Rest for the Weary
Deuteronomy 5:12-15
5th Sunday after Pentecost
June 28, 2015
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
When Joseph died, “a new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph. He said to his people [I think these were his “peeps,” his inner circle, rather than the whole of the Egyptians],”Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, or they will increase and fight against us and escape from the land." [¹]
The one percent always has a very basic problem. They are rich and powerful, but they are outnumbered. There are always more of the ninety-nine percent than there are of the one percent. It sounds silly to say so, but this is something that is often forgotten by the ninety-nine percent, but never by the one percent. Notice how mixed up the one percent is. They are afraid of the Israelites, afraid of their numbers and their power, afraid of their birthrates and their potential for rebellion. But most of all, they are afraid of their escape, afraid that they might have to do without them, afraid that they will no longer be able to steal their labor for their own comfort.
So the one percent come up with a clever plan to keep the Israelite slaves in line. They force them to labor and toil for the benefit of Pharaoh and his crowd. Pharaoh forced the Israelites to build warehouse cities to store all the surplus that the one percent have stolen from the people: all the extra grain that they have grown.
Pharaoh was ruthless and the Israelite slaves led bitter lives of back-breaking toil. When Moses, the outside agitator, came and demanded that the Israelites be allowed to go into the desert to observe a festival to Yahweh, Pharaoh would have none of it. No time off for them! In fact, Pharaoh made the work of the Israelites harder by demanding that they find their own straw for making bricks. Pharaoh knew how to crush a union!
This system is riddled with anxiety from top to bottom. Egypt has enough grain to meet its needs; in fact, it lacks adequate storage space. But Pharaoh doesn’t consider cutting back production. What if there is a drought? What if there are locusts who eat up the grain? What if? So, food production continues as before and, because Pharaoh is anxious, the Israelites have to toil at building Pithom and Rameses, the warehouse cities. But Pharaoh is also anxious about the Israelites, so he plans a campaign of infanticide against them: he will make sure that the boy babies are all killed. He wants to exterminate the Israelites, but he is anxious that he might lose their labor, that they might escape.
Pharaoh’s anxiety infects the whole system. The Israelites hate being oppressed, but they are anxious, afraid to rebel, afraid to rock the boat. They blame Moses when their supply of straw is cut off. They are anxious about any changes in the way things are, even if things are awful.
The result of all this anxiety is that the Israelites have no rest. They work without humanity, without deliverance, without hope. Moses brings Yahweh’s message to them: “I am Yahweh, and I will free you from the burdens of the Egyptians and deliver you from slavery to them. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment. I will take you as my people, and I will be your God…. I will bring you into the land that I swore to give to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” This should have been good news, but the Israelites had been so demoralized that they could not hear the news. “Moses told this to the Israelites; but they would not listen to Moses, because of their broken spirit and their cruel slavery.”[²]
The whole Egyptian system was anxious. The gods were anxious, so Pharaoh was anxious. Pharaoh was anxious, so his people were anxious. His people were anxious and the spirits of the Israelites were broken. This was the regime under which the Israelites suffered.
This was the regime from which Yahweh freed the Israelites. The Israelites escaped from Egypt. They wandered about in the desert for a while not really knowing what to do or what was supposed to come next. They murmured. They complained: “Are we there yet? Are we there? When are we going to get there? I’m tired! I’m hungry! I’m bored!”
And then Moses went up the mountain and when he came back he showed the pattern of their new life to the Israelites, the ten “utterances”. The first three statements deal with Yahweh’s place in the new community. And then comes the answer, the remedy for anxiety. And it’s not Cymbalta, not Effexor, not even Xanax. The remedy for anxiety is rest, the thing they never had in Egypt. Their life in the land of promise will be different from their life in Egypt.
In Egypt they had no rest. In the land of promise they will rest one day in seven. In Egypt there was never enough for the Israelites. In the land of promise the land will produce enough that six days’ work will support them for seven days.
Sabbath is the antidote for anxiety, but it doesn’t work instantly. Habits of the heart die slowly. When the Israelites are told that they will gather enough manna on the sixth day to last through the seventh, there are some who don’t believe it. They go out to gather on the sabbath, even though they have been told not to. They just can’t wrap their heads around the notion that there is enough, that they don’t have to work seven days a week.
No, this sabbath is for real. And it’s for everyone.
My Grandfather Caldwell once got the idea into his head that the family should go on vacation. He knew of a cabin on a lake a day’s drive away that would be just the spot. My grandmother, though, knew that his idea of a restful vacation would be that he would rest and she would work. She would have to cook three meals a day and she would have to do it in a strange kitchen with who-knows-what sort of utensils and supplies. No, rest for the rest was going to mean more work, not less, for her.
But this sabbath was not going to be like that. On the sabbath everyone will rest. Men and women will rest. Children will rest. Servants will rest. Even the livestock will rest. You want your slippers? Don’t tell the dog to fetch them: it’s the sabbath and the dog gets a day of rest.
It is interesting to me that in the two lists of the Ten Commandments, the reasons for the sabbath differ. Here in Deuteronomy the reason for sabbath is the Israelites’ experience of and deliverance from slavery. On one day of the week, the usual arrangements of rank and privilege are set aside. For free and slave, for the rich and poor alike, sabbath is rest, sabbath is time for the things that renew and restore human life: meals eaten together with time for lots of stories and laughter and leisurely walks through the neighborhood or countryside with time to chat on doorstoops or to stop and listen to goldfinches singing. Of course, there is time to read the Torah and remember who we are: by long-standing rabbinical tradition studying the Torah is joy and delight, not work. Cooking is not done on the sabbath. You can feed a fire, but not start one on the sabbath. A leisurely stroll can be part of the sabbath, but not a long walk with the purpose of getting somewhere. Nothing could be less like slavery in Egypt than sabbath.
