Materials
Remember the Sabbath Day to Keep It Holy
Pepperdine University Bible Lectures 2004
by R. Todd Bouldin
Good morning. Please listen as I read the fourth of the Ten Commandments, from Exodus 20:8-11:
“Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to The Lord your God; you shall not do any work – you, your son or daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. 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.”
The word for Sabbath in Hebrew means literally to stop. Cease. Cut it out. Every Sabbath, the call comes to stop working, stop being so productive, and to stop worrying about the future. Stop trying to be the Creator of your world – there already is a Creator, and He is the God of heaven and earth, and He holds your whole world in His hands. So relax. Enjoy the goodness of your God.
Prayer - Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who hast sanctified us by Your commandments, and commanded us to kindle the Sabbath lights. May the Sabbath-light which illumines our dwelling cause peace and happiness to shine in this place. Bless us O God and make Your divine glory to shine upon us. Enlighten our darkness in this hour and guide us and all Your children towards truth and eternal light. In Your beloved Son's holy Name. Amen.
We tend to think of the day as beginning in the morning. By contrast the ancient Hebrews began their day with sundown. Thus, their Sabbath observances always began the night before the seventh day. The idea behind this observance was that Sabbath began with real rest – we cease our work so God can continue His. In the words of Eugene Peterson, “We wake into a world we did not create, to participate in a salvation we did not earn.” The Sabbath was the gift of God to His people to lift their eyes weekly to their Creator and to remember that their lives were lived within God’s creative hands. The idea is this: Because God made the worlds and sustains your life, you can stop being so anxious. You can enjoy a day each week resting in the presence of God.
Meg Greenfield was an esteemed Washington, D.C. journalist for over a half of a century, and just before her death she wrote a book reflecting on her time in Washington. Though her observations were made about our Capitol City, I think her observations are probably just as relevant in Los Angeles or Nashville or Kalamazoo. She said that the town reminded her of high school. She writes, “High school is the preeminently nervous place . . . these are the years in which young people first encounter a make-or-break, peer enforced social code that calculates worth as popularity and popularity as the capacity to please and be associated with the right people (no matter how undeserving they may be), as well as to impress and be admired by the vast, undifferentiated rest.”
Though you and I might not feel those same pressures in quite the same way as a Washington politico, we have learned constantly to ask ourselves, “Have I done enough?” “Have I tried hard enough?” “Have I networked, impressed, or earned enough?” “Is everyone pleased with me?” We might as well be asking ourselves, “Am I one of the cool kids?” If we’re not working hard to impress, we’re working hard to thrive. Gone are the days when only one parent in a household worked. We now demand such a high standard of living for ourselves that both parents now work outside the home, either to survive or to thrive. Our children are busier than ever trying to be enough too – enough for their peers, enough for university admissions committees, enough for their demanding parents. I actually remember what it was like to have dinner every night at home around the table with my parents. Most of our children today will not have those memories. They will remember feasting on dinner in the car from the drive through at McDonalds as they rushed to ballet, soccer and piano in just one evening while their frenzied parents were preoccupied with a hurried crazy world in which they were doing well just to hold together – all of this just so we can be and have enough.
In the midst of all the anxiety about being enough, Sabbath says, “Enough is enough.” To all of our anxiety and worry over a life that still isn’t measuring up and only gets more exhausting, Sabbath is a gift and a command to us by demanding that we simply have got to cut it out. Perhaps that is why keeping the Sabbath is one of the 10 commandments – along with do not steal, do not kill, and do not worship other gods – because God knew that there is no greater way to lose your freedom than to make anxiety your lord.
There is no more counter-cultural activity in America than to observe the Sabbath Day. Its principles and values run counter to everything we are told about the American Dream and how to achieve it, so it is no surprise to me that we so easily dismiss it as the one command of the ten that was “before the cross” and so no longer an obligation for us to follow. I wonder why we have so resisted this commandment when it offers us the possibility of escaping the rat race we are on. I know the obvious answer: “Well, that command was to the Jewish people before the cross, and we have no record of the early church observing the Sabbath Day.” True . . . but I wonder if that really is the reason. I think we resist this commandment because we so want to be in control of our lives. I tell myself, “If we don’t have that ministry committee meeting Sunday afternoon, we are never going to get that ministry off the ground.” Or, “If I don’t clean my apartment this afternoon, someone might stop by and think I’m a slob.” Or, “If I don’t answer the phone call from work, I may not get the promotion or someone will think I am lazy.” Or “If I don’t work, then I will have to deal with my boredom and loneliness.” So we just busy ourselves to avoid the real cravings and thirst for control that runs our lives. To observe a Sabbath is to stop all the busyness, listen, trust, and rest in the great truth that God is in control of my destiny, and I am not.
