The Individual Spiritual Life: Sabbath
+ In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
I have to admit that this fifth--and last!--sermon in a series on the individual spiritual life is sort of an afterthought. I was browsing through the resolutions of last summer's General Convention of the Episcopal Church and found that the Stewardship commission had proposed, and Convention had passed, a resolution (A135) on "Holy Habits." The resolution "encourages all members of the Church to develop a personal spiritual discipline that includes, at a minimum, the holy habits of tithing, daily personal prayer and study, Sabbath time, and weekly corporate worship." Obviously, that list overlaps a good deal with what I have been saying in these sermons, but the mention of "Sabbath time" amongst the Holy Habits caught me by surprise. The emphasis on "Sabbath" is clearly right, though, and the very fact that it did surprise me is, I think, a sign of how important it is to talk about this topic.
If I ask someone--like Ronnie or Clint here--what you have planned to relax over the weekend, after mentally subtracting things you figure you shouldn't mention in front of a faculty member, you're liable to say something about going out to watch the LSU game, or taking part yourself in some sport or lesson or competition, or perhaps going to see a movie or scream your lungs out at a concert. We count all of these sorts of things as "recreation," that is, literally, as re-creation, things that re-make us. But I think that word "recreation" is wrong, taken literally. Sometimes, we call these kinds of things "entertainment," or "diversions" or "distractions": we may even talk about them as ways of "killing time." All of those expressions are, it seems to me, closer to the mark. "Diversions" and "Distractions" are things that make us look away, make us mentally turn aside; and "entertainment" is something we choose to hold in our minds, to the exclusion of other things. If we look away from the problems of our daily lives, if we turn aside, for a moment, from all the work we have to do, if we let something pleasant take up space in our mind instead of something horrible, or merely boring--if we do any of those things, well, all right, as far as it goes. But it does only go so far, and re-creation is a step farther.
The fact is that we can be re-created, but that new creation in us does not come from our looking aside from one thing in the world to some other thing that seems brighter and shinier for the moment. Just like in the proverb about the greener grass, there will always be something brighter and shinier just around the corner, and in our hope for re-creation, we end up being, as the poet T. S. Eliot said, "distracted from distraction by distraction." We can be re-created if we can rest, and rest, rather than mere diversion, is what the Sabbath is about. The idea of "sabbath," and the word itself, go back to the story of the six days of creation with their concluding comment that on the seventh day, the Sabbath day, God rested from all the work that God had done. Now Jesus himself tells us that we can't take that statement from Genesis literally: God is always creating, always causing the world to be, even on the Sabbath--if God were to literally stop working, then all things that exist would stop existing. What the idea of God resting on the seventh day is getting at, first, is that just as God is always in the process of creating, so God is also always at rest. All the business of Creation, all the busy-ness, is outside God. The lesser gods of all the old pagan religions may have had to struggle to create the world in their various mythologies, but the Lord God of Israel creates everything simply by his word, without any effort at all.
The second part of the idea of God resting on the Sabbath day, the second thing that is symbolizes, is that if we want to find our rest, we won't find it in the busy-ness of the world, but rather in God. Eliot--to go back to him for a moment--said it as though the whole creation were a spinning wheel or a top, rotating around a single central axis that somehow remains at rest. God is, Eliot said, "the still point of the turning wolrd." Centuries before Eliot wrote that, Saint Augustine of Hippo wrote, near the beginning of his Confessions, "Fecisti nos ad te, Domine, et inquietem est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te": "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are unquiet until they rest in you." Our instinct to look for rest by turning aside from the things of this world is right, but it doesn't help if we turn aside to some other thing: if, instead, we turn aside from all of them, if we turn away from the creation and to the Creator, we can find that Sabbath rest in which we are truly re-created, until we come to the final rest of our perfect enjoyment of God in God's new creation. That idea of Sabbath rest lies behind the collect for Saturdays in the Book of Common Prayer: "Almighty God, who after the creation of the world rested from all your works and sanctified a day of rest for all your creatures: Grant that we, putting away all earthly anxieties, may be duly prepared for the service of your sanctuary, and that our rest here upon earth may be a preparation for the eternal rest promised to your people in heaven; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen."
