This month and next I’m going to be preaching a series of sermons on an idea we’re calling Sacred Community—based on stories from the Book of Genesis. Most of us know a thing or two about the Book of Genesis. It starts with the stories of Creation and Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. Then there’s Noah, Abraham and Sarah and their descendants, all the way down to the story of Joseph. Collectively, these stories are intended to help us understand where we came from and what kind of life God wants for us. The series will address one answer to that question. What God wants for us is to live together in sacred community.
Sacred community sounds a little utopian, so let me be clear from the start that we’re not talking about perfection here. As early as the third chapter of Genesis, we learn how brokenness comes into the world. So this series is not meant to daydream about some fantasy land where everything is great, but to welcome us into a life where we experience joy together, and also where we are honest about our imperfections and try to navigate together through pain and loss and mistakes. You’ll see in the stories of Genesis that most of the characters we meet are not moral giants; more often than not, they teach us what not to do. So let’s travel together into the sacred community of Genesis and see what we hear God telling us. And I’m going to begin today with two ideas that come to us in the creation stories. The two ideas are sabbath and companionship—which it turns out are very closely related.
To get into talking about Sabbath—which can be kind of foreign subject for many of us—I’m going to start by telling you a little about Jesse Israel. He sounds a bit like a biblical character, but he’s actually a modern guy. He’s an expert in meditation and mindfulness; he’s been one of Oprah’s favorite guests and has packed enormous theatres and arenas like Madison Square Garden for large group meditation experiences he calls “The Big Quiet.” A friend heard him speak at a corporate conference this year; he led a group meditation for them; but first he told a little about his story.
Early in adulthood, he experienced great corporate success accompanied by incredible stress from all of the hustling he was doing to keep up. And he connected that to all the noise that exists in our world. From the noise that comes from busyness, to the tidal wave of information noise from our televisions and phones, to the emotional noise we get from a culture that always wants more, better, achievement, growth, go, go, go…Jesse Israel determined that the only way to survive was to try to reclaim some quiet. Now his whole career is based around sharing that message. And the message resonates. My friend looked around the room at that corporate conference and tears filled the eyes of countless colleagues throughout the room. After the session, the hallway conversations were dominated by talk of the overwhelming noise in so many lives.
It’s no accident that Jesse Israel is able to gather thousands of people just by inviting them to be quiet together. We need quiet in our lives; we always have. Jesse Israel, while his work is grounded in different traditions than our own; has tapped into an idea that also has roots in our very own traditions, beginning in the first chapters of Genesis. Presbyterians prize intellectual rigor, which I appreciate, and we fill much of our worship with words, but we sometimes do so to a fault, forgetting that one of the things that faith is supposed to help us with—perhaps the first thing it is supposed to do—is to help us to experience Sabbath—to be quiet together.
We all know about Sabbath, right—it’s the last day of Creation when God looks at everything and sees that it’s all very good, and rests, and so for us, it’s the day of rest that comes at the end of the week. For the most part, we look at it as a luxury that we afford ourselves once everything else is done. We rest because we’re tired from the work. We rest because we’ve earned it by all the hard work we’ve done. We rest to get away from it all. This is Sabbath. Or is it?
I heard a very convicting argument about Sabbath some time ago in a sermon by a pastor and theologian named Nathan Stucky. Here’s how he reframed this well known story of Creation and Sabbath. In the Creation story there are six days, God separates the light from the darkness, the sky from the earth, the seas from the dry land and plantlife on the earth, the sun and the stars—day and night, living creatures in the sea and the sky, living creatures on land and humankind in the image of God, and then, on the seventh day, God rested from all God had done. And Nathan Stucky observes, only God has been working…and as for humankind, God creates them and not the last thing they do, but the very first thing they do, is to keep the sabbath—to rest. For humankind, rest/sabbath/time devoted to celebrating God and God’s good creation is not a reward, not a privilege, not an entitlement due to those who have completed their work. No, sabbath is the first thing, the command that comes the moment that humankind has been created. It is the first and most important thing—the act that gives meaning and purpose to everything else in life. Rest is not last. Rest is first.
