THE FERVOR AT church during the Advent season is a remarkable sight. Both clergy and laity work like the shepherds, tending to their flocks late into the night. And many move like the wise men, traveling to foreign places and spending extensive resources to celebrate Christ’s arrival with family.

This time of heightened activity makes sense given the story of scripture and the story of our current world. The shepherds could not help but tell others once they learned of the Savior’s birth. And as we now await his return, we should work hard to share the riches of the nativity with a world that is a little more open to matters of faith at this time of year.

But if increased activity is the only melody we pick up from the nativity story told in Matthew and Luke, we neglect a needful counterpoint: the importance of rest. The nativity story is replete with theological, familial, and political lessons about rest that quietly proclaim God’s goodness to this weary world. With exhaustion rampant in the church — perhaps especially so at Christmastime — we would do well to hear notes of rest sounding from the manger.

1. Listen to your sleep

GOD USES SLEEP as a vehicle for saving Joseph’s family (Matthew 1:18-25). God instructs Joseph to honor his marriage to Mary because her pregnancy was not a sign of infidelity. To the contrary, it was a sign of immense devotion to God. Furthermore, this miracle child would save all his people, including his parents, from their actual sins, as opposed to their alleged ones. In obedience, Joseph listened to the message heard in his sleep and thus participated in God’s saving of his family.

Through this dream, God helped Joseph navigate the tension between commitment to religious expectation and commitment to family — a tension prominent in the life of church leaders during busy times of the year such as Advent. Can you be faithful to your public ministry life and to your family equally, or does one have to give way to the other? I am thankful to be the son of a pastor who intentionally maintained her family life alongside her ministry life (Rev. Adonna Davis Reid pastors First United Methodist Church of Oak Park in Chicagoland). But I know that for many families, the demands of ministry can lead to distance between spouses as well as distance between parents and children, sometimes causing enduring harm.

If you ever face this tension over priorities, try looking to Joseph’s example for guidance. Joseph reminds us that God is ultimately in control and that we have a role in the story because God chooses to involve us. God told Joseph that his seed was not needed but that he was still part of God’s salvific plan. Joseph could have ignored this dream and divorced Mary anyway, but he instead listened to the instruction heard during sleep. As earthly father to the child of the Holy Spirit and Mary, he would always remember that ministry is not ultimately by or about him.

So it is with us: The God who protects us when we are drooling on our pillow is the same God who freely chooses to use us. These lessons from Joseph’s sleep can keep needless weight off our shoulders during Advent and Christmas — which, funnily enough, might help us sleep better at night.

As you sleep, if you are one who remembers your dreams, can you gain insights from them about your family? Another angle is to think about your last thought before you nod off or your first thought in the morning. (The psalms routinely talk about how our nighttime self-monologue is a good place to hear instruction from God.) You might find God helping you hold together your commitment to your public ministry and to your family the way God did for Joseph.

I pray that your family ties are stronger this Advent because of how you listen to God through sleep. And as those ties are strengthened, may fruit come that blesses the world. Because Joseph listened to God through his sleep, he was able to participate in God’s deepest vision of rest: the saving of creation from the restlessness wrought by sin.

2. Pause to tend sacred memory

LUKE'S GOSPEL DEPICTS Jesus’ tumultuous delivery, with Mary giving birth in an animal stable (2:1-7). It is hard enough to deliver a child in normal circumstances, but to do so in a stable would have been all the more disorienting. And on top of that, shortly after Jesus is born, the Holy Spirit sends unfamiliar shepherds to the new parents to pay homage to the new king (verses 8-20). Since the Spirit had to give them specific instructions on locating and identifying the child (“you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth”), these shepherds most likely did not know Mary and Joseph beforehand, which would have added to the strangeness of the event.

But after the shepherds moved with haste to the stable and described their conversation with the angels, Mary “treasured” and “pondered” their report in her heart (verse 19). These two verbs may appear to describe benign contemplation, but their use elsewhere in Luke and the other gospels suggests they are about protecting something valuable from danger. In Mary’s case, that might mean protecting these memories of Jesus’ divine glory as the angels detailed it. Perhaps she would return to these pondered memories when Jesus was crucified, which is predicted just verses after the shepherd’s report when Mary talks with Simeon in the temple square (verses 25-35).

The stakes and vicissitudes of Advent can make it hard to keep our attention still enough to remember anything in front of us. There are so many concerts to attend, ugly sweaters to sport, and gifts to wrap that we can get to Dec. 26 with nothing stored up or treasured. But when we rest our attention on special times of God’s gracious presence in our lives during this season, we can store up memories for facing future travails. In this way, Christmas can be seen as a harvest of what my mom would call “God sightings” that can nurture our faith as we move into the New Year. Lest we forget, an African American spiritual reminds us: “There’s a storm out on the ocean / and it’s moving this’a way / If your soul’s not anchored in Jesus / you will surely drift away.”

