A Student of Sabbath

One of my favorite movies of all time is Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Throughout the movie, the good guys and the bad guys have been searching for the Holy Grail: the cup that Jesus traditionally drank from at the Last Supper. There are actually a lot of thought-provoking theological concepts, especially for a popcorn blockbuster. And this includes one of my favorite scenes, near the end.

The good guys and the bad guys have finally made it to the sacred room where the Holy Grail is kept, but they have to choose which cup it is. There are literally hundreds of cups that it could be…pick the right one and you get immortal life, but pick the wrong one, and you age in seconds and dry up like a husk of corn (at least the best that special effects could approximate in 1989.)

The bad guy looks at all of the options and says, “it must be this one, the most beautiful, jewel encrusted, majestic chalice on the table: fit for a king.” But of course, it is the wrong one, and he dries up and breaks into a million pieces. And the keeper of the Grail, with the best comedic timing of the movie says, “he chose…poorly.” But then the good guy, Indiana Jones, looks at all of the chalices and finds one that is quietly tucked into the corner. It is unadorned. Made of wood and not gold. The cup of a carpenter. Indy drinks and survives, and the keeper nods: “you chose…wisely.”

It is a helpful scene because it sets up what is essentially the backstory of today’s text. There is a choice before us, the author of Hebrews suggests. Sabbath is a choice. We may choose the sabbath rest that God offers…or reject it, at our own peril.

Now, it wasn’t always a choice. Once upon a time, when the Israelites were enslaved to the Egyptian Empire, they had no choice but to do the work commanded of them. 7 days a week. 365 days a year. But then, a bunch of stuff happened in a hurry:

• A guy named Moses showed up, and led them out of slavery, to Sinai, the Mountain of God, where God invited them—actually commanded them—to honor one day a week of Sabbath rest. To regularly choose to create boundaries around the rest that our bodies and spirits and communities need. To risk choosing rest, even as the world around them screamed that they must accomplish and produce and progress. To trust that God would take care of them, even if they rested from taking care of themselves.
• And with that command ringing in their ears, the Israelites left Sinai and were almost immediately faced with a choice: to enter a land of promise and rest or to reject that promise for 40 years of wandering in the wilderness.
• They chose…poorly. They were terrified of taking the risk that God would not take care of them in that place and chose immediate security over sustainable rest. For 40 years they wandered in restlessness.

We aren’t sure exactly when Psalm 95 was written, but many scholars suggest that it was created in its present form almost 900 years after Moses, when the Israelites were returning from Exile in Babylon. Again, they had lived in what amounted to slavery to an Empire that did not care for their bodies or their souls. And as they returned, the psalmist recognized that once again the people had a choice:

• So, the writer of the Psalms used that memory of the choice during the days of Moses to evoke a similar choice: “O that today you would listen to his voice! Do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness, when your ancestors tested me and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work. For forty years I loathed that generation and said, “They are a people whose hearts go astray, and they do not regard my ways.” Therefore in my anger I swore, “They shall not enter my rest.”
• Again, said the Psalmist, the people of God have a choice: to regularly choose to create boundaries around the rest that our bodies and spirits and communities need. To risk choosing rest, even as the world around them screamed that they must accomplish and produce and progress. To trust that God would take care of them, even if they rested from taking care of themselves.
• They chose…poorly. Over time, they became convinced that God’s people would only be saved by political power and military might. The rest that God offered was rejected for the trappings of Empire.

Finally, we arrive in the book of Hebrews. This book was written another 500 years after God’s people had returned from Exile and heard the choice of the psalmist in Psalm 95. Hebrews was written to second-generation Christians, at yet another liminal time. The Roman Republic had been disintegrating into the Roman Empire, and now God’s people found themselves once again becoming spiritual enslaved by the values of Empire. In chapters 3 and 4, the author quotes a chunk of none other than Psalm 95, and then proceeds to interpret what it might mean for Christians who had never met Jesus, but were raised on his principles. A letter, written about an ancient psalm, referring to a more ancient story, with the same choice: To regularly choose to create boundaries around the rest that our bodies and spirits and communities need. To risk choosing rest, even as the world around them screamed that they must accomplish and produce and progress. To trust that God would take care of them, even if they rested from taking care of themselves.

If there is a common theme throughout each of these texts, it is the Hebrew word menuha. Scholar Norman Wirzba says that menuha is what God created on the seventh day as rest. He defines it as: “the rest, tranquility, serenity, and peace of God. In the Biblically informed mind, menuha suggests the sort of happiness and harmony that come from things being as they ought to be; we hear in menuha resonances with the deep word shalom. It is this capacity for happiness and delight, rather than humanity, which sits as the crowning achievement of God’s creative work.”

That word keeps popping up in each of the texts we have talked about today. Menuha is what God commanded the Israelites to observe on Sinai, what the psalmist proclaimed as the sabbath rest that God’s people forfeited, and now—in Greek form instead of Hebrew—the New Testament author proclaims the same choice. In each of these calls for Sabbath rest, the question is the same: Will you choose menuha? It is, by the way, also a derivation of the word that we looked at last week, in the sermon on Job: nuach. Again and again, Job yearned for nuach: Quiet. Ceasing. Dwelling. Menuha has the same root and overlapping meanings. The Biblical story asks over and over and over again: will you choose sabbath rest, or will you choose…poorly?

