PLAY COLBERT INTERVIEW
OK – we may not be able to recite all of the Ten Commandments either – though I suspect that most of us would do somewhat better than Congressman Westmoreland did in that interview. However, regardless of how many of them we can spout off, we do know that they are essential to our faith and critical to our understanding of who God is and what is important to God.
Of course, in practice, though we take most of the Ten as sacred commands, there are a few that – face it – we often rationalize as simply good upstanding suggestions. I mean, you can hardly go through a day without hearing God’s name used inappropriately. Likewise, it is a rare person who has not at one time or another said in anger (if only under his or her breath), what my very young children used to refer to as “bad words”. And coveting? Well, in some ways, coveting keeps the economy humming along. After all, if we lived our lives simply, what would happen to the GDP?
Of course, it was not always so. As early as the fourth century, when the Emperor Constantine declared Christianity as the imperial Roman religion, a law against working on Sunday was enacted. By the ninth century, Sunday was called the “Lord’s Day,” a sort of specifically Christian Sabbath.
The Westminster Confession of 1648, read, “This Sabbath is to be kept holy unto the Lord when men, after a due preparing of their hearts, and ordering of their common affairs beforehand, do not only observe an holy rest all the day from their own works, words, and thoughts about their worldly employments and recreations, but also are taken up THE WHOLE TIME in the public and private exercises of His worship, and in the duties of necessity and mercy.” Think Puritans. Yikes!
Much more recently, there were “blue laws”. I remember when we first moved to Maine, most stores were closed on Sunday. Not many years later, grocery stores were open, but the liquor aisle was literally roped off.
And did you know that only in1985 did it become legal to sell housewares such as pots, pans, and washing machines on Sunday in Texas? And only a handful of states still prohibit the selling or trading of automobiles on Sunday?
Over time, most of the trappings of Sabbath-keeping have dwindled to next to nothing. And so, for many of us today: Soccer games, t-ball, voice lessons, grocery shopping. We have many reasons to notmake Sabbath-keeping a priority.
Evangelical pastor Dean Courtier said it well: “Perhaps you are thinking ‘I would love to rest but there is so much that needs to be done.’ Sometimes we are so busy we simply do not find the time to slow down, pause, or stop long enough to rest and listen to God. Yet, since time began, God has offered us all the opportunity to rest.”
As Courtier pointed out, this Sabbath-keeping business goes back further than the blue laws, than the Westminster Confession, than Roman law, than even Moses lugging those two heavy stone tablets down from Mt. Sinai. Sabbath-keeping goes all the way back to creation itself.
Remember the story in the Biblical book of Genesis? On the seventh day, God stepped back after expending all that creative energy used to bring the worlds into being.
The author of Genesis makes a big point of telling us that God simply rested in the glory and beauty of it all – with the expectation that we who are made in the image of the Holy One would do the same. When you think of it that way, we really are hard-wired for Sabbath-keeping.
You would hardly know it today though because we have twisted the meaning of Sabbath-keeping and shorted out those hard-wired circuits. Sabbath-keeping has become an old-fashioned concept held on to by quaintly out-of-touch Baptists, Pentecostals, and other miscellaneous conservative Christian folk. Debates about Sabbath-keeping center around moralistic laws and discussions about whether or not a true Christian man or woman should be able to play cards or buy a bottle of liquor on Sundays.
However, true Sabbath-keeping – Sabbath-honoring really - goes much deeper than that. I agree with Biblical scholar and author Walter Brueggemann who writes that the Sabbath is not simply about keeping rules. It is about wholeness and restoration. It is about becoming a whole person and restoring not only your own soul, but that of the entire society.
Brueggemann ties our difficulty with Sabbath-keeping to the consumerist culture in which we endure. He points out that we live in a 24/7 society. We are encouraged in a million little ways to want more, own more, use more, eat more, and drink more – but, of course, are given no more time to make those dubious aims realizable.
That being said, however, we have become amazingly good at living that way, much to our detriment. While researching her book entitled, “The Five Top Regrets of the Dying”, palliative care nurse Bonnie Ware interviewed hundreds of terminally and chronically ill people. Here is what she reported:
- #1 regret of the dying: I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me, my driven life, driven by others;
- the #2 regret of the dying: I wish I hadn’t worked so hard, which got in the way of my most important relationships and in my enjoying life.
How sad! We can so easily keep our minds preoccupied with work, so that the listening to and caring for those we love is often done on autopilot. We can keep our schedules so full with meetings and shopping and entertaining that – even in retirement, or maybe even more so in retirement – downtime is practically non-existent.
We can keep our kids so occupied with so many activities that they need a day planner in elementary school. I remember when our son Paddy was in fifth grade. One Spring I asked him if he wanted to sign up for track or soccer or some other activity. I presumed that all children were just like his older sister, Heather, who wanted to be involved in everything. However, Paddy looked me straight in the eye and said, “Mom, I just want to play after school.”
