The Sabbath Question - by Bob Scott

Today, I'm featuring a guest post by Bob Scott.  Bob preached this sermon last week while I was away.  He is the Director of Trinity Institute at Trinity Wall Street in New York City, a good friend, and was one of the members of our core team when Vision began.

Did anybody stop off on the way to church this morning? Maybe you went by the grocery store to pick up food for later. Did anybody stop at the liquor store? You don’t need to raise your hands. A few years ago you couldn’t have done that. At one time most stores, and until recently all liquor stores, had to close on Sundays because of Blue Laws. These laws started with the Puritans in the 17^th century. Over the years every state passed blue laws forbidding things like playing baseball or changing wagon wheels on Sunday. In Massachusetts holding hands on Sunday was against the law. In some states you could sell hammers but not nails on the Sabbath.

And there lies the rub. The laws were to protect the Sabbath, specifically the Christian Sabbath, since the Jewish Sabbath is Saturday. In the 20^th century people sued to overturn Blue Laws. The Supreme Court decided they were constitutional, because while they began for religious reasons, they now had other value, such as guaranteeing workers a day off or decreasing public drunkenness. Recently, though, many of the laws have been disappearing, mostly for economic reasons. Why shouldn’t a liquor store owner make money on Sunday? Today a lot of states forbid car sales on Sundays, and people are asking whether we can afford that when car companies are hurting.

Now, since we’re in church and we’re studying the commandment to honor the Sabbath, you might expect a pitch for reinstating the Blue Laws. And in fact, a study by professors at MIT and Notre Dame found that in states where selling liquor on Sundays is legalized, church attendance and giving go down noticeably and use of alcohol and drugs goes up, particularly among youth, and particularly among youth who are religious.

And yet, churches aren’t always big supporters of Blue Laws. In 1920 the New York Times reported that the rector of Trinity Church Wall Street, which as some of you know is where I work, preached a sermon saying that the return of the Puritan Sabbath, which was being advocated by a group called The Lord’s Day Alliance, would “injure religion.” Instead of outlawing sports, he said, pastors should be playing them. Why? Because “God is near in our joys also,” he said. The problem with a legally enforced Sabbath is that it takes the joy out of a day that according to the Jewish Hassidim “should be anticipated like a bride.”

For several weeks we’ve been reading the Ten Commandments. Number four is “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.” Sabbath is from the Hebrew “Shabbat,” which means “to cease” or “to rest.” It was understood as a time to stop our labor. That’s what the Blue Laws were getting at – don’t do business, don’t play games. Cease.

I find it interesting that only four of the commandments are given a reason, and Sabbath given not one reason, but two. The first time we get the Ten Commandments is in Exodus. Moses has led the people out of Egypt, against great odds with the parting of the Red Sea. Then God appears on Mount Sinai to tell them how they are to live as a people. They are told to honor the Sabbath because God did. ^“For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it.” So the Sabbath is about creation, and also about fulfillment. It bothered the ancient commentators that God might be seen as being weary, which makes no sense for the creator of the universe. “Rest,” they said, meant that God stepped back – stopped fussing with creation – and said “It is good.”

The top ten appear again the book of Deuteronomy. Moses has led the people for forty years in the wilderness, and now they are about to cross into the Promised Land. He gives a final sermon where he repeats the laws a second time – “deutero” means second. Here’s the reason this time: “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the LORD your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.”

So the Sabbath is about creation and fulfillment on the one hand, and about freedom – in other words, redemption – on the other. It’s the whole God story, wrapped in a package. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that Exodus 31 says that the Sabbath is the sign of God’s covenant with Israel. That idea appears again in the passage from Isaiah that Amy read. If you will take delight in the Sabbath, God says through the prophet, you will be my people – people who loose the bonds of injustice, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and free the oppressed.

What’s the connection between Sabbath and justice? Keep that question in mind. We hear echoes of Isaiah in the New Testament, when Jesus says, “I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.” Jesus was criticized by the religious authorities for healing on the Sabbath and for letting his disciples pluck grain to eat. But he didn’t reject it. Instead he taught something important: “The Sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the Sabbath.”

The Sabbath is for us. Keep that in mind, too.

A recent national survey found that sixty percent of Americans agreed with the statement, “I am overwhelmed by the pace of life today; too much noise, too much to do, not enough time.” It feels like all of our time-saving devices haven’t given us more leisure, only higher expectations of how much we can do. But other surveys have found that we actually have more leisure time than previous generations, about 45 minutes more per day than forty years ago. Maybe the problem is that we don’t understand what leisure is, because we don’t know what Sabbath is.

