“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh is the Sabbath day of the Lord your God. In it you shall do no work: you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your manservant, nor your maidservant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the seventh day and hallowed it.” (Exodus 20:8-11)

“For the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.” (Matthew 12:8)

Dear Saints,

How are Christians supposed to keep the 4^th Commandment? Christians are not of one mind about their relationship with the Ten Commandments, now that we “are not under law but under grace” (Romans 6:14), but on the question of Sabbath-keeping, more than most other subjects, we are all over the map.

The Scottish track star, Eric Liddell (“Chariots of Fire”), refused to run a qualifying heat in the 1924 Olympics when he learned it had been scheduled on a Sunday. For him, obedience to God’s commandment was more important than a chance at an Olympic medal and his country’s hopes for glory.

I know of a pastor who went to Denmark to study the writings of the theologian Søren Kierkegaard, and there he boarded in the home of a Christian family. On Sunday, after they returned from church together, the pastor began to climb the stairs to return to his books. “Where are you going?” his host asked. “You can’t study today! This is the Sabbath! We’re all going to the beer garden.”

From the Bible we learn that the Lord created and blessed the Sabbath (Genesis 2:3); that he created it for our good (Mark 2:27); and that keeping the Sabbath was a sign of the covenant relationship between God and Israel (Ezekiel 20:12). It was a day to refrain from all work. Even the servants, the animals, and the gentile “resident aliens” were to keep Sabbath. Sabbath observance was a regular reminder to the Israelites of their favored status before God. It was a day for families to gather in the home, to preserve and pass on, with stories and rituals, their religion, national identity, and culture. They did this even when they were exiles and economic migrants in gentile lands.

I recommend Rabbi Abraham Heschel’s beautiful little book, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (1951). I don’t have a copy handy to quote from, but one of the things from the book that stand out in my memory is Rabbi Heschel’s obvious joy in the Sabbath. He speaks of the Sabbath almost as a person, a distinguished lady guest who blesses his home with a weekly visit. And he speaks of the Sabbath as a day when he leaves the clock-driven, urgency-driven time of the six-day week and enters into God’s time. He has a foretaste of eternity in God’s presence. In the Jewish home, the Sabbath is a day for rest and Scripture study, but also a special family meal, games, jokes, songs, and other things that renew family and community.

The New Testament hardly mentions the Sabbath except to show Jesus getting into trouble with the religious authorities for not keeping Sabbath according to their strict traditions. The rabbis of Jesus’ time debated such questions as how does God himself keep the Sabbath, yet continue to sustain the creation on that day? Some rabbis were willing to make allowances for works of mercy to be done on the Sabbath. However, instead of being a gift from a merciful God, the Sabbath had become a severe burden for many, especially the poor, with harsh penalties (including death by stoning) for violating it.

The first Christians, being Jewish, observed the Sabbath on the seventh day (Saturday), but also gathered on the first day of the week, the Lord’s Day (Sunday), to celebrate Jesus’ resurrection. Then the Church moved out into the gentile world, where the 7-day week was unknown and where Israel’s “blue laws” were not in effect. The apostles consciously decided not to require that gentile converts adopt Jewish traditions or try to add anything to their salvation (which is by grace alone– God’s generosity and mercy– and received through faith alone) with such “works of the law” as Sabbath observance. St. Athanasius (295-373) wrote, “We keep no Sabbaths; we keep the Lord’s Day as a memorial of the beginning of the new creation.” When the Emperor Constantine declared Christianity no longer outlawed, but a legally permitted religion, he made Sunday a holiday and forbade all work on that day.

Since then, Christians have fluctuated between grim Sundays with extra church services, starched clothes, and no fun allowed; and, at the other extreme, the degeneration of Sunday into a day when everything is permitted except perhaps taking a thought for God. In our present economy, not everyone has the leisure, or the choice, to take Sunday off for worship or to take a full day off anywhere in the week.

From the time I first attended training as a Stewardship Consultant more than 10 years ago, it has troubled me that so little is being said about Sabbath-keeping as a stewardship issue. Not that I knew exactly what the lessons of Sabbath would be, but I sensed that the idea of Sabbath should not be overlooked in any discussion of the stewardship of our time. At the Province I Stewardship Conference, which the Vestry and I attended in April, I was gladdened to hear the Rev. Kirk “Chief” Kubiček (the Berrys’ former rector from Maryland) make some references to the Sabbath.

The Sabbath was made for our good, to serve a need. What do we need most? (Not everyone needs more hours in the church building; though for some, it might be a good start.) We need to remember that God loves us for who we are, even before we have done anything. We are more than smart apes. We’re made in the image and likeness of God. We’re put here to represent our Creator. Our God has spared us nothing, not even the life of his Son, to win us back into the relationship for which he created us. We need to nourish the life we have in Christ. We are not to be legalistic or calculating about the hours we give to God. All of our time is supposed to be holy time. One day out of seven is hardly enough to spend on being renewed in the truth.

The challenge of the Sabbath as a stewardship issue is this: Do you have faith in the Lord to provide enough for you to do more than just subsist, for seven days, through the labor you perform in six (Exodus 16:22-31)? Do you trust God to know, better than you do, what’s good for you: rest and refreshment; time with God, family and community; time to be quiet with yourself? Or do you have to be so caught up in busy-ness that you can’t sit still for a moment, listen to the Lord and worship him, and “waste time constructively” on things that have nothing to do with efficiency or the “bottom line”?

I find it difficult to do. On the day that I set aside to refrain from work, I still find myself drawn to church busy-ness, rationalizing, “But it’s for the Lord!” I’m writing this article on a day that’s supposed be a day off. Shame! Vainglory! Where is my trust in the Lord to give me enough time to do all that has to be done, and still cease from my labors for a full day? A year ago someone on Vestry suggested we move our meetings from Sunday to another day in the week. I spoke in favor of the suggestion, because I’m convinced that a discipline of keeping church busy-ness out of Sunday might help us recover the spirit of the commandment and to establish Jesus as Lord of our Sabbaths.

Earlier I wrote that the Sabbath was a sign of Israel’s covenant relationship. On Sunday morning, most people we know are sleeping late, doing crossword puzzles, going to the race track, watching the talking heads on TV, or making money. It is an important witness to our culture when Christians are willing to miss out on these things for a morning per week to be with the Body of Christ and proclaim the mighty works of God.

Faithfully,

Chuck Bradshaw +