A Sanctuary in Time

Propers: The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 21), A.D. 2019 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Amidst the hustle and bustle of the Twin Cities, one may find, if one knows where to look, a remarkable little oasis of silence and of peace known as the Ordway Japanese Garden. It’s free to get in and has been open to the public for over 40 years, a testament to the relationship between Saint Paul and her sister city of Nagasaki—traditionally a center of Japanese Christianity and one of two recipients of the atomic bomb.

Japanese gardens, as at art form, date back well over a thousand years, incorporating native Shinto beliefs with those of Buddhism and Taoism from China. The emphasis is on the spiritual tranquility found in the sacred harmonies of nature. One never feels quite so close to the Creator as when communing with His Creation.

Throughout the Ordway Garden you will find stone-carved lanterns, bamboo fences, torii gates, gravel paths, rock bridges, gentle waterfalls, and a tortoise island representing the mythical home of the Taoist Immortals. There is also a traditional Japanese tea house, in which are held traditional Japanese tea ceremonies twice a month. Here the simplest of domestic tasks—the Far East equivalent of brewing coffee in the morning—is imbued with elegance, simplicity, and spiritual reverence. Think of it as a liturgy of the everyday.

Ordway even hosts an annual Obon festival, at which paper lanterns are floated down the garden’s little stream, representing the souls of the dead departing for another world. I would very much like to see that with my own eyes one of these days.

I tell you all this because the role fulfilled by that garden in space and in place is the role that the Sabbath intends to fulfill in time. Just as the garden is an oasis set apart in the midst of a helter-skelter city, a sacred space within and yet removed from the world, so is the Sabbath day a sanctuary set apart inside of time. It is meant to be the peaceful, sacred center of our week.

In the ancient Law of the Israelites, the Sabbath was ordained from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown. It was anticipated, prepared for, and welcomed. In many ways the Sabbath was the world’s first labor law. Before the Law of Moses, only the wealthy—the royals, the priests, the nobles—ever had time for leisure. And by this I mean not simply rest, nor even entertainment, but time set apart to ponder, to pray, to meditate, to think.

It is leisure, time set apart, that gives birth to culture, to civilization, to all the sciences, arts, and philosophies. It is leisure that raises us up above brutes and beasts, those who can think only of survival and their lusts. Leisure makes us truly human. And it used to be that the poor simply couldn’t afford it. Servants and slaves were worked to death—if not physical death, then the death of the mind, the spirit, the soul.

The Sabbath decreed that for God’s chosen people there would be no distinction between those who pondered, thought, and prayed, on the one hand, and those who tilled the soil and built with bricks on the other. All people were worthy of leisure, of creative rest, of a sanctuary set apart in time: rich or poor, young or old, slave or free, all would be given opportunity to commune with the Lord their God in their own time, in their own way.

And not just people, mind you, but animals as well, and the very earth itself. Beasts were to be given rest from their labors, the same as any man. And fields were to lie fallow for a full year out of seven, that the soil should have sanctuary from the violence of the plough. All of Creation was sacred to God; thus God should be held sacred by all of Creation.

When the community failed—when the people of Israel were conquered and driven off into Exile—the prophets proclaimed that this was the result of a failure to honor the Sabbath, a failure to liberate the oppressed and grant rest to the weary. The Exile itself was thus a corrective sabbatical: the opportunity for the meek to inherit the earth, as the rich were carried away captive; and for the wild to reclaim the land, which had been exhausted by thoughtless overuse.

Let us remember this in our own consumerist culture: that if we treat the land as disposable and the people on it as objects to be used, then the land itself shall reject us, and the oppressed upon it shall themselves inherit our wealth. All of Creation, and especially all human beings, are sacred in the eyes of God. Violate that, and we violate the order underlying both our civilization and our world.

Now, for Christians, there is no one set day specified for Sabbath observance. We do not entirely proscribe work either on Saturdays or on Sundays, no matter what the Fundamentalists or the Seventh-Day Adventists may protest. Rather, we are to observe the Sabbath by embracing God’s Word—embracing Jesus Christ—in worship, in prayer, in study and in preaching, every day of our lives.

We should always be able to step out of time, even if just for a moment, into the timelessness of God’s presence, of Immanuel, God-With-Us. God is always present, after all, bidden or not. What’s lacking in us is awareness.

In the Greek of the New Testament there is a distinction between two sorts of time: chronos, which is sequential time, the tick-tick-ticking of the clock; and kairos, which is royal time, opportune time. Kairos is a moment of timelessness, a moment of eternity and clarity, breaking into time. That’s where we find miracles. That’s where we find holiness and wonder.

You and I are drowning in chronos, buried in the sands of time. It’s true that on paper we work less than previous generations; a lot of good people died to win for us the 40 hour workweek. But we’ve filled all of that extra time with busyness and stuff. We are all of us overscheduled, overstimulated, and overwhelmed. Our every waking moment is filled with noise, with images, with advertising from dawn ‘til dusk.

Our phones, our televisions, our radios, our computers, it all beats down upon us. And with housework and hobbies and after school sports and all the things we think we need to be doing to improve ourselves, to realize our potential, or just to keep up with the Joneses, we’re all exhausted. Our entire civilization is exhausted. And it’s not the kind of thing that we can fix with a quick nap or an earlier bedtime. We suffer from a weariness of soul deriving from a lack of quiet, a lack of solitude, a lack of privacy and thus of true friendship. What we need is a Sabbath.

We need to overcome our fear of silence. We must risk being bored by ourselves. We must set aside time not simply for self-indulgence, not for the mindless consumption of infotainment, but for the sacred, for the holy, for the transcendent. And this Sabbath must be found in the forest and in the living room as much as it is in the sanctuary and the altar.

I haven’t a “one size fits all” program. There’s no easy rulebook for eternity breaking into time. But certainly it must involve quiet and contemplation, prayer and meditation, reading and observing and long walks in the woods, deer stands, fishing huts, warm fires, warmer friends, a steaming cup of coffee or tea, and a humble holy gratitude for all that we are given.

We have so many blessings of which our forebears could barely even have dreamt. But they had one thing that we lack and that we need now most of all. They had a sense of Sabbath; of sacred, holy rest; of communion with the Lord and respect for His Creation and peace for every beast and human under Heaven, with nary a price tag in sight.

Find that again, and we shall cure many of our most persistent and personal ills. Find that again, and we might just remember what it is, as a people, to be free.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.