First Church in Cambridge, Congregational UCC
22 August 2004
A Cathedral in Time
Sunday, 29 March, 1967. Duke Ellington performs his Concert of Sacred Music, right here, in this Sanctuary at First Church in Cambridge. When I first found out this morsel of First Church history, I knew I was coming to the right place. Included among his catalogue of songs for that day would have been one of my all time favorite pieces of music: "Come Sunday". The choir at my last church knew this and so sang it on my ordination day and again on my last Sunday in June. If had I known Peter and this choir just a little better, and if had I my sermon together early enough, I might have requested it as an anthem for this Sunday. Instead, I trust you won't mind if I read two verses of lyrics. If you happen to know the tune, by all means feel free to sing along in your minds.
Lord, dear Lord of love,
God Almighty, God above,
Please look down and see my people through.
I believe that God put sun and moon up in the sky.
I don't mind the gray skies 'cause they're just clouds passing by.
He'll give peace and comfort to every troubled mind,
Come Sunday, oh come Sunday that's the day.
Often we feel weary but he knows our every care.
Go to him in secret he will hear your every prayer.
Up from dawn til sunset man works hard all day,
Come Sunday, oh come Sunday that's the day.
God bless you, Duke, and God bless you, Mahalia who sings these words so beautifully on one of the better-known recordings. A part of what Ellington captures in this magnificent piece is a deep appreciation for the Sabbath, a day set apart from work and toil, a day set aside to reveal our secrets to God and to receive God' mercy, peace and comfort. Come Sunday, indeed.
Both of our scriptures for today invite us to ponder, among other things, the meaning of Sabbath observance. In Isaiah, immediately following a profound and quintessentially prophetic call to God' justice, there is an equally profound and prophetic call to Sabbath observance. Apparently when we heed the latter call, we will find a sublime and selfless delight in the Lord, and a ticket to ride upon the heights of the earth. In Luke, the Sabbath lies at the heart of a controversy between a few overly observant temple priests, and Jesus, who (gasp) heals a disabled woman on the Sabbath day. In both texts, what we know as the day of rest is related to God's work of justice and liberation and healing in our world. The fact that Jesus chooses to heal a woman on the Sabbath may be seen as a tribute to the healing properties of a proper Sabbath observance, but more on that later. For now, let's fast forward to the twenty first century.
In our culture, among many Christians at least, Sabbath is one of those churchy words without much currency, is it not? We all know more or less what it means and where it comes from, but when was the last time you heard someone say "what are you up to this Sabbath?" You might hear the questions in a few circles of religiously observant Jews where the language of Sabbath is alive and well, but more often than not, the question would be "What are you up to this weekend, or on Sunday?" The tradition of referring to a day off, or Saturday, or even Sunday as a Sabbath has at least temporarily waned. "Come Sunday" these days, many are working, or making a trip to Home Depot, or drinking a few cold beers and watching the game, or messing around on the computer. Some may even sneak in a family dinner so long as it's over in time for Six Feet Under. Sorry if I sound a little cynical but I'm just coming off a long vacation where I'm only slightly embarrassed to say I spent a few Sundays doing precisely these things, minus the working, in the company of friends and strangers. But there lies a part of the problem with our American culture of time. In the absence of the language of Sabbath, and with increased hours peddling the insidious work-spend cycle, what little free time we do have becomes something of a monolith. We start confusing our need for Sabbath with our need for leisure and even with our need for vacation. This is a troubling trend when we consider that when we do get to spend a little time off, spending is what many of us end up doing, laying down cash or credit on meals, or recreation, or stuff that is supposed to add leisure to our lives. If only Sabbath was a day without much currency! If the idea of Sabbath is fading in our culture, it not because of the 'faceless secularism of mass culture', as some might suggest. The culprit is more likely our own consumerism.
To take a broad stroke which may or may not include you, we work more so we can spend more; the more we work, the more we spend, the less time we have to be anything but a worker or a consumer. Upon realizing this, we might have a little more sympathy for the intentions of the party poopers in Connecticut who framed the much-maligned Blue Laws. They were less concerned about the fatal curse of drink than they were about the commodification of leisure time. I heard somewhere recently that in colonial times a "certificate of necessity" had to be acquired in order to make any purchase on Sunday? I don't know about you, but there are days when I would welcome such a deliberate extra step before pulling out my wallet and caving in yet again to the cultural pressures to buy something I really don't need. The relationship between our culture's waning appreciation of Sabbath, and our economy's waxing pressures to work and spend cannot be overestimated.
One scholar, commenting on the changing role of the Sabbath in our society wonders if contemporary Christians are however unwittingly "coming to see their own church going as a form of leisure activity, as one choice among many in a service economy?"1 If this sounds familiar to any of you, and I hope not, please do me the favor of not letting me know until our little honeymoon is over (which hopefully will be never). Besides, I know First Church keeps many of you busy enough that leisure would not be a word to describe your time here. You may consider your time here some precious "family time", or "down time", or "me time." Without wanting to knock those phrases in the least, none of these expressions capture the richness of the biblical understanding of Sabbath. Just what then distinguishes Sabbath time, from say free-time, or family-time or down-time?
