Sabbath

A sermon offered at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Lafayette, IN

September 4^th, 2005

By the Reverend Hilary Landau Krivchenia

Readings

Letter of John Paul II to the Bishops, Clergy, and Faithful of the Catholic Church on Keeping the Lord’s Day Holy, May 31, 1998

Sunday recalls the day of Christ's Resurrection. It is Easter which returns week by week, celebrating Christ's victory over sin and death, the fulfillment in him of the first creation and the dawn of "the new creation".

The poetic style of the Genesis story conveys the awe which people feel before the immensity of creation and the resulting sense of adoration of the One who brought all things into being from nothing. At the same time, it is a hymn to the goodness of creation, all fashioned by the mighty and merciful hand of God.

Christian joy must mark the whole of life, and not just one day of the week. But in virtue of its significance as the day of the Risen Lord, celebrating God's work of creation and "new creation", Sunday is the day of joy in a very special way.  

Coming as it does from the hand of God, the cosmos bears the imprint of his goodness. It is a beautiful world, rightly moving us to admiration and delight, but also calling for cultivation and development. The "work" of God is an example for man, called not only to inhabit the cosmos, but also to "build" it and thus become God's "co-worker".

The divine rest of the seventh day … speaks, as it were, of God's lingering before the "very good" work (Gn 1:31) in order to cast upon it a gaze full of joyous delight. This is a "contemplative" gaze. Sunday is also the day which reveals the meaning of time.

Thomas Merton said:

There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence  that is  activism and overwork....The rush and pressure of modern life are a form of violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.

Wayne Muller wrote:

Because we do not rest, we lose our way. We miss the compass points that show us where to go. We lose the nourishment that gives us succor. We miss the quiet that gives us. Poisoned by the hypnotic belief that good things come only through tireless effort, we never truly rest. And for want of rest, our lives are in danger.

Most spiritual traditions prescribe some kind of Sabbath, time consecrated to enjoy and celebrate what is beautiful and good. It is time to be nourished and refreshed as we let our work, our chores and our important projects lie fallow, trusting that there are larger forces at work taking care of the world when we are at rest.

Sabbath time is a revolutionary challenge to the violence of overwork, because it honors the necessary wisdom of dormancy. If certain plant species do not lie dormant during winter, the plant begins to die off. Rest is not just a psychological convenience; it is a spiritual and biological necessity.

It’s Labor Day weekend, a time often reserved to commemorate the history of Labor Unions, the struggles of the world’s workers for better working conditions and times of rest – even for days off.  Work is a blessing – to have work, income, is a blessing.  To find or make meaning in your work is a triple blessing.  At this time, the destruction wrought by the storms in the South have deprived so many of so much – including work and those who had no work have found themselves utterly without respite.  It is equally a curse never to rest as never to work.  Rather than reflect on Labor this Sunday we will consider rest – which is the counterpoint of work, and reflection, which is the counterpoint of action. I am going to share with you some reflections on the Sabbath and even to ask – what the Sabbath means to Unitarian Universalists.

To do that we need to do a little exploration.  It’s helpful to know a little about the history of the Sabbath, what it’s meant in the past, and what it might mean on a deeper level in the present.

Time flows in a wildly eddying stream – it did not divide itself into minutes, hours, weeks or years.  We are the creatures who wind the clocks and set the time.  In Sharon McKnight’s song Downstream she says:  “Time is in our hands – we call it past, we call it future owning neither.”  A powerful song.

Time is in our hands and our hands are in time but the Sabbath is intended – by whatever name it might be called – the Sabbath is intended to take time out of time so that those things which are timeless may be considered. The Sabbath is a time set apart. And yet it is a practice which is increasingly vanishing in the rapid current of modern life – a current like a flood that washes away our places of meaning, leaving us homeless.

