Roots…

Remember the Sabbath

Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham

October 29, 2006

Just before Deedee & I left our home congregation in Ridgewood, NJ, some of the men gave a lay service which they billed as the first Father’s Day Service ever. The Unitarian Society of Ridgewood, like many other Unitarian Universalist congregations, ends the church year early in June because Unitarian Universalists are the only people God trusts to take the summer off.

My friend Ed’s story has haunted me since I heard it. On this Father’s Day he wanted to celebrate the fact that he was free of many of the rules which had restricted his own father’s behavior, requiring him to play a certain proper role, not getting too close to his children, serving as a manly model. Ed, living in our more enlightened age, could play with his children from the time they were very little, he witnessed them being born, he even changed diapers! He could really let his hair down with his family. How wonderful it was to be free of all the restraints that had limited his intimacy with his father. He had an excellent job that was challenging for him, exciting and financially rewarding. Increasingly, though, he found that he had to stretch harder and harder to keep on top of his work, that phone calls, work brought home, and an unrelenting stream of emails were cutting into the time he had to spend with his family. He thought back to his job from a few years before, with less pressure and no intrusion into his home life – but without the excitement and challenge of his current job or the tempting financial rewards. Perhaps he should return to that job, but didn’t he owe it to his family to provide them the best home, the best education, the best opportunities he possibly could? Wasn’t he really working harder for them as well as for himself? But wait – weren’t these also a rigid set of role expectations, analogous to those which he perceived as limiting his father a generation before?

Ed’s story – and my own story on my journey to this place – is a story shared by far too many others in our congregations. It’s a story about becoming enslaved by the unrelenting expectations we find laid upon us to do more, to do it better and faster, to become more and more productive and less and less satisfied. Of course, at the bottom of the economic scale the story is far worse. Wages are stagnant and just keeping your head above water seems like a near-impossible task. But even in the midst of the greater prosperity – or seeming prosperity – which is more typical of our congregations, there is too little time to savor being alive.

Time spent with kids has in many cases gotten routinized into lessons, classes, social events and highly competitive sports teams and clubs which claw away at private times in the family and sometimes even intrude into Sunday mornings.

If this story seems familiar, or if you are retired but your children or grandchildren are suffering from something like this time poverty, know that you are not alone. The Massachusetts Council of Churches—the one state council of churches which allows Unitarian Universalists to be members—is promoting an initiative called “Take Back Your Time,” which started across the state last Sunday. Here are some facts they note about American patterns of work:

· Americans work an average of nine full weeks (350 hours) more per year than European workers.

· From 1973 to 2000, the average U.S. worker added an additional 199 hours—that’s five forty-hour weeks—to his or her annual work schedule.

· Americans have by far the shortest paid vacations in the industrialized world.

· America is the only industrialized country that does not have a law guaranteeing paid vacation time.

Somehow we have come to believe that only by working as hard as we possibly can will we be able to avoid being made redundant or uncompetitive. How is it that in the most powerful and wealthy nation of the world we must work as hard as we possibly can to survive and buy some little security for ourselves? How is it that we have become so driven? How have we allowed our perceived need for material security, for what we deserve, to rob us of time, the very substance of our lives?

This terrible pressure on the time of our lives, this demand for our very life stuff in return for survival or for keeping up or for meeting our obligations – this is a Sabbath problem.

Now I know that the very word “Sabbath” can clear a roomful of religious liberals in a New York minute – it invokes images of dreadful obligation, of stupid restrictions, of endless tedium and above all of “holiness.” I have to confess that the Sundays I grew up with as part of our little Pentecostal church in Madison, Wisconsin, were pretty drab affairs – chores, breakfast, Sunday School, church, dinner, nothing, nothing, nothing (grownups all napping), supper, chores, and church again. My father honored the Sabbath and enjoyed it, but he was so exhausted from the work of the week that the main thing he enjoyed was the opportunity to catch up on his sleep. That was not a good context for a young person to learn about the joy of Sabbath. In fact, Sabbath or Lord’s Day observance in my natal tradition provided me one of many good reasons to leave that church when I was sixteen.

