heats of our desire
Thy coolness and Thy balm;
Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;
Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,
O still, small voice of calm.

Going to Israel to see the places of the Bible, it is easy to get into "go go go" mode out of a desire to see as much as we can before we have to head back to the airport. If we are used to a high level of strain and stress and striving in our daily lives, we will have to be intentional about entering into a different mode of being on our trip, in order for this to be a true pilgrimage and not just an exercise in tourism. The Bible speaks of coming into the promised land as "entering God's rest." May we enter into God's rest on this pilgrimage.

slideshow of my pictures from the Sea of Galilee
"Dear Lord and Father of Mankind" - sung by the Scottish Festival Singers

O God of peace, you have taught us

that in returning and rest we shall be saved,

in quietness and confidence shall be our strength:

By the might of your Spirit lift us, we pray, to your presence,

where we may be still and know that you are God.