Daily Press, by Art Wright: What do you think of when you hear the word “Sabbath?” Writing as a Christian, I have some very complicated feelings about this word. It is such a churchy word. Maybe some of you have it all figured out, but I often feel like the notion of Sabbath rest is unattainable in today’s fast-paced, modern world.
Barbara Brown Taylor, reminiscing about her own childhood, suggests that the commandment might as well have been, “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it boring.” She says Sunday was a day where you couldn’t wear blue jeans, play cards, ride bikes or go to the movies. All you could do was go to church in the morning, sit at home bored, and then go back to church again later in the day.
This idea of “keeping the Sabbath” strikes me as unnecessarily restrictive — something that is more likely to stop us from having fun than lead us to joy and life in abundance.
Rest is such a necessary and vital part of being human, and yet so many of us find ourselves hustling through life at a chaotic and blistering pace, simply trying to make ends meet and check all the boxes off on our “to do” list before collapsing into bed at the end of the day. Between work and volunteering and parenting and friendships and walking the dogs and grocery shopping and paying bills and cleaning the house and yard work and CrossFit and hobbies and all the other things, it’s no wonder that many of us spend a majority of our lives feeling tired and exhausted, to the point that it hardly feels like living at all. Honestly, I’m breathless after just writing that last sentence.
I can’t speak for other faith traditions, but Christian churches are hardly immune from hustle culture themselves: the temptation that we often feel is to do more things, add more programs and offer more worship services to reach more people. And it inevitably just leaves us tired and burnt out.
What if we could recapture the idea of Sabbath as a quality of time rather than simply a set of specific and restrictive rules to follow one day each week? What if we could reclaim the original impulse within Sabbath: restorative, life-giving rest?
Rest is profoundly counter-cultural, unfortunately. Our American cultural rhythm is work, work, work — and then collapse on the beach with a Mai Tai in hand and relax for a week. If you can afford to. And then repeat: work, work, work. In our culture, the idea seems to be that work leads to rest. If you work hard enough, then you deserve some time off.
This is almost exactly the opposite of the rhythm of life imagined by some early Christians, who used the Latin phrase otium sanctum to describe “holy leisure.” They argued that restful leisure, rather than frenzied work, lies at the heart of what it means to be human. Doesn’t that sound nice? It flips the script in our American context: life should begin in sacred rest and leisure, and then proceed outward in intentional ways, shaping our engagement with the world with a profound sense of divine purpose.
Sabbath rest is, of course, a commandment, right up there with “Thou shalt not kill.” It must be important, right?
In Deuteronomy 5, the Sabbath commandment says, “Keep the Sabbath day and treat it as holy. … Remember that you were enslaved in Egypt, but the Lord your God brought you out of there with a strong hand and an outstretched arm.”
Compare this to Exodus 20:8-11 and you’ll see that it’s unusual that Deuteronomy connects Sabbath observance to the plight of the Hebrew people in Egypt. Here is the key point, though: Remember when God’s people were the property of Pharaoh? When they were enslaved in Egypt, their value to Pharaoh was defined strictly on the basis of how many bricks they could make for the economy and how much work they could get done in the fields.
But God saved them and led them out of Egypt to a land of promise. And this Sabbath commandment is intended, in part, to remind them that productivity is not how God values people. In America our productivity leads to self worth and net worth, and many of us wear our exhaustion like a badge of honor. But in the divine economy, we are valued simply as we are, because God created us, and we bear the image of God. That’s it. No one has to earn God’s love.
In God’s economy, our value doesn’t come from what we can produce or accomplish, how much we get done on our “to do” lists, whether we learn a new language or write a book, what our job title is, or how great our garden looks. As Rob Bell once said, we are human “beings,” not human “doings,” and we are made in the image of a God who rests.
Remember this: you are not a machine. But we run the risk of feeling like one if we don’t slow down and find ways to experience Sabbath rest in our lives.
Here is a challenge: find a way to be kind to yourself in the week ahead. Carve out time to do something that is deliberately restful and restorative for your soul. Choose something that you know is life-giving for you. Intentionality is key here.
Go for a hike. Have coffee or wine with a friend. Waste time together. Play an instrument, write or sketch just for fun. Not to be productive. Not to “improve” yourself. Instead, try to savor this thing that we call life and remember that it is a gift. And remember that you are a person of infinite worth just because you’re you.
My hope and prayer is that each of us will find and experience true Sabbath rest this week. May it be so.
Prophetic Link:
“It has been confidently declared that this land could never become other than what it has been—the defender of religious freedom. But as the question of enforcing Sunday observance is widely agitated, the event so long doubted and disbelieved is seen to be approaching, and the third message will produce an effect which it could not have had before.” Great Controversy, page 605.3.