Sabbatical Me (Pt. 3)

Last month, I wrote a couple of posts about the Sabbath in response to a friend's questions, but I left this last set of questions unanswered:

I'd be even happier if you would also reflect on/write about the role of Sabbath in your life, in general...perhaps including (but by no means limited to) what you do/don't do on that one day of the week, what your conception of Sabbath is and how/why this has changed for you over the years, etc.

Essentially, S. is asking me to tell the story of my relationship with the Sabbath. I started writing a reply to these questions three weeks ago, but the post kept getting longer and longer. The more I wrote, the more I felt that I do not know and cannot say all there is for me to write: that the story of me and the Sabbath is still "coming to a middle" (to quote the captain of Serenity). And now it's the middle of March, and I think this is destined to be a post without a conclusion. With that prelude, here it is.

When I was very young, my parents read me the Little House on the Prairie books, as well as various accounts from the Puritans, in which the characters took the Biblical mandate to rest on the Sabbath very seriously and strictly. They construed "rest" and "holy" to mean no play as well as no work. As far as I can recall, this was my earliest picture of Sabbath: something austere, defined by all its negatives. Later, my parents took up a habit of fasting on Sunday at lunch time, and I think this also played into my perception of Sabbath as a time of deprivation.

When I was ten or eleven, I began to be concerned about my relationship to fiction, novels in particular. I don't recall what triggered this--perhaps a sermon on idolatry? teaching in my Sunday school class? I do remember talking to my dad about it. He was not as hard on me as I was on myself. Thus it was entirely my own decision (I'm not sure I even told my family about it) to stop reading fiction on Sundays. I kept to this practice for years, with varying levels of stringency; to some extent I still follow it. I don't feel good about watching Firefly or reading Anathem on Sunday. This Sabbath practice represents a seeking of holiness and godliness by turning away from worldly things, and a prioritization of God and God's values (for instance, love for other people) by setting aside pleasures that I sensed to be worldly/fleshly.

This version of the Sabbath wasn't the austere and empty time seen in Little House on the Prairie; the void left by not reading was filled by games or cooking or hiking with my family, and by lively time in my church small group. Nonetheless, it was a negatively defined Sabbath: Sunday as the day I don't read.

Another dimension to my observation of the Sabbath came into play in middle school when my workload at school increased. My middle school forbade weekend homework assignments (thank God), but was big on projects which one inevitably ended up working on during weekends: posters, research papers, art projects, book reports, ... It only got worse in high school. I--probably with encouragement from my parents--decided any schoolwork I needed to do over the weekend should get done before Sunday (if possible); if necessary there was always Monday morning. (I was the kind of kid who did better finishing an assignment at 6am Monday than at 11pm Sunday, or even 10pm. Definitely a lark, not an owl.)

Not doing homework on Sunday reflected the day-of-rest aspect of the Sabbath. Still a negative-space definition of Sabbath (no homework day), but moving toward something more positively defined (rest day).

At some point in middle or high school, I heard John Ortberg preach a sermon on the Sabbath, and he called it a joy day. (A cursory search on mppc.org didn't yield the sermon in question so I leave it to you to seek it out if you're interested.) I think this was the first positive definition of Sabbath that I encountered. He spoke of using the day of rest to focus on relationships, beauty, anything that brings joy. I think this is a much-needed perspective, and a lovely picture, if an incomplete one. But if there's anything I've learned from thinking about Sabbath and other things God-related, it's that no picture is complete.

There was also a conference I went to with my family where the speaker (Mark Labberton?) addressed the Sabbath and exhorted us to observe it more conscientiously. He advocated never buying or selling on Sunday. My dad was not convinced, and talked to me about Romans 14:5--

One man considers one day more sacred than another; another man considers every day alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind.

--which remains the primary source of uncertainty for me about the present day significance of the Sabbath for Christians and the applicability of the Old Testament laws concerning the Sabbath to Christians. You can read more about his perspective here.

In college I tried to avoid homework on Sunday, but it didn't work out too well. Then for a while I tried to keep Sabbath from sunset on Saturday to sunset on Sunday, on the grounds that the Jewish model begins and ends the day at sunset. This was better than trying to cram all my homework into Saturday at the cost of staying up so late that church was painful the next morning; but it felt like I was cheating and I was never convinced that it was really the way to go.

