The Rev. Dr. Pamela Dolan
Sabbath Time: A Sermon for Homecoming Sunday
September 24, 2023
The Episcopal Church of St. Martin
Text: Exodus 16:2-15
In the beginning, according to the seven-day Creation story in Genesis, God created the world by bringing order to chaos and by setting everything in its proper place. The ordering of time was part of this creation. Presumably, God lives in an eternal present, having existed before all time, and God will continue to do so for eternity, when even time is no more. But for God’s creatures—all of us—time works rather differently; we usually experience it as moving in one direction, with a definite sense of before and after. We also think of time as quantifiable, as something we can measure, and as a commodity, something that can be spent and saved and given away. We even insist that time is money.
In Godly Play, we describe the fourth day of Creation as the day when God gave us a way to keep time. We say that the sun, the great light that rules the day, and the stars and the moon, the lights that rule the night, were given to us as “a way to count our days.” And it is in that same story in Genesis that we first get a reference to what we now think of as Sabbath time: after God creates a world that is divinely blessed, that is good and very good, God rests.
Honestly, I have no idea what it means for God, who is omniscient and omnipotent, to rest. (When my children were little, this part of the story always seemed like a good way to encourage my children to take their naps.) And yet I believe that the inclusion of a day of rest in the Creation story is a bit of wisdom that deserves our careful attention. Somehow the Creation is not complete until the day of rest is included in the pattern. So, one implication might be that the pinnacle of creation is not humankind, as so many of us think, but Sabbath itself. This is why some people call the sabbath the Crown of Creation.
Even if you don’t want to take it that far, it is clear that those of us made in the image of God are expected to imitate God by engaging in both work and rest, finding a sustainable rhythm in our days. For our Jewish forebears, God’s example extended beyond taking a day of rest once a week. It meant that every seven years was a sabbath year, a year of rest. In theory, if not always in practice, a sabbath year was for letting fields lie fallow, releasing captives, and forgiving debts.
In today’s passage from Exodus, we glimpse again this pattern of work and rest. We are in the thick of a story of a people who are tired and frustrated. Things are not going the way they had hoped. They are genuinely afraid of hunger and thirst, of desert heat and threat of over-exposure and exhaustion. They complain, and from the safety of our pews it’s easy for us to mock their complaining, and God listens to their cries and responds with compassion. As the words of the Psalm so poetically puts it, while praising the faithfulness and generosity of God: “You satisfied them with bread from heaven/You opened the rock, and water flowed.”
God works with the people of Israel, giving them instructions about how to participate in their own salvation by going out and gathering the food he provides. You’ll notice, though, that even in this extremely precarious situation, God does not want people to work unceasingly. That is why the people of Israel are supposed to gather double their measure of food on the sixth day, so that the seventh day can be a day of rest, a sabbath. No matter how afraid they are that the next day maybe God will forget, or not send down enough for them to eat, they are not to gather food on the seventh day. I’m sure it took a great deal of trust for the people to follow this command.
Honoring the sabbath was at the core of the ethical teachings that shaped Jesus. Although he had what we might call a complicated relationship with the various rules that had evolved about how to keep the sabbath, his life and ministry showed that he faithfully practiced times of withdrawal, rest, and prayer. He understood that some time had to be set apart, offered back to God.
If we think about the ethical implications of the sabbath, how it kept both land and people from being overworked and exploited, we can even see echoes of it in today’s parable, which seems to question the whole notion of commodifying time and idolizing efficiency and productivity over generosity. Sabbath-keeping, as the great Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann has said, is an act of resistance.
Everything in scripture tells us that sabbath rest is essential, and we know that in our own lives as well. Time off from your work, whether that’s paid labor or other kinds of work, is not an elective, not something that is nice to have if it fits into your self-care routine. We need it to survive. Our bodies and brains cannot recuperate and therefore perform well without adequate sleep. We are not machines. We are creatures, created in God’s image. Animals and plants know how to rest, how to take breaks, how to have a sustainable rhythm. Children know how to daydream, how to drift off and do nothing. We lose something essential and irreplaceable when we forget all that.
As you’ve probably guessed by now, sabbath is at the root of the practice of sabbaticals, as well. I want to say publicly how very grateful I am for the gift of my sabbatical, for all that these last three months have meant to me and my family. My sabbatical was truly life-giving.
Among other things, it is very hard to gain perspective without taking the time to step back a bit. In my case, time away helped me realize that I hadn’t taken a sustained break since I started ordained ministry 13 years ago. It was past time. And I know I am far from alone in keeping up a breakneck pace. Teachers, parents, caregivers, and essential workers of all kinds top the list of the overworked and under-rested. Students today sleep far less than those in generations past. Lack of rest, of time to relax and take a break from productivity and efficiency, is ubiquitous in our culture and it is doing serious damage to our health, our children, our creativity, and our planet.
We live in an extractivist economy that is predicated on unending growth, a perpetual upward trend. That is not God’s economy. We are not primarily producers or consumers, we are creatures. We are beloved human beings, made in God’s image. We require and we deserve a sustainable rhythm of life. Those who are most harmed by society’s endless quest for more are those who have no choice but to work multiple jobs or endure inhumane hours and working conditions just to eke out a subsistence living. Many people really have no choice about how they spend their time.
In the book Stolen Focus, the author Johann Hari argues that even for the more privileged among us, our time and attention are being stolen, not just by our gadgets and social media and the other inventions of Big Tech, but by capitalism’s constant drive for growth, as well as inevitable byproducts like our poor diets and lack of sleep and environmental pollutants. He makes a compelling case that our level of distractedness and fatigue is pulling apart the fabric of society, making it hard, if not impossible, to come together and create solutions to some of the biggest problems facing us today, including climate change, racial injustice, and growing economic inequality.
I fervently hope and believe that church is one of the places that we can work on reversing this trend. We can learn together what it means to practice Sabbath, to seek out silence and develop a sustainable rhythm to our days. We can come together to support one another and offer hope to the world, not because we are the biggest and the best but because we find our strength in a savior who willingly gave up all earthly power and influence, and who still calls out to the weary and heavy-laden, offering rest and renewal.
Our lives are precious and singular and finite. Remembering this does not need to lead to more anxiety and a greater drive for productivity and measurable success. Instead, it can give us the space we need to breathe, to remember, to celebrate. It can lead us to those timeless moments around the table, where a tiny sip of wine and broken bit of bread become a foretaste of the heavenly banquet, and where all creation joins in an unending hymn of praise. Amen.
