Thirty
years ago, we still had blue laws (Sunday closing laws) in Missouri. Just about
everytjing except for convenience stories, drugstores, and sports/entertainment
events were surrounded by empty parking lots on Sunday.
The
blue laws disappeared in a statewide vote, driven largely by a combination of
powerful commercial interests and individuals hungry to find extra time to do
grocery shopping, clothes shopping, and other activities that strained
two-income families.
We’ve
already lost Thanksgiving and I suspect Christmas is not far beyond. Thanks to
the reach of electronic communications technology, vacation time, and even
weekends, should be called “work release” time rather than days off.
The
idea of Sabbath – a day of the week devoted to worship and rest is already
coming to be something quaint from another era.
It
shouldn’t be. We probably need it more than ever. Even people who don’t believe
in God need a day of rest.
A
Sabbath, say Christopher Smith, John Pattison and Jonathan Wilson-Hargrove in Slow
Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus, is “an
obvious rebuke to the culture—and even a church culture!—that prides itself on
its busyness, scorns leisure as laziness and boasts that we’ll sleep when we’re
dead.”
That
sounds like modern American work life to me.
I
knew a CEO who once claimed he could run a $16 billion corporation with five
MBAs. When he was asked what would happen when they dropped dead, he replied, “Find
five more.”
The
Slow Church authors point to Exodus
16 as the first mention of Sabbath in the Bible, although you can find the
first reference to a day of rest in the first chapter of Genesis.
Even
God rested.
The
Exodus reference contains three lessons, they point out. The Israelites are
wandering around the desert, grumbling over not having enough to eat,
complaining about starving to death. God gives them manna six days a week, with
a double portion on the sixth day because God said the seventh day was a day of
rest, and holy to him.
They
Israelites learn the lesson of enough, the lesson of redistribution, and the
lesson of Sabbath faith and discipline.
That’s
an arresting idea – the Sabbath takes faith and it takes discipline.
No
wonder we voted it out of existence in Missouri.
For
the past several Mondays, I’ve been posting a discussion of Slow Church. Today’s
post is on the chapter entitled “Sabbath.” It’s worth the price of the whole
book. Next week, the discussion will be on “Abundance.”
Photograph by Lynn Greyling via Public
Domain Pictures. Used with permission.
