Why I Practice Sabbath

We dance in rhythm with God when we keep the Sabbath. The reason we are called to take a day of rest is simple. Humans tend to forget that we did not make the world and thus, the world does not depend upon us.Barbara Brown Taylor tells a story about a friend growing up in Atlanta and what her good friend David taught her about fidelity to God. “When I was a junior in high school, my boyfriend Herb played on the varsity basketball team. He was not the star player however. The star player was a boy named David, who scored so many points during his four-year career that the coach retired his jersey when he graduated. This would have been remarkable under any circumstances, but it was doubly so since David did not play on Friday nights. On Friday nights, David observed the Sabbath with the rest of his family, who generously withdrew when David’s gentile friends arrived, sweaty and defeated, after Friday night home games.”

Following each Friday night game, David’s friends came to his house to describe the game in great detail. “Blow by blow” the Gentiles were allowed to speak and create worlds in David’s living room.I still remember the night someone asked David if it did not kill him to have to sit home on Friday nights while his team was getting slaughtered in the high school gymnasium.

“No one makes me do this,” he said. “I’m a Jew, and Jews observe the Sabbath.” Six days a week, he said, he loved nothing more than playing basketball and he gladly gave all he had to the game. On the seventh day, he loved being a Jew more than he loved playing basketball, and he just as gladly gave all he had to the Sabbath. Sure, he felt a tug, but that was the whole point. Sabbath was his chance to remember what was really real. Once three stars were visible in the Friday night sky, his identity as a Jew was more real to him than his identity as the star of our basketball team.

Christians need to create intentional regular spaces of time in which we do not work, email, fax, clean, do laundry. A time when we allow our hearts settle and the voices hush. Sabbath is a time when we remember that God made the world and rested; that He calls us to rest with him, to hear his voice, and to be clearly aware of his presence.

And it is a time to remember, according to the Hebrew Testament relationship between Sabbath and Jubilee, that there will be a day when all peoples of the world will rest—not just the ones who can financially afford to take a day off. In a very real sense, Sabbath-keeping reminds us that we are pilgrims in a foreign land, awaiting the world to become what she was meant to be. We remember vividly that, although God made the world, the world is not the way God made it. When we keep Sabbath we proclaim to the rest of the world, that God is about the business of making things new. If busyness is a sin, Sabbath is the one means by which we can become more like the person God created us to be.

See: Barbara Brown Taylor in Leaving Church (Boston: Cowley Press, 2005), 136-137 and Walter Brueggemann’s Finally Comes the Poet: Daring Speech for Proclamation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), 90-99.