A Day of Rest
“A Day of Rest”
A Sermon preached by Rev. Daniel Smith
Sunday August 22, 2010
Lesson: Luke 13: 10-17
Well…they thought they had him. Working on the Sabbath? And he calls himself a Rabbi? God, have mercy! I bet you think I’m talking about Jesus, here. Maybe, so. Or, maybe I’m talking about any of the countless rabbis, pastors and priests who always work on the Sabbath! You may think your exempt from this crowd? Go ahead! Count yourselves among us! We are after all, a “priesthood of all believers” as our Protestant tradition proclaims! So, all you priests, all of you who are entitled to your own direct line to God, let me ask you…how do you do when it comes to the Number 4 Commandment? How do you do when it comes to honoring and remembering and keeping the Sabbath as holy? Me neither. If I dare say otherwise, I know
I’m struck by how often the so-called Sabbath controversies recorded in the Gospels involve a story of Jesus healing someone. The healing of a man with a withered hand, the restoring sight to a blind person, the curing someone with dropsy, and here, the healing of a woman with a badly bent back, all on the Sabbath, all under the watchful eye of religious authorities of the day who call him out every time for breaking the laws. Keep in mind that Jesus clearly believed in keeping the Sabbath holy, these are just the rare examples of his differing interpretations of the rules. Indeed, Jesus believed so profoundly in keeping the Sabbath, as did those around him at the time, that we can miss a deeper point to this story, that Jesus is not just teaching the value of healing on the Sabbath; more profoundly, albeit more subtly, Jesus is teaching a lesson about healing of the Sabbath.
In Jewish and Christian tradition alike, the day of rest is a day of healing – the healing of our often badly bent-over lives and world. A day without burden or work, a day without productivity, a hallowing and even a hollowing of time itself. The brilliant Jewish scholar, Avivah Zornberg has noted in her book The Particulars of Rapture that “Shabbat is the very enactment of “vacancy” – of “not doing”, of an apparent lethargy.” To this I would add the words of the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart who said “God is not found in the soul by adding anything but by subtracting.”
Indeed, our word vacation and vacancy share the same Latin root, from the word vacatio, which means to be unoccupied. Imagine that! Imagine not filling our vacations with so much doing that we end up needing a vacation from our vacations! Imagine God’s gift of the Sabbath as a time of stripping down all that occupies, fills up and weighs down our bodies, minds and souls. Sabbath as the enactment of that kind of vacancy!
What fills the space? According to the tradition, rest and peace, healing and wholeness of time spent purely in relation to our Creator in whose image we are made, whose model of rest on the seventh day we are called to imitate and to emulate.
Zornberg further riffs on the idea of Shabbat. She says it “invokes Keats’s notion of a “diligent indolence” as in a conscientious laziness. She likens Shabbat to “Marion Milner’s idea of ‘Doodles’. For the capacity to ‘doodle,’ undignified as that may sound, is an essential dimension to the creative life. This time of the ‘doodle’ is the time that resists premature certainties; resists the hunger of recognizable objects, the sense of a ‘compulsive and deceptive sanity’. This time of ‘diligent indolence’ allows the ‘thought or mood seeking expression’ to mature.”
I wonder how many of us have ever experienced this kind of healing rest – a rest not for the sake of recharging for more work, but a rest for rest’s sake, a time to doodle the day away, a time to unplug, unbend and unwind. Though I try and often fail to take a day between midday Friday and midday Saturday, what I end up doing in that time is a far cry from doodling and diligent indolence. Can any of us even begin to imagine taking a whole day (not a half or even two halfs put together – that’s cheating. really), but a whole day, every week, to do nothing but let our hearts, souls and minds “doodle’ and linger, waiting for our usually rushed thoughts and mood to mature! In our 24-7, plugged in world, the thought of it is practically preposterous! If you are having a hard time picturing this time balm (b.a.l.m.), you probably need it the most! Sabbath is God’s gift of a remedy, a cure even, for our relentlessly twisted tendency to put our “doing” before our “being”.
Considering the healing potential of Sabbath, the writer Barbara Brown Taylor offers the following paradox in her book An Altar in the World:
Anyone who [genuinely] practices Sabbath for even an afternoon usually suffers a little spell of Sabbath sickness. Try it and be amazed by how quickly your welcome rest begins to feel like something closer to a bad cold. Okay, that was nice. Yes you know you said you wanted this, but now you have had just the right amount of rest – maybe even a touch to much – so that you are beginning to feel sluggish. What if your energy level drops and never comes back again? What if you get used to this and want never to go back to work? Plus, how will you ever catch up after taking a whole day off? Just thinking about it makes you tired.
