The Rest of the Week

What stood will stand, though all be fallen,
The good return that time has stolen.
Though creatures groan in misery,
Their flesh prefigures liberty
To end travail and bring to birth
Their new perfection in new earth.
At word of that enlivening
Let the trees of the woods all sing
And every field rejoice, let praise
Rise up out of the ground like grass.
What stood, whole in every piecemeal
Thing that stood, will stand though all
Fall—field and woods and all in them
Rejoin the primal Sabbath’s hymn. [1]

Chickens, Eggs, and Blue Laws

I’ve lived on three-and-a-half continents, and one of the things that I’ve noted are the huge differences in blue laws from place to place.

• In Kentucky, most counties were dry, but even in wet counties, alcohol sales were prohibited on Sundays when I was in college.
• In New Jersey, most everything was closed on Sunday when I was in grad school in the 80’s. At that time, it was even illegal to drive a car on Sunday in the beach town of Ocean Grove.
• I remember one Sunday taking several items to the checkout at a Walgreen’s in Puerto Rico back around 1999. The person behind the register seemed to pick and choose items at random, telling me I could buy some things but others I could not. When I asked why, I was simply told it was Sunday.
• In Germany, it’s basically impossible to buy any groceries on Sunday unless you live near a train station, where you can usually find something akin to a convenience store, with basics available for an inflated price.
• In 21st century California, there’s not much I can’t buy on Sunday, though apparently most banks are still closed here on the Lord’s Day (in some other places, I understand this is no longer the case).

And California is no different than most states when it comes to a lack of blue laws. Many states that still have them are repealing them; and in some that don’t, state courts are declaring them unconstitutional.

Of course, the United States doesn’t have an official religion, and so prohibiting transactions on the Christian sabbath that are allowed on the Jewish or Muslim sabbath seems to be recognizing Christianity as having a place in our society that other religions don’t have. And so I wonder which came first, the chicken or the egg? Did we quit caring so much about observing the Lord’s Day when laws protecting it disappeared? Or were the laws repealed because we no longer bothered to observe the Lord’s Day?

First & Fiftieth

The Christian sabbath is itself a subject of some confusion. Our Bible speaks of the seventh day — Saturday — as being the sabbath, and yet we observe the first day — Sunday — as our holy day. The reason behind this is less than satisfying to people who want an uncomplicated answer, but we call Sunday the Lord’s Day because it is not just any sabbath, but the sabbath of sabbaths — the eighth day, the Day of the Lord, the day of both the resurrection and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. During the season of Easter, Sunday is both the first day and the last (or fiftieth) day. Theologically, it is the day God truly began a new creation (as on the first day) but this was accomplished through Christ, who opened the gate of eternal rest for God’s creation (as on the seventh day).

And really, this idea of the fulfillment of God’s intention for creation is what is prefigured in the first sabbath mentioned in the Bible: the seventh day of creation that we learn about at the very beginning of the second chapter of Genesis. In other words, the idea that the first biblical week is completed by a sabbath day shows us that God’s will for us and for the rest of creation is not curse, but blessing. [2] But please note that this promise is neither for individual humans nor for humans alone, but for all people and the whole created order.

The poem I read at the beginning of this sermon is from a collection of sabbath poems by Wendell Berry called A Timbered Choir. Berry is a deeply spiritual man, but, alas, not necessarily much of a churchgoer. Instead of attending worship, he attends to his spirit on Sundays by communing with nature on his farm in Henry County, Kentucky—a communion which often results in poetry. His poems celebrate the place of humanity in nature, even while they bemoan the distance between modern humanity and God’s intention for us. They observe the cycles of life and death, feasting and grieving. And one of the most beautiful aspects of Berry’s poetry is his commitment to a life of work on the land, even while he practices a kind of letting-go—allowing the land to do its own work without him—and his observations regarding the healing of the land apart from human activity.

