Sabbath FAQs

Text: Genesis 1:1-5, 2:1-4

On Thursday, the city was deserted. On Thanksgiving day in Cambridge you could have walked down the middle of the street without danger. There were no cars, few people, no commerce. It was great!

It was like the good old days. In those times in Massachusetts there were things called Blue Laws. They required most businesses and retail stores to be closed on Sunday. No shopping allowed. No shopping meant no shoppers, which meant no cars. You could drive by a mall and the parking lot would be completely empty. No shopping meant no shops, so people who worked in retail did not have to go to work. It was very quiet. It was peaceful. It was nice.

The bad thing about Blue Laws, and the reason they were repealed, is that they forced a religious ethic—no work on Sunday sabbath—on people whose religion, or no religion, did not honor Sunday. But the good thing about Blue Laws is that they forced everyone to take a sabbath rest. It sounded like a deprivation, but it was a gift. It put the force of law as a balance against the forces of commerce and busyness. It made rest a requirement for the health of the culture, the city, and the health of its citizens.

In the end, as often, commerce and busyness won the battle. The Blue Laws went away, and no law of rest replaced them. We all let this happen, because we all forgot how much we need to rest. We lost the sabbath. We have forgotten the sabbath. And now we are starving for rest. We need a sabbath rest to live satisfactorily. To have forgotten that we need a sabbath is like forgetting that we need to eat. This is not good.

Since we have forgotten the sabbath, I’ve put together a short list of frequently asked questions (and answers) about the sabbath. They have to do with rest and with worship.

Question: Do we need a sabbath?

Answer: Yes.

Sabbath is downtime. Downtime is part of creation. The creator took a good chunk of time off after creating the universe. The story of the creation in Genesis is not a story of six days effort plus a footnote. The time that God rested is included in the story. The story starts, “at the beginning” and ends “these are the beginnings.” And between these two verse markers are God’s work and God’s rest. Downtime was important to our creator, and it is to us as creatures.

We know this to be true through experience and through research, which increasingly shows that not doing something—stopping work—is essential to performance, learning, and civil behavior. You cannot do, think, or be polite without prolonged rest.

And, even if that were not so, we are commanded to rest. Downtime is one of the Ten Commandments. Near the top. The third or fourth, depending on how you count them. I think you know that the Ten Commandments appear in two books of the Bible, one set in Exodus and the other in Deuteronomy. One of these versions says keep the sabbath because God did after creating the world. And the other one says keep the sabbath because once the Israelites were slaves in Egypt and had to work all the time, but now God has freed them. So God commanded us to rest because we need to and to rest because we can. We need to and we can.

Question: Can’t I take little breaks and spread the rest over all the days of the week?

Answer: No.

In Genesis it says that “God had finished, on the seventh day, the work God made and then God ceased, on the seventh day, all the work that God had made.” Little breaks are great and necessary, and maybe God took a few during the creation of the universe. God does, after all, sit back at the end of each day and admire the day’s work. But little breaks are not downtime. They are not sabbath. They don’t work that way, and we all know it. You cannot work seven days a week and ten hours every day and claim that you cease work because you take coffee breaks and naps. We need to take a day off like God does.

Question: Can there be too much downtime?

Answer: Yes.

The sabbath is created in the context of the work of creation. Work and rest are intertwined. Martin Luther wrote that work is a calling by God. This has been interpreted to mean that you should work as hard as possible. Bosses like that when dealing with workers. But that is not what Luther meant. First, Luther wanted to make sure that people, and especially the church, valued all work, not just church work. The clergy had an inflated view of their own work as especially godly, and Luther wanted to deflate that view. But second, and as important, Luther said that God loves a great pair of shoes made by a shoemaker and God loves a clean floor cleaned by a cleaning service. The doing of things with our hands and minds pleases God. But just not doing it all the time.

Final question: Then is this all just about me?

Answer: No.

Sabbath is good for us, and downtime is important for our well-being. But that is not the only reason why it is necessary. Sabbath is worship. Sabbath gives us quiet time and space to pray. It gives us sufficient spans of time in which our thoughts can settle and our hopes and fears become clearer. And it allows us to listen for God and to God. Sabbath is more than downtime in that it purposely pushes away those things that make us most fearful and anxious. Things like performing well and being well-off and having enough. For many people, days of sabbath are the days in which they feel most close to other people, to their families, and to the wonders of the world.

Sabbath is worship because it is connected with God. It is a gift of God and a command of God. So the pleasures we get from rest we can see as coming from God’s love for us and the discipline that sabbath requires we can see as coming from our trust in God.

One of the works of the church is to provide times and spaces for worship, quiet, and sanctuary. And to teach us how to take sabbath time. It is not the only work of the church, and churches do not always do it well. But unlike for the rest of the world, it is an essential part of the job description.

Advent marks the beginning of the church year. Although it inevitably it is seen as a prequel to Christmas, it is really a time of reflection and meditation. Advent Sundays can be sabbath times, downtime, times of rest in an otherwise anxious time. Especially in these days, when there seems to be a lot to be anxious about.

There is no movement on the horizon to bring back sabbath laws. But sabbath time has been given to us nonetheless. Accept the gift. Embrace the gift. Slow down. Stop. Rest.