Sabbath Spirituality: Labor Day
Communion Homily
Including selections From Walter
Brueggemann Mandate to Difference: an invitation to the contemporary church
Hear this, O Church, for our spirit,
and hear this O People, for the health of our lives:
When the Hebrew people were slaves to
Pharoah, they were slaves to production, to brick making quotas, and had no
days to stop work. “Any like any driven production system, the quotas keep
increasing. Every success generated more rigorous demands.” The Sinai
commandments were an alternative to the Pharoah commandments. Unlike the
Egyptian gods, YHWH is a God of restfulness. YHWH is a God of blessing, capable
of assigning life and well-being to every aspect of creation. When the Creator
arrived on the scene (Genesis 1:1) the already extant chaotic matter of “Tohuwabohu”
was distinctively unblessed and incapable of life. God blesses three times in
Genesis 1: all that is non-human, the human, and the Sabbath.
“Then God rested. God was weary. This
is not the God of the catechism that never rests. Such a God is never depleted,
never spent, never needs a day off, because such a God is not intimately and
intrinsically linked to needy creation. And then of course it is only a small
step to be made in the direction of the Promethean God of classical theology
who never rests…But not this God. This God rests. This God so rests that Israel
in its poetic imagination can entertain the thought of YHWH’s dormancy…God rests
because the world will work, because the tasks of creation have been delegated,
and because creation, blessed as it is, knows the will and the energy of the
Creator and does not need constant attention. God rests, because God engages in
self-care, and because God has complete confidence in the sustaining energy of
creation.
God not only rests, but God is “nepheshed”
(the usual noun nephesh for self or soul is used as a verb in Exodus, so soul
in action is to be deepened, enhanced, renewed via rest) is refreshed. In rest
you get your soul back. When the tabernacle, that holy space that moved with
the people on their journey, is set up, it is finished, however temporary it
might be, just as the Sabbath day is a day of being finished, even though we
know we will begin again, but we will only be able to do so because we have
finished, we have Sabbathed.
“It is finished. It is constituted.
Holy zone where God dwells. Holy time where nephesh sets down. Holy space and
holy time, holy life devoted to the presence of God and healing, and a vision
of God’s glory come among us—full of grace and truth—God’s glory which we are
to practice and enjoy. This space is unlike any other space. This time is
unlike any other time. This life is unlike any other life. It is this space and
this time and this life that stands as the wellness center of Creation. There
is no substitute, no reasonable facsimile, no adequate tradeoff or
compensation. An act of restful restoration engages the character of the
Creator….It is the truth of our lives that we are made for restful restoration.
The Creator promises and guarantees
abundance, and Sabbath is the day we luxuriate in that abundance as a gift
which we do not need to perform or possess or acquire or achieve…because it is
a Gift. But of course we violate the Sabbath, the God-given naphshism. I
propose we violate Sabbath and deplete and diminish our naphshism because we do
not believe in, do not trust, do not count on God’s abundance. We do not think
that Creation is abundant, and we do not trust the guarantee of the Creator.
The outcome of such distrust, I propose, is a devouring anxiety…just as Sabbath
is a total antidote to anxiety.
When we do not trust in guaranteed
abundance, we must supply the deficiencies out of our own limited resources. We
scramble to move from our sense of scarcity to an abundance that we imagine
that we ourselves can supply, all the while frantically anxious that we won’t
quite make it: not enough to be loved, not enough to be well liked, not enough
to advance, not enough to secure my family, not enough members, not enough
dollars, not enough published articles, not enough new clothes, new cars, new
homes, not enough bombs, not enough stocks and bonds, not enough freedom, not
enough purity, not enough of our kind of people.
It is necessary (we think) to erode
the holy time of Sabbath for the sake of productivity, given our sense of
scarcity grounded in distrust. “
In the story of the gift of manna
from heaven in the wilderness desert, the people do not trust God’s abundance.
