Honoring the Sabbath: A Practice for Our Time
July 13, 2014Responding to God’s Word
August 3, 201427
Jul.
2014
Honoring the Sabbath: A Little Each Day
Hail Holy Sabbath Day indeed! We conclude today our three weeks of focus on the subject of Sabbath, discussing the habits of rest we might consider if we perhaps slow down this July. How these habits might allow us to honor the command for Sabbath worship, the spirit of Sabbath rest, and how they might prepare us for healthy living in the fall.
For we don’t just leave our faith at the door on Sunday. As busy as our lives are in these parts, and as busier as they may become in the fall, it is not enough to work hard all week and save all spiritual development and rest for one day. We all carry some values, we might as well carry around the values of God.
This might be the summer when, as Chuck Salter of the Washington Post put it, “you might try ditching your App and take a nap.”
As we will discover today in this historically focused sermon, through the theology of John Calvin, one of the preeminent philosophers of our Presbyterian tradition, we need to develop some rest time every day of our lives. Let us pray.
God of work and God of rest. Help us to open our lives to your word and to the wisdom of our tradition as we explore the implications of Sabbath rest for our daily lives. Amen.
There is a tale told where a wise man saw a boy running in the street and asked him, “Why do you run?” He replied, “I am running after my good fortune. The wise man says to him, “Silly boy, your good fortune has been trying to chase you, but you are running too fast.”
Gilles Lilovetsky’s book Hypermodern Times, reports the incredible pace of American life. Americans seem always on the go. Stress.org has reported that 43% of Americans suffer from serious stress as a result. Living in the Washington region we certainly know this issue well.
Earlier this year, famed theologian Walter Bruggeman published a book entitled Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now, in which he argues that the Sabbath is not simply about keeping rules but about becoming a whole person and restoring a whole society. Brueggemann calls ours a society in which we live to achieve, accomplish, perform, and possess. We want more, own more, use more, eat more, and drink more. Keeping the Sabbath and focusing on rest, he maintains, allows us to break this restless cycle and focus on what is truly important.
We have discussed in worship the last two weeks how it can be important for humans to observe Sabbath each week.
God commands us to. God calls on us to remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. From the Hebrew Bible, we know God completed the work of creation in six days and then rested on the seventh day.
Our physical health requires it. We must have some time, blocks of time off, to be healthy. Psychologists will argue it’s important for our mental health.
The Hebrew Bible encourages it. In the Hebrew Bible, the concept of rest took on a geographical focus. For an exiled people in Egypt, Canaan became a rest for God’s people. Rest came to mean a return to the holy land for exiled people.
For the Israelites, Sabbath rest was part of the covenant that God had with God’s people. Wayne Muller writes in his book, Sabbath, that in the Babylonian exile and after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 A.D., during periods of sadness and intense exile, observing the Sabbath became the temple for the people, a sanctuary time to help them remember. The practice of Sabbath was the spiritual glue that helped the people stay together.
Honoring Sabbath set apart the Israelites from other peoples and was a sign of God’s covenant with them. Their God had told them, “My Sabbaths shall you keep: for it is a sign between me and you throughout your generations; that you may know that I am the Lord that does sanctify you.”
The Reformed tradition argues for it. Particularly John Calvin. Calvin believed that God works in the lives of all of us, but that we can put up obstacles to our relationship with God. So we must work daily to lower the barriers, and to put on the values of our God. That is one thing that Sabbath helps us do.
The Christian concept of the Trinity suggests that we experience one God in three ways or persons. That helps us understand that God is not limited. We do not only experience God in one form or at one time. God came to Moses and to Israel but also in the human experience of Christ and we experience God through the Holy Spirit. There was historical debate throughout Christendom about how to celebrate the Trinity. Pope Alexander II argued that “the Trinity in its fullness is honored every day of the church year.”