My title for today, "A Cathedral in Time" is a phrase I borrowed from the Jewish theologian and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. His brilliant and poetic book, called The Sabbath, offers a deep understanding of the day of rest that is rooted in the Bible, in rabbinic interpretation, and a Jewish theology of time. For Heschel, the eternal God does not reside in space so much as in time. If we want to commune with God, we must enter into God's dwelling in time, and so into a sanctuary, or a palace or a cathedral in time. It's a beautiful expression, don't you think? The Sabbath, Heschel writes, is "a day to especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul."2 It is a day set aside to become attuned to holiness in time and so to sanctify our time which is a gift from God. "Even when the soul is seared, even when no prayer can come out of our tightened throats, the clean, silent rest of the Sabbath leads us to a realm of endless peace, or to the beginning of an awareness of what eternity means."3 The day itself becomes an "intuition of eternity", an intuition of what heaven is like.
Heschel also discusses the social implications of Sabbath:4
To set apart one day a week for freedom, a day on which we would not use the instruments so easily turned into weapons of destruction, a day for being with ourselves, a day of detachment from the vulgar, of independence of external obligations, a day on which we stop worshipping the idols of technical civilization, a day on which we use no money, a day of armistice in the economic struggle with our fellow men and forces of nature—is there any institution that holds out a greater hope for [human] progress than the Sabbath?To set aside one day for holiness? To set apart one day each week for freedom? This casts our usual ideas of "free time" into sharp relief. Indeed, Sabbath is free time, but in every possible sense—time that is free from the "time is money" fallacy; time that is free from all doing; time that is free for being, with oneself, with one's family and neighbor, and with God. The Sabbath ought to be a reminder and a celebration of the fact that time, that one thing in shortest supply for so many of us, is wider and more expansive than our usual notions. That our time is God's time, and that in God's time, there is hope for our broken world, especially if we are able to lay even our most noble of burdens down from time to time. Heshchel believes we spend all of other days trying to in some way conquer space, by acquiring and managing places and things. The Cathedral in Time that is the Sabbath has no place or thing attached to it (no house to clean, no computer to fix, nothing to buy or to sell). Sure, it might be nice to light a candle and share a meal on the Sabbath, but even that is not necessary. The Sabbath is free time in the truest form, an opportunity to gain a foretaste of eternity itself. Is it any wonder that so many Jews, week after week, greet the Sabbath with delight in their hearts, singing songs about their love for the Sabbath, as if it was to be their bride! There was a time when I was hoping I might fall in love with a nice Jewish girl so that I could convert and celebrate the Sabbath every week as the Jews do. But the tradition is not limited to Jews. Why have we not done a better job claiming this language of Sabbath in our spiritual lives! One would think there is plenty of God's eternity to go around. To reclaim this language and this tradition could have marvelous effects on our lives. A day of freedom each week! Even using the word could be a start.
I'm beginning to wonder if those who "dis", as in disrespect, organized religion for its conformist tendencies are starting to realize that in some walks of American religious life, take First Church in Cambridge for example, we are here because observing the Sabbath is one of the least conformist, most anti-consumerist, ways we could be spending our time! When we fully reclaim the Sabbath tradition, we are reclaiming a deeply counter cultural tradition. A couple of labor lawyer friends of mine who are not particularly religious but who I sometime ago agreed to marry next weekend in Santa Fe have a great bumper sticker on their car. Perhaps you've seen it. "The Labor Movement: the ones who brought you the weekend!" I can't believe that it was only this weekend that it occurred to me that the Labor Movement had some serious help, namely from God and the ancient Jews, who brought us the Sabbath, and so at least half of our contemporary weekend. The bumper sticker always conjures in me a note of gratitude, as if the weekend was the Labor Movement's gift to the American people. We can thank the Labor Movement for their part, but we should feel a similar gratitude to God and to our spiritual ancestors for building for us a cathedral time and for passing along the precious tradition of the Sabbath. Indeed, the Sabbath is a gift to us from God carried through the generations. What tattered shape will this gift be in for our future generations if we aren't careful to keep it holy and distinct from our other relatively crass ideas of "time off" and of liesure.
As we begin to gear up for fall, as we worship together this Sunday, and every Sunday throughout this year, let us remember the Sabbath and let us keep it holy. May it be for us a day of freedom. When we enter the doors of this sanctuary, let us also enter into a cathedral in time. Come Sunday, Oh Come Sunday, that's the day! Amen.
1Dorothy Bass, in her book review of Holy Day, Holiday: The American Sunday, by Alexis McCrossen, printed in Christian Century, November 1, 2000.
2Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath (New York: The Noonday Press, 1951) p. 74.
3Ibid., p. 101.
4Ibid., p. 28.
© 2004, Daniel Smith