(30) The apostles gathered around Jesus, and told him all that
they had done and taught. He said to them, "Come away to a deserted place all by
yourselves and rest a while." For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure
even to eat. (31) And they went away in the boat to a deserted place by themselves.
- Mark 6:30-31
We continue the Lenten journey of self-examination and reflection by addressing the
topic of sabbath keeping.
I cannot think of a more supremely unqualified person to stand in this pulpit and
preach the gospel as it concerns sabbath keeping. When I look at my life - both in its
external habits and inner attitudes - then compare it to biblical teaching about finding
rest in God, it becomes crystal clear that the phrase "Woe to you hypocrites!"
was made for me. For all kinds of complex developmental and genetic reasons I believe that
salvation really comes through work. That thoroughly unbiblical, insane, but essential
tenant of any red-blooded American, combined with the nature of my career with its
unlimited demands, my inability to say "no," the fact that I am a member of a
two-pastor marriage, and have two teenage sons who like to be fed and transported, means
that I am a sinner. This sermon is for me.
Fortunately, I am more than aware that my story is your story. Sinners! (I've always
wanted to say that too a congregation!) We know the studies where researchers declare that
sleep deprivation among Americans is a mounting problem. We can trace the relationship
between the demands of hyper-charged global economy, the need to increase productivity and
the lack of true rest. I have heard many of you say that your deepest barrier to greater
engagement in the church is not desire, but time. I have heard your own mates come to me
and lament the absence of time that you have to spend with them.
"Come away to a deserted place and rest for awhile." With these words Jesus
rouses deep human longing and equally profound resistance and fear. Who among us does not
dream sometimes of a place clear of life's clutter and noise, a place where we could soak
in rest until it loosened even the deepest knots of our stress and anxiety? But who among
us does not also fear such a place, a place bereft of all the relationships, activities
and productivity that give us some sense of self and secure our position in the world? We
both long for it and fight it, but we know that true rest is becoming a rare and
endangered phenomenon, pushed by our own culture and our inner anxieties to the margins of
life.
"Rest for awhile." Jesus' words evoke both hope and resistance because they
bear us away from the familiar world of activity and achievement and send us into the
wilderness where we fear we will be lost, but hope that we will find the heart of God.
Biblical sabbath keeping is profoundly alien to our 21st century culture. Some of you
long-time Presbyterians may remember that keeping the sabbath was an essential habit of
our tradition. Church and quiet were the marks of every Sunday. Presbyterians and
Congregationalists provided the political clout for New England blue laws forbidding
commercial activity on Sundays, until the gods of the market finally sold our souls only
within the last few decades. By and large, the notion of sabbath keeping has been erased
from our religious and cultural consciousness save conservative and Orthodox Judaism.
A common understanding of sabbath trivializes it by designating it as "a day
off" or a vacation. Eugene Petersen writes that " 'A day off' is a bastard
sabbath. Days off are not without benefits to be sure, but Sabbaths they are not. However
beneficial, a day off is a secularized sabbath. A day off is at the service of six working
days. The purpose is to restore strength, increase motivation, reward effort, and keep
performance high. It happens that family harmony might be shored up as well and modest
improvement shown in mental health. Sabbath in this mind-set means quit. Stop. Cool it.
Take a break. Go on vacation. There is nothing of the faith in it. It is utilitarian.
Sabbath in this distorted understanding is about the non-use of our time, what we usually
call wasting time. But this is not biblical sabbath keeping."
The biblical foundation for understanding sabbath is the Genesis week. Sabbath is the
seventh and final day in which "God rested (shabath) from all his work which He had
done." (Petersen) In the Genesis account where God spoke energy and matter into
existence, we encounter a recurrent refrain: "And there was evening and there was
morning, one day. . . . and there was evening and morning a second day . . . and there was
evening and morning a third day" and so on six times.
This is the Hebrew understanding of day - it is alien to ours. Our day begins with an
alarm clock ripping us from the comfort of the predawn darkness, a shot of caffeine and 16
hours later the electric lights go off one day. The night is intrusion a waste of time.