In Exodus on the other hand the commandment to rest is grounded in God’s rest after the six days of creation. God worked for six days and made all that is. On the seventh day, God rested for the whole day while creation looked after itself. God saw no need to stop by the office to see how things were going. God was not anxious about the world. God trusted the work of creation enough to let it go about its business for a day.
Sabbath is both justice and freedom from anxiety.
Sabbath is not just a day, either. Under the heading of sabbath came several rules, several mandated practices. Once every seven years, the land was not to be planted, grape vines were not to be harvested, orchards were not to be picked. In six years the land would produce enough to support the community for seven years. There was enough. Whatever grew of its own accord on the seventh year would belong to the poor, since they did not have the ability to set aside a sixth of their food against the seventh year. Even the land gets its rest.
Every forty-nine years, that is seven times seven years, there was to be Jubilee. All debts were forgiven. All slaves were set free. All land returned to the families of the original owners. Whatever inequalities had accumulated over the years were erased and everyone was equal again.
Fundamental to the idea of sabbath is the underlying notion of enough-ness. The earth and our own labor can produce all that we need. Not all that we might fancy, not all that we might desire, not all that we might covet, but all that we need. When Jesus points his disciples to the wild flowers and the sparrows who have all that they need, he is appealing to a sabbath-blessed world. When Jesus invites his listeners who are “struggling hard and carrying heavy loads” to come to him for rest, he is offering sabbath. The enough-ness of the earth and our work make sabbath possible and anxiety obsolete. Sabbath in its turn is both celebration and demonstration of the enough-ness of the earth and our work.
For lack of sabbath we become anxious. Out of our anxiety we toil without rest or relief. Out of our fear that we will not have enough, we permit the banks to colonize our future, putting ourselves in debt. When the debts of our people pile too high to be borne and the economy collapses, we rescue the banks and put families out on the streets.
Because we are anxious we push our young people to take on massive debt that they will never repay, so that they can get jobs that pay well enough that they will have more than enough. The companies that hire them– if they can find jobs– will not, however, pay them what their skills have cost and our young people will work in debt slavery for most of their lives.
Because it is not enough that our land produce what we need, because our system demands more than enough-ness of us and of the earth, we never let our land rest. We work without ceasing and so does our land. Our land and we will pay a cost for this.
There is an odd reference in 2 Chronicles 36, not a part of the Bible we get to very often, but it’s worth noting. Judah’s obligation to let the land rest was not carefully observed. The temptation to grow a little more, a little more than enough, was apparently too strong. For centuries the land’s sabbath years were not honored. The result was a debt to the land. Call it accrued vacation time. The Chronicler says that the exile in Babylon lasted for seventy years, because that was the number of sabbath years ignored by Judah. The land lay fallow for seventy years until it had enjoyed every one of those years of rest that it had missed.
Now, I don’t believe, and I don’t think you believe, that God’s judgments work themselves out in our history in such a wooden and mechanical way. But there is something to this. Sabbath unobserved, rest not enjoyed, sleep not taken, joy not celebrated, gratitude not lived out: all of these take their toll on us, on the poor among us most of all, and on the earth, and there is a reckoning to be paid. The nitrogen-rich run-off from our fields– but even more from our lawns– takes its toll on our seas and the life there that we depend on. The carbon in the oil and coal and gas that we burn, carbon that had been safely sequestered for millions of years and we have released in just a few decades, is changing the earth in ways that we have never experienced and the earth will have its due. The mineral resources– heavy metals like nickel and gold and cadmium, and other metals like phosphorous– that we have stripped from the earth are finite resources. The easily obtained minerals we have already taken, leaving the more difficult, the resources that can only be gotten at a high cost to land, air and water, and ultimately, to ourselves.
From anxiety we engage in violence against the earth, violence against ourselves, and violence against each other. Does anyone imagine for a moment that we would be interested in the affairs of the Middle East, for example, if we were not anxious about its oil reserves? Does anyone imagine for a moment that folks in the Middle East would care about us if our anxious presence there had not so disrupted their lives as to plunge them into anxiety as well?
Violence from anxiety; anxiety from the conviction that there is not enough; the conviction that there is not enough from lack of sabbath. Sabbath is not trivial.
Nor is the sabbath simply a matter of personal morality. Sabbath is fundamentally social in its nature. Sabbath is observed by communities, not isolated individuals. Recovering sabbath is not a matter of individual decision-making. How for example do parents model sabbath when the non-working hours and days of the week are given to anxiously shuttling kids from one activity to another? How do we counter the modern orthodoxy that children must be performing athletes and that there is no help for practices and games that are scheduled on Sunday morning? How do we arrange our lives so that everyone can observe sabbath and our rest does not depend on the labor of minimum wage workers in stores and restaurants? How do we make sure that farmers with livestock, the crews that staff the ambulances, and the folks who make sure that those in hospitals and nursing homes are cared for all are afforded their sabbath as well? How do I train myself so that when Saturday comes– allegedly my day off– I’m not still working on a sermon? (Well, okay, that one is probably my responsibility.)
All of these are good questions. But they are second-order considerations and should not deflect us from God’s insistence on the importance of sabbath. As a sign of the enough-ness of the earth, as a sign of justice and freedom, as a sign to Pharaoh with his limitless demand for bricks that he owns a great deal but he does not own us, and as the rest that we and our planet so desperately need, the sabbath is God’s gift. Rightly do Jews welcome the Friday evening arrival of Queen Shabbat, the fairest of God’s creations. Rightly does Jesus welcome the weary and burdened. Rightly do we recognize the sabbath that lies at the heart of the good news, that is good news, good news for us, good news for all of us, and good news for the land and the sea and the air, good news for all of God’s creation.
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