That was a real wake up call for me as a parent! And so that Spring, Paddy and his friend Chris spent lazy afternoons with fishing gear and nets at the golf course in Cumberland, seeing what they could dredge up from the water hole – in addition to golf balls.
Brueggemann concludes, “Thus I have come to think that the fourth commandment on sabbath is the most difficult and most urgent of the commandments in our society, because it summons us to intent and conduct that defies the most elemental requirements of a commodity-propelled society that specializes in control and entertainment, bread and circuses … along with anxiety and violence.”
One blogger I read this week wrote, “Sabbath keeping is actually an active process of ceasing, resting, embracing God, and feasting on or celebrating the gifts that God has given us. By keeping Sabbath, whether that be on Sundays, or other times during the week, we discover a new, but ancient way of honoring God and experiencing renewal.”
Sabbath-keeping has nothing to do with doing nothing and everything to do with living fully and deeply. As Brueggemann concluded, sabbath-keeping is intentionally resisting the 24/7, more, more, more culture in which we exist. Instead, it is intentionally putting into place an alternative, an alternative that gives us permission, as God did at the very beginning, to rest in the glory and beauty and reverence of life itself. It is recognizing – and embracing - that we are hard-wired for Sabbath-keeping.
Yet, when we fail to rest, when we fail to keep the Sabbath on Sunday or even on some other day of the week, we do far more than burn ourselves out trying to keep up with our demanding, chattering lifestyle. In the end, we misunderstand the God who calls us to rest, who calls us to be unhurried in our relationship with the Divine.
Rabbi Abraham Heschel reminds us of the Biblical understanding of Sabbath. God did not rest because God was tired after all that creating. Sabbath is not the anti-climax of creation. Itis the goal, the ending; it is the purpose of creation. Sabbath is the climax of God’s work, not the point where God wandered off to snooze under one the of the big olives trees the Holy One had created. No - Sabbath is an integral part of creation itself. In fact, it is creation’s crowning glory.
Sabbath is not for recovering, so you can go back and work or volunteer or schedule activities for your kids some more. Sabbath is for the sake of life itself. It is not an interlude but rather the apex of living. As Herschel reminds us, “Sabbath is “the last day in God’s creation; the first day in God’s intention.”
In the end, keeping the sabbath is a commandment that comes from our God of restoration. Restoring our relationship with God, with one another, with our own creative selves requires time to reconnect, time to celebrate and play, time to rest.
As worship consultant Marcia McFee notes, “Not to do this sends a signal that what is on the to-do list right now is more important than our relationship (with God and one another, more important than creating) a sustainable rhythm for the long-haul of justice work. (Not to keep Sabbath) will eventually rob us of the ability to engage in this creative process itself. (Sabbath) rest leads to dreaming and the cycle of creativity renews.”
Easy to say, right? We all know that we would be kidding ourselves if we really thought that we could go from seven days filled with activities, pressure, stress, and more, more, more to one day – 24 hours - that we set aside for the purpose of reconnecting with God and renewing our creative energy for the work that Jesus calls us to – compassion, reconciliation, radical welcome and inclusion.
But what if we set aside even just a few minutes? What might that look like to you? What might it feel like? But let’s not just speculate. Let’s take those few minutes right now and keep the Sabbath – honor the Sabbath.
“For Jews the Sabbath is the seventh day, Saturday, and for most Christians it is the first day, Sunday. In either case, it is a day set aside from the other six as the day God himself blessed and hallowed, ‘because on it God rested from all his work which he had done in creation’ (Genesis 2:3).
Banks and post offices are closed, and most businesses shut down. In some states you can't buy a drink, and the regular weekday newscasters are replaced by substitutes. Religiously inclined people may go to church. Otherwise life goes on much as always. The shopping malls are usually just as crowded as on any other day, many of the roads are even more so, and newspapers swell to grotesque proportions. Insofar as it is still treated as a day of rest, the rest is apt to consist of people knocking themselves out on tennis courts, golf courses, and hiking trails or doing things like mowing the lawn, painting the back porch, paying bills, or taking a long afternoon nap.
You think of God resting after the creation was finally all created. You think of the deep hush of it, like the hush between breakers at the beach. You think of the new creation itself resting—the gray squirrel ceasing to twitch and chatter, the kingfisher settling down on the branch by the pond, the man and the woman standing still in the garden. You think of God blessing this one day of the seven and hallowing it, making it holy.
The room is quiet. You're not feeling tired enough to sleep or energetic enough to go out. For the moment there is nowhere else you'd rather go, no one else you'd rather be. You feel at home in your body. You feel at peace in your mind. For no particular reason, you let the palms of your hands come together and close your eyes. Sometimes it is only when you happen to taste a crumb of it that you dimly realize what it is that you're so hungry for you can hardly bear it.
For a couple of moments now, keep and honor the Sabbath – simply be, with yourself and with God.
SILENCE…… Amen and Amen.
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