My wife and I moved from New England to Atlanta for graduate school at Emory from 2016 to ’20. This was our first time living in the Southeast, and so it was quite the experience being there amid the uptick in public racialized terror: A white gunman had massacred the Emanuel Nine a year prior, Black churches were being burned, COVID hit, and then George Floyd was murdered. And on top of these national spectacular headlines was our work in settings marked by quotidian anti-Black violence: health care disparities at Grady Memorial Hospital, where my wife worked as a medical student, and an almost all-Black population at Metro Regional Youth Detention Center, where I served as a prison chaplain while in seminary.

Through it all, the Black elders at the churches we attended modeled how to be like Mary as they treasured in their hearts the joy of being in God’s presence on Sunday morning with fellow saints. We all knew that there was always a possibility that an acolyte of the Charleston shooter might come into our church and open fire, and so despite that and because of that, we protected the shepherds’ testimonies in our midst. We instead chose to still our souls such that we could draw on those memories of glad tidings of great joy when the next headline hit. Our faith was not, and is not, contingent on the predictability of safety but on God’s grace.

How can you still your attention this Advent season and treasure the presence of God in your midst as Mary did in her pondering?

3. Find sanctuary from violence

IN THE BOOK Rest Is Resistance, the “Nap Bishop” Tricia Hersey argues that claiming our rest resists the violence wrought by capitalism and white supremacy. She encourages these politics of refusal by creating art installation projects that are sleep sanctuaries where people can nap together. When we rest, we can dream of other worlds that are not violated by the death we experience in our waking hours. This dreaming can help us act in our present to move our current world toward others yet to be.

Hersey’s vision helps us understand the political implications of rest in the nativity story. After Jesus is born, God visits Joseph in another dream, this time to instruct him to take his family to Egypt to avoid King Herod’s infanticide (Matthew 2). By sending the Holy Family into political sanctuary, God sidesteps Herod’s lust for political power. In so doing, God uses sleep to help God’s children resist the violence of the age.

Because Advent brings Christmas and the changing of seasons from fall to winter in the northern regions, it is traditionally a time where much of society can sleep a little longer (for church folk, that rest may start on December 26). How can this season of longer sleep help you see the violence of our age better? Maybe your sleep habits give you perspective on others’ lust for power. For instance, by choosing healthy rhythms of sleep whenever I can, I see better how greed keeps others from doing so. Or maybe God is telling you that the violent systems that keep people from sleeping regularly need to be avoided if not altogether dismantled.

For many years God has spoken to me through dreams about violence in our society. I often dream at night about being physically hurt by fellow Black men — a dream I am not proud to confess. The frequency of this dream indicates the violence that my people are encouraged to commit against each other and against ourselves. I pray that my ministry can always address these violent realities, and that I can lessen the fear of my own people that whiteness has ingrained.

4. Rest may not lead to comfort

JOSEPH'S OBEDIENCE TO what is revealed in his second dream would lead his family into a place of discomfort. To flee King Herod, they had to become vulnerable immigrants in a new land. While I do not believe God opposes all comfort and leisure, I do know that being well-rested in our society might lead to unexpected risk. This can contradict greater society’s overtures toward rest, which capitalism has domesticated. The health and wellness industry often sells us rest for the sake of increasing our creaturely comforts, but that is not always what God has in mind for us. One day we will rest in paradise with God, away from all evil, but today is not that day. In this life, our rest helps us avoid violence and move into discomfort for the sake of caring for others. But rest assured: The Holy Spirit goes with us.

5. Rest begets more rest

THE FOUR KINDS of rest in the nativity story feed each other. God’s plan for salvation leads to the message in sleep to Joseph about ushering Jesus into the world. Because Jesus comes into the world, Mary stills her attention to treasure that memory. Because Joseph and the Wise Men listen to God through their dreams, Jesus escapes to political sanctuary in Egypt.

I hear these four kinds of rest as a metaphorical music chord, with salvation being the bass note and sleep, stillness, and sanctuary sitting on top. In music, the bass note defines the chord, meaning the other notes derive their identity from their relationship to it. Joseph’s sleep, Mary’s inner stillness, and the family’s political sanctuary all are defined in terms of God’s plan to save humanity, through Jesus, from the restlessness of their sins.

These notes in the nativity story ring together for the sake of God’s glory and our rest in God, offering a reflection on how we can sing the melody of rest found throughout the Bible. This Advent, we can let the good news of salvation lead us to listen to God through our sleep, to protect our inner stillness no matter the external circumstances, and to find sanctuary for ourselves and others from the worldly economic and political systems that seek our death. As we celebrate Jesus this Advent, may the body of Christ listen for the notes of rest from the One who has come to give us rest eternal.