Mandatory Rest
By Rev. Jessica C. Gregory
I consider myself a good memorizer. As a kid I always got hundreds on my spelling tests and did well in spelling bees and throughout my education I had success in languages—at least as far as learning the vocabulary! So, in seminary when I learned that a prize was offered to students who could memorize the Westminster Shorter Catechism I decided to do it. This confession is found in our Book of Confessions-I am sure, as good Presbyterians, you have read it, or will read it when you get home! The Shorter Catechism consists of 107 questions and answers dealing with God, Christ, the Christian Life, the sacraments, the Lord’s Prayer and the ten commandments and was written specifically as a learning tool for the children of the church. However, it is not a simple confession!
And so, just a few months before the exam for the prize, I began to study. I memorized the first twenty questions quite easily…but the thirties got more difficult and I began to struggle to keep things straight. And then I got to the ten commandments and breathed a sigh of relief. Order! The next forty questions were about the commandments, beginning with the first and ending with the last. However, as my friend and I reviewed these questions I realized that I did not know the ten commandments as well as I thought! I listed six or seven pretty easily and then struggled to get the last three. It was the first time in awhile that I’d really thought about them. I can easily recall the greatest commandment Jesus taught: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” and his second commandment the golden rule of loving your neighbor as yourself. (Matthew 22:37-39)
But I don’t often tick off in my head the ten commandments. Let’s take a moment to review:
1. You shall have no other Gods but me
2. You shall not worship idols
3. You shall not use my name in vain
4. Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy
5. Honor your parents
6. You shall not murder.
7. You shall not commit adultery
8. You shall not steal
9. You shall not bear false witness against a neighbor
10. You shall not covet.
Commandments one through four describe how we are to live a covenantal life with God, and five through ten describe how we are to live with one another. It is by following the first four that we are able to follow the rest.
These ten commandments, or teachings, “express the purposeful will of God for God’s people” (Taylor 2008 77). The Commandments are not a list of rules but rather a guide for our lives. “Trust Me, God says. Those other teachings are not good for you” (Taylor 2008 77). God knows that we are not perfect; it’s for this reason that God offers these ten teachings about how to live before God and one another. God’s faithfulness is not contingent on our obedience—we live by God’s grace. However, as theologian and preacher Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “To ignore [the commandments] is to wander into the ways of death instead, where God’s faithfulness can be of little help” (Taylor 2008 77).
We all have particular commandments that we struggle with; for me it is the fourth--
Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all of your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it (Exodus 20: 8-11).
Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy…the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work. This sounds great—but not very realistic. . .and very easy to forget. It is possible to take a day off work, but then it’s time to do the errands—get the groceries, clean the house, do the laundry. How are we supposed to take the whole day off? To many this may be an impossibility. However, for all of us, it is possible to create Sabbath time. This commandment uniquely begins, “Remember”. If we are to remember something, that means that we know it. We know how to have a Sabbath day or time—we know how to spend time with those we love, to enjoy a leisurely meal, to explore God’s creation and to nap…even if it’s just for a morning or a hour. We know how to rest—we just don’t. We are all so busy! As Wayne Muller, author of Sabbath: Restoring the Sacred Rhythm of Rest asserts:
We say “I’m so busy!” to one another with no small degree of pride, as if our exhaustion were a trophy, our ability to withstand stress a mark of real character. The busier we are, the more important we seem to ourselves, and we imagine, to others. To be unavailable to our friends and family, to be unable to find time for the sunset (or even to know that the sun has set at all), to whiz through our obligations without time for a single mindful breath, this has become the model of a successful life” (1999 2).
Our society affirms that to DO is worthy, and to BE is not. We do not forget to go to work or to buy groceries or to go to our many meetings…what we forget is to rest. We do not acknowledge that rest is as important as work, and that is where we are very, very wrong. Dietrich Bonhoeffer reflects,
The Decalogue contains no commandment to work, but there is a commandment to rest for work. That is contrary to our usual way of thinking….God knows that the work we do can gain so much power over us we can no longer leave it alone. Our activity can promise us everything and make us forget God. Therefore God commands us to rest from our work. It is not work that supports us, but God alone; we live not from work, but from God alone. (2007 43).
Sabbath is not meant to be an optional practice to engage in if all of your work for the week is done—it is part of your “work” as a child of God-it is part of your life. We all know that in the story of creation, “on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done and he rested on the seventh day…” (Genesis 3:3) God’s rest is part of the story. “The ancient rabbis teach that on the seventh day, God created menuha—tranquility, serenity, peace and repose—rest, the deepest possible sense of fertile, healing stillness. Until the Sabbath, creation is unfinished. Only after the birth of menuha, only with tranquility and rest, was the circle of creation made full and complete” (Muller 1999 37).
