Subversive Sabbath

The Surprising Power of Rest in a Nonstop World

Swoboda, A. J.

• Publisher: Brazos Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781493412907
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Christianity Today 2019 Book Award Winner (Spiritual Formation) and Award of Merit for CT 's Beautiful Orthodoxy Book of the Year
Outreach 2019 Recommended Resource of the Year (Spiritual Growth) We live in a 24/7 culture of endless productivity, workaholism, distraction, burnout, and anxiety--a way of life to which we've sadly grown accustomed. This tired system of "life" ultimately destroys our souls, our bodies, our relationships, our society, and the rest of God's creation. The whole world grows exhausted because humanity has forgotten to enter into God's rest. This book pioneers a creative path to an alternative way of existing. Combining creative storytelling, pastoral sensitivity, practical insight, and relevant academic research, Subversive Sabbath offers a unique invitation to personal Sabbath-keeping that leads to fuller and more joyful lives. A.J. Swoboda demonstrates that Sabbath is both a spiritual discipline and a form of social justice, connects Sabbath-keeping to local communities, and explains how God may actually do more when we do less. He shows that the biblical practice of Sabbath-keeping is God's plan for the restoration and healing of all creation. The book includes a foreword by Matthew Sleeth.

Part 1
Sabbath for Us

1
Sabbath and Time

Don’t underestimate the value of Doing Nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.

Winnie-the-Pooh, in The Complete Tales of Winnie-the-Pooh

Remembering Sabbath

In 1991, a yet-to-be-identified flea market enthusiast discovered a simple picture frame to his liking. Securing the purchase, the shopper returned home only to discover an ancient document hiding inconspicuously behind the frame. Thinking little of the discovery, he continued about his life. Two years later, a friend stumbled on the document and investigated its origin. The rest is history. The four-dollar frame had hidden a first-edition copy of the Declaration of Independence reportedly worth north of one million dollars.1 This accidental discovery is not isolated. There was the contractor who found $182,000 in a bathroom wall he was remodeling.2 A three-dollar Chinese bowl later sold at Sotheby’s for $2.2 million—it was a treasure from the Northern Song Dynasty.3 Then there was that California family who stumbled on a can of ancient gold coins in their backyard valued at $10 million.4

To borrow Calvin’s words from Bill Watterson’s iconic comic strip, “There’s treasure everywhere.”5 Not only do treasures of gold and silver lie hidden everywhere around us, but priceless ideas do as well. History is the story of ideas lost and found, disappearing and reappearing time and again to the surface.6

This is important, for ideas are a matter of life and death. Take slavery, for example, which deems some peoples as inferior to others and regards people as objects to be used. Eugenics similarly witnesses to a whole set of beliefs that suggest only certain human lives are intrinsically valuable—so long as (in the case of Nazism) they are German, have blond hair and blue eyes, and do not have Down syndrome or a disability. One cannot read Hitler’s writings on the concept of lebensraum (“final solution”) and suggest that ideas, even in seed form, are insignificant or not worth debate. In the end, the ideas of a few led to the murder of millions. For this very reason, Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl commented that the very ideas behind the Holocaust did not arise out of nowhere. Rather, these monstrous ideas were disseminated mostly from the cold lecterns of university classrooms across Europe in the years leading up to World War II. The Holocaust was first conceived as a simple, inconspicuous idea—unchallenged and unquestioned by far too many.

Ideas are not neutral, be they religious, philosophical, or scientific. Cultural critic and historian Howard Zinn once wrote, “We can reasonably conclude that how we think is not just mildly interesting, not just a subject for intellectual debate, but a matter of life and death.”7 Christian philosopher Dallas Willard agrees: “We live at the mercy of our ideas.”8 Christ followers, for this reason, must awaken to their calling to critically examine each and every idea, eschewing any false security within the safe harbor of anti-intellectualism. We must, as Paul admonishes, “take captive” any idea opposed to Christ’s work (2 Cor. 10:5) with the “mind of Christ” (1 Cor. 2:16). As John writes, we “test the spirits” (1 John 4:1). Avoidance of critically examining our ideas, in the end, is the worst (and least Christian) idea of them all.

