University Presbyterian Church - Chapel Hill, NC

KEEPING SABBATH

Exodus 20:1-17; Mark 2:23-28

A Sermon by Robert E. Dunham

University Presbyterian Church

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

November 12, 2006

            I love that line: “The Sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the Sabbath.” I first discovered those words of Jesus as an eighth-grader at a summer presbytery camp in Florida. They were used as part of our closing worship, and the young pastor who used them told us that we were too often slaves to Sabbath observances, missing the joy and freedom God intended. People are more important than rituals, he said, and those words struck a responsive chord in my adolescent psyche.[1]

            You should know that my childhood Sundays were very ritualized, even though in some respects my family was not overtly religious. My father had never, to my knowledge, crossed the threshold of a church. My grandmother Ruth, with whom we lived, was what pastors call a “C and E” Christian – she worshipped only on Christmas and Easter. It was my mother who gathered my brother and me each Sunday and took us to church.  Yet we still observed the Sabbath in our home – or more specifically, the Christian Sabbath, the Lord’s Day.  Church attendance was not required of my brother and me, but it was certainly expected. Non-attendance had its consequences; we could do nothing outside the house for the remainder of the day… and in those days we didn’t have a television. If we had been to church, then it was possible to play outside, to invite friends over, or to go for a Sunday drive.

            Others of you grew up with even more stringent Sabbath practices. We almost always ask our confirmands to meet with elders of the church and to interview them. We ask them to ask their elders, how was your experience of the church as a young person different than ours today? Almost invariably what the elders my age or older remember is a more restrictive Sabbath observance. Of course, many of us in those years grew up in a time when the culture accommodated such strictness. Because of Sunday blue laws and cultural mores, nothing was open – no grocery stores, no gas stations, no banks, no theaters or malls. Worship was thus at the center of the day.

            So, when that young pastor told our presbytery camp that God intended us to enjoy the Sabbath, because Jesus had said the Sabbath was made for us and not the other way around, I found it to be the most liberating word I’d ever heard spoken in the church.  Religious practices, Sabbath rituals, faithful observances – none of those were as important as people.  I couldn’t wait to get home and share this wonderful new insight with my mother.  Unfortunately, when I did get home and related the news, my mother gave his message less than an enthusiastic review.  Still, his message shaped and informed my understanding of the Sabbath and of Jesus’ words for years. 

Other folks apparently heard the same message, but took it even further and used Jesus’ words to justify a much more relaxed approach to Sunday.  One need not set aside time for worship, many said; one could just as well worship at the eighteen stations of the course, or on a mountain hike, or water-skiing at the lake.  And before long, Sabbath came to be understood by many as simply a synonym for a day away from work, or taking care of oneself, or spending time with the family. 

            At this point in my life, however, I have come to believe that the young pastor at the presbytery camp missed the point of the text… that, in fact, my mother’s understanding of Sabbath was closer to what Jesus had intended.  Jesus was not arguing with the scribes about whether the Sabbath should be observed, but about how it was to be observed.[2]  For Jesus it was not human desires versus worship, but worship and rest as the means of satisfying the deepest of human needs.  Jesus observed the Sabbath faithfully; he simply reinterpreted the way his followers should regard it, urging them toward a Sabbath in which worship led to deeds of compassion and justice, not simply to perfunctory ritual.

            The fourth commandment of the ten charges the people of God to “remember the Sabbath day and to keep it holy.”  In our day, it seems to me, we have forgotten both dimensions of the command, indeed, have forgotten the command entirely.  We live in a culture that has virtually no sense of Sabbath at all.  We live at breakneck speed, held captive by the tyranny of time.  We cram meetings into our mealtimes.  We have Blackberries and cell phones so that we are always on call.  We go and go and go. 

Of all the good news the Bible offers us, perhaps none is more needed in our day than the Sabbath command.  We tend to think of commandments as restrictions and prohibitions, but they are more like guardrails on the bridge that keep us safe and alive.  The fourth commandment is no different than the others; it shows us the way to fuller, richer life in communion with God and in community with one another.  We need Sabbath to keep human life human.  We need it to give order and shape to our days.  Just as a basketball player can’t master the finesse moves until she learns the fundamentals, just as a jazz musician can’t improvise until he learns basic chords and keys, so we can’t find full freedom until we find the center of our lives.[3]  And that center is in worship and spiritual replenishment. That center is what keeping Sabbath is all about.

            Sabbath is, first of all, about rest… deep spiritual, emotional rest. Wayne Muller argues that rest is not just desirable; it is essential:

All life requires a rhythm of rest. There is a rhythm in our waking activity and the body’s need for sleep. There is a rhythm in the way day dissolves into night, and night into morning. There is a rhythm as the active growth of spring and summer is quieted by the necessary dormancy of fall and winter. There is a tidal rhythm, a deep, eternal conversation between the land and the…sea. In our bodies, the heart perceptibly rests after each life-giving beat; the lungs rest between the exhale and the inhale.

