1998 CBC Family Camp 4
Monday Morning Chapel, 9:00-9:30
Keeping the Sabbath
Special Days.
Today is Labor Day commemorating the value of work by actually taking a day off. There are standard holidays or special days that annually are celebrated in the American calendar. But for Christians, there is also on a weekly basis, Sabbath, the sabbat in Hebrew.
Keeping the Sabbath for today’s Christians is becoming increasingly a challenge according to traditional perceptions of the Sabbath. No longer are there blue laws that prevent shopping or working around your house on Sundays. In recognition of religious pluralism in America, setting aside one particular day a week for religious practices gives preferential treatment by government for one religion over another. What do Christians do on Sundays that hold faithfully to what God and the Bible have said about keeping the Sabbath?
Describe for your neighbor, what happens during Sunday for you?
What is Sabbath?
According to Dorothy Bass, there are three meanings to Sabbath for Christians:
- Creation. In Genesis, we see that God rests and blesses this day, and makes it holy. God declares as fully as possible just how very good creation is. Resting, God takes pleasure in what has been made; God has no regrets, no need to go on to create a still better world or a creature more wonderful than the man and he woman. Sabbath is rooted in humanity in God’s image.
- Exodus. In Exodus 16, God teaches the people of Israel to share in the blessings of this day. After bringing them out of Egyptian slavery into the wilderness, God sends manna, commanding them to gather enough each morning for that day’s food alone. Mistrusting, they gather more than they need and the manna rots. On the sixth day, however, they are told to gather enough to last for two days. Miraculously, the extra does not rot, and those mistrustful ones who go out on the seventh morning to get more find none. God is teaching us that our anxiety about basic needs will be cared for and we need to keep the Sabbath. Sabbath is a celebration of people liberated from captivity.
- Resurrection. The greatest joy of Sabbath is Christ’s victory over the powers of death. The first day of the week was special to Christians as an Easter day. Sunday, the day on which the disciples had first encountered the risen Lord, became a day to gather, eat together, and rejoice.
Keeping the Sabbath today.
In light of the above understanding of Sabbath, how are Christians to make Sunday special when it is no longer protected by legislation and custom? How do we define “work” if we are not to do work on the Sabbath? One classic definition of work is “whatever requires changing the natural, material world.” All week, we wrestle with the natural world, tilling and hammering and carrying and burning. On the Sabbath, however, Jews let it be. All activities associated with work or commerce are prohibited. Jews are not even supposed to think about them.
At CBC as well as in many congregations, we have an enduring discussion on whether holding membership and board meetings on Sundays is keeping the Sabbath or doing prohibited work. The issue here is not whether we have a meeting or not, but is the meeting a way to manifest or show the joy people expect to experience on that day. As long as the meeting serves as a way for God to reveal his words of hope and promise to the world, then it is not work per se, but keeping the Sabbath. Keeping the Sabbath is not taking a day off but to recall our knowledge of and gratitude for God’s activity in creating the world, giving liberty to the captives, and overcoming death through Jesus Christ.
Attending Family Camp isn’t abusing the Sabbath or taking a day off. But rather, we have come to hear God’s message for us, to “waste” time with each other, and to take part in God’s activity by which God is shaping creation—a foretaste of the feast to come.
When we keep the Sabbath well, we are also fostering a society that balances work and rest. Not working on one day is tied to working the other six. Sabbath affirms the value of work and interprets it as an important dimension of human identity.
Closing.
Keeping the Sabbath reminds us that since God rests on the seventh day, we must do so too.