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Embracing a Day: The Discipline of Sabbath Observance Spencer C. Lawrence, Church of the Cross, Hoffman Estates, IL, March 25, 2007 David Goetz writes in Death by Suburb: I once visited a thirty-year-old stockbroker on the twenty-fourth floor of a building on LaSalle Street, not far from the Chicago Mercantile [Exchange]. He greeted me wearing the financial district’s uniform: a dark blue suit with black wingtip shoes. He also sported green marbled cufflinks which coordinated nicely with his tie. He had an office with a window and the standard cherry furniture. “You must be ‘the Man’,” I said, “to have an office with a window.” Outside his open door a herd of stockbrokers on phones milled in and out of gray cubicles. “I had a good quarter”, he said. “But I worked hundred-hour weeks to get here. And being here now is no guarantee I’ll keep the office after next quarter.” I did not know the broker well (the relationship began with a cold call from him), but my guess is that each year in the middle of his hundred-hour weeks, he squeezes in some time in Cancun. Play is as managed as his client’s portfolios. Keep the pedal on the floorboard while you’re young. Consume life today to enjoy it tomorrow. This is the true religion of the suburbs. I don’t think it’s everyone’s true religion, but it certainly is the case for many. I recall when I was first starting out in ministry I spent tons of hours working for or at the church. I remember once bragging to someone that I had been out ten evenings in a row. I was tired, but it felt good. My wife was not terribly happy with me, but I justified it by saying I was doing the Lord’s work. She replied that perhaps spending time with her and our children might be the Lord’s work, too. Oops! Goetz adds: No one sets out to live a chaotic existence; it just sort of happens; one day you wake up and hate your life, but it’s another fifteen years before the last kid will be gone or another ten years until retirement or another two years until you’re done with your night-school MBA. . . . What do you do? How can we manage our time – our lives - so we aren’t run ragged by our work, our social schedules or our children’s activities? Exodus 20 records the Ten Commandments Moses received from the Lord on Mount Sinai. The fourth commandment – the one that receives the most attention word-wise – is about observing the Sabbath. It tells us to keep the Sabbath day holy. On that day no one was to any work. Not the adults. Not the children. Not the servants. Not the slaves. Not the foreigners who lived among them. Not even the livestock. The Sabbath was a day of rest and worship. Why? Because the Lord created all that is in six days and rested on the Sabbath. God blessed and consecrated the seventh day. The version of the Ten Commandment recorded in Deuteronomy 5 ties the fourth commandment to God freeing the Jewish people in the exodus. Resting on the Sabbath is tied both to creation and salvation. By Jesus’ day the Sabbath had become a burden to many. Religious leaders had created so many rules about what you could or couldn’t do on the Sabbath that many were confused. Those that weren’t confused were worn out by their strenuous efforts to obey them all. There were rules about how far you could walk on the Sabbath without it becoming “work.” Rules about whether – in today’s story - picking a handful of grain on the Sabbath broke the fourth commandment. Rules that allowed getting one’s ox out of a ditch, but not healing a sick person on the Sabbath. Jesus never violated the fourth commandment, but he took issue with how some of the leaders understood it. When his disciples got in trouble over eating handfuls of grain they picked on the Sabbath, Jesus surprised everyone by saying, ‘The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath . . . .” And then he added a kicker: “So the Son of Man [referring to himself] is lord even of the sabbath.” In other words, God did not intend Sabbath observance to be burdensome. God intended it for our good. More than that, Jesus could say this because he himself was one with God the Father. We can come up with all sorts of objections to observing one day as different from another. Some will say that the Bible is talking about the Jewish Sabbath which begins on Friday night and ends on Saturday night. Surely, Christians can’t be expected to observe Jewish Law. That’s true, but in the New Testament early Christians transferred their loyalty from the Jewish Sabbath to Sunday, the Lord’s Day, the day of resurrection. While some Jewish Christians continued to worship Christ on the seventh day of the week, others worshipped on the first day. For Christians the Lord’s Day became the Sabbath. Others may contend that since Jesus said that the Sabbath was made for humankind and not the other way around, then we can do whatever we want on the Sabbath – whether it’s Saturday or Sunday. But that God rested on the seventh day, that God blessed it and called it holy says that the Sabbath is part of the warp and woof of creation. It’s essential to the rhythm of life. Jewish philosopher/theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel in his little book The Sabbath makes a distinction between space and time. He suggests that much of our lives have to do with gaining control over things in space: our world, our work, our homes, for example. But in Scripture it is time that is hallowed first: God rested on the seventh day and declared it holy. God made the world - space- and declared it good. God rested on the seventh day and called it holy. “Time is the heart of existence,” he says. It is by observing a day that we begin to make contact with eternity. So how do we Christians go about resting one day a week? What can we do to interrupt our crazy schedules to take time to observe a Sabbath day? Dorothy Bass, editor of the book Practicing Our Faith wrote an article entitled “Keeping Sabbath.” She suggests three things to avoid on the Sabbath. One of them is work. To refrain from