3rd Floor Balcony

Prolific blogger Lon, who recently made it into church.alltop.com asked a question recently while preparing for a collaborative Sunday sermon. Oh, how I envy him sometimes...

I commented my thoughts, and since I haven't blogged anything noteworthy since spending a week-long road trip with Liz to Cape Cod and the Adirondack's (oh, and Boston for a great fun wedding in Harvard), I figured it best to recycle.

Sabbath. According to Lon's online survey, the question at hand is "Finding rest and wholeness in a world of chaos and brokenness". I dig that. I imagine most of our lives are caught between running to work, running to home, running to family, and running to church. Well, I suppose some people cut out the last one. But for the churchies, it's a whole lot of running.

The standard idea, I gather, is that Sunday is the sabbath day of rest, the day the people rested in accordance with the day that God rested. And so we take the day off, go to church, and celebrate God. The problem - Sunday isn't all that restful when you have to lead worship, teach Sunday school, have church program meetings, etc. (It's compounded by the commuting culture that makes us so far from each other - check out the Jews this weekend in the Globe, a plug for Options for Homes no less - that we can't meet during the week, but that's another post altogether)

It's a big problem, actually. I think often, the Christians who form the backbone of Sunday worship services get really tired from it all. The best ones rationalize it - Sabbath isn't just about rest, it's about discipline and priority of worshipping God in our lives. All good stuff, but simply sidesteps the rest part. The smart ones leave the church and find God on different terms. All great for them, but nothing for the transformative institution of the church which gets less transformative each time it happens.

So, this is where my thoughts take me: There’s the aforementioned standard of God’s sabbath. I wonder if one moves to the dangerous realm of principle, what would you see?

I see that sabbath is the whole rest,reflection,seeing-your-place-in-God’s-big-picture-humbly bit. 

The practical realization regarding rest is different strokes for different folks - not everyone sabbaths (in principle) on a weekly basis. And even those that do, if they are church servants, don’t do it on Sunday. Like pastors, many congregants work more on Sunday then on a Monday. So, while the farmer might be the last person who sabbaths a la biblical tradition (once a week for a day), today’s Christian cubicle monkeys do so differently. They sabbath is ways that honour God, respect reality and work for themselves.

One friend, who is a fantastic Christian Educator, sabbaths once a quarter by not going to church and enjoying the day, at home, stopping. I think that’s fair. Rest and wholeness is more about knowing who you are, who God is, the whole serenity prayer bit, without getting lazy, and changing the world, but putting that responsibility in God’s hands. It’s what I call theological tension. Pulses that pull in sometimes opposite, but ultimately balanced ways.

Me? I sabbath every day. :)