The argument is that our close connection to God should not be limited to one day during the year. It is a real temptation for us is to limit our participation of faith to only Sunday. And to take on different and other attitudes during the year. That is not the standard that Bradley Hills sets for itself. I know the focus here has been on living out our faith in our daily lives and that we’ve tried to look to how we apply faith during the week as well. The concept of the trinity argues for our living our closeness to God each day, not just one day but every day.
The same applies to the Sabbath. Calvin’s theology teaches that Christians should realize that they need to develop some time to rest every day of their lives.
Calvin believed that Jesus was the fulfillment of the Sabbath for Christians. That we are able to find rest not only in a day, but in a person. Calvin’s Reformed theology held that God is with us all the time. Through Christ we can have spiritual rest every day.
Calvin wrote, “The promise of God to the Israelites is fulfilled in the coming of Christ, who made us enjoy the promised rest on every day, not just one.” Calvin wrote further, “This is not contented with one day, but requires the whole course of our lives….”
Sabbath, then, was not just a weekly exercise to honor God, Sabbath for Calvin was a daily rest that helped renew the spirits of Christians.
Sunday is the day the church celebrates the Sabbath because through it we celebrate the resurrection each Sunday.
Calvin wrote that for Christians, the Sunday Lord’s Day is substituted for the Saturday Sabbath because, “The resurrection of our Lord is the end and accomplishment of that true rest which the ancient Sabbath typified.”
Calvin thought, “We are not contented (for Sabbath) on one day but the whole of our lives.” Calvin wrote, “The promise of God to the Israelites is fulfilled in the coming of Christ, who made us enjoy the promised rest on every day, not just one.”
Calvin’s Reformed Trinitarian theology held that God is with us all the time, that we find rest, not only in a day, but in a person. So that Sabbath rest can come each day.
Calvin wrote further, “There can be no doubt that, on the advent of our Lord Jesus Christ, the ceremonial part of the (fourth) commandment (Sabbath) was abolished. He is the truth, at whose presence all the emblems vanish; the body, at the sight of which the shadows disappear. He, I say, is the true completion of the Sabbath.”
For Calvin, Jesus was the fulfillment of the concept of Sabbath. Just as rest had been purposeful in the Hebrew Bible, connected to creation, the Holy land, the Temple and exile, for Calvin, Sabbath was found in Christ.
Not to take away from the weekly observance, Calvin still affirmed that. He thought there should be a day of weekly Sabbath for the gathering of God’s people in worship and to train the people of God in spiritual practices, but also that spiritual Sabbath rest could come each day.
Calvin wrote: Through daily Sabbath, “We begin our blessed rest in him, and daily make new progress in it….” That “….there is a sabbathizing reserved for God’s people; that is, a spiritual rest, to which God daily invites us.”
For, Calvin “Sabbath,” “daily rest,” “daily meditation,” “continual rest” are made possible through Jesus Christ.
One reason the Israelites rested on the seventh day of the week was to pattern their lives after their creator, who, as detailed in the Book of Genesis, rested after six days of creation. Christians are to pattern their lives after the creator too and that involves resting on the Sabbath, the seventh day, as God did.
Yet if Jesus is part of the Godhead, we go further and pattern our lives after what Jesus, who reveals God, did.
Jesus was willing to rest and pray and go to quiet places. For Calvin, we can find rest all week by putting our trust and energy into meditating on the life of Jesus.
Calvin wrote, “The promise of God to the Israelites is fulfilled in the coming of Christ, who made us enjoy the promised rest on every day, not just one.” “This is not contented with one day, but requires the whole course of our lives….” Calvin wrote, “Spiritual practice undoubtedly deserves to have some portion of every day devoted to it.”
Calvin sums up the point, “If people were able on their own strength to fulfill the Law, God would have said to them, ‘Work!’ But on the contrary he said, ‘Rest in order that God might work in us.’”
God’s desire to do work in and through us does cause a person to pause and perhaps to take a step back in order to allow God to do God’s work.
According to Calvin, through spiritual practice and the word, humans can find their “true spirituality.”
