Some Thoughts on "Sabbath"

Living in Jerusalem in my 20's made me more keenly aware of keeping the "Sabbath" day of rest than all my years growing up in Canada before "Sunday shopping" became the norm.

During my growing up years, few if any businesses, including restaurants, were open. In Jerusalem, things were taken a step farther: no buses ran on the Jewish Sabbath. No businesses in the Jewish part of town were open. If you drove your car there, you risked having stones thrown at you in protest. Resting on the Sabbath was taken very seriously.

Over the years, I have thought a lot about how I should be spending my weekly "seventh day of rest" mentioned in the 10 commandments. In my Sunday School years, we teenagers discussed the modern implications of trying to keep the Sabbath: Should we be going to the beach on Sunday? What about sports? 

"Keeping the Sabbath" isn't mentioned much in Christian circles anymore, but it is one of the spiritual practices mentioned in the book, An Altar in the World, which I read with great interest during Lent. Barbara Brown Taylor widens the discussion of Sabbath by reflecting on how, by not resting, we have changed our world. She reminds us that resting on the seventh not only refers to the seventh day - but also the whole seventh year - when the land was to lie fallow (with laborers taking a sabbatical rest as well)!

I found many of her observations very interesting. Here are a few:

There is no talking about the loss of the Sabbath... without also talking about the rise of consumerism...

Where there is money to be made, there is no rest for the land, nor for those who live on it...

In the eyes of the world, there is no payoff for sitting on the porch [and resting on the Sabbath]... Each year's harvest must be bigger than the last...

Sabbath is not only God's gift to those who have voices to say how tired they are; Sabbath is also God's gift to the tired fields... the tired land.