A sermon for the beginning of the Sabbath Experiment.

Exodus 31
12 The Lord said to Moses: 13You yourself are to speak to the Israelites: ‘You shall keep my sabbaths, for this is a sign between me and you throughout your generations, given in order that you may know that I, the Lord, sanctify you. 14You shall keep the sabbath, because it is holy for you; everyone who profanes it shall be put to death; whoever does any work on it shall be cut off from among the people. 15For six days shall work be done, but the seventh day is a sabbath of solemn rest, holy to the Lord; whoever does any work on the sabbath day shall be put to death. 16Therefore the Israelites shall keep the sabbath, observing the sabbath throughout their generations, as a perpetual covenant. 17It is a sign for ever between me and the people of Israel that in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested, and was refreshed.’

Luke 5
15But now more than ever the word about Jesus* spread abroad; many crowds would gather to hear him and to be cured of their diseases. 16But he would withdraw to deserted places and pray.

Matthew 14
22 Immediately Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. 23And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, 24but by this time the boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land,* for the wind was against them.

Mark 1
32 That evening, at sunset, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons. 33And the whole city was gathered around the door. 34And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him. 35 In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. 36And Simon and his companions hunted for him. 37When they found him, they said to him, ‘Everyone is searching for you.’

I shared a little bit last week in worship about how the Sabbath Experiment was formed, “on a low hill in Iona with a pink cottony sunset on one side and a crisp peach moon on the other.” In that setting my husband and I talked late into the night about our priorities, our rhythm of life, and what we truly valued as a couple and as parents. The Sabbath Experiment came out of one of those conversations in which two people are assessing their lives—what you might call a State of the Union—the family union, that is.

The rest of the story goes that we stayed up way too late that night talking, but also packing up our things, since we were all leaving the island the very next day. The following morning I went somewhat groggily to the refectory for breakfast, where I met another person in our group who said, “Boy, I could hardly sleep last night, thinking about all the connections.” This woke me up a bit and I said, “Yes! This place really works on you, doesn’t it?”

I later learned that this person’s preoccupation was with the upcoming day’s travel, from ferry to bus to ferry to train. Ah. The connections… not the connections.

Ah well, I thought. A pilgrimage touches different people in different ways.

And sure enough, this person stopped me several days later and said, “My doctor has been having my monitor my blood pressure for some time now. I wanted you to know that my blood pressure was incredibly low when I returned from Iona and has stayed low in the days since then.”

Such is the gift of rest. Such is the gift of Sabbath time. It does touch different people in different ways. But we don’t need to kite off to Scotland to have Sabbath. The commandment is simply to keep Sabbath time holy, to rest from our work—in the words of Isaiah, to “call the Sabbath a delight” (Isa. 58:13). And while we need to pack ourselves up and escape the everyday from time to time, we also need to learn how to put our work aside and rest from it even when our work is buzzing nearby on a BlackBerry, or sitting in the dryer in the basement, or nagging us from the whiteboard in the kitchen:
-Buy peanut butter.
-Pick up the cat’s medicine.
-Fill out permission slip.
-Balance checkbook.
-Drop canned goods by the church for the food pantry.

“Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.” It’s one of the ten commandments, but probably the one we pay the least heed. Sabbath-keeping seems very naïve to us. I think many of us have secretly decided that Sabbath is one of those cultural trappings that doesn’t apply to us any more, like polygamy and washing a guest’s feet when they enter our home. Yet it’s etched just as deeply in the stone tablets as “Thou shalt not kill” and “Thou shalt not commit adultery” are.

I think for most Christians, the ten commandments and the story of creation are the two main places where we get our understanding of Sabbath. God made the universe and everything in it and then rested for a time. God did it, so we do it. The rhythm is established. But there is another narrative that resonates very strongly in the Jewish tradition, and it is one we dare not forget. The Sabbath day is a gift for the Jewish people because it reminds them of the time when they were slaves to Pharoah’s command, when their ancestors were forced to work, not six days a week, but every day of the week. There was no freedom, there was no relief, just constant expectations of doing more, producing more, building more. Thus the Jewish observance of Sabbath is an exclamation to the world:
We are not slaves to the empire any more!
We are free!

When these freed people reached the promised land, Moses addressed them. He made it clear that Sabbath is not just a festival day but a new social reality that impacts how they are to live in days one through six. His address, recorded in Deuteronomy, addresses the Sabbath day, but it also talks about canceling debts every seven years, and freeing slaves every seven-times-seven years. Moses called the people of Israel, and calls us today, to “seven” our lives. “Sabbath is not simply a pause. It is an occasion for reimagining all of social life away from coercion and competition to compassionate solidarity,” writes Walter Brueggemann.

You might have heard it said that the first four commandments, including the Sabbath commandment, are about our relationship with God, and the last six are about our relationship to one another. I disagree. I think the Sabbath commandment is the fulcrum commandment, the one that stands in the middle and allows us to balance our life in God with our life with one another. Sabbath is a statement to God: “For this particular time each week, I am going to stop trying to control everything and just let you be God.” But Sabbath is also a statement to one another: “In a society defined by production and competitiveness and scarcity, let us break the pattern once a week and celebrate that we all have equal value, equal worth in God’s eyes.”

This is one reason why we’re having a community dinner tonight to begin the Sabbath Experiment. Sabbath is not just an individual discipline but an expression of the beloved community. (Now, do you need to be at the potluck to participate in this grand experiment? No, just as you don’t need to participate in the project to experience Sabbath. You just begin. You try it, and maybe you blow it one week, but you try it again the next.)