I have always envied the weekly Jewish holy day of Shabbat; a day when the entire community rests in God. This day became of primary importance to the Jews when their temple was destroyed in 70 AD. They no longer had a sanctuary to worship in, so they created a sanctuary of time. “The practice of Sabbath was a spiritual glue that held the people together” (Muller 1999 36). The Sabbath meant everything to the Jewish community then and still does today.
Several years ago I visited an old friend in New York City. At the time, her husband was a student at Jewish Theological Seminary training to be a Rabbi and she was teaching elementary school. I arrived at their home around 4 pm on a Friday afternoon, just before Shabbat. As sunset approached Katy and Geoff finished the preparations for the holy day. They lit candles and turned on the bathroom light. It would be left on all night. From sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday Katy and Geoff did not turn anything on or off. After a brief time of singing and prayers we enjoyed a meal of cold lasagna for dinner and then went for a walk in the evening. No phones ringing, no TV on…just time of quiet and time of sharing. It was a beautiful way to end a work week and to begin a time of rest.
While we Christians acknowledge Sunday as the Sabbath, we DON’T GET IT. It has never been our spiritual glue, and we do not depend on it in the same way as the Jews. As a community we do not stop our lives and rest. We are so busy we forget. I am urging all of us to Remember.
Keeping the Sabbath reminds us of whose we are…it reminds us that our lives are not dependent on our works, but on God’s grace that is freely given to us. We live in this world, yes, but we are not slaves of this world. We belong to God.
I don’t watch much television, but I am a fan of the drama Brothers and Sisters. There is never a dull moment in the Walker household! The show chronicles the lives of the mother, Nora, her five adult children, and each of their significant others and families. For much of this season, the focus on her daughter Kitty and Kitty’s husband Robert has been their process of adoption. It has not been easy, but Kitty and Robert were matched with a pregnant woman and are going to adopt her son as soon as he’s born. Meanwhile, Robert, a U.S. Senator, has determined he’s running for governor of California-without discussing it with Kitty. The suspense builds as their birth mother goes into labor at the same time Robert announces his candidacy. As Robert rushes to the hospital moments before his child is born, he has a heart attack and goes to the emergency room. After suffering a heart attack Robert is lying on a bed in operating room with Kitty perched on the side. She is urging him to agree to by-pass surgery, which is by far the best option with his condition. Despite the fact that the surgery will save his life, Robert does not want it, because it will take him away from the campaign. Kitty ultimately talks him into the surgery, by reminding him of their newborn son just a few floors away. When asked if he will still be running for governor, just before his open heart surgery, Robert responds with quiet determination: “Absolutely. I have to...It’s my identity.”
Now I know this is an extreme example, as Hollywood often offers, but I do think it hits a cord for us today. “It’s my identity.” I wonder where do we find our own identities? In what we do? In our family? In our relationship to God? God created Sabbath because God longs to be in relationship with us, longs for us to seek refuge in God. God does not want us to burn out of our jobs or be absent from our lives because of our work—God calls us to be whole people. Remembering the Sabbath, acknowledging our identity as God’s children and spending time with God helps us to keep order in our lives so that we may best live.
As Christians, we not only have the ten commandments to offer us guidance, but the gift of God’s son Jesus to show us how best to live. However, in our gospel passage for today we see an angry, violent Jesus. He is at his wit’s end. Somehow in the business of the temple has taken precedent of worshipping there. If you are like me, you do not particularly like this image of Jesus—whipping a cord around, overturning tables yelling at people. This is not how I think about my Savior. However, sometimes it is only through yelling and the crashing of tables that we can hear what someone is saying to us—even what God is saying. Sometimes tough love is necessary. And, as a commentator notes, “we should not make the quick assumption that because Jesus is our Savior, he is perpetually well pleased with us” (Gloer, 2008 97).
In this passage, Jesus is challenging the status quo of the temple. The animals being bought and the money changers’ actions alone are not bad—both needed to be at the temple for folks on pilgrimage who needed to buy an animal to offer as sacrifice and change their coins to the pay the temple tax. What angered Jesus was that these actions of buying and selling had become the focus of the temple, rather than the worship of God. The temple was dedicated to the purposes of God, but in actuality stood in opposition to it (Gloer 2008 97). The sellers and the money changers had forgotten whose they were. They had begun to worship the idol of money making rather than God. They had created a marketplace void of Sabbath rest—and God was not pleased.
God is not pleased when we neglect his commandments because that means we are wandering from God towards ways of death, rather than with God toward the life God intends. God wants to be our companion in life!
Remember the Sabbath, acknowledging that you are children of God and rest is mandatory for living. Remember the Ten Commandments as you do the greatest commandment, so that they may guide your life and that you may enjoy life as God intends. And if you are really ambitious try to memorize the Westminster Shorter Catechism. . . or not. Amen.
© 2009 Jessica Gregory, Illinois