Reformers, early Presbyterians, were created and influenced by Calvin’s ideas. They borrowed from him to develop concepts of Daily Sabbath.
Richard Baxter, one of the great Puritans, added 30 minutes to his day for daily meditation on the word of God. John Bailey, another Calvinist during the same century, interpreted Calvin’s ideas into a daily devotional scripture routine that encouraged families to read the Bible each day of the year.
Whatever it is for you, let Sabbath be both a weekly and a daily activity. Try this summer to institute some new patterns that can continue into fall. Honor God’s commandments, Christ’s modeling of rest and the Trinitarian power we have to connect to God each day, not only Sunday.
We are not meant to do nothing, but to use God’s gifts. We are to trust God, give God control, and follow God’s commandments, including God’s commandment to rest.
We must be willing to steward our time for God, keep the spirit of Sabbath, find daily moments of spiritual rest, and to follow Jesus Christ, even when counter to the patterns of the culture.
Tin No Han, the Buddhist monk, was on an elevator once when it opened and he saw a clock on the wall. He said, a few hundred years ago there would not have been a clock, but a crucifix on this wall. That is a telling example of the cultural focus on time.
While we are running through life, the wisdom of our faith tradition and many others teaches that when we slow down regularly, we go much further.
This week I tried to renew my own focus on daily rest. The combination of travel and work and family responsibilities have thrown me woefully out of balance. I have traditionally found a routine of scripture reading, meditation, journaling and exercise to be important for me. But my house is often too chaotic to read well, we have taken a step backwards in our children’s sleep patterns making meditation difficult, my hands were too tired to journal and my torn calf muscle is making exercise difficult.
So this week I decided just to pray. Pray about the life of Jesus and his resting by the sea of Galilee as Matthew described it earlier in his Gospel. I prayed about that over and over until it became a kind of mantra for me. Until I found a bit of real rest.
We all put on and carry around some values each day of the week. We can put on the values of our culture. Or we can choose to put on the values, even the yoke, of God.
We usually begin sermons with a focus on the scripture lesson of the day. Let me end today’s sermon with one. We heard that Jesus said, “Come to me all who are weary and caring heavy burdens and I will give you rest.” We like that. That sounds like what Calvin was saying, that Jesus is the source of our rest. Sounds good. But then Jesus continues, Take my yoke upon you,” Jesus says. That doesn’t sound quite as good. It might have sounded even more challenging in Jesus’ day. But the technological advance of the yoke is that it allows the burden on the cattle to be distributed more broadly. It allows the cattle to carry more because its weight is distributed. It’s like a modern day backpack. As Kori was explaining to the children, our prayer to God allows us to distribute the weight of our lives. God helps us carry it.
Jesus would have said these words as Matthew quotes them to a predominantly Jewish audience. The Israelites had very clear understandings of what it meant to have a yoke on in their agrarian age. A yoke was a harness for oxen. Moreover, the word yoke had metaphorical significance for them. It would have made the Israelites think of their times of slavery and exile. The prophets wrote of the yoke of oppression in Egypt, for example.
But the yoke of Jesus is relatively easy. The Greek word for easy, means good. Jesus’ yoke is good. The rest found through the work of following him, is beneficial.
Just as the Sabbath helped the Israelites survive in Egypt and in Babylon, through a routine, a spiritual practice, a discipline, a commitment, so, too, the yoke Jesus offers, the routine, the practice, the discipline, the commitment, of following him, helps us survive.
The rest that Jesus offers in Matthew is not completely without effort. It requires taking on his yoke. It means going to church, as the Sabbath suggests, practicing faith, taking responsibility for our spiritual life and relationship with God.
But the reward of this effort is true. The rest that Jesus offers is a contented rest that comes from the satisfaction of knowing we can rely on God. It’s a hopeful rest that comes from placing our trust in God’s values and grace. It’s a confident rest that rejuvenates because it is infused with Christ’s peace.
Jesus said, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”
Our finding our place with him this summer and finding him within us could mean finding our rest at last.
May it be so. Amen.