Sabbath Reflection on Leadership

It (Christian leadership) is not a leadership of power and control, but a leadership of powerlessness and humility in which the suffering servant of God, Jesus Christ, is made manifest. I, obviously am not speaking about a psychologically weak leadership in which the Christian leader is simply the passive victim of the manipulations of his milieu. No, I am speaking of a leadership in which power is constantly abandoned in favor of love. It is a true spiritual leadership. Powerlessness and humility in the spiritual life do not refer to people who have no spine and who let everyone else make decisions for them. They refer to people who are so deeply in love with Jesus they are ready to follow him wherever he guides them, always trusting that, with him, they will find life and find it abundantly. From Henri Nowen's In the Name of Jesus (63-64).

Dancing with Both Legs (Part Two with Brueggemann)

In an attempt to elaborate on what I wrote in the previous blog, here's some more food for thought. I know some will get lost in the language, meaning, and logic . . . faith is not for the faint of heart. You have to work at it. I've always been suspicious of "the easy way" and equally suspicious of "easy answers" . . .

People often misunderstand Judaism as “salvation by works”. However, this fundamentally misinterprets the covenant relationship between Israel and YHWH. Because of their relationship, God expected them to behave in certain ways. Lev. 19:18 (“Love your neighbor as yourself”) for instance is one of the most powerful texts in all of Torah even though it is embedded in an entire section of rules, commandments, and decrees. If one reads Leviticus 19:18 as the center/heart of this particular text, the advocacy becomes clear. While some make the conservative contestation that religion remain private (i.e. "Let's keep religion within the cult and private. Our duty is to simply keep the commandments of God.") others make the liberal contestation that "the rules are passé, leftover relics from the faith of our grandparents. The public element (public justice) is what is the heart of true Israelite religion.” Leviticus 19 offers a third way for it is concerned with obedience to the obligations set forth and the relationship of caring for the neighbor. That is, live in these particular ways (obeying relatively minute decrees) and once you find yourself in that cadence of spiritual habit, loving your neighbor will be the natural extension. If you will keep the strict dietary laws, etc. you will be able to have an open posture towards the "other" . . . it will be impossible to have any invisible persons in your midst because you will be so attune to God's presence.

Sabbath is a “discipline” which prepares people to do justice. You cannot truly love the poor and pray for liberation if you are not willing to practice Sabbath. Sabbath is practiced every seven days. The Year of Jubilee happens seven years times seven (Finally Comes the Poet, 49). Social justice, according to Brueggemann, is connected to personal piety devotion. The two cannot be separated. Evidently, the liberal and fundamentalist need one another! “Sabbath is the end of grasping and therefore the end of exploitation. Sabbath is a day of revolutionary equality in society. On that day all rest equally, regardless of wealth or power or need (Exod. 20: 8-11). Of course, the world is not now ordered according to the well-being and equality of Sabbath rest. But the keeping of Sabbath, in heaven and on earth, is a foretaste and anticipation of how the creation will be when God’s way is fully established,” (Brueggemann in Interpretation: Genesis, 35-6).

Sabbath

The three most important ingredients to ensure a great vacation are:

1. The people who go with you.

2. Where you go.

3. The books you take with you.

So, let’s do inventory.

1. Kara is coming with me. She’s the best travel partner. She loves adventure. She loves to eat good food. And, she doesn’t mind that I love to read on vacation.

2. We are doing our first ever cruise. I can’t wait to scuba-dive in Cozumel. I have not gone scuba-diving since Ocho Rios with my brother. It’s one of my favorite things on the planet. I first learned on a little island off of Honduras when I was 19. I've been hooked ever since.

3. Last but not least, books. I’m taking Plot Against America, Everyman, Writing for Story, Called out of Darkness, and Becoming a Dad. It’s a good mix: two novels by one of my new favorite writers, one book on writing by a Pulitzer winner, one memoir from Anne Rice, and one book about parenting.

It will be a week of Sabbath. Rest. Space. Time. Food. Kara. Water.

Sabbath is spiritual.

If you are busy and burned out, Sabbath is God’s remedy.

Monday Reflections

Our vacation in Florida with Josh and Kayci was great . . . exactly what we needed. We are now ready for grad school/doctoral work (Kara at OU, me with Columbia), work, and everything else on the horizon. I'm sure Kara will continue to post great pictures.

I made a little list to remember this vacation/sabbath (a "by the number" if you will) :

(7) Olympic viewing sessions
(6) Snickers Ice Cream Bars
(5) Beach Bullpen sessions (I was Papplebon, Josh was Rodriguez from the Angels)
(4) Body Surfing expeditions with Kara (I'm sore today, do you feel sorry for me?)
(3) Good movies (Dark Night being one of them)
(2) Mini-golf competitions (I'm undefeated)
(2) Great books (Thousand Splendid Suns, Year of Magical Thinking)
(1) Best friend
(0) Regrets

= Sabbath Rest for the busy fall ahead!

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I'm preparing to teach a new course for Rochester College this semester--Issues in Culture and Evangelism. Instead of doing a lecture-only experience, this course will be a discussion-centered course with heavy reading and dialog. For the course, they will read: The Shaping of Things to Come, Father Joe, Blue Like Jazz, A New Kind of Christian, and The Shack.

I'm sure there will be a great deal of great ideas and reflection coming out of this course. Let's just hope these students are ready to read.

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.