Rhythm 7: Sabbath

Mark 2:23–28 NRSV

One sabbath he was going through the grainfields; and as they made their way his disciples began to pluck heads of grain. The Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the sabbath?” And he said to them, “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food? He entered the house of God, when Abiathar was high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and he gave some to his companions.” Then he said to them, “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath; so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.”

Deuteronomy 5:12–15 NRSV

Observe the sabbath day and keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, or your son or your daughter, or your male or female slave, or your ox or your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day.

Of all the sacred rhythms we’re looking at this Spring, in my opinion, this one is the standout most delightful and, at the same time, the most difficult to honor. Keeping the Sabbath. To honor God’s intention for humanity to receive rest and delight one day a week is to break with the dominant patterns of our modern culture. To willingly rest and cease from our regular, daily striving is such a gift to live into and such a challenge to receive.

But I will tell you from very personal experience — keeping the sabbath day may be one of the clearest ways the Good News of Jesus has and continues to save our lives.

Let’s pray.

In his book, “How to Be Here,” Rob Bell talks about the modern propensity to keep going and going and going, working and working and working. He links this unending cycle of work and burnout and wok and burnout to the stories of the Hebrew people enslaved in Egypt. For those paying attention to the historical sequencing here, the people of God were captive workers in Egypt following the great famine and relocation from Canaan following the time of Abraham. What they had thought was a brief sojourn to the south for food became a generations-long enslavement to the powers of the Egyptian empire. Empires need labor to build their expansive societies…and they Egyptians use the labor of the Hebrews to make their bricks, labor in their constructions, tend to their assets and flocks. Upon the brick-making backs of the Hebrews, the Egyptian empire continued to rise.

Let’s hear a few of Rob’s thoughts on this cycle of brick-making and the hope for rest…

P. 165 to top of 167.

The people needed to learn to take a rest.

We need to learn to take a rest.

How often are you able to put your phone down, turn it off, and just breathe?

When in your weeks are you able to set things aside and just be?

I’ve found that sabbath keeping actually requires us to carve out and protect our time in ways that we are not culturally accustomed to.

When the world says “keep moving,” God’s sabbath way says, “be still.”

When the world says “produce more,” God’s sabbath way says, “you are enough.”

When the world says “pay attention, you might miss something,” God’s sabbath way says, “everything belongs to God.”

When the world says “get ahead,” God’s sabbath way says, “be here, now.”

To keep the sabbath is to practice active resistance against all the forces of our lives that would tell us to run faster, jump higher, do more, show up, make this, keep going, produce, produce, produce. We need more bricks!

To keep the sabbath is to honor a deep way of engagement with God’s beauty in the world, where we are able to slow down, stop and smell the roses, and remember our humanity.

Of course, the sabbath rhythm, as we heard from Rob Bell, is baked into the ongoing movement of the created order. From the very beginning, we see that God prioritizes the good work of Creation, but also cordons off an entire day to simply delight and remember that it is good. Rest is good.

I’ve also come to realize that there is nothing I can say or no argument we can make that will convince you to keep the sabbath. There will always be practical excuses that will distract us from keeping the sabbath. There is always something more to do, another call to make, another room to clean.

Sabbath must be practiced. And it must be protected.

How do we practice the sabbath?

Jewish thinker Abraham Joseph Heschel wrote a deeply moving book on keeping the sabbath. Among all the descriptions and outlines for how to practice the sabbath, Heschel’s teaching points to one very important perspective on how we take Sabbath. To take the sabbath, according to Heschel, is to “rest as if the work is done.”

Hear that again — sabbath keeping is when we “rest as if the work is done.”

How do we learn to practice the sabbath? We learn to rest as if the work is done.

I’ve found that teaching so important in my own keeping of the sabbath. Let me tell you about when we began to take this commandment seriously and what it has done for our family and individual lives, Stacy, myself, and Asher.

In 2010, Stacy and I lived through a pretty hellish year, where she went through a cancer diagnosis, surgeries, and treatment. We were facd with an imposed season of rest in order to recover and reconfigure our lives. Over the next couple of years, we began to take on new career steps, education, and striving towards some of our life goals. After walking through cancer, we knew it was time to pursue some of the important dreams we had pushed off.

In the years that followed, we both began advanced graduate degrees, Stacy completing her principal’s certification and beginning her doctorate; Me beginning my masters of divinity in seminary. We both worked full time, as well. We bought our home, moved, and delightfully, Stacy became pregnant with Asher. I was in a job where I traveled a lot for work at the time, with weeks when I would be out of the country. All the while, we were figuring out how to be parents, how to be students, how to be married, and how to keep going. It was a time of fullness, but also a time when if we didn’t act carefully, we would find ourselves under water from all the pressures of these endeavors.

