Keeping Sabbath

Title: Keeping Sabbath 

Written and Delivered by: Rev. Ashley Bair 

Scripture: Amos 8:1-12 

Prayer - God, may the jagged words of our ancestors, of your prophets, bring us closer to you, and to our work at hand. May we use this time wisely. Amen.  

I’ve been totally swept up in the new images from NASA captured by the Webb telescope. Have you seen those? A little over a week ago, NASA released some new photos taken by the Webb telescope: Just absolutely incredible, beautiful, graphic images of Jupiter, of star formations, black holes, and galaxies once beyond our vision at light years away, now in front of us.  

Taking in these images has reminded me that I truly have no grasp on the concept of time. And what it takes for an image lights years away to reach our eyes today. Time cannot be contained. The ways we move from one moment to the next in relation to the movement of time continuum and time of space and gravity and the swirling physics of our universe. It is so vast compared to how I experience time and try to envision my time.  

Like everyone, I have my own neurotic ways of trying to manage time. Time was shaped for me in a very linear way - from a young age I was taught to think of time as continual and forward, a clock that’s always ticking seconds, moments going by, moving from one day to the next, watching years pass. The question before me was always: how am I spending my time?  

Managing time revolves around managing priorities, and everything takes time. Taking care of my health takes time, being with my family takes time, my work takes time, and whatever else I want to learn and where I want to go, I try to fit in there. I have friends and family members that put together 5-year plans for their lives and try to map out a trajectory that guides their time to a specific goal.  

At the end of all the planning and neurotic managing, maybe there’s time for rest. But, in our Western concept of time, that usually finds itself at the bottom of the priority list. Rest becomes a recovery mode rather than a solidified place in the order of our time management.  

As I look at those NASA images and the vastness of their beauty and mystery, I am reminded of both the smallness - of myself in the scheme of the universe(s), and of the time I have here in this world. And suddenly my naive ways of managing time become subject to review and maybe repentance. While compared to the light years of the stars, my time here is short, because it is short, it’s meant to be spent well. Spending our time well means utilizing time not as a controlling mechanism for our lives and the lives of others around us, but as a means for good, for ourselves and for others.  

Journalist Oliver Burkeman wrote a book called “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals” and in this book he writes, “No wonder it comes as a relief to be reminded of your [smallness]. It’s the feeling of realizing that you’d been holding yourself all this time to standards you couldn’t reasonably be expected to meet. And this realization isn’t merely calming, but liberating, because once you’re no longer burdened by such an unrealistic definition of a life well spent, you’re free to consider the possibility that many more things than you’d previously imagined might qualify as meaningful ways to use your finite time. You’re freed, too, to consider the possibility that many of the things you’re already doing with it are more meaningful than you’d supposed and that until now, you’d subconsciously been devaluing them on the grounds that they weren’t ‘significant’ enough. 

From this new perspective, it becomes possible to see that preparing nutritious meals for your children might matter as much as anything could ever matter, even if you won’t be winning any cooking awards, or that your novel’s worth writing if it moves or entertains a handful of your contemporaries, even though you know you’re no Tolstoy, or that virtually any career might be a worthwhile way to spend a working life, if it makes things slightly better for those it serves.”1 

In consideration of the vastness of the universe, it serves me well to remember that God, in the creation of the world, made the world to enjoy - and made us all in that same image, out of the stardust, in that same world, to enjoy it as much as God does. It was created for us to embrace all its beauty, to take care of land and sea, and to share with each other in bounty and plenty so that everyone’s needs are met through what it offers. It was not meant to be a commodity, but rather a dwelling place where we can find absolute satisfaction.  

God with God’s own time, on the last day of creation, took a Sabbath. We have it written down as a whole day honoring Sabbath. Given the expanse of time it took to do the other things, and the concept of time beyond our realities, it might be even more than we might consider a day, but even so - a whole space of time for Sabbath. 

So, connected to our creation and our satisfaction, is the Sabbath. Honoring the Sabbath means taking real time for rest and for worship. Prioritizing and keeping the Sabbath has traditionally been a way for God’s people to reflect on the work at hand, give thanks for the blessings of our lives, lament any wrongdoing, and ask God for redirection to care for God’s people. Not keeping the Sabbath, proper time for rest and worship, is a dangerous set up. You likely know, too, what happens when we don’t pause, when we don’t take time to rest, reflect, and honor the people in our lives and what matters in our tiny place in the universe.  

In our Scripture text this morning we find the prophet Amos reflecting on the ways that the church and its people had not spent their time well and had chosen to dishonor the Sabbath.  

As other prophets were, Amos was called by God to share a very particular message as he traveled from his home in Judah to Bethel in Israel to the temple there that served the royals, the temple that the king himself attended. There he spoke this word about what was happening in Israel. Amos did not particularly want to do this. He was a man concerned about local welfare, but he had never spoken out before publicly, certainly not at the temple. But, seeing the disarray and injustice around him, he was so incredibly frustrated, he felt he had to take time to travel to temple and speak.  

