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 Exodus 20:1-17
Do you remember the blue laws? These were laws that dated back to colonial times, and regulated what people did and did not do on Sundays. The last remnant of the blue laws mandated that stores be closed on Sundays.
Many years ago, when New York State was beginning to consider changing the laws, I was at a party, making conversation with someone I'd just met. I made the mistake of saying to him, "I hope those laws don't pass. Every day seems to be like every other day, and we need a break."
His reaction stunned me. With intense, almost violent, anger, he said, "You religious people think you can run the world. You think that you can stop business people from doing the kind of thing that they're supposed to do. If I want to run a business and open on Sunday, I can be open on Sundays. Leave us alone!" And then he said, "The most important thing in the world is the economy of the country."
Trying to get my point across I said, "All I was trying to say is that Sunday seems to be like every other day, and we need a break, otherwise we break ourselves."
A couple of years later Christmas happened to come on a Monday. Late on Saturday afternoon I was in a department store doing last-minute Christmas shopping. The saleslady helping me looked very tired, and I asked her if she had to work the next day.
And she said, "Unfortunately, yes." And she said something like this: "Sir, I think we have lost perspective. You know, if the store were closed tomorrow, people would have had all their Christmas shopping done, and then we would have had Sunday and Monday to be together with family and friends, celebrating Christmas. Doesn't that make much more sense?"
She was right. In a sense, we as a people in the western world are going a little bit crazy. We really need a day when we change the pace of our activities, a time to rest and think. Instead, we just keep going and going, becoming more intense and more active.
A good example of this was my high-school yearbook for senior year. In our yearbook there was a picture of each graduating senior, and underneath a list of the activities that the senior had participated in during the four years of high school. The list under my picture was the longest in my graduating class. I was in all these activities, plus working after school and on Saturdays, and I got all these things done, with wonderful affirmation. And I thought I was pretty good.
Then, as years passed, I began to realize what was really going on during those high-school years. I was avoiding facing myself. I was trying to cover up pain and sadness. It took me a long time to get in touch with that, that all the activity that I was doing was not all that wonderful, because I was hiding something. I was avoiding facing my own issues.
About the time I made this discovery, I also found that I had a heart condition. This was a result of all the covering up I had been doing, and it has had a profound effect on the last twenty-five years of my life. It's been a great teacher for me.
But maybe it could have been avoided. As with any illness we have, somewhere along the way there were stress factors that helped bring it about. I wonder what would have happened if an older, wiser person had taken me aside and advised me to slow down. I have a feeling that may have only made me go faster. But it might have made a difference if I had taken even one day a week to refresh and re-energize myself. We could all do with a day like this in our lives.
You would think that with all of the extraordinary, miraculous medical inventions and advances of the last century, there would be less illness in the world today. We're living longer, we have medical technology to keep us going, but it seems to me there is as much illness and as much disease as there ever was. It's a result of our not taking the time, a day apart, to change the pace, to rest, to think, to re-energize ourselves and to contemplate God.
What do you think Jesus would have done if He had a life as busy and as stressful as ours? We have a very good example of what He did. His life was as demanding, as charged with conflict as anybody's life anywhere.
When teaching the Bible, we don't put enough emphasis on what Jesus did to cope with the stresses of his life. Through the pages of the Gospels, every three or four pages, He went away, to a garden or the seashore, some deserted place, for extended periods of time. I think He went to pray and to think, to meditate and to rest. And we know the balance that Jesus had in his life.
It seems that the Ten Commandments have drifted to the far corners of our consciousness and, if they are anywhere in our lives, they are hidden. But what are the Ten Commandments, really? They are the experience of hundreds and hundreds of years of the Hebrew people. They discovered what works, what is good, what doesn't work and what is not good.
And these are some of the things they discovered. You don't steal; it doesn't work. You don't kill; it doesn't help. You don't lie, cheat or covet. You honor your mother and father. You observe the Sabbath. You take that special Sabbath day of the week and you make it holy, and on that day you worship. It's a day apart, to pray and to reschedule yourself. It is a holy day.
The directions then were very clear. On that day you don't do any work. You have six days to do your work, and on the seventh day, the Sabbath, you take it off and you do something different, something special, and you pay attention to God.
And then comes a very powerful metaphor: when God created the earth, it was created in six days, and on the seventh day, what did God do? God rested. We need to do this, for our health, for our sanity and for our well-being.