Sometimes humanity lives its worst ideas and forgets its best ideas. In Scripture, God’s people often forget the ideas of God. For instance, 2 Kings 22 tells the tale of King Josiah. Rising to power at a time when Israel had all but completely forgotten God’s law and ways, Josiah sends his secretary into the temple to do some administrative work. Seemingly by accident, Shaphan discovers a number of dusty, old, unfamiliar scrolls. He discerns their identity: scrolls of Jewish Torah! When they are carried to the king, Josiah’s heart is cut to its core. He becomes aware of the tragedy: God’s people have literally forgotten God’s word. In a profound act of repentance, Josiah publicly calls Israel back to God’s law. Remembering is a godly act—time and again retrieving the truth of God in the present.9 Perhaps this is why St. Paul constantly “reminds” the early churches of the gospel of Jesus—the church is the one that so easily forgets it. God’s people are indeed saved from their sins. But apparently not from a bad memory.

Have you ever wondered whether there is something we have forgotten?

What has the church overlooked in our time?

What might we have amnesia over?

“Remember the Sabbath” (Exod. 20:8).

Sabbath is that ancient idea and practice of intentional rest that has long been discarded by much of the church and our world. Sabbath is not new. Sabbath is just new to us. Historically, Christians have kept some form or another of the Sabbath for some two thousand years. But it has largely been forgotten by the church, which has uncritically mimicked the rhythms of the industrial and success-obsessed West. The result? Our road-weary, exhausted churches have largely failed to integrate Sabbath into their lives as vital elements of Christian discipleship. It is not as though we do not love God—we love God deeply. We just do not know how to sit with God anymore. We have come to know Jesus only as the Lord of the harvest, forgetting he is the Lord of the Sabbath as well. Sabbath forgetfulness is driven, so often, in the name of doing stuff for God rather than being with God. We are too busy working for him. This is only made more difficult by the fact that the Western church is increasingly experiencing displacement and marginalization in a post-Christian, secular society. In that, we have all the more bought into the notion that ministering on overdrive will resolve the crisis. Sabbath is assumed to be the culprit of a shrinking church. So time poverty and burnout have become the signs that the minority church remains serious about God in a world that has rejected him. Because we pastors rarely practice Sabbath, we rarely preach the Sabbath. And because we do not preach the Sabbath, our congregations are not challenged to take it seriously themselves. The result of our Sabbath amnesia is that we have become perhaps the most emotionally exhausted, psychologically overworked, spiritually malnourished people in history.

Similarly challenging are the cultural realities we face. Our 24/7 culture conveniently provides every good and service we want, when we want, how we want.10 Our time-saving devices, technological conveniences, and cheap mobility have seemingly made life much easier and interconnected. As a result, we have more information at our fingertips than anyone in history. Yet with all this progress, we are ominously dissatisfied. In bowing at these sacred altars of hyperactivity, progress, and technological compulsivity, our souls increasingly pant for meaning and value and truth as they wither away, exhausted, frazzled, displeased, ever on edge. The result is a hollow culture that, in Paul’s words, is “ever learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim. 3:7)—increasingly so. Our bodies wear ragged. Our spirits thirst. We have an inability to simply sit still and be. As we drown ourselves in a 24/7 living, we seem to be able to do anything but quench our true thirst for the life of God. We have failed to ask ourselves the question Jesus asks of us: “What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?” (Matt. 16:26).

We must begin by remembering. If you journey into a contemporary Jewish home prepared for Sabbath, you will likely encounter two candles lit by (more often than not) the woman of the home.11 On Friday evening, she waves the flames from the kiddush candles—setting the mood for restful intimacy—toward her face to symbolize the Sabbath entering her home. One tradition holds that these candles symbolize a room set for lovemaking.12 But why two candles? They represent the two lists of commandments, one commanding us “to remember” (Exod. 20:8) and the second “to observe” (Deut. 5:12) the Sabbath.13 Those two candles are a reminder, the rabbis insisted, that Sabbath observance depended on Sabbath remembrance. To do, one must first remember.