By now, you probably have guessed that I am convicted that Christians should observe a Sabbath. The Bible commands it, Jesus did it, and our lives depend on it. I really believe that we have avoided Sabbath keeping, not because Jesus did away with it, but because we don’t like it. Others of us find ourselves worrying over which particular day Christians should observe as a Sabbath. I believe closest we come to a Christian Sabbath is Sunday. It is on Sunday that our freedom was won and death was defeated. It is on Sunday that time was reordered, and time was given a destiny. So, it seems to me that Sunday is a visible manifestation of what we believe happened on that day. We stop work and worry on Sunday because we celebrate the new reality given to us in Jesus. We stop seeking relationships on that day because we relax and enjoy the community of faith God has given us. We refrain from work so we can engage in the thing we have been made to do for all eternity: to worship and adore God. But I am not so concerned with which day we observe the Sabbath so much as that we do observe it on some day. To not observe a Sabbath is to work against the rhythms of creation and the design of God. To observe the Sabbath is to receive a great gift that has the possibility of renewing our lives and even re-energizing our work.
God Rested – So Can We
My dentist is a Seventh Day Adventist, and he constantly is reminding me that I should be observing the Sabbath because God ordained it from the beginning of time. Though I do not agree with the legalistic way in which the Adventists have observed the Sabbath Day, I do agree with his reasoning. The Sabbath Day was created on the seventh day of creation, not at Sinai. Genesis 2:1 says, “Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude. And on the seventh day God finished the work that He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all the work He had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that He had done in creation.” I could easily summarize what I am about to say into one simple sentence: God rested, so you can too! We rest because God rested.
I want to spend a majority of our time this morning making an argument for Sabbath keeping. It does not originate out of any command, requirement or legalism. I believe we should observe a Sabbath rest because it is a visible manifestation of the very nature of our Creator and the rhythms of His creation.
First, God is the Creator who rested. God Himself stopped and rested from His creation on the Sabbath, not because He was tired or exhausted from the week of creating, but to enjoy all that He had created and called good. The six days of work gave way to one day of taking it all in and enjoying the goodness of it all. Creation culminates not in work – not in productivity and achievement – but in worshipful rest. Now that is just how creation is – it’s true since the beginning. I don’t think it has changed.
Sabbath keeping then is your opportunity to see the creativity of God in all the ordinary days that lie between Sabbaths. Sabbaths sanctify time by helping us look back to a week of blessing and to see the hand of God in it all. To observe the Sabbath is not merely to take time off, but to reclaim time for the Name and worship of God. Even though some of us do not work on Sunday, we have come to see Sunday as our time to run errands or do things around the house. We may even turn to work on Sunday evening in preparation for Monday. But the purpose of Sabbath, and I will assume Sunday here, is not to worship then run home to another endless to do list. The purpose is to rest, as God did. It is to cease doing anything that has to do with achieving, earning, producing or consuming and to just enjoy the abundance of God’s grace and goodness.
In their book on the Ten Commandments, Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon discuss this idea that Sabbath is the goal of work. They write, “Built right into the core of our lives is this gracious rhythm of work and rest, activity and reflection. So to keep Sabbath is to be in step with the way God intends the world to work, it is to participate in an act of “recreation” in which we are put back in touch with the way in which God intends for life to be enjoyed. Sabbath is not the joy of not doing work; rather, Sabbath is perfect work, the end of work, the end of it all.”
Our culture tends to be more influenced by Aristotle than Moses. Aristotle claimed that the only purpose of rest is to regain strength for more activity. Thus rest is a means to an end, and the end is greater work. But from its Hebrew roots, the Bible always has claimed just the opposite. Works is a means to an end, and the end is Sabbath rest. The Sabbath exists not for the weekdays but the weekdays exist for the Sabbath. Sunday is not the interlude to the week but its climax. We have such a difficult time grasping that truth. We only think of rest as a means of catching our breath so we can do all the other things we haven’t had time to do, or as a temporary relief so that we can return to the rat race of improving a life that is not quite good enough. But nothing is more heretical or enslaving than to say “not good enough” to what God has created and already called “good.” Do you feel like by working one more day that you’re going to improve on the work of God? “Not good enough” will always keep you wandering in the desert and unable to enjoy the fruits of the promised land. In the face of a culture that keeps us wandering in this desert, I believe it is time for the church to “redeem the time” and reclaim a day in which we join God in resting and looking at all He has done, and saying, “It is good.”
