"Remember the Sabbath"

According to the Hebrew bible, God introduced the sabbath to Moses during a very stressful time. The Hebrew people had departed from Egypt and were waiting in the wilderness, scrambling for food and doubting their leader. God stepped in and provided them with everything they needed to survive.

Still the people complained and hoarded, trusting neither their leader nor their God. When it came time to observe the sabbath, they were reluctant to do so. They wanted to go out and look for food instead. God became impatient and commanded them to keep the law and rest. He even gave them food so they would have enough to eat.

Three months later, God had to remind them to rest again. This time the message came to them as one of the ten commandments: "Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work; but the seventh day is a sabbath... [and] in it you shall not do any work; ...for in six days God made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them; and rested the seventh day; therefore God blessed the sabbath day and hallowed it."

Eventually the Hebrew people incorporated the sabbath into their week. To this day, observant Jews set aside the time from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday for sabbath rituals. What these rituals should be and what they really mean is a question the Jewish people have pondered for just as long.

According to a Hasidic tale, there once was "a rabbi who disappeared every sabbath eve, 'to commune with God in the forest,' his congregation thought. So one sabbath night they [sent] one of their cantors to follow the rabbi and observe the holy encounter. Deeper and deeper into the woods the rabbi went until he came to the small cottage of an old Gentile woman, sick to death and crippled into a painful posture. Once there, the rabbi cooked for her and carried her firewood and swept her floor. Then when the chores were finished, he returned immediately to his little house next to the synagogue.

"Back in the village, the people demanded of the one they¹d sent to follow him, 'Did our rabbi go up to heaven as we thought?' 'Oh no,' the cantor answered after a thoughtful pause, 'our rabbi went much, much higher than that.'"

According to the New Testament, Jesus questioned the meaning of the sabbath laws too. The rituals had grown empty, Jesus complained, and were carried out with a legalistic attention to detail that had nothing to do with the human spirit. He angered the religious authorities when he dared to perform a healing on the sabbath. "The sabbath was made for people, not people for the sabbath," he retorted.

Those of you who grew up in conservative traditions of all kinds can appreciate Jesus' rebellion against empty ritual and dried up disciplines carried out only for their own sake. You wouldn¹t be here if you hadn¹t questioned them yourselves. You wouldn't be here if you accepted mandatory rituals simply because someone else told you to.

From the beginning, when God commanded the people to observe the sabbath, an element of coercion was present. When adherence to rules becomes more important than the meaning of the ritual, however, the central truth and purpose of the ritual are lost. Perhaps it is human nature to become rule-bound and legalistic. For even though Jesus protested the sabbath laws, his present day followers are just as susceptible to rendering them meaningless, as were the religious people in his day.

And yet, there is a central truth and purpose to the sabbath that we should understand and explore, even now, in our 24/7 world where people work all the time. I'm the worst offender. I find it very difficult to set aside time to rest. Even if I'm not working, I¹m thinking about working. It may look like I've taken the day off, but I know better. I might even travel to a faraway place and call my trip a vacation. But do I ever really get away from work completely? Sometimes, yes. But more often than not ­ no.

When I think about my situation, I find there is little I want to do about it. I care about my work and the people I serve. It's not an attachment I switch on and off. And my days tend to be unstructured, highly varied, interrupted frequently by something more urgent than what I originally set out to do. It's ingrained in me to have work on my mind anytime, and sometimes all the time.

It's not just me. I know how hard all of you work. Whether you're laboring in an office, raising children, or waging peace, you rarely take time off. Everyone works long hours, juggling competing demands and needs, sometimes because we want to, other times because we must. Still, I'm not about to whine about working too hard, and neither are you. These days it's good to have a job.

Yet the idea of a sabbath ­ to set aside time in some shape or form, to step away from the routines of daily life ­ sounds like something we all need as well. It may not be the sabbath as traditional religions have observed it. Most of us would have great difficulty taking one day a week away from everything ­ including trips to the car wash and hardware store ­ to sit at home in quiet contemplation. I can't do it, so I won¹t ask you to. Even though we all might be better off if we did.

Perhaps the Hasidic story expresses the spirit of the sabbath in a way we can more readily implement in our own lives. The rabbi departed from his usual routine ­ even left his own community ­ to spend his sabbath time giving help to someone who needed it. He wasn't resting or communing with God as others imagined it. He had found a personal and private way to observe the sabbath instead.

Many of you may find the idea of sabbath more meaningful if you think of it in untraditional ways. Your sabbath can be the time you set aside to give service to others. The members of our congregation who serve dinner at Turning Point, for example, often speak of how much they enjoy their encounter with the people there. What begins as time we give away nurtures our own souls in the end.

Some of you may be setting aside time for a sabbath if you practice meditation, or take daily walks, or tend your garden, or nurture your family. It may not matter much what you do, if you lose your sense of time when you do it. In Jacob Needleman's book Time and the Soul, he realized that the trajectory of his life made less and less sense as he grew older. It was nothing more than a deep swift "river of time," taking him nowhere except to destruction. Not until he found a way to step out of it, step into the "back-flowing current" of that deep swift river, did he find insight and a sense of the eternal, which gave him peace.

Whatever you do, try to bring the spirit of the original sabbath into your life. As the story in Genesis recounts, God worked very hard the first six days of creation. The seventh day, God not only rested, God looked around and saw "that creation was very good indeed." Creation became God¹s gift to people and according to the biblical narrative, God wants us to enjoy it. The sabbath is a time to remember that life and the world in which we live ­ even the sad and beleaguered world in which we live today ­ is a beautiful creation meant for us to enjoy.

We tend to forget that is why we are alive. We lose track of this truth because we work so hard. The point of life, however, is not simply to work. We work so that we can enjoy the world in which we live.

"We are here," wrote Annie Dillard, "to abet creation and to witness to it, to notice each other¹s beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house." To remember the sabbath is to witness to creation, not simply to take time out. It is to see that our world is holy ­ not our rituals. When we see that truth, our souls are refreshed. We go back to work feeling less driven and pressured because we have remembered who we are and why we are alive.

When work and pressure and the nearness of war and all the concerns of the day fill every moment, it is time to remember the sabbath. Even now, when our livelihood and our lives require all our work and all our hope. Remember the sabbath. Creation is a wonder to enjoy and gives us joy. If we remember. Life is good. If we remember.

Sources for this sermon include Time and the Soul, by Jacob Needleman (New York: Currency/Doubleday), 1998; "The Hasidic Story," as told by Joan Chittister, can be found in Spiritual Literacy, by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat (New York: Simon & Schuster), 1996.