Sabbatical

Pastor’s Epistle—August, A.D. 2019 C

Well folks, it’s August, and I’ll be out of office (indeed out of the country) for the first couple Sundays, because everyone needs a sabbath rest and pastors in particular must be reminded to prioritize their families over their work from time to time. That goes double for myself and my wife.

Of all the wonderful spiritual practices passed onto us by our Israelite forebears, the practice of keeping sabbath has been sorely neglected, much to our detriment. Luther pointed out, quite rightly, that the Commandment to “Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy,” does not, strictly speaking, apply to Christians. It was a Commandment for Israel, to refrain from labor from sundown Friday evening to sundown Saturday. Lutherans interpret this Commandment more broadly as honoring the Word of the Lord.

Yet just because we don’t have to keep a strict sabbath doesn’t mean that it’s not a good idea. In the Middle Ages (and in those areas of the United States still observing blue laws) restrictions were placed on buying, selling, and working during Sundays. In some ways this might seem repressive. Charles Dickens in no less a classic than A Christmas Carol (1843) excoriated sabbath laws as pious pretense which served no purpose other than to deny the poor their opportunity to buy bread. And he may have had a point.

The freedom of the Gospel means we don’t have to keep the sabbath. But we’d be wrong to imagine that sabbath-keeping consists simply in painful strictures and purposeless rules. The original Sabbath in the Law of Moses was, in effect, history’s first labor law. Before the Sabbath, only the rich had leisure to study, to read, to think, to ponder the heavens. Everybody else had to work. The Israelite Sabbath gave everyone a day off, be they rich or poor, young or old, male or female, slave or free—a day dedicated to leisure and things truly human no less than to God and things truly divine. Why, even animals and plants and the very earth itself were entitled to a holy Sabbath rest.

What would that mean for us today? I ponder this myself, what with our busy household and three restless, impulsive kids. Clearly Sunday won’t work as a day off for pastors. But what if I tried, perhaps from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, to turn off social media, to stay away from digital screens, to only check my phone for actual telephone messages, and to refrain from buying anything from Amazon or Walmart?

I know that sounds pathetic: a limp-wristed “tech fast,” paling in comparison to the fortitude of Orthodox Jews keeping a rigorous biblical Sabbath. But my aim here is not to give up small things I enjoy, as through some milquetoast self-flagellation, but rather to eliminate those things which distract me from silence, from leisure, from unfiltered reality. That’s where God and humanity both actually dwell: in reality. Not on some virtual screen.

Watching TV with the children is all well and good. But so is reading, or playing a game, or baking something with them. Entertainment and consumerism have colonized every waking moment of our lives, and for the most part we let them. But wouldn’t we rather be free of their demands and their noise, even if only for a day? To not be distracted from distraction by distraction, but to notice what God is doing in every moment of our lives?

I’m not bashing the internet or movies or social media. I use and enjoy all those things. But like fire, they make better servants than masters. And if we truly desire to hear the still, small voice of God in our lives and in our homes—well, a good first step might be carving out for ourselves an honest sabbath rest.

In Jesus. Amen.