Exodus 20:8-11

In her book, Smoke on the Mountain, Joy Davidman imagines a Martian student being sent to Earth on a Sunday morning to finish making observations he needed to write his thesis on comparative anthropology.  This is what he wrote:

Like so many primitive lifeforms the creatures of the third planet are sun worshipers.  One day in every seven is set apart for the adoration of their deity, weather permitting.  Their rituals vary, and each apparently involves a special form of dress; but all are conducted in the open air, and most seem to require the collection of enormous crowds.  Some creatures gather in vast arenas, to watch strangely garbed priests perform elaborate ceremonies involving a ball and variously shaped instruments of wood.  (The significance of the ball as a solar symbol, of course, is known to every Martian schoolboy.)  Others, no doubt the mystics and solitaries of their religion, prefer to address the ball themselves with long clubs, singly or in groups of two of four, wandering in green fields.  Some, stripping themselves almost naked in their ecstasy, go down to the seashore in great throngs and there perform their rites, often hurling themselves into the waves with frenzied cries … After the ceremonial immersion, devotees have been observed to anoint themselves with holy oils and stretch themselves out full length with eyes closed, in order to surrender themselves entirely to silent communion with the deity …

There exists, however, a small sect of recalcitrants or heretics that does not practice sun worship.  These may be identified by their habit of clothing themselves more soberly and completely than the sun worshipers.  They too gather in groups, but only to hide from the sun in certain buildings of doubtful use, usually with windows of glass colored to keep out the light.  It is not clear whether these creatures are simply unbelievers or whether they are excommunicated from sun worship for some offense – we have not been able to discover what goes on within their buildings, which may perhaps be places of punishment.  But it is noteworthy that their faces and gestures show none of the … religious frenzy with which the sun worshipers pursue their devotions.  In fact, they usually appear relaxed and even placid, thus indicating minds blank of thought or emotion …

Even though she was writing almost 70 years ago, Davidman’s description of Sundays is not far off the mark!  Sunday may be a holiday for most people, but it is no longer a holy day for many of them.  Churches have many empty seats in them, while places of entertainment are crowded, and many people do have to work on Sunday.  In the United States, this may be the Commandment that is the most widely ignored.

We have many sporting events that take place on Sundays.  Professional baseball, football, soccer, golf, tennis, basketball.  And then, recent years, more and more youth leagues schedule games on Sunday mornings.  Add to that people who have hobbies of sports or gardening or hiking or other outdoor activities that they choose to participate in on Sundays, and you can see why the Martian decided that Earthlings are sun worshipers!

But people in our country are also notorious workaholics.  Some work because they choose to, and others work because they have to.  Gone are the days of the blue laws, when almost everything was closed on Sundays.  And, as Anne Robertson writes, “Every year another store or corporation decides to extend hours around the clock and across the week.  Those that don’t may have given their employees so much to do that they take work home and labor around the clock anyway.”  People are overscheduled to the point that they become burned out.  There seems to be so much to do and so little time to do it that even Sundays are filled with work.  We are wearing ourselves out.  As John Killinger puts it, “We forget that we weren’t meant to live this way, that God gave us a day of rest each week to slow down and get in touch with ourselves again.”  The fourth commandment tells us that we are to rest on the sabbath because God rested on the seventh day.  But some people have a hard time taking that day for rest.  J. Ellsworth Kalas comments that “our workaholic patterns smack of a kind of blasphemy; rest may be good enough for God, but I’m above all of that.  In some cases, our unwillingness to take a sabbath is evidence of our feeling indispensable – the universe may survive God’s taking a day of rest, but it will fall apart if we do so!  For others, it is an absence of trust; we’re sure that if we don’t work seven days a week, we won’t survive economically.”

Because of this tendency to overwork, to overcommit, to overschedule, people feel emotional, spiritual, and physical exhaustion.  In a recent Gallup poll, two-thirds of people feel burned out some of the time, and one-fourth feel burned out very often or always.  Adam Hamilton writes that “often it is your health, your family, and your faith that suffer for it.”  Author Brene` Brown says, “Here’s a quote I once heard from a priest: ‘If you don’t want to burn out, stop living like you’re on fire.’  In today’s world, we are surrounded by a culture of scarcity that tells us we’re not doing enough, that we don’t have enough and that we’re not enough … I’ve learned that I always have to be on the watch for burnout.  Because when it creeps up on me, I don’t like the person I become.”  Burnout can have serious consequences on our physical and mental health, on our relationships, our job performance, and our spiritual lives.

God recognized our need for rest, renewal, and recreation.  And so God provided the sabbath.  The commandment to rest was unique to the Jewish people.  There is not evidence in the ancient world that any other nation observed a day of rest until the Ten Commandments.  And the sabbath commandment was clearly important:  it is mentioned 172 times in the Bible, while idolatry is mentioned only 131 times, adultery 69 times, murder 43 times, stealing 28 times, and coveting only 23 times. 

