"24/7 or 1/7?"

First Presbyterian Church
October 1, 2006
Peter S. Buehler
Exodus 20:8-11

Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy.

Today we consider the 4th Commandment, the commandment to rest.
Because God rested -- in six days God created the heavens and the earth, "the sea and all that is in them." We should be able to get everything done we need to get done in the same time frame!

The Commandment is giving us a model for our well-being.
God was setting an example humanity needed to follow for its own health in establishing the rhythm of creation: six days of work, one day of rest. It couldn't be simpler. Yet we're quite free to interpret the Commandment in a more modern, perhaps more convenient version -- one that might go something like this: After six days, God had finished, so he could actually afford to take a day off, but that is not the case with us: our work never ends. There is always more to do, even on the weekends. And since our modern world is way more complex and way busier than the world God created,  the 4th commandment is obsolete, or at least optional.

It's tempting to read it that way. Because these days on a practical level it does seems impossible to get everything done in six days -- our jobs, our chores at home; doing nothing work-related for a full day a week seems highly impractical.

Nor do we want the "blue laws" some of us grew up with -- community ordinances that forced the issue, at least in terms of shopping. As a boy in New York, this was my normal.
In my town every store was closed on Sundays save one, and all they sold were newspapers -- you couldn't buy anything else.
When that ordinance was set aside years later, I was happy, because it made life much easier -- you could get what you needed without having to plan ahead.
I can't think of anyone who missed the blue laws. But today I wonder.
Not about restrictive laws, but about being so busy. Whether our culture worships busyness. Whether as a result we are a restless people, and suffer consequences.

Americans work longer hours than any other country, including the Japanese, who have been cutting back over the past decade -- at no loss to their productivity, which is interesting. Americans, however, put the value of work above the value of sleep, as if sleep is or ought to be optional, and people who don't need more than a few hours a night are to be admired.

I was reading the results of the 2005 sleep poll, conducted by the National Sleep Foundation, and they made me uneasy.
Realizing that many Americans aren't getting as much sleep as is considered necessary to maintain good health and reasonable safety -- and that most of these same people don't think they have a problem. No, I'm not one of them. Not me. I read on. Fewer than one in three adults in the study averaged eight hours of sleep on weekdays. I would be in that category, but so what? I read on. One of four get less than six hours of sleep a night. Well, every so often, but that's no big deal. I read on. 75% of Americans report regular or occasional insomnia, snoring, restless leg symptoms, or pauses in breathing. I'm breathing, so that's obviously not a problem. I read on. 60% report having driven a car while feeling drowsy. It's a good thing I live near a coffee shop, I thought to myself. More than one in three respondents reported dozing off while driving. Good thing I live less than two miles from the church!

We have to take care of ourselves! For me, the 4th Commandment is a challenge; it's not easy to let go of the fact that I'm not the energizer bunny; I can't keep going, and going, and going.
The 4th Commandment is about recognizing our human limits.
At some point our striving becomes losing; we all need our rest.
The idea that success, or even doing our best, means pushing ourselves beyond our limits at work, and depriving ourselves of rest at home, is a formula for losing touch with our selves.
Writer Thomas Cahill, praising the faith of the ancient Hebrews, says "the Sabbath is surely one of the simplest and sanest recommendations any God has ever made; and those who live without such (a one-day-in-seven) punctuation (in their lives) are emptier and less resourceful."

Truly God knows what's best for us; our God knows us well -- that if left to our own devices we'll let our work become a seven day-a-week thing; we'll buy into the insanity of the world's 24/7 schedule, it's always-on-demand, never out-of-touch, never-too-far-away-from-cell-phones-computers-and-faxes mentality. Sometimes we get so used to working that we forget how to turn the switch off. Have you ever been unable to sleep, not because you weren't tired, but because thoughts and worries and unfinished business wouldn't let go of you?
The fourth commandment is God's way of saying I want you to be rested, not restless. I want you to be in touch with that part of you that is resourceful, creative, vital, fun, and human. I want you to be glad you're alive!

But the Commandment is about more than taking time off from work.
It is that; still, a lot of people do that and don't get rest. Of course one could argue, and many do, that a quiet Sunday morning at home is a sabbath, an ideal time for rest. Especially after a day devoted to projects, chores, shopping, soccer, and football on TV (which can be emotionally exhausting). We all have neighbors who don't come to church not because they object to God or mistrust the church but because they're too tired out from Monday to Friday, and Saturday, and want to sleep in on Sunday.

Sometimes we feel that way. Yet this is where the Commandment directs our attention to our inner lives and our deep human need.
There is a difference between time off and true rest. Time off is what the new testament would call chronos time, which is clock time.
An hour goes by, then another, then the afternoon, the evening, and pretty soon the day is past. Then the week is past. Chronos time is time which runs together; time marked off on a calendar with heavy black ink; time as hours elapsed between waking and sleeping that we manage to get through without calamity.

But there is another kind of time. The new testament calls it kairos.
God's time. It's the kind of time that breaks upon us; it's a sudden awareness of God's amazing goodness and truth; it's being in worship and in the absolute briefest moment having an answer to a vexing problem. Listening to a prayer or singing a verse that instantly fills you with light and hope about your life, lightening the load you hadn't realized you'd been carrying.

The 4th commandment is about kairos! It's saying that enlightened and in control as we think we may be, we will, after a time, certainly less than a week, slip back into the notion that we are in charge of our lives and that the clock is not our friend. "Too little time, too much to do," said the mad hatter in Alice in Wonderland; we hear his voice all too clearly.

But at its heart, the commandment to remember the Sabbath day is an antidote to our anxiety; it is a call to remember that we belong to God. The Heidelberg catechism, one of the eleven historic faith statements in our Presbyterian book of confessions, begins with a powerful expression of faith from the heart of the protestant reformers. Written in 1562, it stills speaks truth. The catechism begins like a powerful symphony, Beethoven's 5th; its first question is the downbeat of faith: what is your only comfort, in life and in death?

How would you answer that question? What is the source of our most profound comfort? Things? Vacations? Promotions? Successful children? Good health? Money in the bank? What is your only comfort, in life and in death?

The Heidelberg catechism offers an intensely personal answer: That I belong -- body and soul, in life and in death -- not to myself but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ, who at the cost of his own blood has fully paid for all my sins and has completely freed me from the dominion of the devil; that he protects me so well that without the will of my Father in heaven not a hair can fall from my head; indeed, that everything must fit his purpose for my salvation.

It is on the Lord's Day -- certainly on other days, blessed days -- but most especially on the Lord's Day that we come to worship, to observe the day when God rested, not because he was weary, but because he was delighted! What a wonderful world!

An imperfect world today, mysteriously so -- not by design, but by the heedlessness of people who turn away from opportunities for peace, the hard work of peace. All the more reason to make the Christian Sabbath, the Lord's Day, our single most important habit. Opening ourselves to grace, opening ourselves to truth, opening ourselves to joy, opening ourselves to the power of our Risen Lord, in whom we are born anew, risen from death, alive in hope.

It's a Commandment, but really it's a gift. God wants life for us; God has made new life possible for us in Christ. Faith in him is Sunday's gift to our sense of time. The Lord's Day is about gladness. There is no better rest than knowing that God is good, that God loves us,
that since we belong -- body and soul, in life and in death -- not to ourselves but to our faithful Savior, therefore every moment of our lives, every hour and every day, is blessed.

Six days of the week are ours; God would have us keep one day separate. It is the day we come to Christ's tomb and discover again that it is empty. For the Lord is risen. He is risen indeed!