Somewhere in there I read Lauren Winner's lovely book Mudhouse Sabbath. I don't remember what impression of the Sabbath it left me with, but it was a thought-provoking and life-enriching book. Anyone interested in tradition or spiritual discipline or Judaism and its relationship to Christianity should read it.

At present I keep the Sabbath mainly as a day of personal rest, not really focusing on the social justice aspect. I avoid buying things on Sunday mostly because that feels like work for me. But I don't have pangs of conscience about eating out on Sunday because that results in rest for me. But I don't have a good sense of whether that's God's plan for how I keep the Sabbath. The part I am more convinced about is that I need to avoid novels and movies on Sunday, to surrender that pleasure-source up to God, and spend the day loving my God and the people He has put around me (in this season, mainly O.)

So: that's where I am, and those are the places I've come from. I'm still on the journey, so feel free to check back with me in a few years on this topic! I hope you will join me in continuing to wonder and ask God about His good, pleasing and perfect will for the Sabbath.

[Some rambling reflections:] Sabbath, fear, trust, humility

From the last page of this article in Veritas Riff about Christian politicians and sex scandals:

"Practicing Sabbath rest is one way of exercising humility, but we do it very, very poorly in this country."

I've never thought about it that way. Sabbath as tithe, Sabbath as discipline, Sabbath as a fast, Sabbath as simply following a rule; Sabbath as gift and blessing, Sabbath as "joy-day" (in John Ortberg's parlance); Sabbath as breaking the bonds of putting faith in work and achievement, even Sabbath as an exercise in trusting God, which comes closer. But not Sabbath as an act of humility.

My relationship to the Sabbath has gone through a lot of different phases. When I was little, I never thought about it. Then there was a long period where I fasted from novels on Sunday (though I didn't think of it as fasting, at the time). Then I went through a phase where I tried to get all my homework done on Friday and if necessary Saturday; then some time after getting to Stony Brook, I started counting the day of rest as being from sunset Saturday to sunset Sunday, with the result that I would end up staying up really late Sunday to get homework done. I was keeping the Sabbath rigidly, in a practice that was still good but definitely tainted by a mix of fear and pride.

Then my attitude changed a lot, because I was absorbing the truth of my freedom in Christ. I think I was reading Hearing God and maybe also Celebration of Discipline or Into the Depths of God, all of which discuss listening to the Spirit instead of being tightly and mindlessly bound by rituals (which is what my personality drives me to). No longer knowing how to motivate Sabbath-keeping, I stopped altogether.

Then I went to IVCF's missions conference, Urbana, and read Mudhouse Sabbath, which talks about how the Jewish Sabbath is a day of celebration and community and good eating (not of austerity and fasting and constraint, as in traditional Protestant practice). That was an eye-opener, and it built the bridge in my mind between the teaching I've heard about taking a "joy day" and the Bible's descriptions of the Sabbath.

Lately I haven't been consciously practicing a day of rest. I have effectively been keeping a day of rest from work, because I spend almost all weekend with O., talking and reading and eating and cooking and sometimes watching movies (and last weekend, our (dating) anniversary, going to the Guggenheim and being enthralled by Kandinsky's colors). But I hesitate to call that time a Sabbath because it's not time devoted to God per se. Moreover, I'm not sure I can even call it a day of simple rest, because this semester, Saturday has often brought some emotional stress. Relationships are not about work, but they do require work. (So many intense conversations: sorting things out, finding out how much fear colors my emotional experience.)

Trusting God: that theme keeps coming back this semester. Trust and fear, the opposites that push me back and forth. I'm afraid of judgment, afraid of failure, afraid of being a bad person--and so I keep the Sabbath as an attempted good work. Or: I trust God to take care of my work, I trust God to know what's best for me, I trust God to give me good gifts--and I keep the Sabbath as an act of intimacy with my Father in heaven.

If anxiety is really about arrogance ("this has to happen my way, and what if it doesn't?" in Oswald Chambers' model), is there an element of pride in all my fear? Is my fear the fruit of trusting my own understanding rather than God's revelation? Maybe all trust is predicated on humility. To trust someone else, even God, is to submit myself to their reasoning and decisions, to believe they know and speak the truth. To trust God means to believe His statements about Who He is ("the gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love and faithfulness"), rather than believing the lies about Him that my own faulty understanding spews forth.