The Rev. Joseph Farnes
All Saints, Boise
Proper 16C
How do we observe the Sabbath as Christians? When we read the Ten Commandments, we are told to “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.” When we read Paul’s letter to the Romans (chapter 14), we see an instruction to a divided congregation: if you think one day is more special, then observe it; if you think all days are alike in holiness, then observe that; in neither case should you despise one another. And we also get Jesus’s healing on the Sabbath, doing work to set this beloved child of God free from her ailment.
And so we Christians have an unsure, uncertain relationship to the concept of Sabbath. What is Sabbath for?
When Christianity and Judaism took different paths in the centuries after Jesus, the Sabbath became one of those dividing lines. Judaism kept the Sabbath day as the seventh day of creation, beginning at sundown on Friday. Christians moved their holy day to Sunday, the first and eighth day of the week in honor of the Resurrection of Jesus to make every Sunday a little Easter. In Christianity you can see traces of the old accounting of time where certain major holy days get celebrated the night before as a nod to the Jewish reckoning of time where the day begins at sundown rather than midnight.
And in either case, we need to recognize the radical act of having a weekly holy day at all. Cultures and religions all around the world have had festivals and holy days, but it was the advent of the Sabbath in which not only was there a weekly day of celebration and rest, but that work was actively prohibited. No work. The endless rush of life was forcibly stilled. No work. We were not made for endless work – we were made for Sabbath, for stillness and sacredness in the presence of God.
Others may work seven days a week, but Sabbath demands that we stop. We are not meant to be hustling and breaking our backs every day to make profit for ourselves or anyone else – we, are meant to be children of God and enter into God’s rest.
The Sabbath is so sacred that we have had to debate what counts as work and what counts as rest on the Sabbath. Our Jewish siblings have the Thirty-Nine Melakhot, the thirty-nine categories of work prohibited on the Sabbath; you may do those things on most any other day, but not on the Sabbath. The Sabbath is too sacred to spoil; each Sabbath is a sacred gift of God; why profane the Sabbath by putting our attention on work? (A side note in reference to our Gospel reading: in those categories, there is not a single prohibition on healing another person on the Sabbath, so the leader of the synagogue is not speaking authoritatively for Judaism)
We Christians do not have the same attentiveness to rules, for the most part. We sit uneasily; Jesus was not a fastidious rule-follower but yet he was firmly planted in his Jewish tradition – Jesus did not reject the Sabbath by healing in today’s Gospel, for example, but he did point out that healing and setting this woman free from her ailment was a fulfillment of the liberating power of the Sabbath. If the Sabbath sets us free from work, so too does it set us free from all the other things that bind us. Jesus, as a Jewish teacher, is not going to reject the Law but bring it to its fulfillment.
So, then, how do we fulfill the commandment to remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy?
One of the obvious things is worship. Not as in a guilt-laden “be in church or God’ll be disappointed” kinds of thing, but rather to recognize how often we need a reset on our attention. For six days a week, we’re bombarded again and again by advertisements, by the news, by the pressures of daily life. We need an attention reset. We need to focus on what’s important: loving God with all our heart, with all our mind, with all our soul, with all our strength, and loving our neighbors as ourselves. We do this through gathering in worship as a community. And we most often do it in terms of the Eucharist, where we remember what Christ has done for us and we celebrate God’s gifts that we share.
One of the gifts in our Episcopal tradition is our written prayers. The challenge is not to say them mechanically, but to put our attention into them. It is a good spiritual discipline – to put our whole attention into those words and mean them, to hear them. Sometimes we have to slow down. Sometimes we get distracted and get to refocus, much like people do in centering prayer! The mind wanders, don’t fight it or get discouraged – just return!
And in giving our attention to what truly matters, we live the Sabbath life. We are re-created in Christ, raised with him, and we try again. The Sabbath reorients us toward Jesus, toward his life, death, and resurrection. It rebuilds us and renews us.
The other thing we can do is to be a little radical, a little rebellious, and bring the renewing power of the Sabbath into the rest of the week. We are endlessly inundated with the thousands of things we need to get done. They bleed into the Sabbath. But the Sabbath is a precious gift that sets us free … so what if we turn the direction the other way?
How do we reorient ourselves daily toward what most deeply matters? How do we reorient ourselves toward God, focus on loving God and neighbor, following Jesus day after day?
Take time out each day to do that. As the clamor and chaos and commerce of our society gets louder and louder, it’s harder and harder to rest only one day a week. We need daily rest, we need multiple times a day rest in order to reorient ourselves toward Jesus. We need daily prayer, we need multiple times a day prayer to reorient our attention. If your spiritual practices aren’t working for you, or if you need help figuring out what would help you, let me know! I’m happy to help! Daily prayer is essential as Christians. It brings the holiness of the Sabbath into the present moment.
The great Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote a masterpiece on the Sabbath entitled, strangely enough, The Sabbath. In it he points out that the Sabbath is a holy place, a sanctuary, made out of time itself. It applies to everyone – it’s not a sacred place someone must visit, or a sacred ritual only for the few, nor is it a place too holy that anyone who touches it must be punished like in our reading from Hebrews. Everyone, from the rich and powerful to the oppressed and even animals, get the Sabbath, whether they keep it or not. All of creation gets the Sabbath. It is holy regardless of whether you observe it. It is not something you must work to obtain, but a gift that you simply have to receive.
That same holiness applies to the everyday, too. When you take time to sit and pray, to let yourself sit in the presence of God, that time becomes holy. It is holy to sit and rest, it is holy to connect your heart to Jesus Christ and to rejoice in his goodness and love. Reorient your heart to loving God and your neighbor, every day. Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy – Remember the Sabbath’s blessing for you, and keep it holy by keeping it in your heart every day.