Sabbath: A school for worship

What are some key components we should put in place to foster meaningful Sabbath worship?

 

Erik C. Carter, DMin, PhD, is assistant professor of practical theology, School of Religion, Loma Linda University, Loma Linda, California, United States.

Worship is recognizing who we are in response to who God is; it is giving God His due. However, it is not sustainable unless we continually keep God before us. Thus, for the children of Israel to learn how to worship, Yahweh gifted them with the weekly practice of Sabbath rest. The words of Mark Buchanan capture these truths well: “At the heart of liberty—of being let go—is worship. But at the heart of worship is rest—a stopping from all work, all worry, all scheming, all fleeing—to stand amazed and thankful before God and his work.”1

A true understanding of worship makes the practice of Sabbath a foregone conclusion, an inescapable necessity, even if it is not necessarily always easy to do. What, then, are principles we can follow to help us have a deeper experience of Sabbath and what Sabbath was intended to be? This article will look at two crucial points as we explore the question of Sabbath worship: differentiation and preparation.

Challenges to Sabbath worship

The great challenge ancient Israel faced in embodying Sabbath worship was undoubtedly the Egyptian culture in which they had been immersed for generations. As slaves in Egypt, the Israelites had to work when, where, and how Pharaoh and his taskmasters dictated. There was no option to rest, because the gods of Egypt never rested. These were “confiscatory gods” who demanded endless production and authorized “endless systems of production that were insatiable.”2 By seeking to free Israel, Yahweh not only publicly engaged in a battle of the gods but also collided with an oppressive socioeconomic system. A byproduct of this system left God’s people in conflict with their own desires, questioning their identity, and prone to idolatry.

These challenges to Sabbath worship are not illusions from antiquity, for the “gods of Egypt” persist and manifest themselves today as well. In a fascinating book called Sabbath in the City, Bryan Stone and Claire Wolfteich report their findings of a study conducted with 96 urban pastors from 24 partnerships across the United States. Although the aim of their study was to discover what constitutes and sustains pastoral excellence, they also learned of some serious impediments along the way. “Urban pastors,” they write, “encounter particularly stressful demands and carry a sense of Christian vocation that elevates self-sacrifice and makes boundary setting problematic.”3 Consequently, like the Israelites of old, these pastors experience the pressures of their work toward productivity and activity. The authors conclude how this proves “particularly problematic when it conflicts with their actual vocation—when they find themselves too busy to pray, inattentive to important relationships, exhausted and neglectful of their own health, inauthentic and frazzled.”4

It is not difficult to discern how even God’s work performed on the Sabbath can be idolatrous, that is, if it depends solely on the pastor and leaves little space for God or the people of God. As Abraham Heschel advises, “One must abstain from toil and strain on the seventh day, even from strain in the service of God.”5

A reluctance to rest

Based on this context, the countercultural logic of Sabbath worship embedded in the Exodus account becomes clear. Our imitation of God’s rest on the seventh day is not for recovering from a long work week. Rather, this is part of what it means to be and to do as beings made in the image of God—an image that does not replace God but that is finite and prone to folly.6 As any sabbatarian pastor knows, the Sabbath is not a holiday, vacation, or reward for a job well done, but a gift that can be received only by relinquishing our control of the created world and remembering that we are but dust.

While there are certainly psychological and physical benefits for resting one day of seven, we must resist utilitarian notions of the Sabbath as the primary motivator for this practice.7 Clergy, whose Sabbaths are freighted with pastoral obligations, know too well that conventional notions of Sabbath as physical rest are illusory at best. Thus, the idea that one keeps the Sabbath to increase effectiveness and efficiency for the other six days of the week is complementary to Israel’s desire to return to Egypt. This is nonsensical when considering the bondage that such a life entailed. In other words, “Don’t revive what God has removed. Don’t gather and piece back together what God smashed and scattered. Don’t place yourself in a yoke that God broke and tossed off with His own hands.”8

If by keeping the Sabbath we, like ancient Israel, matriculate into a school for worship, then what lessons can be learned from those who have come before? What can we glean from those whose contemporary experiences of the Sabbath have a story to tell?9

Sabbath as differentiation

In the Exodus, the Sabbath is portrayed as different and distinct from the rest of the week. Although the children of Israel no longer had to fear the crack of a whip, they still had to work to survive their wilder­ness wanderings. However, when the Sabbath arrived, everything and everyone was supposed to stop. There were limitations placed on their sphere of control. “ ‘Six days you shall labor and do all your work,’ ” declared God, “ ‘but the seventh day is a sabbath of the LORD your God; in it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you’ ” (Exod. 20:9, 10, NASB). The fourth commandment also reminded them that God blessed this special day and made it holy.

Thus, one of the worship principles we can derive from this story is dif­ferentiation: whatever happens on the Sabbath ought to be qualitatively and quantitatively different from what transpires on the other six days of the week.