Like so many religious concepts, I believe that the idea of the Sabbath has become encrusted with usages and traditions which rob it of the spirit in which it was first celebrated. One of our ministers, Alice Blair Wesley, remembering the celebration of the Lord’s Day from her own conservative religious childhood, recalls more joy than I do. Her people worked on remembering the Sabbath to keep it holy, and for them

"Holy meant clean.... Holy meant sorrowful.... Holy meant jubilant and affectionate.... Holy meant sexually arousing.... Holy meant self-reassuring.... And holy meant restful."[1]

Wayne Muller in his book Sabbath notes that in Jewish tradition “the Talmud … states that the righteous couple should make love every Friday night.” One practitioner told him that it is traditional among some groups to make love four times during the Sabbath.[2] As I’ve been exploring the real meaning of the Sabbath, I’ve come to realize that it’s not my grandfather’s idea of how to spend Sunday. Sabbath rest is for joy, for taking pleasure in this wonderful world and the people and things in it, for celebrating in the presence of the web of life in which we live, and move, and have our being.

Here in New England, our Puritan and Pilgrim ancestors passed censorious Blue Laws whose intent was to ensure that everyone would honor and respect the day. Like most attempts to legislate morality, however, these restrictions came to be seen as deadly legalisms which restricted individual freedom rather than promoting a true spirit of honoring a day of joy in creation. I must confess to a certain sentimental attachment to one remnant of Blue Laws back in northern New Jersey where Deedee and I lived; the malls were closed on Sundays, and the horrible traffic, the pressure of shopping, all were stilled for Sunday. No one could be forced to work in the mall on Sunday. Of course, that in itself points up the problem with legislating Sabbath time, because those who celebrate the original Sabbath on Saturday couldn’t shop on either day! Jesus in his teaching challenged some of the prohibitions which the legalists of his own day had put in place in their zeal to defend the Sabbath, arguing that healing someone was not a violation of the kind of work which was permissible on the Sabbath. As he puts it, “The Sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the Sabbath” [Mark 2:27]

Distinctly different reasons for remembering the Sabbath are given in the two versions of the Ten Commandments. In Exodus 20:11 we read, “For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day.” This gets some of us off onto creationism and science versus religion and so on with very little profit. A better way to hold this in our minds is to remember that God declared that the creation was very good. The Sabbath is an opportunity to share in the joy and wonder of the creation, to stop trying to change and manipulate nature all around us, stop trying to wrest our living from the earth, and just enjoy it. Love this earth which was given us as a garden. The second version of the commandment in Deuteronomy 5:15 anchors the celebration of the Sabbath to another memory: “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the LORD your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.” Now that you aren’t slaves, it seems to say, you can rest. Remember that – celebrate that freedom – every Sabbath.

I have to say a word in favor of following rules as a way of honoring the Sabbath. Sometimes we imagine that we can follow a spiritual practice but only observe the parts that we like. Time has this peculiar quality of disappearing from our lives if we don’t behave intentionally in using it. We might intend to do something for someone, but if we don’t make a plan to do it, we don’t get around to it. Rabbi Michael Lerner was counseling a couple who resisted the rigors of practicing the Jewish Sabbath on the grounds that they wanted to have the restful balance of Sabbath every day, not just on the seventh day. Rabbi Lerner suggested they try that and report back how it had gone after a year. “Not surprisingly, half a year later they reported what many others have reported: the pressures of the world of work are so powerful that they had not been able to create that kind of balance.” They came to realize that the Sabbath carefully observed represented the conquest of one day from the logic of the marketplace. When this couple began to observe Shabbat, the Sabbath, they found that it was in fact “the high point of their week and that they felt far more spiritually nourished than they had ever felt while they were trying to work the energy of Spirit into the rhythm of every day.”[3]

