Keeping Sabbath
Proper 16C Sunday, July 24, 2025
If you refrain from trampling the Sabbath
If you call the sabbath a delight…
If you honor it…
Then you shall take delight in the LORD…
AMEN!
(Isaiah 58)
When I was newly ordained, I hosted an Easter Sunday brunch. The guest list included a number of clergy who gathered in a circle with their bloody mary’s and eggs benedict competing for who had worked the most hours and preached or presided at the greatest number of Holy Week services.
The gold medal in the clergy Olympics went to a newly appointed rector who boasted that over the course of seven days, she had officiated at fifteen services, preached seven sermons, led three bible studies, taken communion to a dozen shut-ins, visited another half dozen parishioners in the hospital, located the lost paschal candle, baked communion bread, broke up an argument in the flower guild, proofed all the bulletins, laundered her vestments, and cleaned her office. Not only that, but in the middle of the week, she attended the diocesan clergy service where, with her colleagues, she renewed the ordination vow to, “Do your best to pattern your life in accordance with the teachings of Christ, so that you may be a wholesome example to all people.”[1]
It was no surprise that, after a couple of drinks, she referred to the most sacred week in the Christian calendar as “Hell Week.” The other clergy affirmed her sentiment by lifting their glasses with a loud and boisterous, “Amen!” While I wasn’t that priest, I did share her sense of accomplishment, relief, and exhaustion; and if I were being honest, I was probably asking myself: “Did I work hard enough during Holy Week?”
So many of us are defined by our work. We think that the harder we work, the more we will be rewarded with money, status, and even God’s approval. Like Goethe’s (Ger-ta’s) epic character Faust, we are afraid that if we cease to work and lie on what he called “a bed of sloth,” our very existence will cease. So, like the Energizer Bunny, we keep going until we collapse from exhaustion.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Sabbath, the crown of creation, provides a weekly day of rest for both the Creator and the created. Sabbath, Shabbat in Hebrew, has its roots in the verb shavat, which means to cease, to stop, and to rest.
On the seventh day of creation, God finished creation by stopping and resting. The Bible tells us that, when God ceased to create and withdrew into God’s own essence, the Creator “rested and was refreshed.”
Perhaps, the first Sabbath prepared God and creation to enter into a relationship. Germon theologian Jurgen Moltmann explained it this way: “In creation, God went out of Godself. In God’s rest, God returns to Godself. In creation, God engaged God’s creatures. In God’s rest, God gives them space.” Thus, “The Sabbath [becomes] the day in which we can experience God’s silent and restful presence.”[2]
By establishing the Sabbath, God acknowledged creation as family. By honoring it, we acknowledge God as sole creator, harmonizing with the Holy One’s creative and resting dispositions.
The biblical command to keep the Sabbath holy was given to a recently liberated people. God couldn’t impose it on the Hebrews when they were in Egypt, for enslaved people are not in control of their own time. Thus, keeping Sabbath is both a privilege and a duty that accompanies freedom.
The honoring of the Sabbath was what set the ancient Israelites apart from their neighbors. Many say that the Sabbath is still the unique expression for the spirit of Judaism, “a world revolution” as described by the 19th century Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig.[3]
Sabbath is a radical call to justice and compassion. It insists upon rest for adults who work hard and for children who are at the mercy, and sometimes the beck and call, of adults. The Sabbath even ensures recovery to animals that pull heavy loads. The Sabbath is also wise environmental policy and a gift to all creation as it protects land and natural resources that also need rest.
Biblical scholar Walter Bruggemann once suggested that the Sabbath is “an antidote to the enormous anxiety we have about the fragility of the world.”[4] Imagine what the world would be like if all of humanity practiced Sabbath.
Because understanding the intent of a law is essential to keeping it, one-third of the Decalogue (that is, the ten commandments) is devoted to reminding the people what to remember on the Sabbath. Over the centuries the priests, the judges, and later the rabbis devoted much time and intellectual energy discussing, debating, arguing and codifying just what it means to “honor the Sabbath and keep it holy.”
By Jesus’ day, there were thirty-nine forms of work prohibited on the Sabbath. For instance, in an effort to ensure that nobody worked on the Sabbath, there were prohibitions against entering a field on the Sabbath or performing elective or non-essential services.
When, in this morning’s gospel reading, Jesus was accused of healing on the Sabbath, he advocated for “a humanitarian Sabbath exception” that was common in first century Jewish law.[5] When he said, “The Sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the Sabbath” (Mark 2.27), Jesus was engaged in a fairly typical rabbinical debate about the law. There always were and will always be debates and disagreements about the spirit and letter of the law, but that doesn’t mean we should throw the baby out with the bath water.
In the early church, the Jewish followers of Jesus, continued to keep the Sabbath, but they added another holy day to the week that they celebrated on Sunday, calling it the Lord’s Day or the Day of Resurrection.
Sunday first received special sanction in the third century when Constantine declared it a day of rest throughout the Roman Empire. By the end of the eighth century, the Emperor Charlemagne established the Lord’s Day as a new Sabbath, and it became the law of the land.
