THE TASTE OF SABBATH
by Pastor Lem Niere
“If you turn away your foot from the Sabbath, from doing your own pleasure on My holy day, and call the Sabbath a delight, the holy day of the Lord honourable, and shall honor Him, not doing your own ways, nor finding your own pleasure, nor speaking your own words, then you shall delight yourself in the Lord;” Isaiah 58:13, 14.
I’ve been reading a book entitled, Subversive Sabbath, by A.J. Swoboda, pastor of Theophilus Church in Portland, OR. He is not an Adventist but has some noteworthy points to consider for those of us who honor God’s holy day, the seventh-day Sabbath.
Sabbath is a delight. Not useful. Delightful. There are innumerable by-products of honouring the Sabbath: we become healthier, happier, and more available to God and others. But we must be cautions—the Sabbath being delightful is different from the Sabbath being useful. Sabbath does not always pay off the way we wish it would. Resting is costly. Sabbath is to be cherished as a delight in itself, not something we use to get elsewhere.
All things of God are like that—we do not use them as tools to get something. We do not use God. We do not love God because God is useful to us. We love God because He is worthy of being loved. “God is interesting,” writes Colin Gunton, “in and of himself.” Likewise, the Sabbath should not be understood in merely useful or pragmatic terms. The Sabbath is done out of obedience to God, not to get something.
While there are endless benefits to keeping the Sabbath, we don’t do it for the benefits, in the same way that we do not enter a marriage in order to make love. Sex is a benefit of marriage, not the reason for marriage.
Dorothy Sayers once argued that most legalistic Sabbath-keepers had added to “Thou shalt not work” the phrase, “Thou shalt not play.” God never outlaws Sabbath play. On the contrary, Sabbath is time for creation to play in the world of God once again—as re-creation. Sabbath is the celebration of God’s life and His work in our lives. But our overprotective lives have no space for play or celebration.
Harvard theologian Harvey Cox argued that the death of God in our culture was related in some way to the fact that we no longer celebrate, or integrate festivity, in our culture. That is, our celebration deficit is part of our loss of God in culture. When festivity and play ends, argued Cox, culture and community begin to erode at their very core.
The Sabbath makes room for us to play outside once again, like when we were kids (see Zechariah 8:4-5). Hear the words of Donna Schaper: “Sabbath keeping is a spiritual strategy: it is a kind of judo. The world’s commands are heavy; we respond with light moves. The world says work; we play. The world says go fast; we go slow. These light moves carry Sabbath into our days, and God into our lives.” The Sabbath awaits. Come and delight in it!
