I tell people the most spiritual thing I do is
keeping Sabbath – which is nothing. At
least it is nothing the world considers successful. Everything I know about the Sabbath I learned
from Eugene Peterson, and from reading authors like Marva
Dawn and Abraham Heschel who have written on the
topic. Credit for this article goes to
them.
This article is a work in
progress. Let me know what you think and
I’ll keep rewriting as needed.
Sabbath: Making Space For God
And Life
What
would you do tomorrow if you found out today you won the lottery and you now
have all the money you need to live? Since
you don’t have to work for a living anymore, and since you can literally do only
the things you choose to do, what are some things you would stop doing? What are some things you would start doing
more of? What are some important things
you can now do because you have all the time and energy in the world?
Well I
have news for you: you have won just
such a lottery. And instead of a monthly
cheque for the rest of your life, you get something even better – a God who promises
to take care of your needs for the rest of eternity.
You find
it hard to believe? It’s too good to be
true? Do you dare to find out?
When God
rescues the ancient Israelites from Egyptian Slavery (The Exodus Story), he
instructs the newly freed slaves to keep Sabbath – the Jewish practice of doing
no work one day each week.
Sabbath
literally means “stop”. It is a day each
week to catch our breath so we don’t miss living life in the process of making
life happen. The luxury of a day of rest
must sound like winning to lottery to the Israelites who have known only forced
physical hard labour – the kind done while someone stands over them with a
whip. As good as rest sounds, it would
also be a huge test of their faith. Like
us, they need to know if God really can and will take care of them. And like us, it takes faith to leave work undone
and trust our world will not stop spinning, the sky will not fall, and the
bills will get paid.
The Sabbath
is indeed a luxury, only afforded to those with a God who promises to love and
care for them. For those whose life is
entirely up to them, they cannot risk rest and play. For them, constant vigilance is demanded of
them lest the sky falls in.
Having a
loving God is precisely the difference between the Israelites and their
Canaanite neighbours. So in two places
in the Old Testament, God gives instruction for this practice of “stopping
work”. “Do no work on the Sabbath,”
Exodus says, because God rested on the seventh day of his creation week. In Deuteronomy, they are told to stop work
because they are not slaves anymore.
Children
in that ancient culture show love for their dads through imitation. The Sabbath is an opportunity to imitate God
in the way he takes time to appreciate his own handiwork, just as we imitate
his creativity and craft the rest of the week like good children. We are children with a heavenly father,
creatures with a God. In a properly
ordered world, children and creatures find their security and livelihood from
someone else, not from their own industry and work-ethic. The Sabbath is an intentional re-calibration of
our centre on God as our source of security and livelihood. And along the way, we also re-centre our
souls on things that really matter – our faith, people we love, play and
leisure that keep us creative and human. The Sabbath is the antidote to the pressures
of a self-made world which compels us to empire-build, hoard and trample for
our own survival.
The Sabbath
is also the way to safeguard from the tyrannical nature of work. Ex-slaves may be lured into thinking that
hard work is the way to keep from becoming slaves again, only to end up
enslaving themselves. Ex-slaves, having
escaped the structure provided by the one holding they whip, have a way of finding
comfort in new slave-masters. The
Sabbath is a weekly practice of personhood – we do not live for work as slaves
do. And if we are prone to forget that
on the weekdays, the Sabbath is a day to correct the slave mindset.
But the
Sabbath is not to be confused with a day off.
Rather, it is a day on. It is the
day when we practice being fully alive in the life God created us to live,
enjoying the things God gives us for pleasure.
At the end of the Sabbath, we re-enter our work life allowing our
Sabbatical mindset to overflow into the rest of our week. Our work may wear us down. But we know within six days, there will be
the opportunity again to re-centre. So
goes the rhythm of life as a creature loved by God, living outside of paradise. And the Sabbath is not so much taking time
off, as it is honouring time. Everyone
gets the same time in a day, and no one knows how much time they have left. On the Sabbath, we practice treating time as
a gift we treasure, rather than a commodity we exploit.
Unlike
the Jewish Sabbath which is sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, the Christian
Sabbath can be any day that works for you.
It begins at bedtime and ends at bedtime one day later – as a reminder
that when wake up on Sabbath day, the day is already half over, that the world has
gotten along just fine without us while we slept. Four things we need for a Sabbatical
strategy: a plan and a place, for prayer
and play.
Besides
not working, the Sabbatical plan is your own personal declaration of
independence. If you feel enslaved to
something, the Sabbath is 24 hours where you are set free from your vices, with
God’s help. For example, someone who
watches a lot of TV can declare their independence by switching off. Someone who shops a lot can declare their
independence by buying nothing on their Sabbath. Someone enslaved by schedule and clocks can
declare their independence by not wearing a watch and making no
appointments. Ask God to show you your
slave masters, and you can declare your independence from them on your Sabbath
by practicing to say no them.
The
Sabbatical place is an environment where we feel free from work and vices, and
clear a space for encountering God. Go
to the place where you are most aware of God’s presence and your
creatureliness. Go hiking if nature is
your sanctuary. Go for a walk at night
if the starry sky is where you fell closest to God. Get away from your desk, your unfinished
homework or housework. It takes faith to
do that, but it can all wait until tomorrow.
Just because you can.
When we
get to our Sabbatical place, we get all the time in the world to talk with
God. Just as God takes in his creations
on his first Sabbath, we get to kick back and talk to him about what we have
done in our week. We get to celebrate
the triumphs and make mental notes on things that need our attention. But this isn’t self-improvement. Working on us can wait until tomorrow. The Bible and other books can facilitate
conversation with God. And don’t forget
to make space to listen – because it is a conversation where God gets to talk
as well.
Finally,
the Sabbath is time to play - doing things with people we love for fun. On the Sabbath, we have all the time in the
world to spend with people central to us, relationships that are our
lifeline.
Many
people tell me on their first Sabbath, they feel antsy or guilty for not
working. This is almost the clearest
indication of how far we have strayed from our Creator’s life rhythm, and how
much we need re-centering. Some students
tell me their grades improved when the learned to Sabbath. We may even live longer. But even if we don’t, at least we can say in
our lives, God has given us all the time we needed for the most important
things.
Bibliography
1.
Abraham
Heschel, The Sabbath
(Canada: HarperCollins, 1951).
2.
Marva Dawn, Keeping the
Sabbath Wholly (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989).
3.
Guy
Robbins Jr., And in the Seventh Day (New York:
Peter Lang Publishing, 1995).
4.
Eugene
Peterson, “Confessions of a Former Sabbath Breaker.” Christianity Today,
5.
----------------------,
“The Pastor’s Sabbath.” Leadership, Spring
1985, P.55-56.
6.
R.
Paul Stevens and Phil Collins, The Equipping Pastor
(The Alban Institute, 1993).
7.
Emilie Griffin, The Reflective
Executive (New York: Crossroads,
1993).
8.
J.I.
Packer, Growing in Christ (Wheaton,
Il: Crossway Books, 1994).