Sabbath and Time

Sabbath Time

“What time is it?”

My oldest daughter always wants to know. She now even has a digital clock that projects the time onto the ceiling above her bed.

It seems we live in a culture where we can’t afford to not know what time it is, less we lose track of it. When I flew back from Hawaii a few months ago, I left Honolulu at 7pm. In the air over Dallas it was 1 in the morning but when we landed, it was 8am their time.

I remember thinking what? Talk about losing track of time. We want to know what time it is because we like to keep it in check. We like to stay on schedule.

But God is eternal. God didn’t need to make time. God made time and then set forth all of creation. Over and over again he called creation good. The trees were good. The seas were good. Somehow, even the bugs were good. Then he made humans and guess what we got called very good.

After God had made all the things, we are told that on the seventh day God rested. The word here for rest in Hebrew is called shabbat where we get the term Sabbath from. God rested. More than this, God blessed the day, set it apart, and declared it holy.

This is the first time we come across the word holy in Scripture. Abraham Joshua Heschel said that “The mythical mind would expect that after heaven and earth have been established, God would create a holy place- a holy mountain or a holy spring- whereupon a sanctuary is to be established. Yet it seems as if to the Bible it is holiness in time, the Sabbath, which comes first” (The Sabbath, 9)

Heschel says “in time, we find God’s likeness. In the Bible, no thing or place is holy by itself; not even the Promised Land is called holy. While the holiness of land and festivals depends on the actions of the Jewish people, who have to sanctify them, the holiness of the Sabbath, he writes, preceded the holiness of Israel. Even if people fail to observe the Sabbath, it remains holy.” (xiv)

Sabbath is this ancient practice of setting aside a day for intentional rest. In ancient Israel, Jews would observe the Sabbath from sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday, the seventh day. Similarly, the Seventh Day Adventists worship on Saturday as they observe the Sabbath that day.

Sabbath isn’t meant to be an interruption of our time. It is meant to reorient our time. It is considered the heart of our existence. The other six days revolve around the Sabbath, three days to prepare for it and three days to reflect on it.

In Jewish culture, to neglect the Sabbath was considered to lose your identity. Think about that. I will say more about this next week but consider this: the Jewish people were identified not by how they worked but by how they observed a day of rest.

A. J. Swoboda says “What we are depends on what the Sabbath is to us… There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to subdue but to be in accord.” Wayne Muller says “Like a path through the forest, Sabbath creates a marker for ourselves so, if we are lost, we can find our way back to our center.”

Sabbath is not new. As we have seen, it is literally as old as time itself. It is simply new to us because we have failed to remember it. Swoboda says that “Sabbath forgetfulness is driven, so often, in the name of doing stuff for God rather than being with God.”

So what kind of rest are we talking about? Is the Sabbath just an extended nap or maybe a long vacation? When God rested, was God just sleeping?

Sabbath rest is what we call menuha rest. This kind of rest is celebratory rest. Ragan Sutterfield says some “claimed that the Sabbath was the day in which God did not cease from creation, but rather made menuha, which is God’s delight in the creation. Creation is completed not with humanity, but with God’s delight in all God has made.. Sabbath is not simply a cessation from activity but rather the lifting up and celebration of everything. It isn’t an escape from the everyday but rather realize the reality of the creation that is beneath it.”

It is the kind of rest when you aren’t worried or striving or anxious or biding your time. This is the rest of sitting back and enjoying and giving thanks for all that God has made. It is the rest of delight and joy. This is Sabbath rest and Sabbath time.

Perhaps a day like this each week sounds wonderful, but impossible. Delightful, but it just doesn’t fit into your schedule right now. We can rest when we’re dead right? But that isn’t how God created us. If you struggle finding the time to set aside for Sabbath, you aren’t alone.

In 1951 when Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote this little book The Sabbath, his daughter shares that he had only been in the U.S. for 11 years. His book on Sabbath “appeared at a time when American Jews were assimilating radically and when many were embarrassed by public expressions of Jewishness. ...It was as if they desired a religionless Judaism- a Judaism without God, faith, or belief. For them, the Sabbath interfered with jobs, socializing, shopping, and simply being American. In trying to reintroduce the importance of Sabbath, Heschel did not berate Jews for their neglect of religious observance, nor did he demand obedience to Jewish law ...He insisted that the Sabbath was a complement to life, now a withdrawal from it. “

Heschel would say that it was a sin to be sad on the Sabbath. Swoboda said that when his family would begin the Sabbath together, they would light candles and he would give them each a spoonful of honey so that one day whenever the word “Sabbath” was spoken around them, they would smile and remember sweetness and light.

Meanwhile, we have our clocks and our calendars, our smart devices that tell us of a meeting, a package delivery, a text, or a deadline.

And yet we are so in need of rest that even our smart devices are telling us to slow down. Mine likes to tell me when I need to stop and take a breath. My phone alerts me to my level of screen time and then tells me that I haven’t been getting enough sleep. But how many of us swipe the notifications away and move on?

But we are meant for Sabbath time, a day that yearns for us to enter it, to enter into the space of stopping and pausing and surrounding ourselves with sabbath joy, the delight of all that God has made. Yesterday Jim and I took the girls to see some friends. We walked in the woods. Our kids played together. I got to hold their beautiful 4 month-old baby girl. I fed her and then before I knew it we both had fallen asleep on the couch. I woke up to only stare at the perfection of her little face, perfectly at rest. I took delight in this beautiful child of God, of friendship, of music and laughter and good conversation, of the day that the Lord had made.

So let’s reset our clocks and spend some time on Sabbath time friends. For this is the day that the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.