They are to gather what they need enough for their homes, so some gathered this
amount and others gathered a different amount. Usually they are to eat each day
what they gather because the leftover manna will spoil; therefore they have to
trust that there will be manna each day; except on the day before Sabbath there
will be enough manna in the field that it can be gathered on that day to also
cover Sabbath so no one needs to go gather it on the Sabbath. Some people did
not trust that there would be new Manna given the next day, and the manna
leftover spoiled. “They gathered in their anxiety, but the anxiety was a
contradiction of God’s abundance. A surplus of anything gathered in anxiety
will contradict God’s abundance.”
But what is a true and deeper
Sabbath? What is the kind of restfulness and restoration that is reflective of
God’s Creation Sabbath character? There is, Brueggemann says quoting the writer
Mark Slouka, an approved leisure, promoted by the advertising and marketplace
gods,” that is required to be organized, expensive and socially chic. The kind
of “idleness” that is disapproved is the kind that promotes free pondering,
considering options, self-reflection, developing an inner life. Such “idleness”
is an elemental requirement in a democratic society so that free citizens can
indeed exercise free political reflection. The absence of “idleness” of Sabbath
is a deep pathology in our society.” Against this he cites Jesus’ admonition to
consider the lilies of the field, contrasting anxiety with God’s abundance, and
with the story of the loaves and fishes.
“This alternative offer of restoration
(this Sabbath), alternative to coerciveness, does remarkable things to folks:
it makes art possible, poetry, music, narrative; it makes neighbor visible, neighbor in need,
neighbor in joy, neighbor in solidarity; it makes the self coherent, not
divided in frantic, productive ways; it recognizes God, lover of our ourselves,
central to the human project, not pushed aside in idolatrous pursuit of
control; it enables us not to worship other god and to violate the first three
commandments; and it makes it possible to love neighbor and not to covet
neighbor’s self. “
What causes church leaders in
particular to violate Sabbath and to be coerced, as sometimes it is not taking
the form of pursuit of commodities; perhaps instead it is not being good enough
for the first child or only child, the ones who flock to ministry, raised in
homes with demanding expectations, hard to be good enough and that requires
24/7 effort; or overcoming low-level background of education, of demonstrating
competence, which becomes a 24/7 effort to be smart enough; or the need to be
loved and liked enough which is a 24/7 effort; or the belief that we are God’s
only hands and feet and just one more effort will bring the kingdom closer, and
since we have 24/7 available for that we must use it all. Pharoah takes many
forms.
“The power of healing and saving and liberating
goes on in our restfulness. Imagine as the Sabbath was an alternative
community, an alternative reality, to Pharoah, that the church, and its
leaders, could be an alternative community to the god of productivity, of
acquisition.” A Genesis church. An Exodus Church.
We see this in the people who we
serve, and serve with, our neighbors so in need, and we see it in our own
lives. We hope then to bring rest into people’s lives, as I often say about our
food justice days and events, it is to “make their lives a little easier”
because when that happens Sabbath can happen, rest and restoration, can happen
a little easier, and they can become more centered and creative and giving; we
hope to bring more silence into our lives and theirs, silence that is deep
restorative re-focusing, surfacing the traumas and stresses that are masked by
addictions that just add to the stress and trauma; in rest we take ownership of
our selves again, we are re-souled, because we will experience ourselves then
connected to God and to community, and that kind of connection makes real to us
the kind of abundance that is the truth of our lives, instead of the scarcity
falsehoods that the fear-mongerers and the need-mongerers are trying, and succeeding,
to sell us.
Our year ahead will be to
surface Sabbath and find ways to create spaces for it in the lives of all
around us, among us, within us. Communion, in sharing the plate and cup, as we
express in our common liturgy each week, is an act of embodying this reality of
Abundance, and a promise to share the Sabbath with others, especially those we
do not know, those who are different from us, those whom trigger our anxiety.
The Welcome Table is, every time we gather around it during the day and week, a
kind of tabernacle, moveable, holy in the moment, wholly in the moment
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