You can view video of this sermon here.

This time of the year can be hard for a lot of folks. The building expectation of Advent is past us. The celebration of Christmas is past us – even with the 12-day extension to Epiphany that our sacred calendar gives us to sing more carols and to tell more stories from Jesus’ childhood … and of course we need extra time to eat up all the left-over Christmas cookies and to wait for until the needles to start sloughing off of the Christmas tree before we start putting things away. But we’ve about reached that point, right? New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day – it’s all past us now. The holidays are over.  

The people who want us to seek satisfaction through buying stuff have already changed the window dressings to sparkly red hearts. But, Meh, that’s forcing it.  

The days are technically getting longer, but this stretch of January and February can feel like a cold, hard, dark slog, if you’re at all inclined to melancholia.

What we are left with is winter … and ourselves … and more morally distressing news.

So, I am glad for the foresight of our Elders here at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge, who have planned an opportunity today after church to gather in small groups, to connect with each other at the heart level, and to reflect on the wisdom of Wintering.

The wisdom of Wintering.

This phrase is from Katherine May’s recent book called, “Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times.”

The wisdom here is not to turn away or resist or fight or deny times of winter when they come for us.

“Winter” here can mean the literal season that we all pass through every year. But it also can mean the emotional seasons that are like winter, the spiritual seasons that are like winter, the wintery times in the lives of our bodies, minds, souls, as well in our relationships and communities and societies.

“Winter” in this way can mean seasons of loss, seasons of grief, seasons of sloughing away, seasons of dormancy or rest, seasons of sickness or of healing or of recovery, seasons of inwardness, of inner marshalling, of preparation, or of preservation, seasons of bunkering down and toughing it out.

If you, if we, are in such a season, it’s important to honor.

 “Plants and animals don’t fight the winter;” Katherine May writes, “they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through…Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.”

When we don’t deny winter, but accept it and embrace it, we can discover its gifts and learn the kinds of transformation it calls from us.

One way May puts this is that winter is “a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order.”

That sounds a whole lot like Sabbath. Our Biblical wisdom honors the need for Sabbath.

Every living thing has cycles of effort and rest, of creative activity and recuperation, of wakefulness and sleep.

Even the Holy Creator of the Universe itself, according to how Genesis tells the story, even God passed through a period of rest after the first primal efforts of conjuring up all this spectacular something out of nothing.

So, we are to honor rest as holy. So, we are to keep Sabbath.

After every day we sleep. After every week we set a day apart for “reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order.”

This time of Sabbath can be a time for clearing away the clutter, for disentangling ourselves from distractions, so we can become aware of how it is with our souls, so we can remember that God is at the center of all things, so we can allow God to attend to the needs of our souls. Sabbath allows us to receive the restoration and to undergo the transformation we need to live fully and faithfully as we are.

Sabbath is a counter-cultural practice in our society.

Our society teaches us that our identity and value is based on what we produce or what we consume, how we make money or how we spend money, how we command attention or how we give attention, the spectacle we make or what we spectate.

Sabbath lets that all fall away. We are left simply being the simple beings we are, before our God.

This may be a challenge. If we’ve internalized the ways society teaches us to value ourselves, we may feel guilty or lazy taking time for rest and reconnection. Or we may feel itchy from our addictive desires for stimulation or stress.

With time away, this all soothes, and there arises the deeper movements of the soul that can bring forth the insights and changes we need to receive. This is why Sabbath is a practice, something to do and to keep doing whether we feel like it or not.

Remembering Sabbath and keeping it holy is especially important in difficult times. In times of hardship the temptation is to just push, push, push. In times of crisis the temptation is to just rush off in a flurry in whichever direction the adrenaline takes us.

Keeping the practice of Sabbath is key to staying grounded and nourished in the wider and deeper truths and perspectives that our relationship with God can offer us. Sabbath allows us to pause to feel what it is we are actually feeling. This is especially important if we are having difficult experiences that lead to sadness, or grief, or anguish, or outrage … but it also gives us space for experiences like gratitude, or fulfillment, contentment, or peace, or playfulness, love, delight, joy. Sabbath allows us space to name and to pray through what all we’re going through, rather than rush around it or push it down.

It is not at all irresponsible or lazy to practice Sabbath.

In fact, it is highly responsible, for it is a way of staying connected with our highest responsibility, which is to God, to the deepest integrity of our souls as children of the Living God who, as Christians, seek to walk in this good Way of Jesus. We need Sabbath for the health of our minds, bodies, and souls. We need Sabbath for the sake of our ability to live faithful and responsible lives, especially in the midst of difficult times.

It’s been a good challenge for me this week to have had the commitment of preaching a sermon that supports the Wintering theme of our Elders’ small group gatherings after church today.

I know that I’m not alone here, that many of us here have felt moral distress this first week of the New Year with its news of fresh abuses of violent power on the part of those in power. I feel an urgency in how this violates longstanding deeply held values and commitments I have as a matter of faith. I know I’m not alone in that here.

Yet here I am giving a Sabbath sermon and not an activist sermon. This is good. For people of faith walking in the Way of Jesus, the practice of Sabbath is indeed primary, a primary commitment throughout whatever season we are going through in life. It is in fact the wellspring of moral responsibility. We need regular time and space to reconnect with God, to allow the noise to settle down enough for us to hear the voice of conscience and to discern what it may be leading us to do, how the Spirit is leading us to be.

Sabbath is important to be able to respond responsibly, rather than react reactively.

In Sabbath we can grieve as we need to grieve. We can repent as we need to repent. We can undergo the desolations of the winter times of the soul. We can receive the consolations God offers us there.

We can recommit as we need to recommit to the values of the Good Way of Jesus.

I’m not doing to pretend I know what that should mean for each of you, in whatever season of life you’re in.

The most important thing is to stay grounded, and humbled, and whole in God’s universal Love. Then go from there, responsive to how that love leads us to the ways we are being called to serve our God and serve our neighbors.

Thanks be to God.

Delivered Sunday, January 11, 2026, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg, at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge.

Image by Henning Sørby from Pixabay