An Invitation to Rest

".... "When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established, what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?"

I think it fair to say--on this cusp of a season in which rest has been permitted, and in prospect of the season when labor is relentlessly expected--we are a people who struggle with the balance. Vacations have afforded us some degree of distance from the pressures of our life's regular responsibilities, but perspective fades after a few days back in the fray. Evenings under the stars, in retrospect, seem short-lived, as we check our calendars for nights now to be cluttered with meetings and matters of consequence. We are a people, we say, who "work hard" and "play hard," though I think we have the former down a little bit better than the latter.

Hence, before we plunge headlong into another labor-intensive season, we would do well to revisit the biblical mandate to rest...not two to four weeks out of every year, depending on time put in...but rest, once a week, for a whole day, says the Lord.

Luther translated the Sabbath commandment to read: You shall make a day of celebration holy. Instead of using the Hebrew word Shabat, Luther used the German word Feiertag in his translation of Exodus 20 verse 8, which means "to celebrate a festival or simply to take time off from work." Feiertag. It was a familiar word often used in the common life of Germans to indicate a holiday. Hence the coincidence of holiday and holy day for this marvelously bawdy theologian...this Reformer who taught his students about God's grace in beer halls, using language and bodily noises that would still stand proper Philadelphia society on its ear...the coincidence of celebration and the rest God intended, in what Luther considered the third commandment, was theologically and biblically unassailable.

But Luther goes on to explain, "We keep holy days not for the sake of intelligent and well informed Christians, for these have no need of them. We keep them, first, for the sake of bodily need. Nature teaches and demands that the common people--man-servants and maid-servants who have attended to their work and trades the whole week long--should retire for a day to rest and be refreshed."

In other words, the command to make a day for celebration was not first religious in Luther's mind, but necessarily, and by God's intention, re-creational. Common laborers were made by their Creator such that they needed a break. So the Sabbath commandment is first of all, and surprisingly grounded, in the human need for physical, psychological, and social well-being. To be sure, it is God's day, but it is a day God made for us! It is the way God provides for us--God's concrete providence this is: not us for this rest in a religious sense, but this rest was established for our well-being by the One who remembers our frame.

We, of course, cannot bear it. And this is so for a number of reasons, though the reason which is most obvious has to do with our strange resistance to a God who would be graceful toward us. The gift of a day to rest? The command to cease our work? This surely is a test. There must be strict rules set up so that we do this right! There should be laws governing the Sabbath, regulations for our proper rest. So it was that the Pharisees had a fit when then caught Jesus' disciples plucking grain on the Sabbath and found Jesus healing. It was against the rules for the Sabbath, inspite of the fact that the One, who fulfilled the rule of love, assured them of the Sabbath's purpose: made for "man," he said, for human beings, and not "human beings" for the Sabbath.

Later, Protestants stepped into the same misunderstanding, making the Lord's commanded day of rest a work for any who would be righteous and holy. Worship, Bible reading, quiet reflection were in. Game playing, movie going, commerce or sports were out. Even liberal Protestants of today can tell stories of such an upbringing. The only vestige of Sabbatarian rules in my own family involved attendance at worship. If you were sick enough to miss worship, said my mother, you were too sick to do anything the rest of the day. But, go to worship and you were free! I remember pitying Pennsylvanians as I took off, after a morning spent in church, for a Sunday afternoon spent at the mall. To wit, Paul Lehmann so marvelously observed, "When one considers the joylessness with which blue laws and checklists of things not to be done 'on the Sabbath day,' as the going phrase went, have infected 'the making of a day of celebration holy,' it is difficult not to repress at least a Te Deum sotto voce [a praise to God under the breath] for the creeping intrusion upon the once widely observed weekly calendar respite that religious pluralism and an insatiable passion for commercial advantage have irreversibly brought about."

Could it be that the Sunday afternoon crowds at the malls, the 7:30 a.m. tee off time on such a morning as this, the playing of sports, the season opener of the Eagles, for instance, or more importantly the Giants' kick-off at 1 o'clock today, come closer to keeping Luther's understanding of the Sabbath commandment than any Sabbatarian restriction on human playfulness? "The pious regard for the Lord's day," Lehmann concluded, "had slowly but surely been despoiled of celebration, the making of a holy day, in flagrant violation of the precedent set by the Creator, who took time off to enjoy all that he had made...." Sunday as time off! Could it be that the oft used plea of families-stretched-to-the-limit, Sunday morning being touted as the only morning when over-wrought parents can sleep-in and over-programmed children can engage in unstructured play, could this be a modern interpretation of a biblical norm heretofore known as the Sabbath?

