Sabbath: Practicing Delight II (Sabbath VII)

How then can we practice delight? Well, when you when you allow yourself to delight in any of God’s good gifts—in drinking a cup of coffee, in eating good chocolate, in taking a long walk through a park and feeling the warm sun on your body—you are practicing being like God and connecting with God as Father. This is what we call Christian hedonism. It’s the enjoyment of pleasure as an act of worship. We are fulfilling Jesus’ command to “look at the lilies of the field” and to “consider the birds of the air.” We are delighting in God and learning who he is through the world around us. 

Ben Franklin said, “wine [is] a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.”[2] The Psalmist, much earlier, said something similar: “God…brings forth food from the earth: wine that gladdens human hearts.” We can take it further: coffee, chocolate, puppy dogs, creativity, movies, art, poetry, sport—all are pleasures through which the God of creativity and delight is revealed as we delight in them. The word recreation, which we rightly juxtapose with work, literally means to re-create. When we stop to delight in God’s world and rest in His goodness, something is re-created within us. In the midst of a painful world filled with reasons to grumble and complain instead of resting (indeed, this is the choice), delight is an act of surrender and trust.

Obviously, this can be taken to an extreme, and that’s notwhat we are talking about. Delight is not bingeing on pleasure or making it a crutch. The world has plenty of models for the misuse of pleasure, and any one of God’s gifts can be abused and made into an idol—what pastor Tim Keller calls turning a good thing into “an ultimate thing.”[4] We all know that food and alcohol and sex and anything else thing can be made into saviors that cannot save. However, when they’re used properly, God’s gifts can be engaged as acts of celebration and worship. You can only do this if you know that God is good and that he loves you far more than you could love anyone else. That knowledge creates the context for proper celebration. As always, it’s understanding our adoption that changes things. In this case, it allows us to use God’s gifts confidently, as his children and not as suspicious orphans. 

To this point, a story: One of my college professors, who was also a rabbi, told our class a parable. He said that on the Day of Judgement, God would call everyone to account for the pleasures that had been set before them that they had refused to enjoy. 

My brain fell out of my head.

This is a drastically different mindset than our “Christian” fear of pleasure, which is so much a part of the Puritanical tradition. For this reason, it’s important to see Sabbath as a space where you will intentionally engage delight in order to connect with the heart of God. Sabbath is a space where you, quite literally, do your favorite things as an act of worship, seeking to slip your hand into the hand of the Father who has rest for you and who delights in you. Further, it’s a space in which you might invite other people to join you, as a testament of God’s invitation to the whole world.
 

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[1]Matthew 6:26, 28.

[2]Franklin, Benjamin. The Posthumous and Other Writings of Benjamin Franklin, Volume I. Sabin, ed. H. Colburn. London, England. 1819.

[3]Psalm 104:14-15.

[4]See Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters by Tim Keller.Viking Books. New York, NY. 2009.

Sabbath: Practicing Delight (Sabbath VI)

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.[1]
-Soren Kierkegaard

Practicing Sabbath is a way of interrupting the relentless tapes in our heads (about how we are, for whatever reason, outside of God’s grace) and the tired narratives from our culture (you are what you do, for example). Sabbath allows us to humble ourselves into the posture of gratitude, which is the posture that begins to allow us to see the Divine. We humble ourselves into this space by saying, simply, “Jesus, how can you be this good?” How can you be so good as to include me, when there seem to be so many reasons to exclude me? How can you be so good as to love me, not based on what I produce, but for who I am? How can you be so good as to invite me to be your partner in making manifest the Reign of God for others?

Indeed, Sabbath is about entering into the fullness of God’s love, which has been extended to us in Jesus. By practicing Sabbath, we are saying, “I don’t have it all together, and there’s incredible pain in this world that I don’t understand…and, you are good and you are enough and you have rest for me, and for others through me.”  Mature spirituality is always marked by this ability to hold and exist within tension, trusting that the tension resolves in the God who holds us. In practicing Sabbath, we are expanding our ability to think in both-ands, and thereby to live into the mystery of God. If we can learn to hold two realities in our hands at one time, we can grow in grace. We are beggars and we have been invited to the feast. We may not feel worthy of rest and God lavishes His rest on us, because he longs to be near us. We live in a crazy, violent, dark world andJesus wants us to delight in his goodness in the midst of it. 

This is where Sabbath ultimately lead us: through the practice of Sabbath, we are led to delight. We see the passionate God whose heart is full of great joy, and we learn to delight in Him and in the world around us. Sabbath is about joy and pleasure in the heart of God. 

For some of us, this is a bridge too far. It’s hard to believe that God delights in us while we have still have so much unsorted within us. Or it’s just hard to believe that God is passionate when we’ve been raised within the echoes of so much Greco-Roman philosophy, with a picture of God as stoic and unmoved.[2]But when you read the Hebrew Scriptures and look at Jesus, what emerges is a God of such dynamic love and delight that we can drop our joy in wonder, and in hope.[3]God delights, rejoices, and sings.[4]He is the Great, deeply moved, Mover.

In Genesis, what does it mean that God “rested from his labor?”[5]Did the God “who neither slumbers nor sleeps” need a nap?[6]If not, what was happening on that very first Sabbath? Very simply, God was delighting. God beheld everything He had made, and it was good.[7]The first Sabbath was an act of celebration. We move into Sabbath—and through Sabbath, toward The Slow Life—quite simply by doing what God did, and does. We practice being like him by practicing delight. 