The Sabbath began in the Hebrew tradition.  It is a celebration of the 7^th day of the world. Condensed, poetic – the story of creation in Genesis speaks of the 6 days of creation in which the creator was busy - drawing light out of darkness, form out of formlessness, and all life out of nothingness.  When the creator in Genesis looks back at all that has been wrought the book the creator says Vaheenay tov!  And it was very good.  And the scripture reads: and God blessed the 7^th day and made it holy.  Not just good but holy and therefore, on the 7^th day of each week at sundown – the start of any Jewish day – the Sabbath begins, the prayers harken back to the creation of the world.

Thus on Shabbat, there is rest, on the 7^th day because God rested – took time to celebrate the world by contemplating. And I have to say that given the track record of that very young God in further pages of Scripture – he could have used periodic reflection himself so as not to react so impulsively.  In devout homes the cycle of the week for Jewish people follows this pattern.  In the most devout homes Saturday continues as a day of utter rest and reflection.

This pattern is at least 2600 years old and by the early years of the Common Era it had long been established in Jewish communities.  It was this pattern of Jewish life that is followed, as well, in the books of the Christian Scripture.  Because Jesus was a Jew as were many of his followers, their week followed this same rhythm.  There are numerous places in Christian scripture in which the followers of Jesus advocate for and practice keeping the Sabbath. In Hebrews chapter four Paul offers: So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God; for whoever enters God's rest also ceases from his labors as God did from his. Let us therefore strive to enter that rest.” For Jesus and his followers, resting, sharing teaching, healing the sick, or helping others were the acceptable activities of the Sabbath of the seventh day.

By the late 1^st century of the Common Era some early Jesus followers had added a new celebration to their weekly calendar – it was called “the Lord’s day” and it was celebrated on the 1^st day or the eighth day of the week – depending upon how you count the week.  It was a morning worship of the resurrection of Jesus – on the day after the Sabbath and appearing to the women and the disciples.   It was a celebration of the continuation of hope, a deep longing for his return, perhaps on another first day.  It was a celebration of the fact of his life and the power of his teaching to bring new life to his followers.  Thus, the faithful added a morning of prayer and praise to their week.

            As the Romans increased their oppression of Jews, the early Christian Jews – who had enough troubles from Rome, were seeking ways to mark themselves, perhaps, as not Jews.  Then came Constantine, who began his reign as a Pagan.  Constantine was nothing if not a religious innovator.  As a Pagan he moved the Roman Feast Day – the day in which his imperial divinity was celebrated – to Sunday.  There were a number of Pagan religions which met on Sundays particularly Mithraism, which worshipped Sol Invictus – the Unconquerable Sun.  Still the stubborn habit of celebrating the Sabbath persisted until about 365 when the Council of Laodicea put a stop to the practice. After the Laodicean Council, Saturday observance was forbidden. Part of the law that was issued said: “Christians must not Judaize by resting on the Sabbath but must work that day and then if possible rest on the Lord's Day and any found to be Judaizers are anathema from Christ.”

            The Lord’s Day replaced the Sabbath among followers of Jesus.  Anybody else with a desire to thrive avoided the Sabbath – except, of course, the Jews, who paid for it.

            Meanwhile the Day of the Lord developed a rich texture and religious practice. It became tradition and deepened in meaning in the new religion of Christianity.  As a weekly celebration of Easter it no longer carries the same command to rest – but carries a profound sense of hope – because of the Easter message tucked away in it for many Christians.  Yesterday, driving back from Frankfort, I saw a sign outside a church that said: “The way of man is to a hopeless end but the way of God is to an endless hope.”

            And, as you heard in the passage from the letter of Pope John Paul II, the celebration of the first day, the Lord’s Day is still fiercely guarded.  The letter which is many pages long is strong proclamation of the importance of the Lord’s Day.  The late Pope went on to say: It is the duty of Christians therefore to remember that, although the practices of the Jewish Sabbath are gone, surpassed as they are by the "fulfillment" which Sunday brings, the reasons for keeping "the Lord's Day" holy remain valid, though they need to be reinterpreted in the light of the theology of Sunday.”  One troubling thing about this passage is that – at least for Jews and the world’s many other Sabbatarians – which included many early Unitarians – the practices were neither gone nor surpassed. 

