Faith is about service to God, which also means service to the human community. But that service includes ceasing, sabbath.
The new community which is formed by faith is both about work AND rest.
Sabbath means:
- To cease Production and Consumption
- To rest
- To enjoy
- Re-creation
- To breathe
- Too often, it means to be released from a tight or confining place. In the Exodus, Egypt was referred to as "a narrow place." But how many of us have too narrow of lives the rest of the week, seeking openness in worship or in whatever we do on the weekend.
2 Chronicles 36:21b - All the days that it lay desolate it kept sabbath, to fulfil seventy years. For the chronicler, it is a theological understanding of the reasons for the exile in Babylon as Jeremiah had predicted. But for some reason it sounds a whole lot like times when we work so hard with no time off until our bodies force sabbath upon us through exhaustion, illness or injury.
Jesus is Lord of the Sabbath: he healed, fed his disciples and all sorts of other things on the Sabbath which got him in trouble with the Powers that Be. But he also took time away, apart, far from the crowds and the preaching and the healing. He wasn't confined to the set schedule of religion, but he still took sabbath. My concern is that I find in this a justification for workaholism that promises to make up for days off not taken or interrupted or truncated or otherwise missed. There is always a danger of finding what I like in scripture.
Poets understand the Sabbath and the preacher's strange relationship with it better than most preachers do. Etheridge Knight wrote about writing 5,000 words one night about how writing poetry is doing something about the world, but his questioner didn't buy it, and neither did he completely. Robert Bly finishes his poem Things to Think with the lines:
When someone knocks on the door, think that he's about
To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,
Or that it's not necessary to work all the time, or that it's
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.
To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,
Or that it's not necessary to work all the time, or that it's
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.
2 comments:
Interesting. Take this in the context of your own "About Me" information. We all *feel* busy these days. Is it the information age that incents us to think that way? Or is it just that we feel like our "personal space" is no longer quite personal. Under either circumstance, compare to those who live in Europe.
Regardless, I wish that communities would observe the peace and communion and sharing that comes with Sabbath. Sometimes even church feels like an obligation. Would it were not so.
Bill "V." Collins - not a parishioner but a fan
Would that obedience were more than obligation, duty, and chore. Personal space and personal time seem to be in even shorter supply as we work so hard to provide for all our creature comforts. Such strange paradoxes.
Thanks for the thoughts Bill.
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