KEEPING SABBATH
Remember the
Sabbath and keep it holy. What do you
remember about the Sabbath? Growing up Southern
Baptist in the South in the 50’s and 60’s I can remember ‘blue laws’ that
prohibited the sale and purchase of certain things on Sunday. I never could figure those out…you could buy
a cake mix and eggs and milk, but you could not buy a pan to cook it in.
As a teenager,
I remember one of my family’s Sabbath rules had to do with the car: if I didn’t go to church on Sunday morning, I
couldn’t have the car to ride around in with my friends on Sunday
afternoons. And for some strange reason
it was a mortal sin to go fishing on Sundays—even after church. And probably my worst memory of Sundays as a child was never getting to watch
the Wizard of Oz the one time a year it would come on television, because it
was always on a Sunday night—and being the good Baptist family we were, we went
to church on Sunday nights as well as Sunday mornings.
You know, we
like to give the Pharisees of the New Testament a hard time about being too
legalistic about the Sabbath, but Christians have become just as legalistic. When the emperor Constantine converted to
Christianity, he declared Sunday a day of rest throughout the
Even though my
family may have had some weird ways of observing the Sabbath, I have fond
memories of Sunday dinner, time spent with my brothers and sister playing in
the yard, going for an ice cream cone then riding around to look at the
countryside. The thing I remember most
about the Sabbath is not a detail but a feeling—Sunday had a certain feel to it
that was different from other days of the week.
On that day my family would enter into a different rhythm.
Today we take
a look at the Sabbath as it is mentioned in the Ten Commandments. You know there is an order to the sequence of
the commandments. The first four deal with our relationship to God—do not have
other gods, do not make idols, do not misuse God’s name, keep the Sabbath.
And the last six deal
with our relationships to each other—honor your father and mother, do not
murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not bear false witness, do not
covet.
The ordering
of the commandments indicates there is a relationship between the vertical and
horizontal. When our relationship with
God is right, our relationships with each other will be right. When our relationship with God is out of
kilter, then our relationships with each other will reflect that.
Notice that
the commandment to keep the Sabbath falls right in the middle of the list. Not only does it fall smack dab in the
middle, but it is the commandment with the most detail. God commands us to rest and God wants us to
take this commandment just as seriously as the commandment not to kill or
steal.
A Christian
school teacher tells the story of a Saturday night when several of her
colleagues were together for dinner.
Each of them had promised to return papers to their students on Monday
morning, so they were all talking about how they were going to have to work all
day on Sunday to get these papers graded.
Pretty soon their whining session turned into a boasting session as each
one tried to out do the other with regard to how much work they had to do
before Monday. The teacher who tells
this story said, “it was at that moment that the
commandment to remember the Sabbath and keep it holy popped into my head. I realized that we were sitting around
hatching a plan to break this commandment.
We would never have thought to sit around and say, tomorrow I am going
to kill someone, tomorrow I am going to steal something. Yet, our conversation sounded that absurd to
me.”
Sometimes—maybe most of the time—we take this commandment lightly. Surely God didn’t mean a whole day. Maybe just an hour or two, or a half day at the most. “Six days you shall labor and do all your
work, but the seventh is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any
work.” Now we could argue that this
commandment was meant for a pre-industrial agrarian society that needed to give
livestock, land, and the human labor force rest for more productivity. And, that as a technological, industrial
society, we today have outgrown the need for this commandment.
There are core
principles in the all the commandments that are vital to us as the people of
God. I believe the core principle of
the Sabbath commandment is rest and renewal in the presence of God. This commandment echoes the principle of rest
and renewal that was set up at the beginning of creation.
In the first
chapters of Genesis we are told that God works for six days, creating the world
and calling it good, and on the seventh day “God rested from all the work God
had done, so God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it (made it holy) because
on it God rested from all the work God had done.” Now notice that God did not take the seventh
day to tweak creation—to make the sun a little brighter or the animals a little
more diverse, or to give Eve a better nose.
God ceased from all labor. God did
not create rest on the seventh day. God
ceased blessed the seventh day and made it holy.
If the creator of the universe takes time
to rest, who do we think we are when we do not! Sabbath reminds us of what it means to be the
image of God—like God, we observe a rhythm of work and rest. But Sabbath also reminds us that we are not
God. Try as hard as we might to add
extra hours to our days, or pages to our day-timers, or memory to our palm
pilot, God is the one who makes days and nights—we do not. We receive time as a
gift from God. God is the one who makes the seventh day holy—we do not. Our responsibility is to KEEP IT HOLY.