I think many people respond to the idea of Sabbath with a kind of wistful “not now… Once we get ourselves in order, then we can do this.” This is an illusion, because we live in a culture of anxiety. It’s anxious today, and anxious tomorrow, and it will be anxious a year from now. So we might as well say, “As soon as this culture of anxiety ceases to be, I’ll try Sabbath.” As soon the world makes it easier for us, we’ll try it. It’s not going to happen. So what are we waiting for?

Jesus did not wait. He didn’t postpone Sabbath until everyone had been tended to. He did not cross everything off the Messianic to-do list, nod and say, Now. Sabbath can begin. He just went. And people didn’t always understand it or make it easy on him. According to Mark, when he finally comes strolling in after his me time, you can just hear the accusation in the disciples’ voices: “Everyone has been searching for you!” And in Matthew, while he is off having Sabbath time, the disciples are about this close to being shipwrecked.

What do you think was going through Jesus’ mind as he emerged from his Sabbath rest and he saw the boat way off on the horizon, bobbing in the waves like a cork, sails in tatters, just knowing that his most loved disciples were on it, bailing water by the bucketful?

I think if we were the ones watching that scene, we would think, “Well. That will certainly teach me to take Sabbath time.” Thankfully, Jesus doesn’t react that way. We know this because the rest of his ministry is punctuated by moments of rest. He dismisses crowds filled with people still aching to be healed. He sneaks out first thing in the morning before they have had a chance to corner him with more and more need. (And at the wedding in Cana, do you get the feeling he’s just trying to blend in and have a good time, until his mother comes along and says, “They’ve run out of wine”? Sigh. Isn’t Jesus entitled to a night off?!)

Jesus took Sabbath rest in certain ways. He went up to a mountain. He went to a desert place. He went by himself. He prayed. And he did ministry on the Sabbath day, which suggests to me that he chose other times to take his Sabbath rest.

But that’s how Jesus did it. And here’s a heretical statement: You don’t have to do it the way Jesus did it. You will do it a different way.

You will experience Sabbath by digging your hands into a spongy batch of bread dough.

Or by feeling the sting of a baseball snapping into glove as you have a catch with your kids.

Or by stretching out in your favorite chair with a good book and a mug of something warm and delicious at your side.

Or by doing what a friend of mine does—she says, “I have stumbled onto a way to have restful time with my sarcasm-offering youth: I teach her something. Like sewing, or how to make a cake from scratch, or how to knit, or how to sew on a button… and then we sit there and do it. If she sticks her ipod in her ears, I ask to have one ear bud. I hate the music, but it means a great deal to her.”

We may do many of these things now. But do we set aside the time each week to do them? Do we “seven” our lives the way God calls us to?

Like Mary Oliver, whose poem appears on the cover of today’s bulletin, you may not know what a prayer is. But through Sabbath you will learn “how to pay attention, how to stroll through fields, how to be idle and blessed.” (from Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day”)

What gives your heart real joy and peace? That’s the content of your Sabbath time, period.

At the same time, there is something to be said for shutting down the noise, even the things that bring us contentment. Sometimes those things can insulate us from hearing the still small voice we so need to tune in to:

Carl Jung tells the story of a patient, a minister, who was addicted to his work, laboring 80-90 hours per week. He was suffering from disabling ennui. Jung asked him to stop working for two nights. He asked him to spend the nights alone by himself.

The first night the minister listened to Beethoven and read poetry. The next night he listened to Mozart and read a novel. The following morning he went back to Dr. Jung, who asked him how we spent his time. The minister told him, and Jung cried, “No! That’s not what I asked you to do. I asked you to spend the night not with Mozart but with yourself!” The man said, “But I can’t stand to be with myself like that!” Jung said, “That self that you cannot stand is the self that you are inflicting on the people around you 80-90 hours a week.” (from Communitas, published by Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Volume 4, 2007)

Rather blunt, perhaps, though the Old Testament is no softer. “Whoever doesn’t practice Sabbath will be put to death,” the Lord says to Moses. Harsh words. Is Sabbath really as serious as all that? Can Sabbath actually save us from death?

The Quaker educator and writer Parker Palmer tells about a retreat he led some years ago with a group of government workers from Washington DC. Many of them got involved in public service out of a sincere desire to help people, but over the years had become jaded and discouraged by a system in which the common good often takes a backseat to power and politics. One man was a former farmer who now worked for the Department of Agriculture. He told the other folks on the retreat that he had left behind on his desk an administrative action relating to thinning topsoil in Midwestern farmland, which is apparently a big environmental problem. The administrator in him knew what he was supposed to do, but he couldn’t reconcile what was expected of him with what his farmer’s heart knew was right. He felt stuck.

The retreat went on. It was a time of prayerful rest and community with the other participants. The last day of the retreat he told the group that he hadn’t slept much the night before; he had come to the realization that he had to resolve the issue of the thinning topsoil in a way that honored his farmer’s heart.

After a time of reverent silence, one of the others asked how he was going to face the reaction of his boss, who had been pressuring him so vigorously to do what he knew in his heart was wrong.

He said, “I don’t know what is going to happen to me. But I know that if I do not do this, a piece of me will die. And that is much more grave than the prospect of losing my job.”

And then he made one of those statements of clarity that can only come from the gift of true Sabbath time. He said,
“I realized that I don’t report to my boss.
I report to the land.”
(from a lecture for the Shalem Institute, May 2007)

We all have our roles in life, our responsibilities, and people who have their expectations of us. And those expectations will fill every moment if we let them. So it’s a faithful thing to step back and consider:
Who do you report to?

Take some time to be quiet, to do something joyful and unproductive, and the answer may sneak up on you…
surprise you…
and save your life.

The title of this sermon and a few of its ideas are drawn from Walter Brueggemann’s excellent study of “Sabbath as Resistance” for the series The Thoughtful Christian (www.thethoughtfulchristian.com)