I believe the failure to observe a Sabbath rest has come at great cost to us as Christians and as churches. We have been created to live in a rhythm of working six days and resting on the seventh. Work and worship. All creation from humanity to the animals and even the dirt has been created with the need to rest, not just to recover strength, but to recover the goodness of the creation of God. If we resist that rhythm long enough, it isn’t long before the weariness returns to the soul and we lose the vision of God’s good work in our lives. If you can see the goodness of God in the midst of the life you already have, then you have left the desert, crossed the Jordan, and you have entered the promised land.
Second, Sabbath reflects the justice of God. Micah 6 tells us that God loves to do justice, and justice in the Bible is primarily economic. The Sabbath is an outgrowth of God’s concern that His people also be just. Sabbath is for the rich and the poor. The rich often are oppressed by their workaholism and their consumerism, while the poor are overburdened by their work. To both, Sabbath day is a day of rest. On this day, the gap between rich and poor is lessened as all come to rest in the gracious hand of God. In our culture, the poor and middle class struggle to find any leisure time. Leisure is a luxury of the rich. On Sabbath, all is rearranged and we are reminded that God is the creator of all things, not free markets or consumer demand. On this day, a little justice is done and all take rest in the provision of God.
Third, Sabbath reminds us that God is sovereign. Sabbath teaches me over and over again that God runs the world and I do not. We don’t have to work harder to make everything come out alright. God invites us to work in Genesis 1, but at the end of the day, our labors have their limits and God must provide. Even God trusted that He could rest and creation would continue. I think that one of the real truths contained in the practice of this commandment is that we do not have to bear the whole weight of the world, or our church, or our business, or our family on our shoulders. We can stay away from the office for one day, stop the shopping and the errands, put away the projects at home, and just for one day live in the conviction that the world will not go to hell if we take a rest because there is a God in heaven who holds it all in His gracious and good hands. Sabbath asks us to just stop and to trust.
Finally, Sabbath claims that God alone is Jehovah-Jireh, our Provider. Because God is our loving Creator, He has generously provided for all of our needs. During Sabbath, we remember, recall and re-create because remember that God is loving toward us and resourceful beyond all of our actions, and longs to bless us beyond our achievements. And when Christians observe a Sabbath on Sunday, we declare that God has ultimately provided for us in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Therefore, it is not surprising that the early church changed their day of worship from the seventh to the first day of the week. I do not believe they intended to free themselves from a day of rest devoted to God. In fact, in Acts 20 we see the church coming together to break bread on this first day. So, when we join the followers of Christ around the world in redeeming Sunday for the resurrected Lord, we say with a common affirmation: “We are free! We will not be afraid. We will not allow your demands, your expectations and your pleasures to enslave us. We will lift our eyes to heaven and behold our resurrection hope. We will rest because we believe that our God is good.”
JESUS AND THE SABBATH
The observance of the Sabbath then expresses the character of God as one who loves justice, who provides, who is sovereign and can therefore be trusted, and who is a creator who Himself observes Sabbath. The Hebrews honored the Sabbath because by doing so they expressed the character of Yahweh and consecrated time to remembering His work in their lives. It was not merely a matter of legalistic rule-keeping – Sabbath, like the other commandments, was not meant to be a burdensome rule but a way of freedom and rest for busy people.
It was the attempt to make Sabbath into merely a legalistic rule that Jesus so resisted. Jesus never forbade His followers from observing the Sabbath; He simply resisted the attempt by religious people to take what was a gift and make it a rule. Let’s spend a few moments looking at the relationship of Jesus to the Sabbath.
Jesus observed the Sabbath Day. In Luke 4:16-19 Jesus begins His ministry in the synagogue on Sabbath Day, “as was His custom”. As one who was steeped in the Judaism of His family, Jesus honored the Sabbath regularly and never disparaged the Sabbath or gave any indication that one should not honor it. In fact, the Sabbath in many ways describes the ministry of Jesus. Sabbath was a day of freedom, of rest and recovery of the good creation God had made. That in essence describes the ministry and gospel of Jesus, as He expresses in vv. 18-19: to preach good news to the poor, to free the oppressed, to give sight to the blind, and to proclaim release to the captives.
