What's So Special About the Sabbath?
"Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.
Six days you shall labor, and do all your work; but the seventh day is a
sabbath to the LORD your God;
in it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your
manservant, or your maidservant, or your cattle,
or the sojourner who is within your gates; for in six days the LORD made
heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them,
and rested the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day
and hallowed it. Exodus 20:8-11
I was saying to someone at our prayer time on Wednesday that I thought
Henry Ford and Thomas Edison will have a lot to answer for in heaven. By
that I meant Edison gave us electric light and now we can work all night
if we need or want to. And doctors treat more and more with sleep disorder
and we all at some time or other suffer sleep deprivation. Henry Ford of
course made it possible for anyone to be able to afford an automobile and
now, not only can we work in the evenings, but we can drive across the city
to do so. And now that we can, we must. Henry Ford also is the pioneer of
assembly line production paving the way (pardon the pun) for mass consumption.
Ditto Sam Walton and his shopping temples where low prices are the only issue
that counts.
I know I am possibly romanticizing the notion of work, but there was a
time when local craftsmen and women took their time to make a product worthy
of their name. Now only the wealthy can afford hand-made goods.
Of course we cannot turn the clock back, and even if we could, would we
really want to? Personally, I would really miss Novocain. And yes there
were more poorly paid laborers than there were happy craftsmen—largely thanks
to the industrial revolution.
Most of us have driven across southern Alberta, Saskatchewan or Manitoba
at some time. Those not born or living there, tend to enjoy the open straight-as-an-arrow
highways as an opportunity to get through those places as fast as possible.
They tend to be flat, open and to many who do not know them, uninteresting.
So traffic rushes across highway #1 at the highest possible speeds, stopping
only for bathroom and meal breaks—preferably as close to the highway as possible.
But for those of us born there or those who lived there for any length
of time, we know that the prairie we insulate ourselves from inside our air
conditioned automobiles, can only be appreciated by stopping and taking the
time to experience it. When you do, you find it is a landscape that is alive
with sounds and sights and smells that you never experience when you whiz
through. Otherwise you miss the smell of sagebrush or the sight of prickly
pear cactus in bloom and the dry cracking sounds of summer grasshoppers or
the sight of wind blowing across fields of ripening grain making waves like
on the ocean. And all because we don't want to take the time to stop and experience
our world.
And so we come to the passage known as the Ten Commandments, and particularly
to that least observed of them, the Sabbath. Anne Robertson, in her book
God's Top Ten: Blowing the Lid off the Ten Commandments, points out how even
people who stringently promote obedience to God's law here and in Deuteronomy
hardly ever even bother about this commandment except when some sports event
interferes with church on Sunday.
When you read the list of God's top ten, most are obvious and need only
a phrase. Do not kill, steal, commit adultery or lie about your neighbor.
We understand coveting, but are given examples. But the commandment to honor
the sabbath is given three paragraphs of explanation. We are given the commandment,
how to apply it, what it means and its cosmic significance. God does this
for us because otherwise it would be easy to marginalize it and ignore it.
Whoops, that's what we do now, isn't it?
When we ignore God's sabbath, we live in a bubble—insulated from our environment
bit by bit losing the meaning of creation and our own humanity. We are slowly
reshaped into consumers and production units, not human beings. It is interesting
that God extends the sabbath to slaves and to the farm—its land and its animals.
It's not just about us taking a rest, it is about all of creation that we
have control over also being allowed to rest.
We know in simple ways this is true. Fields need rest. Yes you can continue
to squeeze production out of an acre of land by pumping in fertilizer and
pesticides, but eventually the land itself—a highly sophisticated piece of
biology—begins to break down. The natural processes that make the land productive
begin to fail when it is given no rest.
I remember growing up in southern Alberta when a ranch was an open space
where cattle grazed widely. Nnear my home now are factory feedlots where
millions of livestock are penned in the smallest possible enclosure and fed
unnatural foods and injected with unnatural hormones. And we are fed that
meat. I read many years ago that E-coli in beef is almost never present when
they feed on grass the way God designed them. They are ruminants and not meant
to feed on carbohydrate intensive grains, at least not in the quantities they
are fed. But range free cattle do not put on as much weight as fast, and
that means less money.