Well, not exactly. For you see, God knows the rest we need is not any kind of rest. The Sabbath command is so much more than recreation from a human perspective. It is recreation from God's perspective. "Is there anything more depressing," writes Karl Barth, assuming a godly stance, "than the sight of obviously very bored male and female humanity [one of the few times, by the way, Barth was inclusive in his language!] wandering about our streets on Sunday afternoon around three o'clock all dressed up and pushing prams? What is the point of it?"

Barth's point was that the rest commanded in the Book of Exodus is a rest with a very particular content: "It says that, in deference to God and to the heart and meaning of [God's] work, there must be from time to time an interruption, a rest, a deliberate non-continuation, a temporal pause...[Why? What sort of pause?]...a pause to reflect on God and [God's] work...."

"When I look at the heavens," sings the Psalmist, "the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established...." It is a "time out" from the work of our hands...why?: to consider the work of God's fingers, the imprint of God's toe, the mark of God's love upon our lives. A walk along the Wissahickon, perhaps? A ride down a country road? An early dawn observed along the beach? To be sure, the psalmist has reflected in just such places and ways. But on the Sabbath, we cannot forget that the psalm was uttered in the context of worship, his praise offered in the gathered community of faith. Such godly consideration, of a Sunday, was made to be had not alone, according to the biblical witness, or even to be had within the confines of one's own family, but in the midst of the community which gathers to pause and reflect on God and God's work. "I am not happy when I do not regularly attend church" [Barbara Grizutti Harrison] "and not [I think] because I am oppressed by the consciousness of wrongdoing, but because I am weightier, having missed the opportunity to meditate, express adoration, contrition, thanks and supplication in loving and dignified communion with others."

Because we are those made restless until we rest in God, it is as though God made time for a relationship to be forged with the only One able to get us through the rest of the week! In Luther's words, "we keep holy days so that people may have time and opportunity, which otherwise would not be available, to participate in public worship, that is that they may assemble to hear and discuss God's Word and then praise God with song and prayer." Harrison regularly attended church because the acts of adoration, contrition, supplication and thanks were acts to be done "in loving and dignified communion with others."

The point is that we waste so much of the gift of this day on things which leave us empty at its end. The point is that we neglect the One who cleared this time, as a lover clears time for the beloved, in hopes that we would come to know the Savior of our lives better, love Him more, rejoice in His nearness. Instead, we hie to the Court at King of Prussia...or the craft fair at Lancaster...or the nineteenth hole to drown all memory of our duffed balls. This is alright with God, perhaps, though a great disappointment. This is an option once a week, we are free afterall, but it is also a missed opportunity. For observing the Sabbath is not first a law: that we should spend a day each week stuck in a pew. The Sabbath commandment is rather a free gift, from a God who knows our frame, and it is therefore simply true: that without this day spent "looking at the heavens and the work of God's fingers," together in praise, we face Monday more diminished than we will ever admit.

All of which turns the Sabbath inside-out, I do believe, from its Old Testament roots to its New Testament fulfillment...from a day to rest up from all of our labors at the end of the week, now to the first day of the week wherein we begin the next six days with celebration, and in freedom, and filled with gratitude. Because early one Sunday morning, after all human efforts had come to nought, the day of resurrection dawned upon human history, the Lord's Day is forever our new beginning, the fulfillment of the covenant between God and creation, which no human Sabbath-breaking could destroy.

Thus is the resurrection on the first day of the week God's earnest that "[Human] history under the command of God really begins with the Gospel and not with the Law, with an accorded celebration and not with a required task, with a prepared rejoicing, and not with care and toil, with a freedom given [us] and not an imposed obligation brought to [our] notice, with a rest and not with an activity, in brief, with Sunday...." [Barth]

"I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand....There is one church here, so I go to it. On Sunday mornings I quit the house and wander down the hill to the white frame church in the firs. On a big Sunday there might be twenty of us there; often I am the only person under sixty, and feel as though I'm on an archaeological tour of Soviet Russia. The members are of mixed denominations; the minister is a Congregationalist and wears a white shirt. The man knows God. Once, in the middle of the long pastoral prayer of intercession for the whole world--for the gift of wisdom to its leaders, for hope and mercy to the grieving and pained, succor to the oppressed, and God's grace to all--in the middle of this he stopped, and burst out, 'Lord, we bring you these same petitions every week,' After a shocked pause, he continued reading the prayer. Because of this, I like him very much. 'Good morning!' he says after the first hymn and invocation, startling me witless every time, and we all shout back, 'Good morning!' Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy.

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