In Mark 2:22-28, Jesus and His disciples are walking through a field of grain on the Sabbath day, and some of his disciples picked some of the grain and ate it, a violation of the rules that had sprouted up from the Sabbath tradition. The Pharisees were appalled that the disciples would disregard the Sabbath rules and evidently with the consent of Jesus Himself. Jesus then pointed to the story of how David and his men ate the showbread when they were in desperate need of food, even though it was a fragrant violation of the law to do so. Jesus then said to them, “The Sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the Sabbath; so the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.”
Rather than giving reason to disregard the Sabbath day, this story makes the more important point that the Sabbath is a gift to humanity and not a rule for the religious. God gave us the Sabbath day, not so a wall of ultra-fussy legalisms could be built up around it, but so that we might come to live in the rhythms of the Creator and the creation He made.
Again, Luke tells the story in Luke chapter 13:10-17 of a woman who came to Jesus in the synagogue where he was teaching on the Sabbath. The woman was bent over like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, a condition she had suffered for eighteen years. Jesus saw her, and he said, “Woman, you are set free from your infirmity.” Luke says the woman “straightened up and praised God.” The religious leaders were incensed that Jesus would heal someone on the Sabbath day, evidently because healing was considered prohibited work. Jesus responded that they were hypocrites because they would lead their donkey to water on the Sabbath but not free a woman from her disability. By His gentle touch, Jesus healed and freed a woman who probably had not been touched in eighteen years. The Greek text underscores the extent of her healing (she was “rebuilt”) and her praising (it was continual).
The Sabbath is about rebuilding people for the praise of God. If we have a Sabbath practice that enslaves people rather than one that frees people, we have the wrong Sabbath. Contrary to popular opinion, Sabbath also does not take us away from people but takes us into the lives of people in ways that free them and do not enslave them to our addictions or neediness. We most keep the Sabbath when we embrace people rather than procedures. I believe that Sabbath creates the possibility for deeper caring for the people in our lives because there is no need to hurry – time on that day is a gift to us that we can pass on to others. If we are resting in grace, we can bring others into that freedom as well.
SO WHY DO WE NOT KEEP THE SABBATH?
The Puritans of North American strictly observed a Sunday Sabbath, and the freedom to observe it was one of the main reasons they left the shores of Europe to come to America. The Puritan “blue laws” were named for the color of paper they were printed on, but they required church attendance and punished anyone who got there with haste or too showy of a horse. They forbade unnecessary visiting, smoking and sports.
Sunday remained a consecrated day in American culture even after Puritanism lost its hold. In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville observed with surprise that few Americans were “permitted to go on a hunt, to dance or even to play an instrument on Sunday.” (sounds like he must have visited a Church of Christ). As recently as 125 years ago, it was impossible to find a museum or a library open on Sunday. Eighty years ago, football was considered too vulgar to be played on Sunday. This year, we saw an outrageously vulgar football game on Sunday. Many of you who are a bit older might remember standing in line at the bank to get cash on Friday for the whole weekend because banks were closed and spending sometimes was limited by the days. Anyone older than 30 remembers a time when Wal-Mart was closed on Sunday too. The expectation now is that all stores will be open on Sunday, and we are miffed that they close at 6:00 p.m.
"The Lonely Days Were Sundays" is the title of a book about growing up Jewish in the churchgoing South, but there is no more lonely Sunday. The lonely Sunday has become the overscheduled Sunday – soccer, Little League, and catch-up-around-the house Sunday. Americans still go to church, but only between chores and sporting events and shopping malls. As one writer pointed out last year in an article in the New York Times, megachurches now have ATMs so that you can waste no time between services and the mall.
Of course, the erosion of Sunday as a consecrated time has been coupled with the ballooning of work hours in America, the increase in the number of people working more than one job, and with an increase in time devoted to shopping and acquiring. Our members are not immune. When was the last time you heard one of the members of your church tell you that they resist going to Wal-Mart on Sunday because they stop acquiring for one day in order to just rest? Most of our people no longer even schedule work around Sunday worship and rest. It’s no wonder that our culture no longer observes a Sunday rest because even God’s people have turned a holy day into a hurried day.
SO HOW DO WE PRACTICE A SABBATH?