Sabbath, then, is not just about not working, it’s about engaging in gratefulness and celebration. When we take delight in something, we have an opportunity to discover and be surprised by the heart of the God who created joy and pleasure—nay, the God who isthe heartof joy and pleasure. In Sabbath, God’s Spirit has an opportunity to remind us that God created and redeemed us for joy and that He longs for our freedom and abundance.[8]Jesus wants to use our practice of delight to put our curmudgeonly views of God to death (after all, these views have nothing to do with God and everything to do with our own inability to see Him as He is). As we practice delight, we will come, more and more, to understand the God of passionate love who established Sabbath as a holy day. In this sense, the practice of Sabbath is a foretaste of eternity, when we will see and know God fully as He is.[9]

[1]Kierkegaard, Soren. David F. Swenson, Lillian M. Swenson, and Walter Lowrie, trans. Either/or: A Fragment of Life. Princeton University Press. Princeton, NJ. 1946. Page 28.

[2]Many scholars will tell you that the church has been influenced more by Plato than it has by Jesus.

[3]For making sense of the violent passages in the Hebrew Scriptures (The Old Testament), see Greg Boyd’s Cross Vision: How the Crucifixion of Jesus Makes Sense of Old Testament Violence. Fortress Press. Minneapolis, MN. 2017. 

[4]E.g., Zephaniah 3:17.

[5]Genesis 2:2.

[6]Psalm 121:4.

[7]Genesis 1:31.

[8]See, for example, Hebrews 12:2.

[9]See, for example, I Corinthians 13:12.

Sabbath: Embracing Weakness (Sabbath V)

Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.[1]
- Jesus of Nazareth

Sabbath is about walking into life, not about “doing it right.” And to continue the unexpected and the paradoxical, we walk into life not by rejecting limits but by confessing and celebrating them. This confession must be at the heart of our practice of Sabbath. The way of our culture is to resist our limits; the way of Scripture is to rejoice in them. 

Of course, it’s obvious that we have limits. However, we often get stuck precisely because we forget the reality that God is without limits and we are not God. Unless we are acknowledging our own limits, we can experience very little freedom. The paradox is that by acknowledging and then rejoicing in our limitations, we actually experience freedom. The do-it-all, be-it-all, experience-it-all ideal of American culture is a sort of bondage. We cannot go on without replenishment, we cannot work without ceasing, we cannot be everywhere at once. Furthermore, what our souls really desire are limits and clear boundaries. While our ego is desperate to prove itself and terrified of failing, our spirits want to just be—with ourselves, with God, and with others. The spirit wants permission to not be everywhere, to not have all the answers, to not be spread so thin. Ultimately, it’s only in a posture of acknowledging weakness and limits that we can receive grace.[2]

Acknowledging limits means saying, “I cannot do all things and be everywhere at once and make everyone happy. Thank God!” We are celebrating the fact that—without replenishment and connection to the life which is in God—we will never be enough and that we only connect with the life of God by fully acknowledging our weakness. Weakness, again, is our tendency to self-focus and self-obsession, to temptation, to doubt and despair, or to any other tendency which is at odds with our spirit and from which we long to escape. Weakness is the stuff for which we tend to judge and hate ourselves. But in accepting our weakness (which does not mean giving in to it), we learn to hear the whisper that calls us beloved. In fact, we often have to hear that whisper in our places of weakness first, before we’re able to hear it elsewhere.

Sabbath, then, is a crystal-clear, unmitigated acknowledgment of both our weakness and—in all our limitations—our belovedness. It is our way of declaring that we have clear physical, psychological, and emotional boundaries, and that we, very simply, are not God; that we need rest. And here’s the rub: if we cannot embrace Sabbath rest or rest in general, it’s probably because we hate our weaknesses in a way that God doesn’t. Sabbath and rest in are difficult for many of us because of the deep bastions of self-doubt, self-hatred, self-loathing, and shame that have been nurtured in the most unreachable recesses of our hearts. If you aren’t deeply aware of your adoption in Jesus and of the new life that flows from that adoption, you will invariably struggle with rest because you won’t be able to see yourself as beautiful, the way thatJesus sees you. Subsequently, you won’t be able to believe that you’re worthy of rest, or that you’ve done enough to earn it. Until we can embrace our weaknesses and our limits, we will find it very difficult to let God embrace us. 

Sabbath, as an acknowledgment of our weakness, is a celebration of the scandal of grace. We are imperfect, flawed, with clear limits, and yet God fully embraces us. Sabbath is about more than resting our bodies; it’s about identifying all the ways we try to prove ourselves by accomplishing things, and about recognizing how hollow this path is. It’s about identifying the lies of our culture—that ultimate meaning can be found in in looking good or being rich or performing well.[3]How perfect that God commands us to keep a day when we’re not supposed to “produce” and during which we must refrain from our normal means of proving ourselves. 

[1]Matthew 11:28.

[2]Cf. Eswine, Zach. Sensing Jesus: Life and Ministry as a Human Being. Crossway Books. Wheaton, IL, 2012. Especially ‘Part 1: Exposing Our Temptations.’

[3]Which echoes the underlying temptation in Matthew 4:1-11. Cf. 1 John 2:16.