Sabbath Drudgery: Cleansing the Palate
Nehemiah 13:15-19
Lent 1 (series)
March 9, 2014
Lent 1 (series)
March 9, 2014
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
We are tired. Some pundits have been saying that we are
war-weary, but I think it’s truer to say that we are just weary, period.
It’s true that those
of us who are fortunate to have jobs are working longer hours than we have since
we started keeping records. For many of
us, the jobs never really end. Since we
are able to log in to our office computers from anywhere, many employers expect
us to monitor email evenings and weekends.
We feel obliged to answer our cell phones wherever we are. We are on-call. Like the ancient Israelites we are enthralled
to a Pharaoh who has ever-increasing quotas of bricks to be produced and who
has ideas about ever-decreasing labor costs.
“Fewer bricks? Absolutely out of
the question! Oh, and find your own
straw!” The beast demands our ever-increasing productivity.
But it isn’t just
about work. It’s also about the demands
of parenthood. We no longer trust our
children (or the world) enough to allow our children explore and learn about
their world on their own. We distrust
their imagination. We have constructed
mostly imaginary dangers from which they must be protected at all times. We have bicycles and helmets for each member
of the family and they sit in the garage, mostly unused, because we are fearful
of allowing our children to explore their neighborhoods and town and we
certainly don’t have time to go with them.
Our children are under house arrest.
One of the few
exceptions is for their organized activities.
It is written somewhere that children must participate in all sorts of
organized athletics: soccer, swimming, gymnastics, to barely scratch the
surface. None of them bad in themselves,
they come to dominate the life of families. Parents are reduced to taxi
drivers, shuttling their children to and from practices, games and
tournaments. There is no respite. There are no days off. Parents are tired.
Children are tired, and
not just from their athletics, either. They
have homework. Lots of homework. We should have known that something had gone
terribly wrong when backpacks became a necessary part of back-to-school
wardrobes for elementary school children.
And then, in
addition to the demands of school and sports there are the beastly demands made
on children by the media. They watch a
great deal of television. They text each
other. The cyclopean eye of the
hand-held video screen demands their attention and they give it. Our children are sleep-deprived and so are
their parents.
You might imagine
that there will eventually come an end to the demands, at least when we retire,
but as many people have discovered “re-tired” just means “tired again.”
The beast has us in
its shackles and the worst of it is that the beast has taught us to call this
“freedom.”
Our culture has a
troubled relationship with rest. Rest
dangles in front of us like a carrot on the end of a stick, just out of reach, maintaining
a tantalizing distance while we move faster and faster. The beast has a thousand reasons why we can’t
rest just now and we accept them:
There is too much to do. If I
don’t get this done, bad things will happen.
There are people depending on me.
Even, God is depending on me.
Mostly, though, we
can’t stop because we can’t stand the anxiety that arises in us when we do.
This is one of the
shapes of “evil, injustice and oppression” that we face and that we are called
to resist. But while the specifics may
differ, our troubled relationship with rest and with time itself remains the
same. Fortunately for us our ancestors
in faith were given some tools, some strategies for resisting the unending
demands for production and consumption. Among
these the most important, for my money, is the gift of Sabbath.
During Lent it is
traditional even in Protestant churches to focus on spiritual disciplines like
prayer, fasting and self-denial. This
Lent I am preaching a series on the Sabbath as a spiritual discipline and a way
of resisting Pharaoh and his beastly demands.
The bad news is, as
soon as I mention Sabbath, we throw up walls of resistance. If we don’t deal with those right at the
beginning, if we don’t deal with the distortions and perversions of the Sabbath
we will never to the heart of the Jewish blessing that serves as a Sabbath
greeting: Shabbat shalom, Sabbath peace!
The Sabbath was
given to a band of escaped slaves as part of a way of life, a political and
socio-economic system, that was offered as an alternative to life under Pharaoh
and Pharaoh’s gods that was a life of unending toil, of constant production, of
human beings whose lives have been distorted until they are machines. The
Sabbath was the gift of humanity, a respite from the demands of production, the
provision of time for friendship and neighborliness, for food and drink, for
laughter and dancing and song, for poetry, and, yes, for worship as the deep
appreciation and gratitude for life itself.