And that is part of what Sabbath means--allowing the earth to produce
at a natural pace and allowing it to rest.
Anne Robertson points out large stores that advertise they are open late
for “your convenience”, but the moment late openings becomes less profitable,
yours and my convenience will not matter. You know, I think I would patronize
a store that advertised, “closed on Sundays for your welfare.” I have to
confess it would take a while to get used to not being able to take for granted
that I can buy whatever I want, whenever I want.
There is something fundamental about Sabbath. Ralph Klassen has rightly
pointed out we would not need a carbon tax if we practiced Sabbath and were
able to turn our energy demands way down on one day a week. A Sabbath in
every sense just might be able to save our environment from disaster.
When we ignore Sabbath, we are in effect saying that we are the creator.
Ignoring Sabbath is surrendering to the anxiety that God will not provide.
In the wilderness the Hebrews were not allowed to gather manna on the sabbath.
God promised to provide.
Ignoring the Sabbath is also enslavement on all levels.
Six days of work is enough, says God. We need a day to say thank you and
to remember that it is God and not we ourselves who is the source of our
being and our needs.
The present financial crisis is an example. Clever mathematicians and
bankers created ever more sophisticated devices of enslavement. That is
not an over statement either. People were enticed into the foolish use of
debt by offering loans where only minimum interest needed to be paid, at
very low interest rates. Consumers were enticed into more and more debt
they could not afford. Then when they missed one payment to anyone, all
their lenders were entitled to ramp up their interest rate three and four
hundred percent. People became enslaved to their lenders. Many worked day
and night and still could not pay off their sub-prime and exploding loans.
And now the huge pyramid of debt is crashing down. The Bible has an answer
for that: Do not force everyone to become enslaved to the need to produce
and consume.
And as part of the Sabbath was something called a Jubilee year. A Jubilee
was that every fiftieth year the whole debt cycle was canceled and the playing
field leveled. You could only offer a loan for a maximum of forty nine years.
All mortgaged land was returned to its original owner and debt slaves were
set free. God says forty nine years of compounded interest and debt is all
the creation can stand. It seems we are finding out in unusual ways.
In his book, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes
of the Twentieth Century, John Howard Kunstler writes, “It has been hard
for Americans (and Canadians) lost in the rapture of nonstop infotainment,
recreational shopping and compulsive motoring to make sense of the gathering
forces that will fundamentally alter the terms of everyday life.”
He is describing us as living in our mobile infotainment shoptopia which
we have turned into a version of Hades Inferno where the purpose of every
individual—no longer an individual—is to stay connected to the technological
web while we frantically dash about either producing or consuming. I see
people walking a beautiful beach with a celphone stuck to their ear. It reminds
me of "The Borg" in Startrek. That was a vision of techno-enslavement. Help!
We need Sabbath!
It is tragic that twenty five people lost their lives in a railway accident
near Los Angeles because the engineer was so engrossed in text messaging
he missed the stop signal. There is a metaphor in that.
We read that earlier generations enjoyed a different kind of life. A classical
education in earlier times meant you studied music, learned botany and knew
all the plants in your environment. You learned the names for all the animals
in your environment and had more than a passing acquaintance with their nature
and characteristics. Today far from knowing the kinds of dairy cattle on
a farm, city children think milk comes from a refrigerator. We need sabbath
to reconnect with our environment.
So what do we do about it?
Begin taking back your life and the world in chunks you can manage.
Begin with making your sabbath a true day for rest and honoring your creator.
And I am not talking about going to church, although that is part of honoring
God.
I mean lets begin making the small shifts we need to to take back our
lives from the forces that drive us to a frazzle.
Remember though that Christ has set us free from condemnation. Jesus healed
on the Sabbath and incurred the wrath of the elders. So ask what enslaves
you to an artificial lifestyle.
What causes you to feel you are like a hamster on a treadmill?
What small piece of your life can you reclaim?
Take back a piece of it and give thanks to God.
Preached
Dr. Harold McNabb
West Shore Presbyterian
Church
Victoria, British Columbia
Resources Consulted
Charles Fensham, Emerging from the Dark Age Ahead, Novalis,
Ottawa, 2008
Anne Robertson, God's Top Ten: Blowing the Lid off the Commandments,
Morehouse, 2006
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