A time of Sabbath rest can be both re-generative and generative. Come and reflect on different ways to look at ‘rest.’

This service will take place in the Meeting House. If you cannot join us in person, click here to access our YouTube channel at 10:30 am.

 

Sabbath: Time For a Cool Change – Sermon preached by Rev. Liz Lerner Maclay, February 11, 2024

To me, one of the most interesting things about sabbath – about the idea of sabbath, about the idea of what the reality of sabbath is supposed to be – is that it’s not a luxury. It’s not just for the elite or for people with enough leisure to easily carve out the time. It’s laid out in Exodus, 31:18 where it’s one of the original 10 commandments, the most important directives for humanity laid out by God.

⁸ “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. ⁹ Six days you shall labor and do all your work. ¹⁰ But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. ¹¹ For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it.

 

Check that out – it’s for everyone – regardless of gender or class, regardless even of species – livestock get to rest! – and regardless of nationality or belief – even the resident alien shall be free of work, all work, after 6 days of work, sabbath is non-optional, imperative, for everyone.

There’s so much in the Bible that I’m glad we’ve gotten beyond – we don’t stone anyone for anything, we can blend wool and linen to make that rare fabric that is warm yet wrinkly, we can plant wildflower fields with different kinds of seed, we can blend donkeys and horses to make mules or marvel at narlugas (narwhal-beluga whale hybrids) in the wild, we can eat shrimp cocktail to our hearts content, we can cross dress if we feel like it, and so much more.

 

But there is also a lot of good, a lot to learn from and embrace still, in the bible, and one of the best examples is the bible’s teaching on sabbath. Because many of us do tend to think of sabbath as a luxury. It’s for people with too much time on their hands, or people who are lazy or self-absorbed, or don’t care enough about working for all the imperatives so urgent all around us – antiracism and the environment and affordable housing and voter rights and all the countless issues that need our time and energy. Plus all the stuff of daily living that we put off during the week – grocery shopping and cooking and home repair and laundry and housecleaning and taking care of babies or children or elders or partners or helping friends to do these things – and on and on. Who has time for rest?

And what qualifies as rest anyway? Is it lying in bed? Reading a book? Gardening is kind of work but if you want to do it, if you don’t get paid for it – is it rest? What about other things we like to do, choose to do – we may have circled back to cooking now, or home repair even – if it’s fulfilling and enjoyable is it rest? What about reading – while it’s pretty inactive and in that way restful, some reading is pretty demanding, like aerobics for our brain.

Actually, you know what – I think this issue of rest is actually a rabbit hole. Technically the commandment says do not do any work – and that leaves a lot of room for activities, arguably for anything that doesn’t feel like work. It’s not just about whether we get paid for it, it’s also about whether the activity is a chore or a pleasure.

Traditional Judaism has a lot of rules and regulations to define what is or isn’t a proper observance of sabbath. There are fascinating details in all that which have developed over the last few thousand years – but we don’t have time to explore them today. Different versions of Judaism and Christianity define Sabbath differently. Unitarian Universalism has never defined Sabbath in any definitive way, and arguably never really observed it, at least not in any demonstrable way. There are maybe many reasons for why we haven’t – including some of those ideas I started with of sabbath being a luxury or an indulgence. But another is that the world around us makes sabbath challenging. The world around us expects connectivity and activity and participation and not the slowing down, deliberation, apartness or differences in what we do and when and how we do it that sabbath necessarily entails. But the thing is, many of us also think about sabbath as a great – and elusive – ideal. Time to live differently, time to attend to the spirit, time that we are given permission – by god, by tradition, by ourselves – permission to not be busy and behind with everything, time. A cathedral in time, as the great rabbi Abraham Heschel put it – think about that, a cathedral we inhabit in time, with all the soaring spaciousness, extraordinary beauty, different light, different sound, all the intention and care, insulation and apartness, we have ever experienced even just walking into such a space. The church I grew up in, the First Unitarian Society – now the First Unitarian Universalist Society in Newton, Massachusetts  or FUUSN as they inevitably call it in our UU way – FUUSN was built like a small stone and Tudor cathedral. It was built around 1900 and has huge Unitarian-themed stained glass windows. One near the front has always been my favorite – it has a very handsome knight in armor in it that I developed a crush on when I first started attending in the 3^rd grade. But really the whole sanctuary, saturated in colored light from those magnificent windows, filled with dark and elaborately carved wood, and with stone carved angels holding up the high vaulted ceiling, is beautiful to be in, especially when the lights are off and the windows are lit from daylight outside and the space is quiet and you feel the presence of the place all around you. To this day, anytime I’m there during the day, I try to find a moment to sneak into the sanctuary by myself and soak in that space for a minute or two.