As said, contemporary Christianity has an acute case of Sabbath amnesia—we have forgotten to remember. We have become what the rabbis called tinok shenishba. Literally translated, this means “the child who was captured.” Judith Shulevitz illuminates the image of the one who forgets the Sabbath: “The rabbis [discussed] the legal implications of forgetting the Sabbath. . . . What would the penalty for such amnesia or ignorance be? And what kind of Jew could be so oblivious to the Sabbath? Only, the rabbis thought, a Jew who had suffered extreme cultural dislocation. Only a Jew who had been kidnapped as a child and raised by non-Jews.”14 For Jews, forgetting the Sabbath was akin to forgetting one’s entire identity. A Jew forgetting the Sabbath was like an Israelite who was raised by Pharaoh. While Christians are going to enter into the Sabbath in a unique way, to remember the Sabbath is to remember who we are—children born of the grace and mercy of Jesus Christ. To keep a Sabbath is to give time and space on our calendar to the grace of God.

Made to Rest

Humans were made to rest. Literally. When God created the world, he entrusted Adam and Eve with a wondrous world of potential where they could explore, discover, play, eat, and enjoy. A new world spanned brilliantly before them. A cadence can be immediately discerned to that creation story: “Let there be light . . . Let there be a vault . . . Let the water . . . Let the land . . . Let there be lights . . . Let us make . . . By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done” (Gen. 1:3–2:3). There is a rhythm to the week. God finished six days of work by resting for one.

God’s rhythm of work and rest soon became the framework for human work and rest: “Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work” (Exod. 20:9–10). From the beginning, God’s own life becomes the model for human life. Diana Butler Bass draws a connection between God’s rhythm and ours: “Our bodies move to a rhythm of work and rest that follows the rhythm originally strummed by God on the waters of creation. As God worked, so shall we; as God rested, so shall we. Working and resting, we who are human are in the image of God.”15 To image God is to work and rest as God worked and rested.

Humanity was made on day six of creation. Day seven was that day in which God, Adam, Eve, and the whole garden ceased from productivity and effort. Striking as it is, Adam and Eve’s first full day of existence was a day of rest, not work. What a first impression! Social scientists point out that we make up our minds about people in the first 100 milliseconds of our first meeting.16 Indeed, first impressions matter. Imagine what Adam and Eve learned about God’s generosity from their first impression of him on their first day. Their first knowledge of God and the world God had made was that rest was not an afterthought—rest was of first importance.

Adam and Eve had accomplished nothing to earn this gratuitous day of rest. Sabbath is, in my estimation, the first image of the gospel in the biblical story. God’s nature always gives rest first; work comes later. This is reflected in all of our lives. Before our lives in this world began, we got nine months of rest in the womb. Before taking up a vocation, we get a few years to just play as children. And before our six days of labor, we receive the day of rest. Karl Barth famously pointed out that the only thing Adam and Eve had to celebrate on that first Sabbath was God and his creation: “That God rested on the seventh day, and blessed and sanctified it, is the first divine action which man is privileged to witness; and that he himself may keep the Sabbath with God, completely free from work, is the first Word spoken to him, the first obligation laid on him.”17 Humanity had only God’s goodness to celebrate, nothing more. Work had not even begun. The Sabbath teaches us that we do not work to please God. Rather, we rest because God is already pleased with the work he has accomplished in us.

A problem quickly ensued—God’s word was forgotten. Eden’s first residents, Adam and Eve, were given God-established boundaries, such as with food: “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden,” God says, “but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Gen. 2:16–17). Adam and Eve could eat from any tree but one. There were similar boundaries around time. One day a week, as a culminating moment in time, Adam and Eve were to rest, or menukhah, from their garden activities.

These boundaries soon fell by the wayside. Amnesia set in. The memory of God’s word eroded, as reflected in Eve’s attempt to explain God’s command to the serpent after being tempted to eat the forbidden fruit: “But God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die’” (Gen. 3:3). Eve, in that critical moment, reveals humanity’s vexing and perennial problem: a keen ability to forget what God actually said. Of course, God never commanded Adam or Eve not to touch the tree. Rather, God comm...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Endorsements
• Contents
• Foreword
• Prologue
• Part 1: Sabbath for Us
• Part 2: Sabbath for Others
• Part 3: Sabbath for Creation
• Part 4: Sabbath for Worship
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover