Nancy J. Duff
St. Columba’s Presbyterian Church, Johannesburg, SA
Sunday Evening, October 18, 2015
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| Rev. Prof. Nancy Duff and her husband Rev. Dr. David Mertz |
The Sabbath is endowed with a felicity that enraptures the soul, that glides into our thoughts with a healing sympathy. It is a day on which hours do not oust one another. It is a day that can soothe all sadness away.
They are beautiful words, but I have to admit they don’t ring true for me. I have memories as a child of visiting my grandparents in rural East Texas where Sunday required sitting through long worship services with long-winded preachers. As kids, we spent Sunday afternoons desperately seeking ways to occupy ourselves as the adults took naps, resting from the usual bustle of farm life. It may have been great for them, but to us children it was dull and tedious.
To make matters worse, so-called blue laws at the time required virtually everything to be closed. Movie theatres were closed on Sunday, and the few retail stores that were open had to post a list of items that could not be purchased on Sunday. And, of course, anything of interest to me was on that list. For me, Sunday was a tedious day of too much time on my hands and nothing to do.
That stands in stark contrast to how things are in the U.S. today. Except for privately owned stores, most retail stores are open on Sundays. Malls are crowded with shoppers. Restaurants are open to diners. And sports events are scheduled throughout the day, forcing some parents to choose between letting their children go to practice or insisting they go to church. And I have to admit, I often use Sunday afternoons to catch up with work for the week ahead. As Walter Brueggemann says about the U.S., “we are a society of 24/7 multitasking in order to achieve, accomplish, perform, and possess.”
Sabbath is “endowed with a felicity that enraptures the soul”? When Sabbath becomes a tedious day with nothing to do or just another day to work, the rhythm of life intended for us by the Sabbath commandment has been destroyed. It is destroyed, on the one hand, by the emptiness of endless and unwanted rest and, on the other, by the emptiness of “unending labor” and activity.
But when rightly understood, the Sabbath commandment provides us with a circadian rhythm of sorts. According to biologists, every cell in our body works according to the rising and setting of the sun in 24-hour cycles. We know that caffeine or computer screens or crossing too many time zones can interrupt that rhythm, as can being required or being compelled to work all the time or being required to do nothing at all.
The Old Testament scholar, Pat Miller, says the Sabbath commandment is about what the community does with time. The commandment provides the bookends of the time God has given us.
• On the one hand, the Christian tradition has sometimes, like Judaism, understood Sabbath to be the last day of the week – “the day toward which all other days move”: the day of rest and peace.
• On the other hand, Christian tradition has also understood the Sabbath to be the first day of the week –the day of resurrection and of hope for new beginnings.
Sabbath gives us the bookends of life itself where God has the last word when work is over and when God has the first word as life is renewed.
Those bookends are reflected in the two reasons the Bible gives us for observing the Sabbath:
• The book of Exodus tells us to keep the Sabbath because God rested on the seventh day. Sabbath has to do with the circadian rhythm of creation and our need to rest.
• The book of Deuteronomy tells us to observe the Sabbath because God freed the Israelites from slavery. Sabbath has to do with freedom from bondage.
Here we begin to understand Heschel’s beautiful words about the Sabbath – how it is endowed with a felicity that enraptures the soul: Sabbath brings peace born of rest and hope born of freedom and then infuses that peace and hope into our weekly lives and even into the seasons of our lives. But some people have entered a season of life that isn’t infused with the peace and hope offered by the Sabbath. Some people have entered a season of nothing to do while others have entered a season of endless work.
On the one hand, some people have entered a time of life that is emptied of anything meaningful to do. This may be especially true of the elderly who have entered the world of institutionalized care, where medicine has learned to take care of the body while killing the soul, where days are scheduled around medication, meals offered when others think it’s time for you to eat, and genuine encounter with human beings is often replaced by endless hours of TV. The blessing of Sabbath rest and Sabbath hope has been destroyed.
On the other hand, some people– by choice, necessity, or compulsion – have entered a time of:
• endless work that still doesn’t bring in enough income;
• or endless responsibilities that time cannot possibly accommodate;
• or endless attempts to fill the time with meaning through constant activity.
In both cases the Sabbath rhythm of rest and peace, of freedom and hope are destroyed.
Because we are commanded to keep the Sabbath holy, I believe the church is called to redeem the time for it’s own members and for those who live around us. We don’t have to force our practices and beliefs on others (as Sunday closing laws did) to help redeem the time for those with too much rest imposed on them and for those for whom “unrelenting labor” produces its own kind of emptiness.
There is, for instance, an Alzheimer’s village in Amsterdam where people with dementia are not locked in their rooms with strangers for roommates. They eat according to their own schedules and freely walk about the village that has a time square, a movie theater, and a garden. Caretakers are dressed in regular clothes watching over residents’ activities while cameras monitor their movements. There is only way in and out of the village, so everyone is safe. It is an alternative form of care that refuses to allow people’s lives to fall into a season of meaningless rest. We may not be able to duplicate such a project, but our own understanding of the rhythm of life offered by the Sabbath commandment should encourage the Church to find and support new and creative ways to redeem the time for those who are older, isolated, and alone.
And for those who are over-worked, the church should confess that it has been complicit in the Protestant work ethic that endorses culture’s expectation of endless work to reach success. The church should confess that we have not always spoken on behalf of those who labor long hours for poor wages with no time or resources for genuine rest. Our understanding of the rhythm of life offered by the Sabbath commandment should encourage the Church to gather its energy to ensure that the circadian rhythm of rest and peace and of freedom and hope is available to all.
The bookends of Sabbath as God’s last word and God’s first word apply to our life and death as well. Before he died, the neurologist and author, Oliver Sacks, compared Sabbath rest with his own impending death:
And now, weak, short of breath, my once-firm muscles melted away by cancer, I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual, but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life — achieving a sense of peace within oneself. I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest.
Knowing that our final Sabbath rest is with God does not take away the sting of death. It does not mean that death is a natural part of life that should be easily embraced. But letting the Sabbath have the last word of peace, when all our work is done, and the first word of hope as we face our own mortality means we know, as Paul writes, that in Christ neither death nor life nor things present nor things to come can separate us from the love of God who created us, redeemed us, and who sustains us throughout our lives.
At the close of each day of our lives and at the close of the last day of our life, we can pray:
O Lord, support us all the day long
Until the shadows lengthen
And the evening comes,
And the busy world is hushed,
And the fever of life is over,
And our work is done.
Then, in your mercy,
Grant us a safe lodging,
And a holy rest,
And peace at the last.
And we can add “and hope at the beginning,” because we know that our final resting place is not the grave. The only emptiness the Sabbath should ever hold for us is the empty tomb. Heschel’s beautiful words regarding the Sabbath – that it is endowed with a felicity that enraptures the soul – can ring true for us when we move into the rhythm of God’s first and last word, and when we know that Sabbath infuses the peace born of rest and the hope born of resurrection into our weekly lives, into the seasons of our lives, and even into the life to come.