The word spirituality gets bandied about a lot today, but St. Augustine had a simple definition for it in the 4^th century. He called it the ordo amoris, the ordering of our loves. Whatever we give our time and attention to will shape our inner lives, our spirituality. I’m not the first person to suggest that the primary spirituality of our culture is consumerism. Our culture needs us to be consumers. You know the technical economic definition of consumer: people who buy things. That keeps the system going. I’m not about to go into a diatribe against capitalism or materialism. I’m here to focus on the question Sabbath asks: What’s at the center of our lives?

Joan Chittister is a Benedictine nun, which means she’s a contemplative. She’s also an activist working with inner city children, which means she knows something about balance. She points out that the Talmud, the ancient rabbinical commentary on the Hebrew Bible, gives three reasons for Sabbath. The first is to equalize the rich and the poor, at least for a time. On a day when nobody works, nobody is exploited. The second is to give us time to evaluate our work, to see that it is good – or if it’s not. And the third is to give us time to contemplate the meaning of life.

The Benedictines honor Sabbath in what they call “Holy Leisure.” Today the word “holy” usually means pious, but it literally means “set apart.” In the Jerusalem temple the inner sanctum, where only the high priest could go and him only once a year on Yom Kippur, was called “the holy of holies” – set apart squared, you could say. And leisure is from the Latin licere, to give permission. So the Benedictines remember the Sabbath by giving themselves permission to set apart time to respect all people, to evaluate their work, and to reflect on the meaning of life.

That’s why Chittister says, “When people are sleeping on subway grates, it’s Holy Leisure that asks why.” Now do you see why Isaiah ties honoring the Sabbath to caring for the poor and freeing the oppressed? Sabbath asks us to step back from the tyranny of the urgent to ponder what’s important, and that affects what we do. It isn’t only about shutting things out. It’s also about letting them in so we can see them as God does.

If we don’t cultivate Sabbath, how will we ever quiet down enough to hear the voices of the poor? If we don’t free ourselves from slavery to constant doing, when will we ask whether what we’re doing is good? If we don’t periodically disengage from our culture’s demands to conform to the system, how will we ever know who we are? Psalm 46 says, “Be still, and know that I am God.” If we fail to set apart time to do that, how will we ever realize that money and accomplishment and our own egos aren’t gods?

So what could we do today to remember the Sabbath and keep it holy – set apart? One thing would be to take it literally. Observe a full day of Sabbath. Give up some things you regularly do -- working, shopping, watching television, or doing chores. Use the time to have a leisurely meal with your family, listen to music, read poetry, go to an art museum, stroll in nature, or daydream. See if that doesn’t become a day to anticipate, as the rabbis say, “like a bride.”

You can also schedule ten-minute “mini-Sabbaths” during a regular day. Stop what you’re doing. Find a quiet place and focus on your breath.

Here’s a really counter-cultural suggestion: unitask. Do one thing at a time with mindfulness.

Do what the rector of Trinity said in 1920 – play baseball, or play the piano, or play with your children. But do it for its own sake. Lose yourself in it.

Most of the suggestions I just made come from my friends Fredric and Mary Ann Brussat. Their website, Spirituality and Practice, has lots of good ideas. But we don’t need to look far. All monastic orders have what’s called a Rule of Life. Francis of Asssi resisted writing a Rule for the Franciscans. He said they already had one – the gospels. Jesus had some pretty good advice on this subject:

“No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.  Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?  Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?  And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you -- you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”

Jesus’ constantly told people that the kingdom is at hand. It was true when he was near, because he lived it. And it’s true when we live it, which means that Christ lives in us. That’s what being a disciple of Jesus is. Sabbath teaches us to do that. And we need to do it as a community. That’s one thing the Blue Laws got right. We do it as a community when we support one another in setting apart time, standing back from our striving, and letting the things of our lives in, so we can see them as God does.

Wendell Berry said the same thing more eloquently than I have in a short poem that I’d like to share by way of closing. It uses imagery we find all around us here in Warwick: 

Enclosing the field within bounds
sets it apart from the boundless
of which it was, and is, a part,
and places it within care.
The bounds of the field bind
the mind to it. A bride
adorned, the field now wears
the green veil of a season’s
abounding. Open the gate!
Open it wide, that time
and hunger may come in.