The word holy means ‘set apart,’ ‘other,’
‘different.’ So how do we keep a day of
the week set apart, holy, for rest and renewal?
Maybe we should pause here and clarify the day of the week we are
talking about. In Jewish religion the
Sabbath is the seventh day of the week.
It begins at sundown on Friday and lasts until sundown on Saturday. There is a wonderful practice in the Jewish
observance of Sabbath of lighting the candles at sundown and offering a
blessing to welcome the Sabbath. Some
Rabbis will go to the hills at twilight and offer songs and prayers welcoming
the gift of Sabbath.
In the early
church Christians began celebrating the Sabbath on the first day of the week
because this was the day the women found the empty tomb and encountered the
risen Christ. In the Christian tradition
the first day of the week, Sunday, is called a little Easter and our observance
of these little Easters throughout the year provide a regular rhythm of
celebration, rest and renewal in the context of Jesus’ resurrection. From the very beginning of Christianity the
same basic elements have embodied Christ’s presence on each first day: a gathering of the community in Christ’s
name; hearing scripture; and sharing a meal.
Keeping the Sabbath
holy is certainly about going to church on Sundays—but it is about so much
more. In a society that offers round the
clock shopping, employment, and entertainment, keeping Sabbath is a subversive
act. Just as society challenges Sabbath,
Sabbath challenges society by sowing seeds of resistance—cultivating another
way of BEING in a world of doing.
Keeping the
Sabbath holy means that we are intentional about the way we spend the WHOLE
DAY. It is going to take more than
nostalgia to set this day apart from all the others. So I offer some suggestions on how to do
that:
1.
Rest from commerce. Six days you shall shop, but on the 7th
day you shall cease from all your shopping (that
includes Home Depot)! Try stepping out of the rat race of consumerism for at
least one day. Instead of going shopping
for a Sunday afternoon activity, take a nap, or make love—in the rabbinical
tradition making love on the Sabbath is a blessing. This practice helps us get off the treadmill
of working more, to buy more. The
Sabbath practice of resisting consumerism awakens the parts of ourselves that cannot be nourished by possessions. When we are awakened like this our whole week
looks different.
2.
Rest from worry. Refrain from activities like paying bills or
doing tax returns, or making lists for the upcoming week. I know one woman who refrains from thinking
about people who have made her angry the week before.
3.
Rest for creation. Notice in this commandment that there is
provision for rest for animals. In the
Old Testament the Sabbath principle was applied to the land and animals as well
as people. Every seven years the land
was to lay fallow and debits were to be forgiven. How can we practice Sabbath that is good for
creation? Walk when you can instead of
driving. Garden. Spend some time with the earth. Refrain from work—if you don’t have to work
on Sunday, don’t, so that the earth that bears our toil may have rest.
4.
Worship. Not out of a sense of duty or guilt, but out
of a place of gratitude for the gift of time and rest that God has given. The 4th commandment reminds us
that time is not our enemy but a meeting place—a point of rendezvous with
God. We need each other to live fully
into this gift. We come to church on
Sunday not because of some cultural expectation or even God’s expectation. We come to celebrate God’s gift of rest. We come to encourage one another in our
efforts to meet God in time as we struggle with our date-books. We come to be subversive in a world that uses
the language of management instead of gift to speak of time.
The story is told a famous Rabbi and his son who hid in a
cave for 13 years to escape an evil ruler who wanted to kill them. While they were in the cave they studied the
sacred Torah—the scriptures. When it was
safe for them to come out, the Rabbi was appalled at the apparent waste of time
in which the people were indulging themselves.
The Rabbi was so enraged that people were plowing and sowing the soil
instead of studying holy texts that he burned someone to death. God reprimands the Rabbi and sends him back
into the cave for another year to reconsider things. When he comes out of the cave a second time
he meets an old man carrying two bundles of myrtle. It is the twilight hours before the Sabbath
day and the man is running between the suns—on his way to greet the Sabbath
before nightfall. The Rabbi asks him why
he is carrying two bundles and the old man replies that they are to fill his
house with a pleasant fragrance during the Sabbath day. “If that is so,” responded the Rabbi, “would
not one bundle suffice?” To which the
old man replies: “One bundle is for the
biblical verse commanding us to remember the Sabbath day, and the other is for
the command to keep the Sabbath day.”
May your house be doubly filled with the fragrance of our
gratitude for God’s gift of time and rest. Amen.