Biblical Sabbath

A holy day set apart to go to church when convenient, but mostly to serve our whims and hobbies, is not the kind of sabbath that the Bible talks about, nor is it what Wendell Berry talks about in his sabbath poems. Sabbath is a gift from outside ourselves that occurs at the end of a God-given week—or even a God-given life—and must be observed in relation to the work of God in the world. “Anybody can observe the sabbath,” said Alice Walker, “but making it holy surely takes the rest of the week.” [3]

Keeping a sabbath after six days of indifference to both our neighbor and to the rest of creation may be a sabbath kept, but it is not a sabbath kept holy. The first thing to remember about the sabbath is that, though we may think of ourselves as keeping it, it is really we who are kept by the sabbath. The day of rest is a gift, and as such, it cannot be something we do. In the Hebrew Bible, we see two remarkable texts that make this clear: The first one is the one we heard earlier, when God rested on the seventh day. If even God ceased “doing” on this day, then it only follows that keeping it ourselves must be in the context of God’s creative activity. And the second one is a reminder in Deuteronomy (5:15) that observance of the sabbath is a celebration of Israel’s deliverance from slavery—once again, a gift not of their own doing.

The Jewish observance of sabbath, as many of us are aware, is very different from our own. A great deal of preparation goes into its observance so that all things are finally in order by sundown on Friday and no work need be done for an entire 24-hour period. And work includes the operation of just about anything mechanical, meaning that, to an Orthodox Jew, even pushing a button is forbidden on the sabbath. I remember once visiting a church member who was in a Jewish hospital in Manhattan. There was an entire bank of elevators, but one of them was set aside as the sabbath elevator, meaning that on the sabbath, it stopped at every single floor—no button need be pressed.

Though Jesus clearly believed in the sabbath, he taught that common sense should prevail in its observance. Rules that caused more stress than peace were not the original purpose of the sabbath, for the sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the sabbath, he taught. [4] One of the main reasons the religious establishment turned against Jesus, in fact, was his willingness to perform healings on the sabbath. [5]

Sabbath-Keeping, Peacemaking,
Justice-Creating, Earth-Healing

And this, in the end, is what we must remember: Sabbath is a day of peace. Peace is not simply the absence of war, but is the presence of health and wholeness and justice. The first sabbath, according to the Bible, was a celebration of God’s wholeness when God completed the creation of the heavens and the earth. Even when humankind turned aside from God’s intentions, God continued the work of justice and healing and release from labor, commanding Israel to remember God’s work to make them whole whenever they observed the sabbath. And for Christians, it has to be noted that Jesus refused to separate a day of rest and peace from the work of healing and justice. The gift of sabbath is simply not complete as long as any part of creation is groaning in labor, awaiting God’s redemption. [6]

And so if we would be a sabbath-keeping people, we must also be a peacemaking people, an earth-healing people, a justice-creating people. As we stand at the doorway to Lent in this, another year of our Lord, let us pause and ask ourselves not only what we should let go of for Lent, but, more importantly, what is missing. What gift of God is lacking in us, what gift of God is underappreciated or unnoticed, or even what gift of God is being hoarded by the lives we lead. The universe is no less complete now than it was thousands of years ago. It is, unfortunately, by our own doing that too few have way too much, while too many have far too little. The sabbath is the day to let go, to cease our striving, and to ask ourselves what’s missing—not only from our own lives, but the lives of our neighbors, and the life of the planet.

Let us approach a new season of the year asking ourselves these important questions, accepting God’s gifts without hoarding them, and practicing the healing generosity of the One whose Name and whose Image we bear as Christians.

©2012 Sam L Greening, Jr

NOTES

1. Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997 (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1998), p. 13.
2. Michael Horton, The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), p. 410.
3.  Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (Boston: Mariner, 2003), p. 351.
4.  Mark 2:17
5. See Matthew 12:9-14
6. See Romans 8:22-23
   
   
   
   
   
   

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