Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
In Hebrew, Sabbath means "stop" or "cease". It's the day of ceasing, or as we call it, the day of rest. The commandment asks us to do no work on this day...to complete our routine tasks in six days and put them aside on the seventh.
Nature itself speaks to the value of rest. We sleep somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of our lives. We awaken renewed and refreshed, capable of continuing. It's not like we can just skip the sleep and keep doing our daily tasks. You might make it for a day, but as sleep deprivation extends our ability to function--mentally, physically, emotionally--dwindles rapidly. Pull one all-nighter studying for that big test and you might do better. Pull two or more in a row and welcome to your lousy grade...and being cranky with everyone around you...and having to hunt to find where you put that #2 pencil...and falling asleep involuntarily while waiting for your lunch. Rest helps us bear our burdens, sets us straight again, allows us to tackle our problems in the best possible way.
And speaking of, sometime when you're at church ask Jake S. how he builds muscle and helps U of I athletes do the same? I'm guessing he will tell you that the first step is working those muscles: training and lifting daily. But you know what comes after that? You also have to rest. The work actually damages them. As you rest the body repairs itself, creating new, better, and bigger muscle tissue to meet the demands you're placing on those muscles. If you train the same muscles every day without ever stopping you won't grow them, but damage them. Rest isn't about starting all over again in the same fashion. Rest allows for growth.
Theologically speaking, rest is a reminder that the universe doesn't depend on us, but on its Creator. Once you get enmeshed in the work of the world getting out is hard. Our daily tasks seduce us. They appear to give us importance. If we don't cook dinner nobody will eat! If I don't drive my child to practice she'll be kicked off the team! If I don't attend every single game my son will grow up thinking I'm a bad dad! If I don't file these six reports in exactly the right way the office will fall apart and my boss will be mad and I'll be fired and we'll go broke and lose our home and life as we know it will be over!
These things have a degree of truth to them, but we also need a day...a time to say "No" to all that. The world can survive for one day without me being in charge of it. The globe still spins, the sun still rises and sets, none of my friends and neighbors spun off into space today because I wasn't doing the same thing I do the other six days. Maybe...just maybe...the most important realization is not that I do what I have to do, but that God takes care of us all no matter what we get done or don't. Maybe the thing that binds us together isn't how well we perform for each other but our identity as Children of God. We don't need to scramble to look or feel blessed and important through our daily tasks. We are blessed and we are important because God loves us. Knowing that, we can then approach our daily work in a different way: loving and serving through it instead of extracting and controlling. We come to each day full instead of empty, looking for opportunities to give instead of validation.
That's a whole new approach to life...a perspective that only comes when you understand and respect the sanctity of the Sabbath, the ceasing and resting, the holy discipline of laying down the yoke and celebrating freedom. It takes trust. It takes commitment. It even takes training people around you to accept something new...something friends and family might have a hard time understanding. But setting aside a day for God, for renewal, for doing something different than the other six pays back in ways beyond mere time and rest. That one day changes the other six and everything we do in them.
--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)