But of course a minute or two is all I take there. Which is part of a larger issue I’ve been thinking about for a long time – many years – what constitutes sabbath, what makes sabbath possible – and what makes sabbath impossible, even though most people think it’s a great principle – in principle. Hypothetically. But when it comes to making it happen, even with the best will in the world, it’s pretty difficult to truly honor sabbath, to carve out a day from work on a regular basis howsoever much we might wish to, howsoever much we might yearn for it or believe it could be important for our hearts and minds, our spirits and souls, it remains for many of us, ultimately impossible.

And in a Unitarian Universalist context, part of why I think it’s impossible is because it’s hard to do it alone. Just us by ourself or with a friend or one family.  One of the few experiences of sabbath I had was in graduate school. There was a year when there were a few Jewish women studying there – a very small group, just 3 or 4. And while I was only half-Jewish and wholly Unitarian Universalist, studying for ministry, they welcomed me and my interest in Jewish studies. Once a month they had a Friday night shabbat dinner together, and they invited me to join them. For that year, I often did join them and those potluck shabbat dinners were like nothing I’ve ever experienced before or since, mostly because during the meal, on and off, amidst the conversations about anything and everything, we sang. We sang traditional shabbat songs, we made up harmonies on the spot, we experimented and lifted our voices simply and unselfconsciously together sitting at the table. Looking back at it, it seems so strange to have had meals like that, but we didn’t sing with our mouths full and it was marvelous – those meals felt special, felt sacred, felt like … sabbath. One of the songs we sang was called Dodi Li. It’s lines from the Song of Songs in the Bible, Dodi li, va ani lo. Haroeh bashoshanim dodi li. ‘My beloved is mine and I am his. The shepherd grazes his flock amidst the lilies, my beloved.’ The ancient interpretation of this very romantic, even erotic, book in the Hebrew Bible is that it’s a metaphor for the passionate love between God and God’s people. Which is why some lines of it have been turned into Shabbat songs. The choir is going to help me share it now, singing the melody and a harmony line I created all those years ago one Friday evening. Apart from hearing it in church, I only hear it by myself, when I sing the melody line and then the harmony line, blending them in my head because I can’t do it alone. I can’t sing a shabbat song properly by myself – it’s a perfect illustration of the first of two points I’m exploring this morning, that sabbath may be an experience of apartness, but it’s not one we can fully fulfill alone.

Sing Dodi Li and then have choir come in:

Dodi li, va ani lo,

haroeh bashoshanim dodi li

Which brings me to the purpose of sabbath. We’ve talked about the obvious purpose which is to take time apart from work, often known as rest, in one form or another. We often talk about rest as necessary for health and resilience, physically, mentally and spiritually – rest is what helps us renew ourselves for the days ahead.  It is revitalizing and regenerative and therefore necessary – those are pretty much just facts, not really up for debate.

But in thinking more about this lately, I’ve realized that I want more from sabbath than that. I don’t just want to get enough to keep going. When things are really hard, enough rest to keep going isn’t enough. That’s the promise of a unionized work week, not the promise of sabbath. Sabbath is about rest, time apart, however we want to define it, sabbath should be generative and not just regenerative. By which I mean, something that creates freshness in me, something that helps me to new things – new experiences, new goals, new creativity in me and through me which is so much more than just enough ‘whatever’ to keep going. And in reflecting on this, I think this isn’t – or shouldn’t be – ambitious. I think it’s what sabbath is supposed to be. Time that isn’t just sleep or spiritual/mental/physical recovery but more than that, time this is rich enough, honored enough to strike sparks in us, to kindle the spark that burns in each of us, to help us not just live but live into the fullness of our personhood and potential, the sacredness and scope that all of us possess and are meant to realize and manifest in the world. Not just regenerated for more of the same, but with room also for those divine moments of creation, realization, manifestation when we make more, do more, become more than we already had, than we already did, than we already were, not because we are pressed to but because it flows in and through us, because we have given ourselves, our souls, our divine spark the time and space needed for the flow to flow. The flow may be generate something as simple as a line of harmony to a song, it may be something that becomes part of our living, it may change or fulfill us in tiny or great ways – it may only rarely show up – but there is a there there for us all, a cathedral in time that awaits our presence and cannot be without us.