Now I want to invite you back to the beginning of the sermon and the story I told about Jesse Israel. Take everything that I told you about “noise” and our need for “quiet” and consider that all of the non-sabbath in our lives is the noise. All of the things we do to earn, accomplish, check off, in order to earn money or power or respect, in order to feel valued in a culture that is all about these bizarre measures of success, these things that exhaust us with every passing day and month and year, these things are the noise. And Sabbath…Sabbath is the quiet. Whether you have it on Sunday or some other time during the week does not matter. But what does matter is the realization that Sabbath—quiet—cannot be the thing you earn when you’ve done enough work; Sabbath is the activity that is first—that frames all of life, and without which, we cannot survive. And here’s another thing to consider; I don’t think that Sabbath—the quiet, centering, and focus on God that we seek for our lives—I don’t think it’s something we can do alone. We need each other.
At right about the same time that the Creation stories talk about Sabbath, there also comes this little story about companionship. The woman is created out of the rib of the man, and there’s the language you sometimes here at a traditional wedding about the man leaving his mother and father and clinging to his wife—which I just love because of the many obvious ways in which I cling to my wife for survival! Of course, the language is archaic. It’s not particularly helpful for gender equality or during Pride Month or among single persons—which I was for the first 37 years of my life—but acknowledging all of those obvious shortcomings of a text written in ancient times, let me simply call this to your attention: The whole story is that the first emotion the human being feels after God has created him might have been…loneliness. There is perhaps nothing more natural than for human being to find themselves longing for companionship; companionship is found in all kinds of forms—not just marriage, but friendship and the sacred community of a church. In so many ways we see that that God did not create us to be alone. We need each other. And God’s recommendation in this story is to name the need for companionship.
The practical takeaway from that is that we’re not meant to be loners here at church, and part of the blessing and the challenge of being at church is that not only should we seek out companionship when we arrive here, but those of us who are already here are tasked with seeking out those who may be lonely—and to be aware that the need for companionship is everywhere.
So here’s something to wonder about, as we begin this summer series on Sacred Community. I suspect that many of us walk into worship on Sunday without a lot of intentionality. We get up, get dressed, drive to church, come in and sit down because it’s the right thing to do, or because its how we want to raise our children, or because we want to see our friends, or because we like the music—all worthy pursuits. But what if you started to walk through the door intentionally, purposefully, saying to yourself: this is my Sabbath. This is my rest. This is my time to reconnect with God. This is the time I take, not because I have earned it at the end of the week, but because God gifts it to me at the beginning of the week, to help me ride the wave of demands and expectations, to embrace the joys and endure the sufferings that will inevitably come—not because I have earned it, but because God loves me. It is a gift. This is my Sabbath; and my only job is to receive it.
There are a few ways you may wish to think about think about Sabbath as you sit in church today, or as your go into your week. One is that Sabbath (or quiet) doesn’t have to mean a total absence of sound. We often invite you, in worship, into a time of silence at the start of the service, or during confession, or our prayers. During that time its okay if a chair makes noise, or a child is moving about, or someone’s phone goes off. If we are burdened by the need to keep the room totally silent, we won’t get much of a break from the constant pressures of life.
The other thing is that, a lot of time people will say, quiet meditation isn’t really my thing—my mind wanders too much. Okay, sure. But you know, everyone says that. That’s why people who are good at quiet have to practice it—it’s a challenge for everyone. In times when you are trying to practice Sabbath—expect that your mind will wander. That here in your hour of church, your spirit will often be pulled away by your stresses, your family problems, the thing awaiting you at work on Monday. When those things come, you don’t need to feel bad. Acknowledge that they are there, ask God to help you with them, and come back to the Sabbath we are sharing together.
I find that practicing Sabbath—whether I am doing it here on Sunday morning or some at some other time—helps prepare me to live more graciously throughout the week. To be more attentive when I am talking with someone else. To swim in the pool or work in the yard with my four year-old and be fully there—appreciating the fleeting time I have with him. To pay attention to the needs of others who are gathered here with us, experiencing Sabbath together—to remember that we all need rest, we all need companionship, and I am not alone.
This time is a gift to you. It is God’s love, coming alongside you in this sacred community and going with you when you depart. It is love. This is Sabbath. Amen.