I suggest that we start by stopping and planning. We have to stop the assumption that Sunday is just another day to get our work done. We have to stop planning work, errands and obligations for Sunday. As a minister, I have made a commitment to our congregation to not plan any congregational meetings on Sundays except for fellowships, picnics and other activities where community and not an agenda is the goal. We also not only have to stop the obligations but also start planning for the Sabbath. Jews make preparations throughout the week, knowing this will be a day for rest. We should “gather our manna” on other days knowing that Sunday is around the corner, and the rest will be all the sweeter if we have scheduled ourselves to allow for it.
I would be happy to share with you how I observe the Sabbath. As a minister, it is a bit more difficult because Sunday is a “work” day. But I vow to have my sermons and classes finished by Saturday so that Saturday evening through Sunday evening is restful for me. The sermons don’t really feel like work when they are just an overflow of the real work of preparation during the week before Sunday. I also have made a commitment to our congregation to not plan congregational or committee meetings on Sunday afternoon or evenings. We do not have Sunday evening worship for the same reason. When Sunday becomes a frantic rush to and from religious activities, rest somehow gets lost in the holy mix.
Anyone can practice a Sabbath. I began as a graduate student at Princeton. Despite the enormous demands of graduate school, I always left Sunday evening for walks, friends, and the Sunday paper. I violated that practice in law school, and my GPA was much lower than it was at Princeton when I took a Sabbath. I am a miserable failure at perfectly practicing a Sabbath – last Sunday, even as I was preparing for this lecture, I found myself at Best Buy purchasing a TIVO and then repenting for being a spender rather than a receiver and a giver on this day. When I practice it well, after service and occasionally a lunch with good friends (not a ministry obligation – that can come later in the week), I head home where I may go for a walk with my dog, go for a hike, spread out on the floor with the Sunday paper, read a book that has been waiting near my bed, write a letter to a friend, call my family or a good friend, listen to music, go to the beach, or see an art exhibit. Others may wish to play a sport, fix dinner for friends, or spend time in prayer or Scripture. I play only classical or Christian music on Sunday to keep my mind focused on worship and praise to God. Bottom line: I do whatever is God-honoring, restful, and renewing and I avoid anything that feels like an obligation, an achievement, an acquisition, or work. Here are a few suggestions:
Things to Say “Yes” to on the Sabbath
1. Worship that is joyful, restful, contemplative.
2. Feasting and eating together.
3. Playing
4. Spending time in nature or God’s creation.
5. Gardening
6. Small group study and worship.
7. Doing something to serve or contribute to the freedom of others – visit a shut-in or a prisoner; feed the homeless.
8. Doing something different from what we do on other days.
9. Whatever is truly renewing and re-creating.
10.Creative entertainment.
Things to Say “No” to on the Sabbath
1. Work in any form.
2. Errands
3. Anything that feels like an obligation.
4. Meetings and productivity.
5. Shopping
6. Sadness and mourning:
Pinchas H. Peli in The Jewish Sabbath states, “The Sabbath does not ‘do away’ with sadness and sorrow. It merely requires that all sadness be tabled for a day so that we may not forget that there is also joy and happiness in the world and a more balanced and hopeful picture of life. Even mourning is suspended in order to prepare the community for Sabbath. The Sabbath, by its very nature, comforts and heals.”
7. Canned entertainment – video games, arcades, television.
8. Phone calls related to work or an obligation.
Sabbath observance is a reflection of the nature of God and the rhythms of creation. Creation culminated with the act of stopping. Why did God stop? Rabbi Elijah of Vilna put it this way: “God stopped to show us that what we create becomes meaningful to us only once we stop creating it and start to think about why we did so. The implication is clear. We could let the world wind us up and set us to marching, like mechanical dolls that go and go until they fall over, because they don’t have a mechanism that allows them to pause. But that would make us less than human. We have to remember to stop because we have to stop to remember.” (Judith Shulevitz, New York Times, “Bring Back the Sabbath”).
Let’s be a Sabbath people again. If we again return to our most ancient roots and observe this day of freedom and rest, I believe we will see the renewal of our people and rediscover a spiritual life and community that have long been missing among us. It will require “work” to not work, planning to not plan. Most of all, it will require us to trust in the goodness, sovereignty and provision of our God when all our labors cease. That sounds like a worthy undertaking to me. The promise comes to you as it did to the Jews of the ages: If you will keep the Sabbath, the Sabbath will keep you.
Questions
I wish to close this morning with this reading from Hebrews 4:9-11:
“So then a Sabbath rest still remains for the people of God; for those who enter God’s rest also cease from their labors as God did from His. Let us therefore make every effort to enter that rest.”
Amen.
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