This is what the poet/philosopher David Whyte means when he lays out the “place
whose only task is to trouble you with tiny but frightening requests, conceived out of nowhere but in this place beginning to lead everywhere. Requests to stop what you are doing right now, – (sabbath!) – and to stop what you are becoming (merely regenerated!) while you do it, questions that can make or unmake a life, (generativity!) questions that have patiently waited for you, (yearnings! possibilities!) questions that have no right to go away.”

David Whyte followed up on that poem – he realized he needed to spend time figuring out what were his own questions that had no right to go away and what answers could he find for them? So far, he has shared 10 questions he uncovered for himself and the answers he has found to them so far. One of them is “What can I be wholehearted about?” Here is how he explains finding and answering that question:

 

“There was a time, many years ago, working at a nonprofit organization, trying to fix the world and finding the world didn’t want to be fixed as quickly as I’d like, that I found myself exhausted, stressed and finally, after one particularly hard day, at the end of my tether, I went home and saw a bottle of fine red wine I had left out on the table that morning before I left. No, I did not drink it immediately, though I was tempted, but it reminded me that I was to have a very special guest that evening.

That guest was an Austrian friend, a Benedictine monk, Brother David Steindl-Rast, the nearest thing I had to a really wise person in my life at that time or at any time since. We would read German poetry together—he would translate the original text, I read the translations, all the while drinking the red wine. But I had my day on my mind, and the mind-numbing tiredness I was experiencing at work. I said suddenly, out of nowhere, almost beseechingly, “Brother David, speak to me of exhaustion. Tell me about exhaustion.”

And then he said a life-changing thing. “You know,” he said, “the antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest.”

“What is it then?”

“The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness. You’re so exhausted because you can’t be wholehearted at what you’re doing…because your real conversation with life is through poetry.”

It was just the beginning of a long road that was to take my real work out into the world, but it was a beginning.

What do I care most about—in my vocation, in my family life, in my heart and mind? This is a conversation that we all must have with ourselves at every stage of our lives, a conversation that we so often don’t want to have. We will get to it, we say, when the kids are grown, when there is enough money in the bank, when we are retired, perhaps when we are dead; it will be easier then. But we need to ask it now: What can I be wholehearted about now?”

 

But the other thing is that maybe the cathedral in time depends not only on each of us but on all of us together. This is part of what the Rev. Lynn Ungar proposed in her meditation Pandemic, written at the start of COVID and a piece that ironically itself went viral – because everyone was in it together, she saw that it gave us a chance to not only lament or fear or struggle but also to lean into understands that could only flower then when everyone had to stop together. Sharing sabbath is an essential piece of this. Because we all have questions and answers to uncover, wholeheartedness to live into, a cathedral in time that awaits our presence and that maybe cannot be for us unless we all invite its creation together, you can’t stop and seek something fresh if I am still driving in all the same ways, and I can’t stop and seek something fresh if you are still driving in all the same ways – we are interdependent in so many ways, in our breathing and in our ability to stop or start, to go deep or broad, to keep on keeping on or to change in small or large ways – none of us can do it alone as richly or meaningfully as we might do it together.  This is part of the reason for religious community in the first place. For these reasons, and in answer to our church’s strategic plan which calls, among other things, for us to continue to grow our experiences of spirituality and community, we are beginning to plan for Sabbath month next January – a year away which should give us time for this important spiritual exploration together. We will work on plans to create different experiences for our beloved community throughout that month – different forms of Sunday worship, a quiet time to pursue calm and fulfillment in a number of different practices together, experiences here in our Meeting House and Parish House and out in the world – in the woods, at the shore, in our homes. We will explore what it offers us to participate together as a congregation in these different offerings. No one will have to do anything they don’t want to, but there will be a rich variety of possibilities for us all. If this idea already strikes sparks for you, let us know, especially if there’s an experience or opportunity you’d like to contribute to this sabbath month.

This won’t change the rest of our church year; it isn’t meant to now or later. But engaging this, in community as a whole church for a month, will give us the room to explore sabbath experiences together and try different opportunities to feed our souls in fresh ways, for not just renewal but generativity, creating new things in and around us, and in doing this, also exploring– and sometimes answering – the questions that have no right to go away, that will never go away until we honor them and seek their resolution, singing a new song together. What more is there for each of us, and to all of us together. What unplumbed depths, what lessons to share or learn, what yearnings to fulfill, what unexpected blessings will we receive or give? Only time – a cathedral in time – will tell. Amen.