work not only allows us to rest and worship it reminds us that God is ultimately the supplier of all we need. If we don’t work one day a week we will not die. As we refrain from work we also learn not to demand excessive work from others. Some of us, of course, have to work on Sundays. A good practice to get into is to take another day to rest and worship. Pastor Eugene Peterson has written extensively of his practice of taking Monday off to rest, walk in the woods, meditate and pray. Another thing to avoid is commerce – buying stuff. We could refrain from shopping on Sundays. It might complicate the weekly schedule at first, but we would eventually get used to it. Third, she suggests avoiding worry on Sundays. We should avoid doing the things that make us anxious: paying bills, preparing tax returns, watching the latest news, reading the latest medical report from our doctors. She also suggests some things that are good to do on the Sabbath. Joyful worship tops the list. She writes: For Christians, every Sunday is Easter Sunday, a time to gather together with song and prayer, to hear the Word proclaimed, and to recognize Christ in the breaking of the bread. It is a festival, a day of freedom not only from work but also from condemnation . . . . Sunday worship is not just about going to church; it is about taking part in the activity by which God is shaping a new creation. It is a foretaste of the feast to come. What to do with youth sports on Sunday mornings is a big problem for some parents. Goetz tells about one family who decided that their son could play on a traveling soccer team but he could only play every other weekend. He had to sit out the first period of the next game, but at least he got to play. More important, they were able to worship as a family at least twice a month. Spending time with loved ones after worship is another good thing for a Sabbath. Not productive time. Not efficient time. Not planning the next week time. But time “wasted” on the fun of being a family, of being together, of playing together. She adds that some may also need time alone: time to pray or read or even sleep. To make us all feel a little guilty, Bass adds this about Sunday afternoon church meetings: Churches must be careful, however, not to devour Sabbath freedom with “religious” or charitable obligations. Filling Sunday afternoons with church committee meetings, for example, is a terrible violation of this freedom. And it is this violation that unfortunately seems to be increasing, precisely because of the pressures that Sabbath freedom specifically opposes. Of course, it is difficult to find time to meet during the week, but part of the point of Sabbath keeping is to cause shifts in weekday priorities. In many churches, it is the people on the committees who most need to be reminded to keep Sabbath! I realize that sometimes it is a better use of time to meet right after worship, but we need to be careful not schedule meetings too frequently. Our family has had sort of a mixed record on Sabbath keeping. We generally tried not to go on major shopping junkets on Sunday. We tried to take care of that stuff during the week. Our goal was to save Sunday as a family day. Sometimes we succeeded; sometimes we didn’t. As I have hinted I was a big offender: it was hard to stop working. It still is. I wish I could say that like Eugene Peterson I use my Mondays to take long walks in the forest preserves where I rest and pray. But I don’t. I work some every Monday, and when I am not doing church work I am running errands, buying groceries and making minor repairs around the house. Sunday mornings were a different matter. As you can imagine, in our family worship was a high priority. Our kids only missed if they were sick. Karen and I did disagree over the role of sports on Sunday. As far as she was concerned our children could simply forego all athletic activities on Sunday. (She had been raised in a family that sat around a read all Sunday afternoon – not a bad idea, really.) I didn’t mind if Ben and Susan played sports – actually, I liked to watch them, but they had to attend worship first. Often we were late to the games. Neither Susan nor Ben ever played on traveling teams, which, of course, would have introduced another issue into the mix. Right now I find it pretty easy to go home after worship, get something to eat, and then plop down in front of the television to watch golf or some other sport. At the time it seems restful, but when the show is over I often feel like I have been drugged. I am not sure what that is about, but it likely means that TV watching is not all that restful. Maybe my Sundays or Mondays could be spent better doing something else. Goetz suggests that learning to keep the Sabbath is like fly fishing – especially the practice of “mending” – i.e. gradually adjusting the position of the “fly.” It is a delicate process that a fly fisherman does bit by bit. It helps keep the “fly” on the water to trick the fish into believing it’s a real insect and not a fake one. So it is with learning to observe the Lord’s Day. We learn to do it a little bit at a time. As we make an adjustment here and there, as we stop doing one thing and begin doing another, we gradually learn how to rest. Goetz adds: I once spoke at a Bible study for women on the soul practices of suburban living. After I had pontificated about the values of keeping one day holy, a young mother essentially clucked that as a man I didn’t fully grasp how impractical a Sabbath was for a mom of three. As I was choking on my words, a middle-aged woman spoke, “Well, I don’t do laundry on Sunday. The kids don’t have to do homework on Sunday. We don’t go out to eat a lot, but we might do that on Sunday.” Her final words still ring in my ears: “The Sabbath won’t come up and embrace you; you have to embrace the Sabbath.” Today, I challenge you to do something different. Embrace the Sabbath. Decide to take one new step to learn the discipline of Sabbath observance. | |||||
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