Yet this is just the kind of sickness that makes for deeper healing, the kind of grief that makes for joy! Taylor couches the practice of Sabbath keeping in another kind of spiritual practice, the practice of saying yes and saying no. She goes on…
Is weeding the garden really work if you enjoy it? Is looking through a Garnett Hill catalog really shopping? This, [she thinks], is how the rabbis were finally forced to spell out all the kinds of work that are forbidden on the Sabbath – because people keep trying to find ways to get to yes instead of no. If I am a doctor and someone calls for help, am I allowed to hel? If my dog gets sick, can I take her to the vet? Is striking a match really making a fire?
Yes it is. If you decide to live on the fire God has made inside of you instead, then it will not be long before some other things flare up as well. Most of us move fast enough during the week to outrun them, but you slow down for a day, then all kinds of alarming things can happen. You can start crying without having the slightest idea why. You can start remembering what you loved about people who died before you were ten, along with what you did when you were eighteen that still send involuntary shivers up your back. You can make a list of the times you almost died in your life, along with the reasons you are most glad to be alive.
Clearly, I can relate to Taylor’s appreciation of Sabbath, both the spell of Sabbath sickness, and the rush of faith and hope and love restoring healing that inevitably follows. I’ve felt both when on vacation, but all too rarely on weekly basis. I can also relate to this practice of “saying yes” and “saying no”, a worthy topic for an entirely different sermon. But this is precisely the practice that Jesus models for us all when contrary to common observance, he says “yes” to healing the bent over women on the Sabbath. In so doing, he not only says yes to healing on the Sabbath, he says yes to the healing of the Sabbath! In so doing, he says no to bondage in all forms, no to whatever keeps animals from quenching thirst, no to whatever keeps people from quenching their deepest desires for God’s mercy, pardon, healing and peace.
Next weekend, Nancy and I will be in DC attending her nephew’s Bar Mitzvah. The last time I got on a plane for a Bar Mitzvah was in 1996. A dear friend was similarly attending her nephew’s coming of age moment in Jerusalem and she invited me to meet her there so we could do some traveling together. I was 23, still coming of age myself. It was my first time out of the country. I arrived alone in Tel Aviv and boarded a bus at the airport that took me straight to the center of Jerusalem. When I got off the bus, the city was almost completely still. It was about 3 in the afternoon on a Saturday. I barely saw a soul on my ½ mile walk from the bus station to the hostel where I would be staying. The streets were vacant. Stores were closed. Vendor’s carts were covered. The entire city was at rest. And then it dawned on me. Of course! It was the Sabbath. There was something haunting about those first few hours – perhaps something like a Sabbath sickness, a taste of homesickness, even, not because I wanted to turn back, but because I found myself amidst a strange new home that offered a glimpse of the peace and stillness, and an echo of freedom, freedom from noise, from technology, from making and breaking and buying and selling, freedom from doing and freedom for being!
By nightfall, I would find myself at a local bar chatting up people, many younger than me, off-duty Israeli soldiers, holding a drink in one hand and unloaded Uzi sub-machine gun in the other. And all that was just the first few hours of an amazing trip to an amazing place full of eery and awesome paradox. It was there in
Not the peace of a cease-fire
not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb,
but rather
as in the heart when the excitement is over
and you can talk only about a great weariness.
I know that I know how to kill, that makes me an adult.
And my son plays with a toy gun that knows
how to open and close its eyes and say Mama.
A peace
without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares,
without words, without
the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be
light, floating, like lazy white foam.
A little rest for the wounds - who speaks of healing?
(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation
to the next, as in a relay race:
the baton never falls.)
Let it come
like wildflowers,
suddenly, because the field
must have it: wildpeace.
A little rest for our wounds! A Sabbath of wildpeace! A delicious, diligent indolence! The fields must have it. And so must we! So must our world. As we get back into our fall schedules, as vacations end and we pass batons of busyness from generation to generation, I invite us all to consider how we can we can experience the healing of this all but forgotten commandment. Start with an hour if you must, build it up to a day, but let it come. Let it come, indeed. Amen.