Sabbath as Communal Trust

How many of you think you get enough rest? Your lack of raised hands communicates what experts in mental and physical health have been saying for years: we as a society do not rest enough.

• There are technological reasons for this. For most of the existence of humanity, our rhythms of work and rest were based on sunlight. When the sun went down, we slept. When the winter made for shorter days, we slept more. But how many of you go to bed every night whenever the sun goes down? Probably not most of us. Today our homes are lit up like a casino, with bright lights and screens adorning every room, and every pocket. TVs, phones, computer screens: this incessant light keeps our brains from being able to rest, and scientists suggest that it is wearing us down.

• There are financial reasons for this. Many of us grew up in generations where rest was considered unproductive, or unprofessional, or just plain lazy. My generation (Gen X) and older (Builders or Baby Boomers) have been taught that rest has no value, at least not as much as your job and housework and yard. Younger generations, Millennials and Gen Z, tend to understand they need more rest, and their generation tends to talk in healthy ways about how rest impacts mental health. But studies show that they actually get less rest than other generations, largely because of financial pressure. They are forced to choose between rest and working a few more hours to cover the bills. These generations find themselves in the unenviable place of knowing they need to live differently, but are unable to do so because of current realities. Sometimes you’ll hear people chiding Millennials for their expensive coffee or avocado toast, but you understand that these are attempts to infuse bits of restoration into our lives. If I cannot get the rest I need, I will have to settle for a “little treat,” a sliver of restoration while buried in economic despair.

• And finally, there are spiritual reasons that we do not rest enough. Or more to the point, there is spiritual language that is laced throughout our cultural values about work and rest. Scholar Terrell Carter talks about the historic language in the American Church, pointing to concepts such as a “Protestant work ethic,” or “bootstrap theology.” The Bible and the language of the Church have been used to insist that if you don’t have enough money, it is not about injustice or failed systems, or racist or sexist policies. YOU need to work harder. YOU need to pull yourselves up by YOUR bootstraps. YOUR poverty is YOUR fault. So the end result is that rest is considered unspiritual, unfaithful, unbiblical, lazy, even sinful behavior. Rest does not feed the economic system, thus it is sin. And what we are left with is kind of a Biblically-mandated indentured servitude system. Now, don’t misunderstand. I am not here to argue about one economic system over another…capitalism or socialism or libertarianism. But simply that when our economic and political systems back their way into our theology, and define how we read Scripture, we’ve already lost.

Let me offer that this is not only an American problem, or a current generational problem, or a 21st-century technological problem. I would argue that the text that we read this morning comes from a community wrestling with the same spiritual concerns. For generations, the Israelites had been enslaved by the Egyptian Empire. They were forced to labor for the Empire, to build and construct according to the needs and desires of the Egyptian power structure. They were viewed by the average Egyptian as literally inferior humans. And I would argue that the Israelites had come to internalize that identity: they had come to believe that they were no more than commodities to be used.

Look at this through the lens of rest. For generations, they had believed that they were worth as much as the Egyptian Empire said that they were worth. Their purpose and identity was to work for the Empire that owned them, and when they did not work hard enough, produce enough goods fast enough, or dared to catch their breath, they were punished with heavier demands and requirements. Not enough bricks? Then make them without straw. An even more difficult task. In short, the Empire had proclaimed that work is of primary and ultimate value. So, when one rests from their work, they are failing to live up to this ultimate value, and are therefore deemed less worthy. Rest equals failure. Think again of that language of the “Protestant work ethic” and “pull yourselves up by your bootstraps theology.” The values of the Egyptian Empire, and a system that demands non-stop production and competition and “more, more, more”…has parallels to our own system. In these models, rest will always be deemed as failure. And those who rest are considered spiritually corrupt.

Now, the Bible does not say that work is inherently problematic. In fact, it is necessary. But if it becomes the ultimate value, the thing that the system is based upon, and the definition of what it means to be human, then bodies and minds and souls will crumble. The rest-less Israelites could not keep up with the demands of Empire, so they cried out to God for help. Now, if you know the story, you remember that God sent a man named Moses to confront the power and authority of the Egyptian Pharoah. With a thunderous “let my people go!” Moses proclaimed that God had something better in store for his people. However, even after they were freed physically, it quickly became apparent that they were still enslaved to the Egyptians mentally and spiritually. While they were no longer physically enslaved commodities of the Empire, they simply could not see themselves as anything else. So, within days of their escape from the Egyptian army, they were begging to be taken back into slavery. Back to the Empire that was literally killing them. It seems they were still spiritually enslaved to this mindset of Empire, and they simply didn’t know how to operate any other way. It was all they knew how to be. Then, and now, the story of Empire is the same. A culture that does not know how to rest has lost something of its soul.