While Jews continued to observe Shabbat at sundown on Fridays entering what Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel called “a cathedral” or “ a palace in time with a kingdom for all,”[6] as Christianity grew and spread, the Sunday celebration of Sabbath became the societal norm in Western Europe and America.
But over the centuries, something happened to the essence of Sabbath. Most of us – Christian and Jew alike, lost it. In the business and busyness of life, we decided that we didn’t need to or couldn’t afford to stop and rest. Our Friday nights became dedicated to working late, catching up on emails, attending sporting events, going to the movies, eating out with friends, or collapsing into the sofa to watch mindless hours of television. Our Saturdays got filled with shopping, errands, cleaning house, working in the yard, paying bills, driving kids, attending sporting events, tending to family obligations, and for some, catching up on more email.
Our Sundays became jammed packed with similar activities. Rush to get up on time, eat breakfast, get the kids dressed for church, drive to church, hustle from worship to Sunday School to coffee hour, stop at the store to pick last minute items for Sunday dinner, grab a quick bite to eat before the hour of sporting events begin again, run to the mall to take advantage of the Sunday sales, do the laundry, finish homework, clean the house, cook and eat dinner, and collapse just in time to start all over again at the crack of dawn on Monday morning.
Just thinking about it makes me exhausted. Our increasingly long workweeks, family demands and social obligations; our cell phones, tablets and computers; the internet and our social media networks have become signs and symbols of our oppression. We are slaves to a new pharaoh – our busy schedules and our 24-7 wired, linked-in, and turned-on accessibility. As religious commentator Dorothy Bass wrote: “The arrangement of time is one of the basic building blocks in a society’s way of life – and in our society, these blocks are not building a habitable dwelling, but an all-night arcade.”[7]
What happened to keeping Sabbath and experiencing God’s restful presence? What happened to honoring the Sabbath and experiencing rest, refreshment and re-creation in our own lives?
Something is missing, we’re paying the price for its absence, and I’m hearing Jesus, and all the prophets, speaking on behalf of God and saying, “Slow down, you’re moving too fast.”
How do we heed this advice? I suggest that we recover Sabbath – a day for worship, rest and refreshment? Some might experiment with a fusion of Christian Sabbath and Jewish Shabbat: Saturday evening to welcome Shabbat with the Jewish ritual of a leisurely meal with family and friends, followed by Sunday morning as a celebration of the Lord’s resurrection, and Sunday afternoon as a time of rest and play before spending Sunday night to prepare for the week ahead. Interfaith families might try keeping Shabbat on Friday nights, enjoying a Saturday of rest and recreation, and wrapping up the Sabbath with church on Sunday mornings as a way of incorporating both Christian and Jewish ritual and tradition. Twenty-four hours is all you need.
Sabbath invites us to take one day – 24 hours – when we don’t participate in the commercial system, when we limit our use of non-renewable energy, when we spend time talking and playing with family and friends or reading a good book instead sitting in front of our computer or television, when we enjoy relaxed meals made of healthy and wholesome food, or when we take a leisurely walk through one the beach (or even our neighborhood) rather than going to the gym – one day when we are lazy and rest, just because God wants us to do so.
“But I can’t take Sundays (or Saturdays) to myself,” you insist. ”I have to work on the weekends.” We need to remember the words of Jesus: “The Sabbath was made for humankind,” not the reverse.
If Saturdays and Sundays don’t work, then develop a weekly pattern of Sabbath time. As Dorothy Bass reminds us, “To act as if the world cannot get along without our work for one day in seven is a startling display of pride that denies the sufficiency of our generous Maker.”
Craft a schedule and ritual that incorporates the elements of Sabbath keeping. Find time for silence, prayer, rest, play, recreation, and slowing down. Find the time to be creative without having to create something, to breathe freely without having to produce something, to rest and enjoy life without having to earn something.
Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Director of One Wisdom River School in Nashville, suggests that for those of us who are overwhelmed, overburdened and exhausted by the obligations of life, including our religious obligations, we need Shabbos. Shabbos (the Yiddish word for Sabbath) is for Rabbi Rami a day set aside to breathe freely and to simply celebrate life. For those who can’t figure out how to do it on their own, he offers two Shabbos rules: Rule #1. There are no rules. Rule #2. When tempted to make a rule for Shabbos, refer to Rule #1.[8] And then, just do it.
The Very Rev. Tracey Lind
St. James the Fisherman, Wellfleet, MA
[1] Book of Common Prayer, 544.
[2] Jurgen Moltmann, “Sabbath: Finishing and Beginning,” The Living Pulpit, April-June, 1998, 4.
[3] Franz Rosenzweig, letter to E. Rosenstock, 1924.
[4] Walter Bruggemann, Talking about Genesis: A Resource Guide.
[5] The Jewish Annotated New Testament, edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler (New York, Oxford University Press, 2011), 65.
[6] Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man ( New York, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1951) 21.
[7] Dorothy C. Bass, “Keeping Sabbath; Reviving a Christian Practice” (Christian Century, January 1-8, 1997) 12-16.
[8] Rami Shapiro, “Shabbos,” Alive Now, July/August 2012, 13-14.