Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
June 2, 2002
Genesis 2: 1-3; Mark 6: 30-32
At a World Council of Churches meeting a few years ago, an African church leader came to the podium for his turn to speak. The nervous moderator informed the man that he only had three minutes to speak. (no, I was not the moderator!) The African objected with great dignity, saying, “I doubt that I only have three minutes, Mr. Moderator. I am an African and I take my time.”
That story reminds me of another story told about Rabbi Zusya of Hanipol. One day he started to study a volume of the Talmud, a collection of Jewish wisdom. A day later his disciples noticed that he was still dwelling on the first page. They assumed he must have encountered a difficult passage and was trying to solve it. But when a number of days passed and he was still immersed in the first page, one disciple gathered the courage to ask the Rabbi why he did not move on to the next page. Rabbi Zusya answered, “I feel so good here, why should I go elsewhere?”
Perhaps some day such a story will be told about me…but I doubt it. As many of you know, I was pretty sick a couple of weeks ago, as sick as I have been in a long time. Sinus infection, tired all the time, almost completely lost my voice (preacher’s nightmare – congregation’s dream). I had been visiting our daughter in Louisiana and came back sick. I needed to take more time off to recuperate, but since I had already been gone a few days, I knew I had to get back. I’ll work my way through this; I’ll tough it out. I could not give myself permission just to take it easy, to allow myself to get well. I toughed it out all right; I only got worse. I just couldn’t let go. I couldn’t just be still for a few days. I drove my wife crazy and about the second week of me being sick it was clear that if the illness wasn’t going to kill me, she would. I just could not bring myself to stop, even when that was precisely what I most needed to do. And I suspect I’m not alone. I live a life of frenzied activity, a life in which I constantly carry around a knapsack filled with tasks, responsibilities, and schedules. In the Buddhist tradition they speak of the “Monkey Mind.” This is the mind, which jumps like a monkey from subject to subject, worry to worry; a mind that never slows down…a mind much like mine.
Which brings me to what is for me one of the most difficult of all Biblical concepts – the concept of Sabbath. “And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and God rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that God had done in creation.” Sabbath – a day of rest, a day away, a day when the usual routines of a workaday world are put aside and not allowed to interfere, a day when the “Monkey Mind” takes a day off. But Sabbath is far more than simply a rest from work. One can be retired and still observe, indeed need, Sabbath. In her helpful book, Sabbath Sense, Donna Schaper points out that Sabbath comes from a word meaning “to separate.” Sabbath is a deliberate separation of time into different parts, a separation so essential that it becomes a Commandment– “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God and you shall not do any work …”
The story is told of a rabbi who was strolling through his garden on the Sabbath. He saw a tree that needed pruning and thought to himself, “I will prune it tomorrow.” In that instant, God caused the tree to wither and die. The lesson? You shall not even think about work on the Sabbath! Too legalistic? At one time I might have said yes. But now I’m not so sure. “I am an African and I take my time.” Do we take our time? I’m not sure we do. Which is to say that for many of us in today’s world, all time has become too much the same time. In the words of Donna Schaper: “In our middle-class society of today, fewer and fewer people organize their lives into work and rest slots. We work most of the time. We imagine little time off. We think we have obligations most of the time. We imagine little time for deeper emotions, like joy or weeping. All time seems the same. It is as homogenized as milk. In a world without Sabbath, time is the river in which we rush from one place to another.”
I don’t know how your Sundays used to be, but think how they are now. It is a big day for youth sports, particularly soccer – all the biggest tournaments are on Sunday. It is now a day to shop – all the stores are open, which means more people are working on Sunday – to do household and yard chores, to run errands we didn’t have time to run the rest of the week, to clean off the desk, call the family, and who knows what else. More than once I’ve had people ask if we could move worship to 9:30 on Sunday. Why? Then we would have more of the day – to rest? –no, to get more done! As one person has said, “I tried to observe Sabbath, but it ruined my Sunday. I had so much work to do.” Again, all time becomes the same. Why do stores have to be open seven days a week?
In the words of the great Rabbi, Abraham Heschel, “Time loses its beauty when every day is the same.” But Sabbath, you see, calls a halt to this frenzy. Sabbath dares to suggest that there is more to time than simply filling every empty space on our calendars. Sabbath invites us to steal time – our time – back from the chaos of a hectic world. It would seem that Jesus understood this. He and the disciples are surrounded by people constantly coming and going so that there was not even enough time to grab a meal. It is a dangerous time - Herod has just killed John the Baptist. It is a heady time as Jesus’ popularity clearly is growing by leaps and bounds. There is much to do, many places yet to go. But what does Jesus do in the midst of all this important activity? He issues an invitation to Sabbath: “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest for a while.” Can we do that – can I do that? Regularly take back a piece of our time, renounce our normal work and routines and just let go for a while? Can we trust that the world just might survive without us making things happen for a while? Of course, maybe we are tougher and more important than Moses and Jesus. They needed Sabbath – we don’t! And yet, how many people on their deathbeds say that they wish they could have spent just one more day working in the office? In the words of Wayne Muller, “Sabbath is more than the absence of work; it is a day when we partake of the wisdom, peace, and delight that grow only in the soil of time – time consecrated specifically for play, refreshment and renewal. The Sabbath has proven its wisdom over the ages. It gives us the permission we need to stop, to restore our souls.” Sabbath speaks an important word, and that word is “enough.” I think back to Rabbi Zusya reading that one page of the Talmud…for days. “I feel so good here, why should I go elsewhere?” What a radical concept in a culture which constantly screams: “MOVE ON, MOVE UP, MOVE OVER, MOVE, MOVE, MOVE!” In a culture of what one author calls, “insatiable instability” we forget what enough means or could mean.
I don’t know about you, but I have a difficult time being right where I am. Unlike the good rabbi, my usual refrain is something like this: “I feel so good here, but I really need to get over there.” Donna Schaper pretty well captures my life and I suspect a lot of us when she says, “The capacity to be happy where we are is pretty much lost in the modern world. Most of us like the page we are on quite well. It’s just that we are also looking over our shoulder at the next page or something ‘better.’ The next obligation invades the current obligation. We could really enjoy our son’s soccer match if it weren’t for the groceries we should be picking up later. These invasions of ‘now’ by ‘later’ are insidious, a form of mental enslavement. It becomes so easy for others –or for time – to own us.”
I begin to realize that Sabbath is a path to freedom. Sabbath is an intentional halt; in Sabbath time we say for now, I am finished, I have enough, I don’t need more than this; today I will live in the world, in my own skin, just as it is, in peace and gratitude. What a liberating idea! For isn’t it true that more often than not, the only time we know we have done enough is when we are totally exhausted and when the ones we love most are the ones we see least? How liberating to open up time in our lives when we can say to the world, “I have enough;” a time when “should,” “ought,” and “must,” have no power over us, when we simply are where we are and refuse our culture’s orders to move along. That is Sabbath.
And remember the commandment: “The seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.” Over 700 years ago, Meister Eckhart wrote, “God is not found in the soul by adding anything but by subtracting.” Finally, Sabbath is all about our relationship with God. Regular attention to Sabbath helps us to step off the seemingly unending treadmill of work and spend and worry and into the circle of glad gratitude for the simple everyday gifts and grace of God. Sabbath reminds us that we can step outside the corporate culture’s values and into God’s redeeming, creative, liberating presence, a presence which has never left us even as we have surrendered our sacred time to so many other gods.
Subtracting instead of adding. It seems to go against all we have been taught, but it is a new math that promises nothing less than fullness of life.
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