Wayne Muller has an answer for us. In his book on Sabbath, he tells us that just like God’s people after the Exodus, and in Psalm 95, and in Hebrews, we face a choice:

“A thousand times a day, in a million forms, calling to us from billboards, magazines, television, radio, newspapers, movies, Web sites, and telemarketers, every single message without exception is this: You are not enough. You do not have enough. You are not happy. You have not achieved the American Dream….If you want to be happy, you have to drive around in a very expensive car and you have to live in a Victorian mansion so large that you have to walk through an acre of perfect gardens just to get to breakfast with your perfect children who are always laughing in your perfect kitchen and then go off in your perfect clothes to lunch and opening nights and cocktail parties with everyone else who is young and beautiful and smiling with clean, white teeth, natural clothing, and sleeping golden retriever.”

It is a picture that most of us will never achieve, which means, as Muller says, “you are not happy.” This unattainable picture is the promise of just about every advertisement, of just about every politician. And it was the promise made by the Empire of the Egyptians, of the Babylonians, of the Romans, and Muller would say, loud and clear, it is the promise of the American Dream. If we are not fighting and grasping and grabbing and stealing and buying this version of happiness, we will never get it. We will never be enough!

But then there is this other thing. It is the thing whispered from tent to tent, peeking up at the Mountain of God, after a lifetime of being told “You are not enough.” It is the thing proclaimed by the worshipping psalmist, to those who had just survived a generation of being told, “you will never be happy.” It is the thing that second-generation Jesus-followers, raised on the stories of their parents’ faith, dare to ask, “might it be for us, too?” And it is the thing that we, too, worn and weary from the never-ending grind of accomplishment and progress, might start to see. That thing…is Sabbath.

Again, Muller explains the promise: “Sabbath is a time to stop, to refrain from being seduced by our desires. To stop working, stop making money, stop spending money. See what you have. Look around. Listen to your life. Do you really need more than this? Spend a day with your family. Instead of buying a new coffee maker, make coffee in the old one and sit with your spouse on the couch, hang out—do what they do in the picture without paying for it. Just stop. That is, after all, what they are selling in the picture: people who have just stopped. You cannot buy stopped. You simply have to stop.”

We had a great conversation about this in the Two-Way last week. Most of us are of the generations where Sabbath still feels like it can be an oppressive thing, a obligatory requirement, a cultural heaviness. We acknowledged that if Sabbath is another set of rules and regulations, we have no interest in it. But if Sabbath is delight… If it is soul-feeding, life-giving, community-building, menuha, then maybe we might give it a try. If there are rules then, they are rules to open the door to menuha. We acknowledged that rest will not assert itself into our lives. Hurry will. Busy will. Progress will. Tyranny of the urgent will. So, if we are going to create rules, then they must be boundaries that will protect menuha from getting stolen away by the wiles of progress.

Marva Dawn has written a book titled “Keeping the Sabbath Wholly.” She claims that there are at least two parts to the work of Sabbath. First, we must cease:

• We must cease work. Traditionally, Shabbat observes a time of ceasing Friday night through Saturday. After Easter, the Church said the Lord’s Day on Sunday means that we cease our work on a Sunday. Some of us, including your preacher, have a job that requires work on Sunday…so my shabbat is Sunday afternoon or evening when I get home, into Monday. That’s why if you text or call on Monday, I may not know where my phone is for a good several hours. What is your Shabbat? When do you cease work?
• Dawn writes that we must cease productivity and accomplishment. How many of us, on our days of rest, work twice as hard? How many of us stick all of our appointments on those days? All of our errands? All of our honey-do tasks? Dawn says that on Sabbath we must admit that we will not be “useful.” It’s the thing that was so counter-cultural to the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Romans, and our own Land of Productivity and Accomplishment.
• Thirdly, we must cease possessiveness. How important to the gospel of progress is that we must possess! Money. The latest gadget. A new-ish car. A good enough home. When we observe Sabbath, we are saying that we don’t need things, because we have God.

But again, that ceasing needs to be a boundary-making, a choice-making, so that we can embrace what comes next in the life of Sabbath: what Dawn calls feasting. Once we cease, then we can feast! For Dawn, that means a plethora of Sabbath joys:

• We feast with Music, enjoying the gift of music, whether it be classical and orchestral, or down-home bluegrass!
• We feast with Beauty, including art, and poetry, and maybe a good movie, and spending time wandering through God’s creation!
• We feast with Affection, spending time in the arms of loved ones, showering each other with physical love. Or whatever their love language is.
• We feast with Food! Isn’t there something special about getting together and cooking with someone we love? Or if cooking feels like a chore, perhaps we save up and make our sabbath our date night! Or maybe tonight’s dinner is Sylas and Maddy’s and bowls of popcorn with a card game.

If we aren’t feasting on the sabbath—spiritually and physically—we are missing the point. Generation after generation, God’s people in Scripture have made a choice. Instead of the ways of progress and Empire and grasping and greed, they have chosen Sabbath. And they have chosen…wisely.