How do we do this? We're not going to get help from our society or government. Society is moving in another direction. It's on an express train going at a tremendous rate of speed with no brakes. We don't know where it's going to end up. So we have to take charge of the process ourselves.
The other day I was in conversation with Sister Carol Perry, who conducts Bible studies in various parts of Manhattan at noontime. People come with their lunches and study the Bible. She says that one of the things people complain about is the inability to disconnect. With today's email and cell phones, we are expected to be in touch all the time, with our jobs and with everyone in our lives.
And I thought, "That's craziness!" Then I realized when I go out on my boat, I take my cell phone with me. It doesn't make sense. We have to separate ourselves from the demands of our everyday lives.
Do you know what might be an interesting thing? Just imagine, if we can fantasize for a moment, if all the leaders of government, industry and so forth would get together and realize society is going in the wrong direction, and take one day to be a day off for everybody. Stores close down, industry closes down, airports close down, even television cameras aren't working. The whole world shuts down. You can't do anything or go anywhere. It would take a few months' time, but do you know what would happen? Families would be stronger; relationships would get closer; we would get a perspective on life. The quality of life would increase about a thousand percent. We would have lives with much more meaning. This could never happen, but it's an idea.
Since we're not going to get any help from the outside, we have to get help from the inside. It would require self-discipline for every one of us commit to making the Sabbath day a holy day and doing something very different on that day. We would change the pace. We would rest. We would think. We would restart our emotional and spiritual engines. We would worship. We would be with God. This would make an unbelievable difference if we could discipline ourselves to do this.
There was a twelfth-century rabbi who said, and this is a beautiful statement:
I keep the Sabbath. God keeps me.
Isn't that beautiful? The Psalmist talks about being faithful to God, and that God is always faithful to the ones who are faithful to God. I keep the Sabbath, God keeps me.
In the last century, one of the great Christian leaders was Leslie Weatherhead. He was the head of a large Methodist church in London, a prolific writer, a wonderful soul and a great communicator. In one of his books he gives a couple of paragraphs on the modern Sunday. This is what he said:
Our thoughts about Sunday have vastly altered in the last fifty years, and the behavior of many would suggest that there should be no criticism expressed by anyone on what is done on Sundays. Yet while we are glad that the ancient tyrannies have gone, I would like to make the plea that Sunday is worth saving, and to do so by means of a parable.
I know a little park with beautiful flower beds, well-cut lawns, shady trees, a rock garden and even a little pond. The park is locked at night. Iron railings surround it, and there are notices, "Do not pick the flowers," and in a few places, "Please keep off the grass." A critic might ask, "Why the notices, the palings, the locked gates?" But clearly the answer is that, without them there would soon be no park for anyone.
Sunday is a little park, an oasis in the desert of this noisy, hectic, rushing weekday life. If we do not guard and protect it, there will soon be no Sunday for anyone.
I conclude with a focus on three words that I feel should be a part of the Sabbath. These three words are part of the meditation and contemplation of Rabbi Abraham Heschel. The first word for the special day is wonder. Rabbi Heschel said:
As civilization advances, the sense of wonder declines. Such decline is an alarming symptom of our state of mind. Mankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation.
We fail to wonder. This is the tragedy of every man: "to dim all wonder by indifference." Life is routine, and routine is resistance to the wonder.
And so this is the first word for the Sabbath, a day for wondering.
The second word is awe. We're too smart and too sophisticated to be awestruck. And yet go back to your childhood. Remember what it was like when you were awed by the wonder of the world, by the magnificence and mystery of it.
Heschel says:
There is only one way to wisdom: awe. The loss of awe is the great block to insight. The greatest insights happen to us in moments of awe.
And the third word of this meditation is celebration.
The man of our time is losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating, he seeks to be amused or entertained. Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. To be entertained is a passive state - it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or a spectacle.
Celebration is becoming involved in life. And what do we have to celebrate? It's life itself. We celebrate the fact of the moment, taking in the moment, absorbing it, and loving it.
Wonder. Awe. Celebration of life. Let the Sabbath day be special, a day apart. Build the Sabbath into your life, a time for you to change the pace, to rest, to think and to worship. Let us pray.
Help us, O Lord, for we need You. Help us get balanced. Help us get perspective. Help us remember the Sabbath, to keep it holy, that we in turn might be whole. Help us to know what the good rabbi said: "I keep the Sabbath. God keeps me." AMEN |
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