We have lost this essential rhythm. Our culture invariably supposes that action and accomplishment are better than rest, that doing something – anything – is better than doing nothing. Because of our desire to succeed, to meet…ever-growing expectations, we do not rest. Because we do not rest, we lose our way. We miss the compass points that would show us where to go, we bypass the nourishment that would give us succor. We miss the quiet that would give us wisdom. We miss the joy and love born of…delight. Poisoned by this hypnotic belief that good things come only through unceasing determination and tireless effort, we can never truly rest. And for want of rest, our lives are in danger.[4]

There is a physical danger to such stress and busyness, of course. The Chinese pictograph for busy is composed of two characters: heart and killing. But that pictograph also hints at an emotional and spiritual danger that is even greater.  Without rest our heart dies and we forget who and whose we are. Without rest, life disintegrates.  Without Sabbath, our temptations overwhelm us: temptations to over-estimate our own importance, temptations to think the in-box will ever be empty or our work ever done, temptations to imagine ourselves at the center of the universe and to forget that the time we have been given is a gift… arguably God’s most precious gift. 

Sabbath is a time for sacred rest [says Muller]; it [is best] a holy day, the seventh day of the week, as in the Jewish tradition, or the first day of the week, as for Christians. But Sabbath time may be a Sabbath afternoon, a Sabbath hour, a Sabbath walk – indeed, anything that preserves a visceral experience of life-giving nourishment and rest… Sabbath time is time off the wheel, time when we can take our hand from the plow and let God and the earth care for things, while we drink, if only for a few moments, from the fountain of rest and delight.

Sabbath is more than the absence of work; it is not just a day off, when we catch up on television or errands. It is the presence of something that arises when we consecrate a period of time to listen to what is most deeply beautiful, nourishing or true. It is time consecrated with our attention, our mindfulness, honoring those quiet forces of grace or spirit that sustain and heal us.[5]

The discipline of stepping back from our busyness and stopping our work one day a week makes us pay attention. At least one time a week we need reminding that the world we live in, as full of toil and suffering as it can be, is also a world of joy and abundance.  Sabbath helps us to sense and taste that abundance… and to offer to God our thanks.

But there is more, too. In the end, Sabbath is more than our own private observance. Sabbath extends to the community… both this community [here] and that community out there. Sabbath reminds us that the abundance is intended for everyone. Barbara Brown Taylor reminds us of this larger dimension of Sabbath. She says,

Sabbath is not only about rest but also about resistance. Each time it appears in the Torah, the [Sabbath] commandment limits the exploitation of others as well as the exhaustion of the self. When you stop working [says the Law], so do your children, your animals and your employees…. By interrupting our economically sanctioned social order every week, Sabbath suspends [if only for a while] our subtle and not so subtle ways of dominating one another….The lion is restrained from making a profit on the lamb, who may still choose to lie down for a Sabbath nap alone, but is free from the fear of waking up as lamb chops, on this one day at least….

Real rest involves all creation: freeing slaves, forgiving debts, restoring property and giving the land every seventh year off. Leviticus 25 shows divine concern for grapes, for God’s sake; it promises both the tame and wild animals in the land enough to eat, along with the hired hands who have time to play horseshoes during the year that the tractors stay parked in the barn. While there are a lot of yard signs supporting the Ten Commandments in the rural county where I live, [says Taylor,] I do not know a single farmer who keeps the Sabbath holy by giving the fields their hard-earned sabbaticals.

Where there is money to be made, there is no rest for the land, or for those who live in it. Developers bulldoze the laurels by the river where the raccoons taught their babies how to fish. An entire pine forest comes down to produce the paper for this week’s Eddie Bauer catalog. People who have already run out of closet space work overtime to pay the interest on their average $9,000 credit card debts, while economic predators send teenagers applications for their own pre-approved cards in the mail. No resistance to such ravenousness will come from those who are heavily invested in its revenue. The resistance will have to come from elsewhere, from those who live by a different rhythm because they worship a different God….

God did not give [the Sabbath] commandment to a person but to a people, knowing that only those who rested together would be equipped to resist together. To remember and keep the Sabbath is to remember what it means to be made in God’s image and, when the Sabbath ends, to join God in the holy work of mending the world.[6]

Good friends, in these hurried days we need Gandhi’s reminder that there is more to life than increasing its speed. In these hurried days, we need Sabbath… a Sabbath rest and restoration anchored in worship that replenishes and equips… and a Sabbath rest that prepares us to seek the healing and well-being of all God’s children, indeed, of the whole creation.  We need Sabbath.  Needing it so much, it is remarkable that we claim it so seldom, for though it is God’s command, it is also a gift that is ours for the taking.  A free gift of God offered for you… and to me… and through us to all humankind.