            John Paul II also said in that same letter: “The Christian Sunday is wholly other! Springing from the Resurrection, it cuts through human time, like a directional arrow which points them towards their target: Christ's Second Coming. Sunday foreshadows the last day … already anticipated by Christ's glory in the Resurrection. In fact, everything that will happen until the end of the world will be no more than an extension of what happened on the day when the body of the Crucified Lord was raised by the power of the Spirit and became in turn the wellspring of the Spirit for all humanity.”

We come to the present -- in which, all too often, our time is spent in a headlong rush, a driven pace, a tumble toward the end of time. So I wonder, earnestly, if we might think carefully about the Sabbath – not just think about it but engage in deep Sabbath again so that we can stop spinning the clock.  We seem under the pressure of time, technology, terror, continuing in that headlong rush from moment to moment toward some critical moment.

            Oh – that we might – stop and consider time itself again – to treasure the present and to call ourselves and this headlong world to reflect on a Sabbath of the affirmation of life on earth, of our being here with one another and here with what the Unitarian Universalist poet Mary Oliver calls your one wild and precious life.

            Now that we have perhaps a slender beginning understanding of the Sabbath we can begin to really look at its place in life today. 

            Wayne Muller, a minister, social activist, and writer shares in his book Sabbath that as he meets countless people in his work he hears what he calls a universal refrain: "I’m so busy." Muller goes on – “The more our life speeds up, the more we feel weary, overwhelmed and lost. It all piles endlessly upon itself, the whole experience of being alive begins to melt into one enormous obligation. It becomes the standard greeting everywhere: "I am so busy." We say this to one another with no small degree of pride, as if our exhaustion were a trophy, our ability to withstand stress a mark of real character.

            Muller is pointing to the most elemental human need that the Sabbath addresses – the need for rest amid the labor of life.  This is not a simple truism – in the Hebrew Bible there were instructions for leaving fields fallow to allow them to rest as well as for having people rest.  There’s a recognition – in the rhythm of prayer, meditation, quiet, retreat in almost all religions and courses of study that we restore the mind, body, soul – a recognition that we require time to process, absorb, reflect as well as time to create, act, speak.  The work that we have to offer the world is better work for our taking the time for such restoration. More importantly the joy with which we live, the depth of our relationships, the quality of our own offerings of the heart are made finer by our taking time out of time.  Over time I’ve noticed among most writers, that there are long fallow periods between times of great creativity.  During the fallow period it can be easy to be drawn into pessimism – largely because we don’t respect, as a society, the time it takes to be a creative person, the unseen time of nourishing the roots.  And we don’t trust what we can’t measure in terms of immediate results.   Yet we need this time.

            We are little better than automatons without it.  And we are made to be so much more.  The Sabbath is not only about the rhythm of rest and work but of reflection and action.  Is it really possible to live ethical lives if we have no time to sit in the quiet of the soul and listen and choose.  It is through reflection that we find balance and wisdom.

Further the Sabbath is a time of freedom – on a simple level it’s freedom from work – but on a deeper level – if you exercise the power to stop reacting to the clock – the human made dimension of time – you gain a deeper freedom. In this deeper freedom you can discover another freedom – Wordsworth said – and my father oft repeated to me: The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers…”  In our headlong world we can get caught up in running hither and yon and we become slaves then to petty thoughts, mean processes, and goals that devour our short lives.  Perhaps the power of Shabbat – rest – can be to free ourselves from that slavery. 

