“Sabbath Delight”
Isaiah 58:6-14; Matthew 12:9-13
Rev. Dr. Deborah L. Clark
July 19, 2015
“Don’t let anyone see you using that pen.” Larry warned me, a smile on his face but a hint of urgency in his voice. It was Saturday morning at Temple Beth Sholom, a synagogue just down the street. I had been asked, as a newly certified yoga instructor, to participate in a new experience of sabbath worship. Like churches, synagogues are struggling with how to adapt their traditions to meet the needs of a changing world. When there are so many choices for what to do on a Saturday or Sunday morning, when everyone is busy, when young adults are searching for meaning but assuming they won’t find it in synagogue or church, what do we do?
This new model for worship is part of Temple Beth Sholom’s response. Every couple of months, the synagogue offers Saturday morning Shalom-Plex. After opening prayers, each person can choose from a variety of ways to delve into the Torah portion–the scripture reading–for the day. One option is Torah yoga.
The week before, I had met with my friend Rosanne, from Open Spirit, and with Larry, a young man from the synagogue, to plan the Torah Yoga session. Together we had created a class using yoga poses to help folks experience the deeper meaning of the scripture.
That morning, I had my notes neatly typed, the key phrases highlighted, the scripture in italics. As Rosanne, Larry and I talked through our parts before the program began, I pulled out my pen to make a few changes.
That’s when Larry warned me. “Don’t let anyone see you using that pen.” “Why not?” I was perplexed. “It’s shabbat–the sabbath,” he explained. “Writing is a kind of work. We are not supposed to work on the sabbath.”
Embarrassed, I put my pen away. I hoped I would remember what I had wanted to write down. I had to trust that if I didn’t remember, the world would not fall apart. It didn’t.
Long after the shabbat services were over, I kept thinking about that brief conversation. What would it mean for me not to write on the sabbath? Or since a pastor’s day of rest doesn’t necessarily correspond to Saturday or Sunday, what would it mean for me not to write for any given 24-hour period?
Of course I wouldn’t be able to work on my sermon, or write newsletter articles, or respond to email. I also couldn’t make my to-do lists, not even lists for things I planned to do once the sabbath was over. I would need to trust that if something was important enough to make it onto a to-do list, I’d think of it the next day.
If I had a conversation that intrigued me or saw a tree that inspired me, I couldn’t rush to my notebook to jot down ideas for some future sermon. I would have to let the experience exist just for itself, not for how I could turn it into something productive. I would have to accept that the moment has meaning and beauty whether or not I find a way to use it.
As I tried to imagine a day with no pen, I found myself tempted to argue with the rule about not writing on the sabbath. What about journaling, writing as a form of prayer? Surely that would be a good thing for a day devoted to God. Or how about writing a thank you note to my mother? An expression of gratitude seems an appropriate use of a pen on the sabbath. These arguments, I knew, were beside the point. The point, as Jesus reminds me in our gospel reading, is not the rule itself. The point is how the rule shakes up my usual ways of being in the world, how it challenges me to seek the deeper meaning of sabbath.
That Saturday morning conversation happened this past spring, around the time our Bible Studies were concluding our year-long slog through the book of Isaiah–long, difficult passages peppered with moments of brilliance and beauty. We happened to read Isaiah 58 the week after the Torah Yoga class.
Isaiah 58 has always been one of my favorite social justice passages. Isaiah’s vivid imagery reminds us that God cares less about how we worship and more about how we treat one another. We are called to share our bread with the hungry, to bring the homeless poor into our houses. We are promised that when we stop pointing the finger and speaking evil of one another, we will be like a watered garden. It is glorious poetry–a challenge to care for the most vulnerable among us, a promise that when we do, the entire community will thrive.
I usually stop there. But there’s another stanza to the poem. Perhaps because I was still thinking about that sabbath conversation, this time I didn’t skip over it. “If you refrain from trampling the sabbath…if you call the sabbath a delight….then I will make you ride upon the heights of the earth.” Isaiah recites a long list of social justice demands, and includes keeping the sabbath as one of them. Sabbath, for Isaiah, is not a break from the call to transform the world; it is an essential part of that transformation.
Isaiah recognizes our human tendency to think the world revolves around own own needs and interests. We get caught up in our own affairs; our desire for success and security begins to take over our lives. Sabbath short-circuits that natural human descent into greed, forcing us to stop our quest for more stuff, for more power, even if only for a day. Sabbath is the great equalizer: it doesn’t matter whether you work in the fields or make the laws, you still have to stop your work. And because the Sabbath law comes from God, it doesn’t matter how powerful you are: no one has the authority to make someone else work for them on the seventh day. Sabbath reminds us that we did not create the world; God did. At its best, the Sabbath break from our instinct for acquisition and accomplishment calls us back to our better selves, not just that day but all week.
I am aware of the irony of my preaching a sermon about keeping sabbath, especially since I ended up writing it on my day off. Perhaps I should have started by exhorting you to “do as I say, not as I do.” Instead, I will invite you to join me in exploring what gets in the way of our following this biblical exhortation to keep sabbath, and in imagining what our lives might be like if we did.
For me and my pen, the call to keep sabbath threatens my inclination to define my worth by what I do. I get great satisfaction from accomplishing things. It feels really good to check items off my to-do list. It feels even better to do something that helps another person. That good feeling, though, is seductive. It is all too easy to slip into thinking that those actions are the source of the meaning in my life. That kind of thinking can be poison, for it leads to frantic efforts to do more and more and more.
The challenge of sabbath, for me, is that when I stop doing, I am forced to look deeper than my own actions for meaning. The promise of sabbath is that I rediscover the true source of my worth–God’s deep, abiding love for me. The blessing of sabbath is that, for the rest of the week, my work is transformed–from a frenzied effort to do more into a joyous response to God’s love.
What about for you? What makes it hard for you to relax? How does the call to stop working challenge the way you organize or understand your life? What might change for you if you set aside intentional sabbath time?
A few years ago, on vacation in Florida, I was having a particularly hard time relaxing. In my everyday life, I have a strong sense of purpose. What, I thought, was my purpose on vacation? I understood that it was the wrong question to ask; the whole point of vacation is not having to have a purpose to the day. But I needed something–a touchstone. So I came up with a set of sabbath intentions. To the part of me that needs a sense of purpose, they look like goals. In reality they are anti-goals–intentions that help me let go of my need to accomplish something. When I am on vacation, or sabbatical, or just taking a day off, I begin my morning repeating these three sabbath intentions: Absorb beauty. Enjoy being present in your body. Treasure the people you are with. The intentions help me let go of my pen and be present in the moment. In coming weeks, I will preach a three-sermon series on these Sabbath intentions. I hope they will spur your own sabbath intentions.
Keeping the sabbath is a commandment–and it is so much more than that. The sabbath, Isaiah proclaims, is a delight. When we put down the pen, when we let go of our need to prove ourselves by what we do, we open ourselves to the beauty of each moment, to the wonder of creation, to the joy of simply being.
Let us delight in the gift of sabbath. Amen.