Sabbath

A Sense of Peace, by Somniodelic Workshop

Lections: The Eleventh Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 21), AD 2025 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.

Rest, peace, liberation, and healing: these are the hallmarks of the Sabbath. These are the fruits of time spent in the presence of God.

The whole concept of the Sabbath appears uniquely Jewish. Some have argued for parallels or predecessors in the lunar cycles of Babylon, with the full moon set aside as a day of sacred significance. There might be something to this. “Month,” after all, derives from “moonth,” a period originally coinciding with the phases of the moon. But the notion of a weekly day of rest, applicable to every person regardless of age, gender, class, or wealth—applicable even to slaves and to beasts of burden—this proved revolutionary, humanity’s first labor law.

Its universality made it scandalous. Perhaps back in the annals of prehistory, when human bands survived as hunter-gatherers, periods of respite were a common fact for all—as of course was constant insecurity. The Agricultural Revolution changed all of that. Suddenly we had fields of grain to make our bread and beer. We settled down, specialized, built cities, came up with literacy, mathematics. Now we had professional rulers, professional soldiers, professional priests; now we had skilled artisans producing luxury goods. And the wealthy had the greatest gift of all: time.

The rich, the powerful, the elite had leisure. They had time to think, time to plan, time to build. This is how we ended up with philosophy, law, the arts, and the precursors of science. This is how technology bloomed—but only for the upper crust. Most people worked, from sun-up to sun-down, all their lives long, which weren’t all that long.

But these Hebrews, these Israelites, they have something no-one else around them seems to have. They have rest, every seventh day; and not just for the wealthy and the powerful. Every man, woman, and child, rich or poor, slave or free, even the aliens and the animals amongst them, have a day when they don’t have to work; they’re not allowed to work. Instead they are to study, and to pray, and to enjoy being together—to enjoy simply being, instead of always doing. And this is deeply humanizing, deeply dignifying.

The Sabbath asserts that people, animals, the very land itself, have an intrinsic value, an intrinsic sanctity, beyond merely that which they provide. Many cultures have built sanctuaries in space, in buildings or sacred places, but here the Hebrews have built a sanctuary in time. In that moment, on that day, every man is a king, every woman a queen, and each of us a child of the Most High. I think it no exaggeration to say that the nucleation point for democracy, for human rights, begins precisely here: a sacredness accessible to all; for all, in all.

Fast forward several thousand years to the modern day, to metamodernity. You might think we’ve got the Sabbath down, that we’ve improved upon the original. After all, now we have weekends, and child labor laws, and 40-hour workweeks—theoretically. Look at all the stuff we have, all the luxuries, all the entertainments. Most middle-class Americans would not trade places with the richest king from 200 years ago. I mean, the gold might be nice, but who wants to give up hot showers, healthcare, dentistry?

We have it so much easier than our forebears. Don’t we?

And yet—and yet!—I think we often miss the point. Sabbath isn’t simply laziness. Nor should it be filled with entertainments. A few centuries back, Western civilization underwent a socio-political seachange, as we transitioned from subjects to citizens. This had repercussions for every facet of our lives: philosophical, familial, religious. Within the last 150 years or so, we’ve undergone no less a radical transformation from citizens to consumers. That’s what we are now.

We don’t meaningfully participate as self-governing citizens. Instead, we are defined in purely economic terms: by what we earn and how we spend it. Americana boils down to the dialectic between producing and consuming. We’re always engaging in either the one or the other. And that’s not Sabbath. How many weekends do we experience as rest and peace and healing? How many actually involve the sacred and the silent? How many Saturdays set us free?

In our Gospel reading this morning, Jesus teaches in the synagogue on the Sabbath—because education, mind you, is a form of liberation; the only sort, according to Epictetus. One of the women present has a crooked spine, a crippling ailment or injury under which she has bent and suffered for 18 long years. And Jesus sets her free. With but a word, but a touch, He straightens her back for the first time in a lifetime. You can almost hear the luxuriant crack of each and every vertebra clicking back into its place.

She stands now liberated, healed, restored, released. Yet someone says, because there’s one in every crowd, “Hey, cut that out now. No healing on the Sabbath. If you want to play the chiropractor, come on back tomorrow.” And one can almost sympathize with this. Sabbathkeeping’s sacred, after all. You have to protect that sanctuary in time, that nascent divinely-given human right. But Jesus says we’ve missed the point. The notion of the Sabbath isn’t simply rules to keep. It’s for setting people free, for making people whole. Else it’s no Sabbath at all.

God has come to restore us, to straighten us out, to leave us standing tall. Her healing is physical, yes, but it’s also societal. He returns to her her dignity, her standing in the community. People see her now, whom moments ago they ignored. If you’ve ever been sick or enfeebled, or simply gotten old, then you know how people tend to look away. Jesus never does.

The Third Commandment—or Fourth, depending on your numbering—is to “remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.” This does not apply to Christians in the way in which ancient Israel kept it. For us, the Sabbath is not a given day, be it the seventh or the first. Rather, to paraphrase our catechism, we keep the Sabbath whenever we hold the Word of God as sacred. And God’s Word, of course, is Jesus. He is our rest, our peace, our liberation and our healing. We are at our most human, and most divine, when we keep close to Christ.

Which is not to say that setting aside a day for Sabbath rest is a bad idea. How healthy might it be to carve out time—say, Friday sunset to Saturday sunset—in which to slow down, set aside our screens, and value one another as we are, rather than only for what we can do. We live in a haze of distractions, a miasma of anxiety, overscheduled, underslept, hypercaffeinated, and deep in debt. We are worried and distracted by many things. Only one thing is necessary. And we remain free to choose the better part.

Take the time to spend with Christ. Find Him in the forest. Listen to Him in the Scriptures. Speak to Him in prayer. Serve Him in your neighbor. Worship Him in this assembly. Draw His Spirit into your lungs, and eat Him at this Table. Christ is always here, pouring out His peace, welcoming His children, healing us of our ailments and straightening our spines. For sin curves us in upon ourselves, like a serpent consuming its tail. But Christ opens us up: to God, to our world, and to all of humankind.

I know how much there always is to do: laundry and dishes and cooking and yardwork and exercise and doctors. I know that every weekend is the choice between what you want to do and what you ought to do, and no matter which you pick you will be wrong. I get that. Christ hasn’t come to be another item on our to-do list, fitting Church between our children’s sports. He has come to bring us peace, and rest, and health, and freedom; come to be our sanctuary in the midst of time. In Him we all have dignity. In Him we all are loved.

Time spent with Jesus isn’t really time at all. It’s a foretaste of eternity, beyond before-and-after. It’s the one thing that shall not be shaken as heaven and earth pass away. And I promise you, if for even a moment, you seek Him in the silence, He will be there waiting, welcoming. And He will give you life.

Jesus is our Sabbath. We find our rest in Him.

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

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

Blog: https://rdgstout.blogspot.com/

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St Peter’s Lutheran

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Nidaros Lutheran

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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nidaroschurch6026