            The Sabbath can be even more than that – it could be also for us to be restored in soul for the real work of life.  I don’t need a show of hands to know that in this room there are no people who earnestly believe that there was one literal week of creation – or even that the bible was really talking about a God with hands and feet that shaped things – we recognize that this is a metaphor, profound and beautiful.  Here we believe that creation is ongoing, evolving -- self-creating – and we are of it, in it -- we are shaping it ourselves.  The possibility exists to be restored by the Sabbath to reenter the cycle of constant creation that is our life – the constant flow of evolution.  The flow of evolution is being shaped in part by forces outside ourselves, beyond our control , but even more it is shaped by the choices of an individual or the collective members of a species – humanity – in particular.

              God rested and was refreshed in soul – the word for refresh and for soul paralleling each other – nefesh and nafash – thus as the work of creation paused soul – consciousness was breathed into the world.  When I look at the young God of the Hebrew Bible I can see that reflection was needed – and silence finally replaces the voice of God. 

            To be human is to live in time and aware of time.  Time is in our hands – we call it past, we call it future owning neither.  But while we own neither our imprint is everywhere – the imprint of our choosing – on our earth – in one another’s hearts. 

When I retreated with the Zen Master Thich Naht Hanh a few years ago I was awakened to the power of the moment – the power of our awareness of the moment.  To string a week of those moments together gave me a strong sense that we need practice to be awake and aware in the moment – not to rush to respond but to respond from reflection.  In a slowly dawning process, I wonder if the possibility of the Sabbath was and is and could be for this sort of mindful practice, this soulful practice.

Sharon McKnight’s song has another passage which says – the mind is rushing onward – is the heart prepared to follow?  To have time in our hands is to know that we may, perhaps we must – take time of time for rest, renewal, and for reckoning.

This is radical – to stop our headlong rush through space and time – to move back into deeper time and trust that wisdom awaits us if we seek it out, that peace is possible if we establish it in our hearts, one more rushed day won’t make the difference – though one day of careful reflection can make all the difference in the world.  The tragedy along our Southern Coast may have been partially averted if decision-makers had chosen to take time to reflect on the vulnerability of New Orleans and decided a few years ago – when they saw its weakness – to strengthen the levee.  Or if they’d decided to provide busses and help for the poor rather than issue an evacuation notice for everyone while knowing that those without transportation and means were trapped. Perhaps a time of reflection not on the fiscal bottom line but on the ethical path could have made a world of difference. We may not be, in fact, so helpless, we may just be moving too fast to encounter the wisdom that the present moment requires or has to share.

Our stillness is part of our work.  As silence is part of music.  Our anxiety about life speeding up is not addressed by continually speeding up – like the latest computer speeds up to respond to faster software – we need to go deep to refine our processors – not fast – but deep.  Emerson wrote:  There is a difference between one and another hour of life, in their authority and subsequent effect. The spirit Sports with time. there is no profane history; that all history is sacred; that the universe is represented in an atom, in a moment of time.  In 2005 we are still challenged to see that moment – that atomic recognition of wisdom and the cosmos that our forbear RWE alluded to.  But we can do it only if we still ourselves, call ourselves to a deeper Sabbath.

Perhaps this is the rest from which all worthy labor is made.  It is fitting that we rest on Labor Day weekend – or that we work to offer rest for those who have even less rest than ourselves.  The tumult of the last week still churns in us – but here we can release some of the tumult and hone ourselves to life.  As Unitarian Universalists we are free to find our Sabbath where we will – we need not follow the calendar of one god or another or of any ting we call God -- but we are not free to ignore it – we do so only at our own peril and the peril of our world.  Instead – we come here for lifted moments – and perhaps for the recognition that some of our Sabbath is to be found in the community of one another – yet we are here – perhaps we have responded to that deep hunger for the natural cycle that includes rest and reflection.

Abraham Joshua Heschel said – in the tempestuous ocean of time and toil there are islands of stillness where we may enter a harbor and reclaim dignity.  The island is the Sabbath.  May you each find the Sabbath in your hearts, in your lives, in this place and make it and keep it with one another.