Remember the Sabbath

Text: Exodus 20:1-17

God leads the Israelites, already tired of wandering about aimlessly, to Mount Sinai. They have been freed from slavery in Egypt. The redemption they have long hoped for has been accomplished.

Now what? They are stuck in a place without boundaries. They are a people without definition. No longer slaves, free but uncertain. Who are they? What shall they do next? Where shall they go? Freedom can seem like chaos, a limitless landscape can make one feel agoraphobic.

The commandments given at Sinai are therefore a gift to the people. They are a confirmation of God’s presence, a reaffirmation of God’s promise, and a guide to being God’s people.

People of faith share the conviction that life is to be lived before God, in the light of God, with God in mind. Our actions come from more than the urgings of our consciences, from somewhere in addition to our moral reasoning. There is more to us than us. We hope to live our lives in alignment with God for our sake and the sake of the world. We are made complete and whole, as we say in Sunday worship, by conforming our lives to God.

We need guidance, as the Israelites did. We ask ourselves: Who are we and how shall we define ourselves? And also: how shall we live and what shall we do? And also: how can we save ourselves and the world from destruction? And, finally, how might we be a light to others, to serve our brothers and sisters?

The commandments—the top ten, which are called in the Bible the ten words or ten sayings of God, and the other 600 or so that follow—served to create boundaries in which the Israelites might best operate.

Commandments, like these but also the ones Christians learn from the teachings of Jesus, do a least three things. First, they define a people who belong to God and for whom this God alone is their god. Commandments create a community of those who acknowledge particular limits and procedures. Second, they are criteria by which the people judge their actions. Like gauges and warning lights, the commandments help people know when things are working well and when not. And third, they are guidelines to life in God, like roads and signs that make journeys of life easier and more predictable.

The Ten Commandments are customarily divided into two parts, or two tables: the first deals with our relationship with God and the second with our relationship with other people. But of course they are interdependent and make up one cloth. Loving God both enables us to love and reflects our love for one another. On the cusp, or at the hinge, of these, is the commandment regarding the sabbath, the one I want to talk more about today.

This commandment is unusual in many ways. First, it contains in itself a little essay about why we should follow it. The reason given in Exodus, in the version of the Ten Commandments we heard today, is that God the creator rested on the seventh day, and that therefore God blessed this day as special. The sabbath was created for us, God’s creatures, as part of the nature of the world. In Deuteronomy, however, there is another version of the commandments. It differs from the one in Exodus mostly in this commandment regarding the sabbath. In that version, we are reminded that God brought the people out of slavery. We are not slaves and do not have to live as slaves, working non-stop. Sabbath is thus the child of both creation and freedom.

Second, the commandment is unusual because before it tells us how to behave (as the other commandments do) it asks us to remember: Remember the sabbath. We need to remember that the sabbath is a gift from God, and therefore not to discard it or squander it. We need to remember that the sabbath is as important to us as the rest of creation is. It is as important as dry land to live on, food to eat and water to drink, companions to love. The commandment asks us to keep the sabbath holy, which means keep it separate or special, a day that is not the same as every other day.

This commandment respects God’s wish to interrupt our lives. Though the commandment tells us to rest, and though it talks about God’s resting, it is is more about carving out a special space (a holy space). It is certainly true that we need to rest, but this commandment is not so much about therapy as it is about obedience to God’s direction. God tells us to put aside the things that usually drive us—and that sometimes drive us crazy. On the sabbath we are to honor God’s request to think about God first.

Worshiping God with others is one good way to be mindful of God, but it is neither the only way nor the complete way to do that. Sabbath itself is worship. Sabbath gives us quiet and space to pray. It gives us a big chunk of time in which our thoughts can settle and our hopes and fears become clearer.

Sabbath is more than downtime. It purposely pushes away those things that make us most fearful and anxious. Things like performing well 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. We need some slack. which is the sabbath of everyday life.

Yet, we are forgetting the sabbath and letting the boundaries between the seventh day and the other six crumble and become porous.

Maybe that is because to observe the sabbath is inconvenient and annoying. It is visible to others. It brands you, marking you as part of a particular (and maybe peculiar) community of religious people. It requires that you trust God to provide for you even if you abandon work and commerce for 15% of the week. It demonstrates in humility that you need and welcome rest. Observing a day of sabbath is a spiritual discipline. It takes practice. It takes time to learn. It takes time to do. Its benefits are sometimes obscured at first by its drawbacks.

Or maybe we are forgetting because we are frantic because we are so afraid. We think perhaps our strong efforts and constant vigilance can make things less scary. But they do not. They have not.

We are forgetting the sabbath. And now our culture is starving for it. To have forgotten that we need a sabbath is like forgetting that we need to eat. We need to remember that God has created us to live and to be free. To remember who we are and what we are called to do. To remember the sabbath, and keep it holy.