--John Wm. Houghton
+ In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
I have to admit that this fifth--and last!--sermon in a series on the individual spiritual life is sort of an afterthought. I was browsing through the resolutions of last summer's General Convention of the Episcopal Church and found that the Stewardship commission had proposed, and Convention had passed, a resolution (A135) on "Holy Habits." The resolution "encourages all members of the Church to develop a personal spiritual discipline that includes, at a minimum, the holy habits of tithing, daily personal prayer and study, Sabbath time, and weekly corporate worship." Obviously, that list overlaps a good deal with what I have been saying in these sermons, but the mention of "Sabbath time" amongst the Holy Habits caught me by surprise. The emphasis on "Sabbath" is clearly right, though, and the very fact that it did surprise me is, I think, a sign of how important it is to talk about this topic.
If I ask someone--like Ronnie or Clint here--what you have planned to relax over the weekend, after mentally subtracting things you figure you shouldn't mention in front of a faculty member, you're liable to say something about going out to watch the LSU game, or taking part yourself in some sport or lesson or competition, or perhaps going to see a movie or scream your lungs out at a concert. We count all of these sorts of things as "recreation," that is, literally, as re-creation, things that re-make us. But I think that word "recreation" is wrong, taken literally. Sometimes, we call these kinds of things "entertainment," or "diversions" or "distractions": we may even talk about them as ways of "killing time." All of those expressions are, it seems to me, closer to the mark. "Diversions" and "Distractions" are things that make us look away, make us mentally turn aside; and "entertainment" is something we choose to hold in our minds, to the exclusion of other things. If we look away from the problems of our daily lives, if we turn aside, for a moment, from all the work we have to do, if we let something pleasant take up space in our mind instead of something horrible, or merely boring--if we do any of those things, well, all right, as far as it goes. But it does only go so far, and re-creation is a step farther.
The fact is that we can be re-created, but that new creation in us does not come from our looking aside from one thing in the world to some other thing that seems brighter and shinier for the moment. Just like in the proverb about the greener grass, there will always be something brighter and shinier just around the corner, and in our hope for re-creation, we end up being, as the poet T. S. Eliot said, "distracted from distraction by distraction." We can be re-created if we can rest, and rest, rather than mere diversion, is what the Sabbath is about. The idea of "sabbath," and the word itself, go back to the story of the six days of creation with their concluding comment that on the seventh day, the Sabbath day, God rested from all the work that God had done. Now Jesus himself tells us that we can't take that statement from Genesis literally: God is always creating, always causing the world to be, even on the Sabbath--if God were to literally stop working, then all things that exist would stop existing. What the idea of God resting on the seventh day is getting at, first, is that just as God is always in the process of creating, so God is also always at rest. All the business of Creation, all the busy-ness, is outside God. The lesser gods of all the old pagan religions may have had to struggle to create the world in their various mythologies, but the Lord God of Israel creates everything simply by his word, without any effort at all.
The second part of the idea of God resting on the Sabbath day, the second thing that is symbolizes, is that if we want to find our rest, we won't find it in the busy-ness of the world, but rather in God. Eliot--to go back to him for a moment--said it as though the whole creation were a spinning wheel or a top, rotating around a single central axis that somehow remains at rest. God is, Eliot said, "the still point of the turning wolrd." Centuries before Eliot wrote that, Saint Augustine of Hippo wrote, near the beginning of his Confessions, "Fecisti nos ad te, Domine, et inquietem est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te": "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are unquiet until they rest in you." Our instinct to look for rest by turning aside from the things of this world is right, but it doesn't help if we turn aside to some other thing: if, instead, we turn aside from all of them, if we turn away from the creation and to the Creator, we can find that Sabbath rest in which we are truly re-created, until we come to the final rest of our perfect enjoyment of God in God's new creation. That idea of Sabbath rest lies behind the collect for Saturdays in the Book of Common Prayer: "Almighty God, who after the creation of the world rested from all your works and sanctified a day of rest for all your creatures: Grant that we, putting away all earthly anxieties, may be duly prepared for the service of your sanctuary, and that our rest here upon earth may be a preparation for the eternal rest promised to your people in heaven; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen."
--John Wm. Houghton