While all of these great things were happening, we were growing more and more exhausted.

Time and money didn’t allow us to take a long vacation or take a break. We had to keep moving, had to keep making the bricks, even as good as those bricks were, the work and foundation they were laying for us.

Being pulled so many directions, good as they might have been, was exhausting and we began to sense the need for a change in our rhythms. So, carefully and in fits and starts to begin with, we began to carve out time on Saturdays to put all of the things down, and simply learn to be.

We found that, because I have worked in churches most of my career, that Sundays were not truly a day for us to rest, but rather a day to work and connect with others. We couldn’t carve out the time to rest and delight in God’s goodness that day, so we began to protect our Saturdays for that time of Sabbath rest.

It isn’t easy. Our phones continue to buzz,

I’ll argue this: I will bet, that for many, if not most of us, if we want to find the quickest route to beginning our sabbath practice, it will involve us rethinking our relationship with these little things — our cell phones.

As wonderful as the advent of new technology can be, so much of our time is demanded by these little devices and they can turn into the greatest of brick-making apparatus if we do not attend to them with caution and deliberate focus.

When was the last time you took a day (or even just a few hours) and turned off your phone, your computer, your TV?

What might happen if we carved out that time to do just this? To turn off?

We cannot look at sabbath keeping as merely an individual practice. We have to also attend to how we practice Sabbath in community. As a church, we need to think deeply about our own rhythms and work to protect times when we will intentionally practice sabbath.

I’m not sure if you’ve picked up on this in the last 7 years, but I am really protective of my Saturdays. I don’t work on them. I rarely, if ever respond to emails. I try my best to not check my phone or computer. Saturdays are the day in our weekly rhythm that we have found we are able to actually take a pause and simply be.

I think it would be wise for us all to consider the rhythm of our lives and what it would look like to practice sabbath as a community. For me, I need Saturdays to be my day. For you, perhaps that is the same. Maybe you’re an elder on our Church Session and have obligations many Sundays throughout the year. Maybe you’re a deacon, offering similar support and presence these days of worship.

And maybe you’ve found this is your way to rest. And maybe it’s not.

Here are some attitudes that define our sabbath keeping:

First, it is not simply a time to lay around or sleep, though that is absolutely allowed. Rather, Sabbath rest is more about full-life rejuvenation. Sleep, yes. But also exercise, movement, and sunlight. Perhaps you rest as you cultivate your garden. Perhaps you find rest by running and hiking or biking and kayaking. Sabbath rest must be…rest, but how we rest may look differently depending on who we are. So the first important feature of sabbath keeping has to be doing or not doing things in order to enter into restorative rest.

I needed to learn this, early on. I am still, at times, to think that if I just sleep more or if I just eat a big meal of all my favorite heavy foods, that this will somehow help me rest. It will, but only to a point. I have learned I need to move, to raise my heart rate, to be outdoors, in order to really let my body rest.

A second attitude that defines sabbath keeping is delight. What do you delight in? What do you find great joy in? Perhaps you are able to find delight in nature, witnessing the beauty of God’s world. Then sabbath keeping should lead you to delight in nature, to go be and experience God’s goodness there. Another source of delight, I find, is in people. Specifically, when I practice the sabbath, I find ways to notice and delight in my son, Asher, and wife, Stacy. I love these two. In rest, I am able to see them more fully and delight in them.

Think of your friendships, your family, your dear ones. How could you set aside time in the weeks to come to intentionally delight in one another? Perhaps this comes from a good long phone call with an old friend. Perhaps this comes through intimacy with your partner. Perhaps this comes through laughing and being childlike with a kid. Delight is a practice and outcome of the sabbath.

So, there’s rest. There’s delight.

And a final piece of keeping the sabbath that I commend is learning that the world is, others are, you are — enough.

In keeping the sabbath, we affirm that we are enough. Put this way, in keeping the sabbath, we learn that we are not defined by what we produce or how many commitments we have or how much responsibility we are given. Rather, we learn to be defined by the image of God, the mark of our Creator, alone. And we see that in Christ, we are enough. You are enough.

I wonder, can you imagine making space in your week to rest, delight, and remember you are enough? Can we help each other move towards this?

I believe if we can become a people who practice the sabbath during our weeks, we can be a people who resist burning out, resist overfunctioning, and who can discover the goodness of God that does not hinge upon production, but rather on our own belovedness.

May we learn to practice this life giving way. Amen.