Whenever we
read the Ten Commandments in church during Lent and come to, “Remember the
Sabbath Day, to keep it holy,” I feel like I say it a little louder than the
other commandments. “Hear that, people,” I say to myself in my most prissy
priestly inner voice, “That means that you are supposed to come to church! Ha! So
there!” I know that I am wrong as soon as the thought enters my sinful head,
but I don’t think that I am alone in short-changing not only my practice of
Sabbath, but even my understanding of what it is.
Normally, we tend to think of Sabbath-keeping
as defined by the old Blue Laws, and as a bunch of things that we are not allowed
to do. In Germany, where I lived for seven years, stores were still closed from
Saturday afternoon through Monday morning, and people didn’t work on Sundays.
Sunday was for church, followed by tea-drinking and cake-eating with friends or
family, and a walk in the woods. It was wonderful! Unaware and uninvited at
first, though, I remember as a newcomer being annoyed when my neighbors would
chide me for the simple, quiet act of pulling up weeds in my front flower beds
on Sunday afternoons:
“It’s the Sabbath,” they would say.
“You shouldn’t be doing yard work!”
“It’s the only time that my husband is home
to watch the kids! Mind your own business!” I would grumble resentfully to the roses, annoyed at such strict adherence to rules that weren’t my own.
When thinking of the Sabbath,
our imaginations are often full of the movies and novels that portray the
stultifying Sundays of the past, where hours were spent sitting on hard benches
in church and then in boring conversations about the weather, as people
squirmed in their corsets in stuffy parlors. Or we tend to listen to the
intricate lists of things that our Jewish brothers and sisters must avoid on
the Sabbath (which, of course, is really Saturday, not Sunday) and we “tsk,
tsk” about the legalism of it all. We look down our noses at the Pharisee in today’s
Gospel, so law-bound that he would deny healing to a crippled woman, so afraid
of losing control that he would stop a divine miracle. “Thank goodness that
Jesus put an end to all of those silly little laws,” we gloat, as if we ourselves are not bound and gagged by our own rules. “Thank goodness
for Christian freedom.”
Freedom, however, is just as important in the Jewish understanding of Sabbath. In our reading from Isaiah, the prophet is
speaking to the people of Israel after they have returned from Exile, as they
are trying to reestablish themselves in their own land. Things are not going
well. People are scrambling for meager resources, looking out for “number one.”
God is telling them, through the prophet, that He will be with them, that all
will be well. They do not need to hoard their resources. They need to give to
the poor, to fix the broken structures of society. Fixing systemic evils like
poverty and injustice is a big task, an overwhelming mandate. Yet, honoring the
Sabbath, Isaiah points out, can be needed practice for putting one’s own
economic interest aside, for giving up control and resting in God’s ways. Giving
up making and spending money for one day each week can be, like the practice of
tithing, an opening to God from which more substantial life-change can flow.
It is no accident that the woman
described in today’s reading from Luke is suffering from a disease that causes
her to be bent over, as if by a mighty burden. We stoop from illness and age,
but also from oppression. Work, worries, poverty, hopelessness, rejection,
stress … they all cause us to bow our heads to the ground and to stoop our
shoulders as we trudge through the realm of space. When we are bowed down, we
cannot look up to God; we cannot look into the loving eyes of others. “Come to me all ye that travail and are heavy-laden,” says
Jesus in the old translation, “and I will refresh you.” Of course Jesus heals
the bent woman on the Sabbath, for such healing is a deepening of Sabbath,
rather than a transgression of it. By touching and healing the woman, Jesus is
giving her the things that Sabbath is meant to give to us all: freedom, fullness of
life, wholeness of body, and a welcome back into the strengthened community of
her brothers and sisters.