The prophets often were called to speak truth to power, to have the audacity to stand up and speak on behalf of God, creator of the universe. And their words were often harsh, jagged words. The theologian Fredrick Buechner once quipped that there is no evidence to suggest that any prophet invited home for supper was ever invited twice. The words of Amos are hard words and I think we have a human tendency to read a passage like that or hear it and render it a rant set in that time and then move on, looking for more comfortable words.2 But it's important to heed the warnings of the prophets like Amos and recognize that even though time has passed since their message, the issues have not.  

At the time of Amos, the people in Israel and Judah were experiencing days of calm and prosperity, and affluence and luxury. The king put the needs of the nation's people first. Israel’s borders had been restored, so there was no interference from neighboring countrypeople, which has caused some strife in the past. People were eating meat and drinking wine, new houses with fancy decorations were being constructed, businesses were booming. People were feeling secure and preparing for the future, setting their 5-year plans, with optimism.  

Amos, however, saw a storm on the horizon. He knew that the reason people were so comfortable and optimistic was because they were serving a king and nation-state - and a church – that was not as concerned about the teachings of God and their neighbors as they were about their own prosperity.  

In the first chapter of Amos, he writes about how he felt the words of God roaring like a lion from Zion. He couldn’t escape the roar, the reverberation of God’s words, filling his head and telling him that what was happening was not of God. At the cost of luxury for many, there were the poor, the widowed, the orphaned, the ill, the ostracized, who were still left out of this prosperity and comfort. Many people were being ignored and silenced so that others could enjoy a life that was calm and prosperous.  

At the beginning of this passage, Amos tells the high priest Amaziah that he received from God a very dramatic vision. God had shown Amos a basket of summer fruit. Better translated as ripe fruit. Fruit ready to be picked. In other words, God is saying to Amos, the time has come to reap. And the verses that follow indicate that this is not about people reaping a harvest for bounty to share, but rather the reaping of a people. 

Why was God ready to reap? 

Because the actions they had taken and the ways that they were falling away from each other were indeed leading to an end. God’s warning was a real warning, that they had reached a tipping point - the ripe season in time - and that the poor would be dying, and the season would be over. God warned, “you say when will the Sabbath be over? So that we can continue to make money by overpricing our wheat and withholding wages.” They had not honored the Sabbath. They were ignoring the Sabbath and dehumanizing God’s people to get back to profit.  

We also can’t wait for the Sabbath to be over. And honoring the Sabbath is more than taking a day off. It's about how we honor our time and others' time, too, as people of God called to work together toward that vision found in our creation - when we were all made from stardust to enjoy the bounty of this world and be in equal satisfaction.  

As we see in Amos’s lament, to get there, the questions at hand regarding the Sabbath are: are we honoring people’s labor? Humanity? Dignity? Or are we forcing people into a system that dehumanizes and devalues and pays poverty wages? Are we hungering to spend our time prioritizing capital over people?  

Economic anxiety is so, so high right now. At the gas pump, for people paying rent, grocery prices have tripled. And who is going to reap the benefits of that and who is going to be the most hurt by it? Who gets to choose how they spend their time and for whom is time chosen? Who is dishonoring and who is keeping the Sabbath? 

Understanding the answer to that question is how we prioritize our time.  

Though it may be hard to read, I believe Amos’s strong warning came with a message of hope. We have hope in knowing that God is indeed here among us, on earth. God never owes us any revelation - or warning, but God did so through the prophets we read, like Amos, and does so today amongst us all, because God loves us. And wants us to thrive on this beautiful earth that was created, amidst all the galaxies in the universe, for us for good. And there is hope in knowing that we do not need to look anywhere to find the things we need to remedy this kind of fraught situation. Why else would God call that out? Why would God tell God’s people what harm they were doing, else they could do something about it.  

Amos's call reminds us that when things are big and vast and overwhelming, we can remember our smallness for its beauty. And that even something as simple as keeping the Sabbath has power. The first step in tearing down the walls of corruption - is to honor the Sabbath and all it offers us, so that we can honor others. Honoring the Sabbath is more than a time of rest. It’s an opportunity to do something to help ourselves and the generation after us, creating a place that is more liberated.  

How are we going to use our time for rest and receive the word and examine ourselves to better this place for ourselves and for the next ones?  

If we need a reminder of this, we can look at the NASA images or at the sky at night and see the stars out there. Knowing we are made from the same dust found light years away. Our time here is short, but it means something. May we keep the Sabbath and honor each other with it. Amen. 

 
Footnotes: 

1.  https://onbeing.org/programs/oliver-burkeman-time-management-for-mortals/#transcript  

2. “Amos 8” by Rev. Canon Jan Naylor Cope, 2013.