Differentiation was a major theme in my research with rabbis, including how they practiced Shabbat. As a part of their training for the rabbinate, all but one was required to spend a year in Israel. While there, they had the opportunity to experience how Israeli society structures its public sphere around the Sabbath. In the words of one Reform rabbi I interviewed: “Buses stop, things close, and work gets out in time for you to prepare for the Sabbath in a way that does not happen in this country [i.e., the United States].” This transition from a weekday way of life to a Sabbath way of life is not simply an ideological shift; it is an embodied transformation as one turns toward the creator God.

Most of us do not live in a society oriented toward the seventh day, where there exists a clear distinction between the workweek and the Sabbath. Indeed, we must choose to swim against the current of contemporary culture. The Sabbath is thus the call to resist the taskmasters of our society; and, for pastors, those taskmasters are of a specific ilk. Not only Pharaoh’s demand for insatiable productivity and effi­ciency haunts us as an “angel of light,” tempting us to do more good or to serve in such a way as to be noticed, but we need to find other ways of adopting the differentiation principle of Sabbath worship wherever we may find ourselves.

One way is to intentionally treat the boundaries of Sabbath with care. Friday and Saturday nights—the beginning and the end of the Sabbath—are impor­tant thresholds that are laden with meaning, for they usher in and dismiss a different way of life. Interestingly, both rabbis and ministers related a marked difference in their experience of the Sabbath at these times as opposed to Saturday morning and afternoon, which were replete with numerous responsibilities. For the pastors, Friday night, in particular, was a time for the family to be together in the home, enjoy a wholesome meal, engage in stimulating conversation, and listen to sacred music. All of these imbibed an atmosphere of peace, which then set the tone for the remaining hours of the Sabbath.

After “running hard” all week, one pastor related, “On Friday night, we stop. We’d be with the kids, the family, and we’d be reading stories to them. We would have all the electronic stuff off. Friday night just had a different feel. We were coming into the presence of the Lord, [and] all that stress of the world just seems to melt away.”

Another tangible way to imple­ment Sabbath differentiation is to be mindful of our food, possessions, wealth, conversations, thoughts, use of and relationship with technology, and the places we inhabit as areas in need of the transformative touch of the Sabbath. With respect to technology, a creative project known as the Sabbath Manifesto is raising awareness among young Jews and people of all faiths regarding the differentiation principle contained within the ancient practice of Sabbath. If you are a person who has multiple cell phones, takes an iPad on vacation, and finds it difficult to get through a conversation without posting an update to Facebook or Twitter, then they invite you to take the “unplug challenge.” In a hyper-connected world, they say unplug your devices and “start living a different life: connect with people in your street, neighborhood, and city, have an uninterrupted meal, or read a book to your child.”10

The necessity of preparation

Preparation is another key com­ponent to foster meaningful Sabbath worship. The classic text in the Exodus narrative regarding Sabbath preparation is taken from God’s pro­vision of the manna (Exod. 16). The Israelites were to gather what they needed for each day in the morning, no more and no less. On the sixth day, however, they were to gather twice as much. Why? The reason is that God wanted them to rest on the Sabbath as an act of trust in God’s provision, to recognize that human beings do not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord (Deut. 8:3). An ancillary passage regarding Sabbath preparation occurs later in the book of Exodus. Here, we find God instructing Moses to tell the children of Israel to make the Sabbath throughout their generations, as a perpetual covenant (Exod. 31:16).

Both of these passages call for forethought, planning, preparation, and discipline. They combine to illus­trate how our Sabbath experience in many ways is a do-it-yourself project. Meaningful Sabbath worship does not simply happen. The Sabbath is not only a revolutionary idea; it is a transformative theological experience. Thus, to make the Sabbath, Aryeh Kaplan writes, “You must prepare yourself and get into the mood . . . [for] true understanding only comes from doing and feeling.”11

Suggestions for how we can pre­pare for the Sabbath fall within two categories: outer and inner preparation. Outer preparation often gets the most attention and involves such things as buying food, cooking a meal, clean­ing the house, bathing the children, and turning off electronic devices. Inner preparation, on the other hand, is often overlooked. Here spiritual practices can be especially helpful to become more attuned and sensitive to each moment of the coming Sabbath. The goal is to bring the inner into the orbit of the outer, so our preparatory actions are then infused with heartfelt and faith-filled intention. Moreover, it is entirely possible to cease work­ing on the Sabbath externally while still occupying one’s thoughts with work-related matters. For the pas­tor, the converse becomes especially important—“working” externally but maintaining an inner sense of Sabbath shalom, or peace.