Rabbi Abraham Heschel explains the true meaning of Sabbath best, I think. He describes our lives in this world as a kind of self-made bondage to the dimension of space. In the world of space, our lives are all about things: the acquisition of things, the care of things, the conquest of things. In our obsession with things, we forget about the equally present dimension of time. Time becomes only something that we expend to gain space, to enhance our power in the world of space.[1] Time, however, should not be our enemy, for it is God’s realm. God is not a thing and is not restricted to the realm of space. According to Heschel, God comes to us in sacred moments in time, and the meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space.The Sabbath is a “day to mend our tattered lives,” to fill them with good things and to delight our souls with pleasure, resting in God. When we live in time, in the Sabbath, we are contemporary with one another. It becomes possible to “repair the breach” and “restore streets to live in,” to use Isaiah’s language.
Rabbi Abraham Heschel explains the true meaning of Sabbath best, I think. He describes our lives in this world as a kind of self-made bondage to the dimension of space. In the world of space, our lives are all about things: the acquisition of things, the care of things, the conquest of things. In our obsession with things, we forget about the equally present dimension of time. Time becomes only something that we expend to gain space, to enhance our power in the world of space.[1] Time, however, should not be our enemy, for it is God’s realm. God is not a thing and is not restricted to the realm of space. According to Heschel, God comes to us in sacred moments in time, and the meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space.The Sabbath is a “day to mend our tattered lives,” to fill them with good things and to delight our souls with pleasure, resting in God. When we live in time, in the Sabbath, we are contemporary with one another. It becomes possible to “repair the breach” and “restore streets to live in,” to use Isaiah’s language.
During our last official meeting with
the Nzundu’s, the Congolese family whom we helped sponsor through Kentucky
Refugee Ministries this spring, Ortance expressed her desire to continue to
visit us at St. Thomas, even though our sponsorship is over. She had found love
and acceptance among us, her first friends in a frightening new country, and
she wanted to keep in touch. But Ortance’s desire to visit us was frustrated,
not just by distance and lack of a car--obstacles that she could perhaps have
overcome--but by a far greater systemic burden. Her desire to visit us was
frustrated by the lack of Sabbath in this country. Ortance, like some of you in
our parish, has a job that requires her to work on Sundays. As a maid at a
hotel, she does not have control over her schedule, and she desperately needs
her job for her family to survive. She has no say in when she will work, no
real choice in how she can provide for her children. She does not mind hard
work, and she is grateful for her job, but she spoke to us with some
indignation. In her home culture, she explained, no one works on Sundays.
Sunday is a day to spend in worship, in time with family, in rejoicing and
delight. It is a pause in the back-breaking grind of poverty, a breath of
freedom in lives filled with hard work. “In America,” she pronounced, speaking
to us in the voice of the prophet Isaiah, “there is no Sabbath. There is no
time for God or for one another.” It is a voice that we should heed.
Sabbath, then, is more than a private relief, more than a gift of individual freedom. The Sabbath to which Isaiah and
Jesus both point is inseparable from the kind of healing justice that God wants
for the whole world. For Christians, you know, our Sunday Sabbath was
adopted because Sunday is the day that Jesus rose from the dead. Early
Christians called Sunday the “eighth day,” the day beyond the bounds of
creation, another way of framing Heschel’s mystery of the depths of time.
Ancient baptismal fonts were often octagonal, a reminder of the “eighth day,” of
the eternity that brings us together as the Body of Christ in Baptism. For Christians, Jesus brings both
Sabbath freedom and wild resurrection hope to the whole world.
Fifty years ago, at the March on Washington that we will commemorate
on Wednesday, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. also spoke of the realm of
time, of the inbreaking of God’s presence in our lives: “We have … come to this hallowed spot to remind
America of the fierce urgency of now,” King cried. Sabbath, too, is filled with the "fierce urgency of now." “Now is the time to make
justice a reality for all of God’s children," King implored.[4]
Did you read about the group of Louisvillians, all graduates of Male High
School from the class of 1969, who recently decided to gather regularly to “mend long-unspoken racial
wounds of their high school years,” to talk and to listen, to
laugh and to smile together and to try to understand? Fifty years after meeting on separate sides of the racial divide, living lives in separate spaces, these men and women decided to take some time to eat and talk and share. The title of the
front-page article in the paper reads: “Breaking Bread, Healing Wounds.”[5]
Sounds a bit like Eucharist to me. Sounds a bit like Sabbath, too. Such is the Sabbath to which we are
called.
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