“Joy Together: Sabbath” Exodus 31:13 Ex 20: 8-11

For the past several years I have been collecting books to read about Sabbath. I was so captivated by the idea of Sabbath because I knew I was failing at it. So I spent hours reading, thinking, praying about what God was doing with the creation of the Sabbath. I finally settled into the comfort that the Sabbath was made for worship and rest. But one day during devotions, I was listening to and reflecting on a sermon, and I remember realizing that when I'm really tired, bone tired, I often push God away. All I want to do is drop into a deep sleep, not rest in the presence of God. Sabbath rest is about renewal - growing closer to God. Worship, eating long meals with friends, reading good books, snuggling with cups of tea. I try to have Sabbath moments throughout each day, but I also know that I, and others, need one full day where the totality of our attention in intentionally pointed at God to remember who we are.

However, Sabbath is a concept that if we are honest, we struggle with quite a bit in our society, even in churches. We have a hard time seeing it as a good gift from God. I still remember at one church I served that I did the same thing I do here - list my Sabbath in the bulletin. However, a church member asked me why I called it a Sabbath, when really its just a day off. But is it really? Is there more to Sabbath then simply having a day off to run errands and do the things that we find hard to fit into our schedules the rest of the week? What is the true purpose of Sabbath?

God spoke about Sabbath, this day of rest, several times to the Israelites as they were venturing towards the promised land. For this particular people, the concept would have been so foreign. They were used to working day after day, without any rest, in order to fulfill the demands of the Egyptian government. They had such a hard time imaging a new possibility, let alone living into it, that God had to keep telling them that the Sabbath was important. 

The Sabbath was to be a day of rest. A day to worship God. Yet, when we hear the word Sabbath is this what comes to mind for us today? A day of rest? I think a lot of people have one of two images or ideas that come to mind when they are thinking of Sabbath. The first may be similar to the scene set forth in the Little House on the Prairie Books, where Laura recollects that she couldn’t do anything fun on Sundays. She could just sit. No work. No laughter. No running around. No playing. Just sitting and reading the Bible. For her Sabbath was a day of rules, not a day of rest. 

The second idea is that Sabbath is simply the worship service on Sunday mornings. Once you go to Church and come home, the rest of the day is yours to do with what you please - one giant checkmark for worshipping God and now you can move on to the next thing. 

But was this really what God had in mind when it comes to Sabbath? In Exodus 31 we find God once again telling the people to keep the Sabbath, but has a beautiful line of explanation that follows: because the Sabbath is a sign between me and you in every generation so you will know that I am the Lord who makes you holy. 

Sabbath really exists to remind us that God is God and that we are not. It is to be our day to yes, worship God and draw our attention to God, but also a day to reorient our lives back to the God who both created us and provides for us. In ceasing to work, even just for one day, we surrender our lives to God and say with our lives, God I cannot live without you.

And perhaps that’s part of what makes Sabbath one of the hardest spiritual practices of our time - it is so radically different from what the world is telling us. The world says that we need to be working all the time or people won’t know our importance. We need to be busy all the time or people will judge us as lazy. That we need a calendar that is absolutely bursting at the seems or we aren’t doing enough. We live in a world that links our value with our production and Sabbath stands in the face of all of that and says that we are to stop. And that when we stop, even for one full day, that we are reminded that our value lies in God alone, not in what the world has to say about us. 

But we fear stopping. We seem to fear a whole lot more what other people will say about us then God’s deep desires for us, and as a result, Sabbath quickly becomes one of the two commandments that we willingly and sometimes proudly break, along with the command not to covent. And they are linked, are they not? We need to work harder and longer to keep up with what other people have around us, those things that we so desperately want for ourselves and our family. So we keep going, thinking that if we work more and have more then we can eventually rest some day down the road. All the while God, is inviting us to stop and rest now. 

We need to take time to examine Sabbath in our own lives, because the truth is what Sabbath means to us and how we practice it can change over time. How we practice Sabbath when we have young children in the house may be very different, by necessity, then Sabbath before or after kids. But the underlying premise remains the same - that we have a day of rest in order to be reminded of the good gift that God has give us and draw our attention back to our loving God who knows exactly what we need, even if we buck against it time and time again. 

We need Sabbath in the life of our families as well. I was recently listening to a podcast where an author of books about family life was sharing what the word Sabbath meant to him and his family. They had one hour each evening, where they spent time with one another, just sharing stories and reconnecting. They had one day each week, where they put nothing on their schedules  and turned away from the screen in order to appreciate God’s gifts in their lives. And they took one week together each year, where they went away to reconnect with each other and with God. Maybe that doesn’t sound like Sabbath to you, but the question is what Sabbath practices would work for you in your life right now? 

However, when I was studying abroad in Australia, I was also volunteering at a church, who took the practice of Sabbath to a different place then I had ever considered before. They had a congregational Sabbath, a weekend where everyone gathered, as the body of Christ, for rest and relaxation away from the city. We traveled to beach together, where we spent three days, laughing, eating, worshipping, and telling stories. This setting was where the young people were baptized and confirmed, and together we affirmed God’s good gift of rest. 

We all need rest. We need rest as individuals and rest as the body of Christ. We need margins in our lives where we continually draw our attention back to God. We never are too young or too old to not need Sabbath. May we find the joy of the day of rest, anew, together, today. Amen.