As a principle, of
course, Sabbath is easy enough, but as a practice or a set of practices, it
becomes more difficult. It’s been made
harder for us by the fact that the Sabbath in its final biblical form was
imagined by urban Jewish elites in Babylon.
Their notion of Sabbath doesn’t always translate simply to non-urban
settings.
We can see some of
this being played out in our text from Nehemiah, who was sent to Jerusalem by
the Persian emperor to reestablish some semblance of Jewish life in their
homeland. Nehemiah was sent as a
governor for the province of Judea with the mandate of setting things to
rights. Nehemiah found that there was a
lot that needed fixing. The walls around
Jerusalem were in disrepair. Its gate
was destroyed. The Temple had been
looted and burned. But perhaps the worst
of it all was the way the people were living.
They weren’t following the rules.
Especially they weren’t keeping the rules that made Jews distinct from
other people: They were intermarrying. They
were not obeying the rules about ritual purity.
And they weren’t keeping the Sabbath.
They were pressing
grapes to make wine. They were gathering
grain, putting it in bags, and loading up donkeys. They were bringing wine, grapes, figs to
Jerusalem to sell on the Sabbath. They
were bringing fish from Tyre and all sorts of consumer goods and selling them
on the Sabbath, in Jerusalem itself!
Nehemiah was
outraged. He resorted to shaming his
subordinates. He scolded them like
children. He accused them of making the
Sabbath impure. He threatened them with
God’s wrath. I think this reaction was
unhelpful. Instead of holding up the
purpose of the Sabbath and the vision it contains for human life at its best, Nehemiah
framed the question in terms of what was not permitted. He turned a gift into a burden, a delight
into a list of rules.
We can see the line
that runs from Nehemiah to the illustration on our bulletin cover warning young
men not to play soccer on Sunday (and perhaps especially not to play soccer on
the Upper Iowa), lest God drown them, too.
Because, after all, this is what our God is like?!
Trust the Scots to
take an idea to its illogical conclusion by a series of iron-clad
arguments. They excluded all sorts of
innocent behavior until there wasn’t much left that was permitted on
Sundays. One Presbyterian minister from
the eighteen hundreds remembers it this way:
All
of a sudden everything that I had been doing last week had become wicked. Latin,
Greek, Mathematics, were now wicked; so were marbles, ‘tig’ [tag], and races; so
were walking, except to church, laughing, singing, except psalms, playing the
flute, ‘fiddle’, or any instrument of music, reading newspapers (specially
wicked), or anything except the Bible and ‘good’ books. There was scarcely
anything that was safe to do from our rising in the morning until our going to
bed at night, except reading the Bible, singing psalms, saying or joining in
prayers, hearing sermons preached in church or at home.[1]
Some of you will
remember as I do the last remnant of this way of thinking about the Sabbath embodied
in the Blue Laws. These laws (and I
don’t know why they were blue) outlawed many ordinary activities on
Sunday. Grocery stores were closed. Drug stores were open, but only so that the
pharmacy could stay in service. Gas
stations, book stores, clothing stores, all closed.
In my not
particularly pious home growing up I remember these as absurd
inconveniences. What I didn’t notice
then that I appreciate now is that the low-paid employees of these places were
at least guaranteed a day off to spend with their families each week. But no matter, the Blue Laws are long since
dead and there are few legal restraints on the beast’s demand for production
and consumption.
Thanks to Nehemiah, a
legalistic understanding of Sabbath, and the Blue Laws, Sabbath has left a bad
taste in our mouths. We will have to
cleanse our collective palate if we are to have any hope of receiving the gift
of Shabbat shalôm. Only with the
Sabbath, at least as an idea, do have any hope in resisting Pharaoh’s
insatiable demands for more and more production. Only the Sabbath promises us the rest that we
need. Only the Sabbath can provide for
lives—ours as well as our children’s—that are more rather than less human, and
for communities that are more rather than less humane.
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[1] Wallace,
Robert. Robert Wallace. Life and Last Leaves. [no place given]: [no
publisher given], 1903. Cited on http://jasongoroncy.com/2013/04/23/on-the-doom-of-sabbath-breakers/.
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