There are further extensions of the Sabbath idea in Jewish thought. The Sabbath each week is a temple in time, a day for admiring creation as God admired the creation and declared it “Very Good.” But the earth, too, deserves a Sabbath, and so the laws called for the land to have a year of Sabbath rest every seven years. In this way the soil was also preserved so that it could last through the generations. Here we see the wisdom of allowing the land to lie fallow, resting as humans are to rest and restore themselves each week. More than that, any one of the people of Israel who had been forced into slavery for debt in the course of the previous cycle of seven years was to be freed from slavery—the children of Israel had been taken out of slavery in Egypt and were not to re-introduce enslavement of each other. Might there be some wisdom in forgiveness of indebtedness in this manner to ease the burdens of those who have lost out in the struggle for survival in our hyper-competitive world?

Finally, every seven years of seven, that is, every forty-nine years, there was to be a Jubilee year in which all debts were forgiven and all land returned to its original owner. This year represented a grand redistribution of wealth, a starting over point, a return to equilibrium after years of accumulation by some and loss by others. This notion of a Jubilee year inspired the recent interfaith efforts to obtain forgiveness of debts for the poorest nations in the world. We are reminded by these ancient laws and practices that we did not create what we have come into possession of, that we are stewards of what we own, not just masters. At a time of insecurity and growing inequality, it would be well to remember this ancient wisdom.

The Lord’s Day was in fact a day of rest for my father on our farm. He rested because he was following a commandment. I hope that we as religious liberals can step back from our hostility to legalisms and commandments and find anew the true spirit of the Sabbath. We can’t force anyone else to enjoy this day, to revel in the creation rather than subduing it, to rest and to enjoy their resting, but we can begin to experience the joy of Sabbath rest for ourselves. We can model it and let our lights shine so that others can find rest as well. If we don’t step back, if we don’t take Sabbath time, we become wrapped up in the work of the moment and we readily forget what service we are really about, what our life force should really be expended on, what better land it is we are going to, what gifts we bring to the building of the Beloved Community. “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt.”

There are some practical steps we can take to defend the Sabbath for ourselves and others. We can use this day as a day of enjoyment with our families, adopting such rules as we find helpful to ensure ourselves that this is a day of rest, of enjoyment, of regeneration, of wonder at all that we have been blessed with. We can turn off the TV for the day and keep the commercial world at a distance. We can try to reduce the pressure on our children’s time from the over-scheduling of sports events which pack our days and leave us frazzled. We can encourage others to join us in Sabbath joy here in worship and during the rest of the day.

We can also expand the spirit of the Sabbath beyond one day. Let me close with a poem by Wendell Berry, our modern Henry David Thoreau:

“Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.”

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,

vacation with pay. Want more

of everything ready-made. Be afraid

to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.

Not even your future will be a mystery

any more. Your mind will be punched in a card

and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something

they will call you. When they want you

to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something

that won't compute. Love the Lord.

Love the world. Work for nothing.

Take all that you have and be poor.

Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace

the flag. Hope to live in that free

republic for which it stands.

Give your approval to all you cannot

understand. Praise ignorance, for what man

has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.

Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.

Say that your main crop is the forest

that you did not plant,

that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested

when they have rotted into the mold.

Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus

that will build under the trees

every thousand years.

Listen to carrion - put your ear

close, and hear the faint chattering

of the songs that are to come.

Expect the end of the world. Laugh.

Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful

though you have considered all the facts.

So long as women do not go cheap

for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy

a woman satisfied to bear a child?

Will this disturb the sleep

of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.

Lie down in the shade. Rest your head

in her lap. Swear allegiance

to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos

can predict the motions of your mind,

lose it. Leave it as a sign

to mark the false trail, the way

you didn't go. Be like the fox

who makes more tracks than necessary,

some in the wrong direction.

Practice resurrection.[4]

Amen