Friday has the potential to be a truly unique day of inner and outer preparation for Seventh-day Adventist pastors. Contemporary Judaism offers keen insight into how this can be so. For example, Joseph Soloveitchik once quipped that in America, there are many shomer Shabbat Jews (Sabbath observant), but not very many shomer Erev Shabbat Jews (ones who properly prepare on the eve of Shabbat).12 What he meant by this was that in places like Israel, observant Jews feel a greater intensity of the Sabbath because Friday equates essentially as a day off. As one Orthodox rabbi stated, “Kids don’t go to school on Friday or [at the most] they have half a day. Many businesses are kind of in ‘Sunday mode’ on Friday. Israel has a very different experience of the workweek, certainly in religious centers like Jerusalem.” Soloveitchik’s point: if you want to take your Sabbath experience to another level, slow down and begin your Sabbath rhythm on Friday. While this goes beyond the realm of possibility for most church members, by carefully managing one’s time throughout the week, Friday can become a type of proto-Sabbath for Adventist pastors.

Beyond Friday as the primary day of preparation, perhaps one of the best ways to learn how to fully rest for 24 hours is to experience such rest for shorter periods throughout the week. After all, how can we expect to fully inhabit Sabbath and focus on God if we have not done so throughout the week? We could do this by stopping more frequently at fixed times, dropping whatever we are doing to acknowledge God, pray, ruminate upon a passage of Scripture, go for a walk, or reflect on our day. One Hasidic rabbi noted that resting on the seventh day of the week and working the other six shares a symbiotic relationship—they are partners in practicing Sabbath and they inform each other. “Six days of the week if you think about Shabbos, you will do Shabbos; then if you do Shabbos, during the six days of the week you’ll think about being godly.”

Conclusion

“Tell me what your Sabbath is like,” writes Pinchas Peli, “and I will tell you who you are and what kind of person you are.”13 As pastors, what does our Sabbath practice say about us? Is it truly a revolt against the “gods of Egypt,” or are we still beholden to the taskmasters of our time?

In this article, we have seen how dif­ferentiation and preparation constitute indispensable biblical principles for making Sabbath worship meaningful. Of course, others could be mentioned, such as the role of ritual and the cen­trality of community. There are also numerous variables to consider as the Sabbath envelops not only time but also person and place. In the end, the important thing is to act, do, and make Sabbath in such a way that transfor­mation can occur. My hope is that by continuing to renew our Sabbath experience we may ultimately graduate from this school of worship and be eternally united with our Sabbath-keeping God.

1    Mark Buchanan, The Rest of God: Restoring Your Soul by Restoring Sabbath (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2006), 94; emphasis his.

2 Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now (Louisville, KY: Westminster/ John Knox, 2014), 2. The rhetoric of Pharaoh is relentless and serves as a prime example of what the Israelites were up against. See Exodus 5. 

3 Bryan P. Stone and Claire E. Wolfteich, Sabbath in the City: Sustaining Pastoral Excellence (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 2008), 44.

4 Ibid., 44, 45.

5 Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005), 30.

6  If human beings are ontologically unique, as indicated by the statement “God created humankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27, NET), then according to Wilma Ann Bailey, “humans image God when they do the work of God in the world.” That is, “image and likeness reside not in our being . . . but in our responding to relationship that we have with God.” Thus, being created in God’s image is a call to action; it is commensurate with worship language. Wilma Ann Bailey, “The Way the World Is Meant to Be: An Interpretation of Genesis 1.26–29,” Vision 9 (2008), 47. I would like to thank Sigve K. Tonstad for bringing this insight to my attention.

7 See, for example, Simon Dein and Kate Loewenthal, “The Mental Health Benefits and Costs of Sabbath Observance Among Orthodox Jews,” Journal of Religion and Health 52, no. 4 (December 2013), 1382–1390; Margaret Diddams, Lisa Klein Surdyk, and Denise Daniels, “Rediscovering Models of Sabbath Keeping: Implications for Psychological Well-Being,” Journal of Psychology and Theology 32, no. 1 (2004), 3–11.

8 Buchanan, The Rest of God, 89.

9 Erik C. Carter, “The Practice and Experience of the Sabbath Among Seventh-day Adventist Pastors,” Pastoral Psychology 62, no. 1 (February 2013), 13–26; “The Shabbat Practices of American Pulpit Rabbis in Practical Theological Perspective” (PhD diss., Claremont School of Theology, 2015).

10 “Join Our Unplugging Movement,” Sabbath Manifesto, accessed November 14, 2015, http:// www.sabbathmanifesto.org/unplug_challenge.

11 Aryeh Kaplan, Sabbath: Day of Eternity (New York: National Conference of Synagogue Youth, 2002), 47.

12 Yehoshua Looks, “Turning Friday Into Erev Shabbat,” Haaretz, March 28, 2012, http://www.haaretz.com /jewish/rabbis-round-table/turning-friday-into -erev-shabbat-1.421089.

13  Pinchas H. Peli, The Jewish Sabbath: A Renewed Encounter (New York: Schocken, 1988), ix


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Erik C. Carter, DMin, PhD, is assistant professor of practical theology, School of Religion, Loma Linda University, Loma Linda, California, United States.

April 2016

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