So it was up to God and Moses to un-enslave them, mentally and spiritually. And let me suggest this morning that the key to it all…was rest. The Bible actually has a lot to say about rest, and (spoiler alert) it isn’t considered a failure. In fact, on the contrary, over and over again in Scripture, those who fail to rest are considered disobedient to God.

I just read that commandment from Exodus 20: “Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.” But did you know that this isn’t the first time that God gives the command to keep Sabbath rest? In response to their yearning to go back to Egypt, before they could even make it to the foot of the mountain to receive that command, God had already commanded them to rest. Again, it wasn’t fifteen minutes after they escaped the army that they were complaining to Moses about not having enough food. So, God provided with this stuff called “manna,” a substance that they could gather, and bake, and eat….and quail that was plentiful to catch and cook. But the purpose of this food was two-fold. One, it kept them alive. And two, it was the tool that God and Moses used to rebuild their assumptions about work and rest. For five days, they could gather enough food for that day alone. But then on the sixth, they were to gather and prepare twice as much. Because on the seventh, they were commanded to rest. No gathering. No preparing. Ceasing from work.

Exodus 16.22–26

²² On the sixth day they gathered twice as much food, two omers apiece. When all the leaders of the congregation came and told Moses, ²³ he said to them, “This is what the Lord has commanded: Tomorrow is a day of solemn rest, a holy Sabbath to the Lord; bake what you want to bake and boil what you want to boil, and all that is left over put aside to be kept until morning.” ²⁴ So they put it aside until morning, just as Moses commanded them, and it did not rot, and there were no maggots in it. ²⁵ Moses said, “Eat it today, for today is a Sabbath to the Lord; today you will not find it in the field. ²⁶ Six days you shall gather it, but on the seventh day, which is a Sabbath, there will be none.”

This was an intentional act of re-training the Israelites to see themselves in a new way. And to see God in a new way. They began to learn (slowly…it took them 40 years to figure it out) that their God was a God of provision, of restoration of their bodies, in both the forms of food and of rest. This thing that they were never allowed to do in Egypt, they were now commanded to do. They could not refuse to rest. If they went out to gather on the seventh day, there would be nothing to gather. Rest was not a failure, but an expectation. Together, Moses and God were un-enslaving them, building in them a new form of trust. Listen to how Ruth Haley Barton talks about it:

…on the sixth day, God led them into an even deeper level of trust by instructing them to gather enough food for two days so they could cease and rest on the seventh, patterning themselves after God’s rhythm in creation. In its earliest iteration, sabbath was about learning to trust God’s provision, and the people’s capacity to follow God in this rhythm was actually a test of their obedience.

Do you see her connection between rest and trust? Rest was an act of trusting that the God who had saved them would still provide, even if they were not accomplishing something by their own work. They heard this in Exodus 16, and again at Mt. Sinai in Exodus 20. But it took them 40 years for God and Moses to “un-enslave” them to this mentality. For them to learn the rhythm of rest and work. Of trust and obedience. But they did. They built this community of trust and rest. Weekly sabbath. Land sabbath, allowing the land to lay fallow. Economic sabbath, what they called the Year of Jubilee. Multiple examples of trust and rest…that gave them a new identity and a new purpose.

So why is it that with this story in front of us, we as a culture insist that God’s command to rest is the wrong answer, and it was the Egyptians who had it right all along? Again, Terrell Carter suggests that it doesn’t have to be this way:

As we replace bootstrap theology with a gospel of generosity and justice, we begin to understand that the value people hold before God is not based on how much they produce in society, how often they work, or how long they are able to maintain a job, but it is instead based on the love that God inherently has for all creation. We then begin to have a more faithful view of God and one another and are able to develop steps to more appropriately live in relationship with one another.

What if one of the gifts that the church gave our culture was to show them what it means to rest? To push back on the narrative of “rest = laziness”? Perhaps learning how to practice Sabbath rest is one of the most important things that we can do. Over the course of the next 17 weeks, we will be asking what that looks like. The word “Sabbath” is mentioned 139 times in Scripture. And the concept is mentioned even more than that, including the first chapters of Genesis where it says God ceased work on the seventh day. So, this is an idea that is central to our faith. Yet, I would suggest that we don’t talk about it nearly enough. That is about to change. From today until mid-September, we will be exploring these ideas and asking how we might practice sabbath…as individuals, as families, and as a congregation. It won’t be 17 straight Sundays of the same theme, but just like the rhythms that the Bible teaches, we will touch upon these ideas, in rhythm with other important topics, coming back over and again to the Biblical call to rest. Learning to trust God enough to rest is a gift for ourselves, and one that we can share with the world.