Scripture Sunday: Remember the Sabbath

by Ashtyn Adams

Exodus 20:8-11 (NRSV)
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.

Physicality and spirituality are not so sharply divided in the Israelite world. Here, in one of the two versions of the Decalogue, the Israelites receive the command to “remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy.” We come to see that holiness is not defined as a personal mode of piety, but realized by giving rest to all creatures and creation. As these wandering people are led away from the regime and economy of Pharaoh, they are learning what life with God is all about, unlearning their familiar systems that maximize profit, production, and time. It must have been incredibly startling and uncomfortable to hear the message to slow down after being defined, not as creatures endowed with dignity to be, as ends in themselves, but as subjects defined by labor output, a mere means. We hold onto the definitions and conceptions of ourselves and the world so tightly, even when it is self-destructive for us to do so, because we don’t know any better and lack the imaginative resources to grasp what they might otherwise be. It is why as Moses descends Mount Sinai, the Israelites begin to worship the golden calf, wanting back the “gods who can lead us,” the gods who oppressed them (Exodus 32:1). The golden calf event has often been equated to cheating on one’s spouse on the wedding night. Yahweh had just made a covenant with the Israelites out of deep love and established boundaries for refreshment (Exodus 31:17), but just as God utters a “yes and forever” the people turn back to the life they knew before they had their freedom, not knowing how to accept this way of life or what to make of it. It really is not a scene all that foreign to our contemporary moment in the Anthropocene: we too evade Yahweh so we might cling to our golden gods of rampant consumption, capitalism, and greed. We need the active resistance of remembering and keeping the Sabbath.

In the Sabbath command, God wants the people to become divine, to be like God by resting and beholding the beauty of creation in all its fullness. It is an invitation to mimic and embrace a rhythm of work, play, and rest, to be attuned to our interconnectedness with all things, respecting boundaries and honoring limits. It is not merely something we accomplish by mindlessly checking out and avoiding our daily tasks, not something to cross off on Sundays and ignore the rest of the week. Sabbath is a rest of liberation from oppressive systems so we might reorder our lives towards the surplus of God’s grace and mercy. It grounds us for the week as we move forward so we can better attend to the world with God's posture of delight and protection. Sabbath is the very way we heal relationships with God, ourselves, others, and the world, and our neglect of the Sabbath as a spiritual and economic practice is far more damaging than we realize. Our culture implores us to chase after unlimited growth, but the Sabbath calls us to find our place among creation, to simply be where our feet are. As Norman Wirzba says, “God is constantly working to make his love incarnate in bodies and places.” Sabbath gives us access to recognize this love incarnate in the world around us. If we can love the world, then we might use our creative energy to save it. ​

Our culture implores us to chase after unlimited growth, but the Sabbath calls us to find our place among creation

This is what Jesus did– healing on the Sabbath was one of the radical choices that led to his crucifixion. Liberation is the embodiment of the Sabbath, which we see even before Jesus’ time in the culmination of Israel’s sabbatical year every seven years, which included complete rest for the land and reaping only what was necessary to feed one’s household (cf. Lev 25:1-6), and Jubilee every forty-nine years, which celebrated forgiveness and “liberty throughout the land for all its inhabitants” (cf. Lev 25:10). Mutual care and abundance are distinctive markers of the Sabbath that critiqued Israel’s and now our own systems of scarcity and gross inequality. It is our responsibility to discern where we need to slow down and demonstrate self-restraint, and where we need to reach out and actively free others. In the climate crisis, this may look like giving up meat once a week or going out to shop at a local farmers market, it could be eliminating plastic usage or writing letters to local congressmen. The vital question is how are we reorienting and restoring our intertwined relationship with creation, the companion and sibling God has gifted us with. This is how we remember and keep God’s love, Sabbath is how we practice and embody holiness. It is the hope we have for ourselves, our neighbors, and creation.

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Ashtyn Adams is a Seminary Intern at Creation Justice Ministries. Ashtyn earned her B.A. in Religion from Pepperdine University and is currently pursuing a Master’s in Divinity at Duke University.

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