Embracing Rhythms of Work and Rest

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BEGINNING with GOD

There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord.

ONE OF THE WAYS I got around sabbath-keeping for so long is that I dismissed it as "a Jewish thing" that had very little to do with me. It was certainly a nice idea, but I wasn't convinced it was something important from God for me. I am not alone in this; it seems many have had a tendency to dismiss sabbath as being part of another culture, a relic of another place and time. This is why it is so important to begin our exploration of the sabbath by fully grasping that this whole idea actually begins with God. God lived it first and later shared it with his chosen people as the optimal way to live.

When time had no shape at all, God created "a holiness in time" by working six days and then ceasing on the seventh. Over time this rhythm became uniquely associated with the Jewish culture because the Israelites were the first group of people to practice sabbath and experience its benefits, but the pattern of working six days and then resting on the seventh is something that flows from God's very nature and being. So we honor those who first incorporated sabbath-keeping into their way of life and learn all we can from them (which certainly puts the Judeo back into our Judeo-Christian tradition!), knowing that the practice of sabbath-keeping really cannot be relegated to one group of people in one time period. Sabbath begins with God.

MORE THAN A LIFESTYLE SUGGESTION

Sabbath is more than a lifestyle suggestion or an expression of one's ethnicity. It is a spiritual precept that emerges from the creation narrative where God expresses God's very nature by finishing the work and then ceasing on the seventh day. In an article about Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, George Robinson writes:

In the Torah it is written, "On the seventh day God finished the work . . . and ceased from all the work . . . and God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, because on it God ceased from all the work of creation" (Genesis 2:2-3). But what did God create on the seventh day? Didn't God "cease from all the work of Creation" on the seventh day? What God created on the seventh day, the ancient rabbis tell us, was rest.

Rabbi Abraham Heschel in his seminal work, The Sabbath, elaborates:

After the six days of creation-what did the universe still lack? Menuha. Came the Sabbath, came menuha, and the universe was complete. Menuha which we usually render with "rest," means here much more than withdrawal from labor and exertion, more than freedom from toil, strain or activity of any kind. Menuha is not a negative concept but something real and intrinsically positive. . . . What was created on the seventh day? Tranquility, serenity, peace and repose. To the biblical mind menuha is the same as happiness and stillness, as peace and harmony.

What a thrilling thought! What if rest has already been created and all I have to do is find ways to participate? What if God has already done the work of creating this sanctuary in time and all I have to do is enter in? What if, on this one day a week, I am freed to cease my own work and productivity and can simply be at one with all that has already been created? And if this pattern of working six days and then entering into tranquility and peace, happiness and harmony on the seventh has always been there for us-established by God at the very beginning of the created order-how might this change our lives if we fully grasped its significance?

George Robinson continues:

Shabbat offers us a chance for peace with nature, with society, and with ourselves. The prohibitions on work are designed to make us stop-if only for one day a week-our relentless efforts to tame, to conquer, to subdue the earth and everything on it. The prohibition against making fire is also said by the rabbis to mean that one should not kindle the fires of controversy against one's fellow humans. And, finally, the sabbath offers us a moment of quiet, or serenity, of self-transcendence, a moment that allows us to seek and perhaps achieve some kind of internal peace.

That sounds exactly like what our world needs now. It is exactly what I need right now-to stop arguing and pushing and wrestling-for one day a week! Entering into this God-ordained rhythm is one very concrete way in which God's people can become partakers of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). Sabbath is a means of grace, a practice that creates channels for God to impart something of God's self so we can then be a conduit of God's nature to the world.

When we first start practicing the sabbath, we might not always experience this peace and serenity right away or even every time. The first thing we might experience is the discomfort of discovering how addicted we are to human striving and hard work; we might discover that we do not even know who we are when we are not working. As we unplug from our normal ways of being connected, we might experience intensifying feelings of angst or fear of missing out, or we might be ambushed by emotions we have kept at bay by staying so distracted and busy. This is all very normal and most of us will encounter some of these inner dynamics from time to time, making sabbath feel anything but peaceful. But after twenty years of practice and learning to wait through the initial discomfort, my experience now is that this peace, this tranquility, this shalom descends more quickly as I unplug and power down, trusting my weary soul to God. Given the stresses and strains that are part and parcel of life in a fallen world, what God does in and through my feeble attempts to try and enter in is a wonder each and every time.

SABBATH AS CEASING

Pastor David Alves offers this important clarification about what God actually did on the seventh day that is very helpful for our own reflection:

The Hebrew word shabbat, used by God in Genesis, is really a stopping or ceasing more than a rest. God never tires. He did not rest on the seventh day. He is the one who never sleeps nor slumbers. He needs no rest. Bible translators would have better served us to stay closer to the denotative definition of the Hebrew than to have made it seem that God just took a short breather. He ceased from his work. He stopped what he was doing. That is what He meant to communicate. Therefore, that is what he calls us to do on our Sabbath-make an abrupt end to our labor. All labor? No, our usual labor-the labor we've been doing the other six days of the seven-day week.

One of the reasons I find this nuance to be so life-giving is there are some activities that could be considered work that bring such delight to me I actually save them for the sabbath-so I can savor them rather than just push through to check them off my list.

One of those activities is being in my yard planting new plants, adding a few flowers, observing the beauty and the growth of what's already there; wandering around to rejoice at the tiny new shoots of perennials as they emerge from winter, the buds on my flowering trees, the courage of the daffodils as they dazzle us with their color before knowing if winter is even over yet. On the sabbath, I move slowly, dig deeply in the soil, pull up a dandelion here and there, and savor God's good earth without worrying about having a little bit of it under my fingernails. During the different seasons, being present in nature actually puts me in touch experientially with the different dynamics that undergird the spiritual life. Wayne Muller writes,

Sabbath honors the necessary wisdom of dormancy. If certain plant species, for example, do not lie dormant in the winter, they will not bear fruit in the spring. If this continues for more than a season, the plant begins to die. If dormancy continues to be prevented, the entire species will die. A period of rest-in which nutrition and fertility most readily coalesce-is not simply a human psychological convenience; it is a spiritual and biological necessity. A lack of dormancy produces confusion and erosion in the life force.

Where else can we actually learn this except by being in the garden? Yes, I suppose you could call this work, but it is a different kind of work, done in a different way. On the sabbath, I settle more deeply into the soil of my own life and call it good. And not just good, but very good! Now, if farming or gardening is your everyday work, this might be a different kind of choice for you and it probably should be! But the point here seems to be an emphasis on ceasing one's usual labors, whatever that is for each one of us. Tilden Edwards speaks to this distinction when he writes,

The principle involved here . . . is not so much the physical nature of the activity but its purpose. If its intent signifies human power over nature, if it shows human mastery of the world by the purposeful and constructive exercise of intelligence and skill, then it is meluchah, work, that violates the...