Let’s consider the history of how this commandment has been observed, or not observed.  The sabbath was originally intended to be a day of no work, a day to rest and to enjoy yourself.  In the early days of Israel, the sabbath was celebrated as a feast.  But with the rise of an organized and legalistic priesthood, this day of gladness and joy was turned into a day of discipline.   By the time of Jesus, there was a list of 1,521 things you couldn’t do on the sabbath.  But then Jesus came along and said, “The sabbath was made for man and not man for the sabbath.”  And the Christian sabbath – celebrated on the first day of the week rather than the seventh – included a feast, Holy Communion. 

The negative views of the Sabbath in modern times seem to have originated in the 17th century.  In Scotland, one man was actually taken to court for smiling on the sabbath!  And the Puritans seem to have read the commandment as “Thou shalt not enjoy life on the sabbath.”  They drove all the joy out of the sabbath with enforced piety.  People were punished for not going to church, and for going anywhere else.  According to Joy Davidman, they thought that “a purely intellectual and spiritual concentration on God was the only religious experience worth seeking … And… they preferred negative methods; they believed you could make people enjoy God by forbidding them to enjoy anything else.”  I remember my dad’s mother describing the way that she spent her Sundays as a child.  After attending Sunday School and worship, she and her sister came home with their family, ate lunch, wore their Sunday clothes all day, and were not allowed to play.  They could sit on the porch, read the Bible or their Sunday School lesson, or talk with the adults.  And that was about it.

The fourth commandment has two requirements:  remember the sabbath, and keep it holy.  So what does it mean to remember the sabbath?  Adam Hamilton writes, “Remembering is not a casual thing.  It means keeping something front of mind as an expression of its importance.”  The theological foundation for remembering the sabbath is that God rested on the seventh day, blessed that day and made it holy.  We know that God did not need to rest; God chose to rest.  God established a rhythm between work and rest, and modeled it for us to follow.  Hamilton continues, “Sabbath is about stopping to savor, to enjoy, to reflect, to be in awe, to celebrate, to give thanks, and to be renewed.” 

And what does it mean to make the sabbath holy?  The word “holy” in Hebrew is “qadash,” which means “something set apart for God.”  To set apart the sabbath as holy, according to Hamilton, means “treating it as a day given to God … God has claimed one day in seven as being specifically his.”  It used to be that people would attend church every Sunday unless they were sick.  But now church is in competition with a lot of other things:  travel, work, sports.  As Hamilton says, “We have taken a day intended to be holy, and we have made it ordinary … We’ve overprogrammed it, along with the rest of our lives, so that we don’t have an hour to worship … We’re too busy.”

How can we restore the holiness of the sabbath?  How can we encourage people to come back to church?  Joy Davidman recommends that we think about the fun of worship, things such as sacred dance and church festivals.  And she says that we should stop thinking about churchgoing itself as the goal.  “God is the goal,” she writes.  “If we believe in him at all, we must believe that every [person] wants God in his heart far more than he can ever want anything else; that is, every [person] wants peace and love, answers to his questions, and the keys to heaven.  When a church gives these, its doors overflow.”  Adam Hamilton suggests that we make a list of four things that renew us or bring us joy that we haven’t done in a while or not enough lately.  What if we did those things that renew us next Sunday? 

It is impossible to overstate the importance of keeping the sabbath.  Anne Robertson writes, “The loss of Sabbath is a much greater contributor to the destruction of family and societal life than the divorce rate, homosexuality, … or any of the other things that people like to blame for our current state of affairs.  The Bible makes a big, huge, hairy deal out of keeping the Sabbath, while Christians … act as if it’s not even there, or as if it’s obsolete and far less important than other issues that the Bible mentions only in passing.”  But the sabbath is not obsolete or unimportant for Christians today.  Adam Hamilton encourages us to ask ourselves, What if you made a commitment to remembering the Sabbath and keeping it holy with greater intentionality from now on?  How would it impact your life?  He writes, “If you remember the Sabbath and keep it holy, your faith will grow deeper, your stress will be lowered, your mental health will be improved, and your work-week may even be more productive.  If you are married, your marriage will be stronger.  If you have kids, your relationship with them will be better.”

So I invite you to remember this sabbath day and keep it holy.  Remember the rhythm of work and rest that God modeled for us.  Remember that the sabbath is meant to be a day of rest, renewal, and recreation, not a day of legalistic piety or drudgery.  Remember that worship can be fun and should involve celebration, that church can and should be the most pleasurable and restorative experience we have during the week.  And keep the sabbath holy by not working (if possible), by worshiping God, by not doing ordinary tasks, by looking for the divine, by reflecting on your faith, and by celebrating the tasks done well in the week just past.  Remember, too, the words of Jesus:  The sabbath was made for people, not people for the sabbath.