If you’ve been following the news lately, you know that we’ve begun a national conversation about our health care crisis and how to solve it. I heard Obama, in a recent speech, succinctly sum up part of what the problem is: While we spend more money on health care than any other country, we are not the healthiest by any measure. At least part of the problem is that those who actually have health insurance are getting too much of a good things – too many tests, too many therapies, too many drugs. And the evidence has shown that more is often not better – the more tests, the more drugs given to patients, the worse their health outcomes and the unhappier they become.
This was in the back of my mind when I read a story recently about a doctor in a book called Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in our Busy Lives, by Wayne Muller, a local author. “Charles,” says Muller, “is a gifted, thoughtful physician. One day…” (5)
Isn’t that fascinating, I thought? Perhaps part of the reason for the health care crisis, the reason for our soaring health-care costs, is because we are not allowing our healers the space and time and rest they need to actually heal us. Busy, tired, distracted, our doctors and health-care professionals are relying on machines to give them the information that their intuition can supply when they have the space in which to listen, to be present. If that isn’t a plea for the importance of Sabbath in our lives, I don’t know what is.
In the Jewish tradition, which is also our own, of course, Moses goes up, alone, onto a high mountain to be given by Creator God the fundamental moral laws that should govern our existence together. Christians have come to call these laws the Ten Commandments, and they include all the things you hope a wise God would have in such a list: don’t kill each other, don’t take what doesn’t belong to you, don’t lie. Most of these things we learned in kindergarten, right? But then, there’s this one (Exodus 20:8-11)
[8] "Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. [9] Six days you shall labor andRight up there with not murdering each other or stealing, is: “Take a rest.” Take a rest. We learned that in kindergarten, too, didn’t we? Basically, God is saying, “Even I needed to rest after my labors of creating the planet. So, really, you need to do it to. In fact, I am commanding that you do it.” Perhaps our wise God knew we needed “take a rest” to be a clear-cut commandment or otherwise we wouldn’t do it.
do all your work, [10] but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On
it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your
manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates. [11]
For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that
is in them, but God rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the
Sabbath day and made it holy.”
Why is resting of such godly importance? Why would it merit its own commandment? There’s only 10 of them. Why give so much air time to this one? In fact, why do most of the world’s spiritual traditions include something like ‘take a rest’ in their own list of ethical imperatives?
I think the reason is, if we don’t rest, if we don’t observe Sabbath, we forget who we are. And there is nothing so alienating, or potentially dangerous for us, as this forgetting. We forget that we are beings made in the image of God. We forget that we live in a world with other beings also made in the image of God. We forget – in the words of the psalmist -- that the “earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it.” (Psalm 24)
When I go too long without a rest, I forget to kneel down and look into my son’s face when he really wants to say something important to me. I forget that we waited for three long years for him to come into our life, and that it was a miracle when he did, and that surely now I can give him 30 seconds of my undivided attention before he heads to preschool for the day. When I go too long without a rest, I forget that I am something more than a machine with a to-do list, that I am a body that needs a hug, a soul that needs a long walk at dusk, a spirit that needs to commune with God in prayer.
We forget. It’s so easy to do that. Even Jesus forgot. Or maybe he was afraid he’d forget. So numerous times in the Gospels he, too, departs to a mountain or a wilderness or a lonely place to pray – to rest, to be renewed, to remember: Who am I, really? Who are we, really? Why am I here? To what should I give my attention?
“Like a path in the forest,” Wayne Muller says, “Sabbath creates a marker for ourselves so, if we are lost, we can find our way back to our center. “Remember the Sabbath” means “Remember that everything you have received is a blessing. Remember to delight in your life, in the fruits of your labor. Remember to stop and offer thanks for the wonder of it.” The commandment from God assumes that we will forget. And so, we need to have those demarcated, set-apart times, in which we rest, and remember. Ideally, I think, we set aside a few minutes every day where we do this, a day every week or month, a few days every year.
Of course, if you are lucky enough to be a professor or an employee at Genentech or a pastor at this church, you get a few weeks every few years to take some Sabbath time. I know how blessed I am to have this sabbatical time. I know how many of you could use a sabbatical yourselves. And I know how blessed I am to have a congregation that recognizes the need for pastors to take a sabbatical. I just heard, the other day, from a Mennonite pastor applying for the same sabbatical grant that I got. He told me that some people in his congregation have said to him, “Your job isn’t very hard. Why do you need a break from it?” I couldn’t help thinking, once again, of how very blessed I am to be among you.
And so, I wanted to say a bit more about what I am going to be doing during my eight weeks away. The short answer is: meditating, gardening, writing poetry, hanging out with my family, reading good books, cooking good food. And I want to put in both a greywater and rainwater catchment system at my house. The longer, slightly more poetic answer is that I hope to become more fully an inhabitant of my home, my neighborhood, my community, my ecosystem. I read a story recently about a man whose farmer father, upon coming to a new place, would take a pinch of dirt, sprinkle it in his palm, sniff it, stir it, squeeze it, then taste it. When the boy would ask his dad “Why eat dirt?” his Dad would say, “Just trying to figure out where I am.” (From Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World by Scott Russell Sanders)
In a way, that’s what I hope to do on my sabbatical: I want to really figure out where I am. I want to pinch, stir, sniff, squeeze and taste the place I live. I want to know what bird sings every day at the first suggestion of morning. Is that a towhee? A robin? I want to know what that wild plant is that grows everywhere around our house. I want to know what kind of tomato my soil produces, and then I want to taste it – sun dry it, can it, simmer it into sauces and, of course, put it on top of a basil leaf and eat it standing up, right there in the garden. I want to go on long bike rides on the flat island where I live. I want to smell the tide as it goes out on the waterfront that is only a few hundred feet from my house, but to which I’ve rarely been.
I also want to more fully inhabit my marriage, and my motherhood. I am curious what I will discover about Jerome and Patrick, and my relationship to them, when I am able to be more present to them, when I will not be quite so preoccupied with the remnants of that day’s work. And I want to more fully inhabit my neighborhood and town. I am blessed to live on a street where people actually know each other and hang out together. I want to get to know my neighbors better. And I want to get to know the faith communities and clergy colleagues in my town of Alameda. I plan to visit several of them on Sunday mornings during my sabbatical time.
When I went to a workshop for other pastors who had received sabbatical grants, I was struck by the fact that so many of them were traveling to Turkey or Greece or Israel for their sabbaticals. Those not traveling overseas were going to drive across the country on various excursions. My own sabbatical plans – to not leave my house and neighborhood, to inhabit this one place even more – were rather ordinary in comparison.
But I have long known that when we are fully present to the ordinary, to the familiar, that begin to “hear how it all fits together” in the words of the physician, Charles. I have long known that when I am fully present to that which is “close at hand,” I begin to see the outlines of a realm that was there all along, but which I couldn’t see because of my busyness, my distraction. I’ve long wondered if this is why Jesus says so often that the “Kingdom of heaven is close at hand.” Maybe he didn’t mean that it was close in terms of time – just a few days or years or millennia around the corner. Maybe he meant that it was close in terms of consciousness or perception – a realm that is right here if we only have eyes to see.
Thank you for giving me this gift of time in which I can see, hear, taste, and remember. I am deeply grateful for this. I encourage each of you to see this summer also as a time of mini-sabbatical – as a time to more consciously set aside a few minutes or hours or days to rest, to renew, to remember. We all need it. And, if you need a further reason, the Creator of heaven and earth has commanded you to do it! Tell that to your supervisor! May we each be blessed by our times of Sabbath in these coming weeks. Amen.