When God does a new thing in the Bible, when he creates, there is division. Think about the creation story: God separates the waters above from the waters below, he divides the night from the day, he raises-up the dry land distinguishing it from the waters.
When God creates Eve he begins by dividing-up Adam, taking a portion of him out of him.
But division is not the only thing that God does during creation. There’s more. God transforms, reunifies, and glorifies the new union.
God divides darkness and light and then reunifies them into the cycle of day and night. God sees that this is good –it is more glorious than the earlier thing.
God divides the waters above from the waters below and reunites them into a single world system inhabitable by living things. This too is good. It is glorious.
God divides Adam to make Eve and then reunifies them “for this reason a Man shall leave his father and mother and cleave only to his wife” (Gen. 2:24). The end result is a new and more glorious union. This is very good.
Can we think about a pastor’s sabbatical as a new creation cycle? The pastor and his parish are divided, ripped away from one another for a season of reconstitution and remaking, saying farewell (as we did yesterday) they undergo a severing. And yet, the end goal of their departure is their reunion. The purpose of a sabbatical is a more glorious union between clergy and laity, between pastor and pastor’s family, between those who leave and those who have stayed.
Perhaps, I wonder, if we can even extend this to various kinds of travels. The goal is homecoming. The goal is not returning to the same home the way everything was when we left, for that would not be a homecoming, nor is it for the ones who leave to “never change,” the goal is a reunion that is more glorious than the original unity.
When the pastor’s family leaves on sabbatical we ought to look forward, and pray forward, to a more glorious unity of the faith, a strengthening of the bond of peace. God leads his church from glory to glory. What lies ahead of us is more glorious than what we leave behind when we send the pastor off on sabbath.