In order to understand the Hebrew day, we have to take an imaginative leap. In the
Hebrew consciousness, a day is the basic unit of God's creative work. Evening is the
beginning of that day. In the evening, God speaks light, stars, earth, vegetation,
animals, man and woman into being. It is also a time when we quit our activity and then go
to sleep. We drift into unconsciousness for the next six to eight to ten hours in which we
are totally unproductive and have zero cash value.
We then jump out of bed and rush out the door to get things started only to discover
that everything was started hours ago. All the important things were already underway
while we were asleep. The sun is already rising without me. The operation is half over
already. The plan is already basically established. The lights are on, the assignments
given, God's creative plan is already unfolding. We wake into a world we didn't make. We
live by salvation, we didn't earn.
Evening: God begins without our help. God's creative work unfolds. While we sleep,
great and marvelous things happen, far beyond our capacity to engineer or control: the
moon marks the seasons, the coyote captures its prey, the stars turn in their courses,
proteins repair our muscles, our dreaming brains restore a deeper sanity beneath the
scheming and prattle of our waking hours. Our work is relativized. Honored. Respected and
set aside. We do not hold up the stars in the heavens nor control the flow of our own
blood coursing through our bodies. Our work settles into the context of God's work. We
wake into a world that we didn't make. In a blow to the ego, but a comfort to the soul we
discover that everything started hours ago.
Morning comes. God invites to enjoy and share and develop the work that God already has
initiated. We work. We engage in creative endeavor. We pour our own souls into it because
grace has already been provided. We do not need to hold up the skies for the skies are
already there. We only need to look at them and appreciate their beauty and their wonder.
There is a rhythm to this biblical notion of day: "And there was evening and there
was morning, one day." It is a rhythm of grace and sufficiency that counters the
idolatry of productivity and striving.
When we quit a day's work nothing essential stops. We prepare for sleep not with a
feeling of exhausted frustration because there is so much unfinished, but with expectancy
and gratitude. The day is about to begin! God's creative work is about to be spoken again
and I can rest, confident that as I lay me down to sleep, and pray the Lord my soul to
keep, all will be well.
Sabbath in the Bible begins with a recognition of this rhythm of evening and morning.
Of course, we can hardly avoid stopping our work each night as fatigue and sleep overtake
us. But we seem to avoid very well taking a true sabbath whether on the seventh day or
some other day. Weekly rest with God takes decisive action. True sabbath keeping seems
like an interruption, an interference with the habits that make us the proud, frazzled and
fractured people we are. Sabbath keeping is un-American, but that's okay - its only our
souls and our bodies, the health of our families and our communities are at stake.
There are two biblical versions of the sabbath commandment "to Observe the sabbath
day and keep it holy," one in Exodus and the other in Deuteronomy. The reasons for
sabbath keeping the sabbath in Exodus is because God kept it. God worked for six days and
then rested. If God sets apart one day to rest than we can, too. Martin Marty said many
years ago that the true atheist is the one who can't sleep at night because at the core
they believe that God cannot run the world without them. God apparently feels comfortable
resting, perhaps so should we.
The Deuteronomic reason for sabbath-keeping is that our ancestors in Egypt went for
four hundred years without a vacation. Never a day off. The consequence was they were no
longer persons, but slaves. Hands. Bodies. Numbers. Units. Widgets. Not persons created in
the image of a loving God, but equipment for making bricks and building pyramids. Humanity
was defaced and desecrated. So that we don't do that to our neighbor or our husband or
wife or child or employee or fellow church member or colleague, we are commanded to keep a
sabbath. The moment when we begin to see others in terms of what they can do rather than
who they are, we mutilate humanity and violate community. We mutilate ourselves.
We may try to claim, "I don't need to rest this week. I can keep working."
Yet our lives are so intertwined, the damage we do, will not only be to ourselves but to
the ones we most say we care about. Sabbath keeping is about simple kindness so that we
can preserve the image of God in our neighbors and in our self.
Observe the sabbath day and keep it holy, as the LORD your God commanded you.
Jesus said to them, "Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a
while."
Thanks be to God who sets the stars in their courses, who holds up the heavens with
love. Thanks be to God for the grace that is sufficient and for holy rest. Amen.
