Holy Currencies: Wellness
Deuteronomy 5:12-15, 15:1-2
Exodus 23:10-12
October 16, 2022
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/i_BfsPaiJDE
October is almost the busiest month of the year for me. It feels busier than December, busier than the March or April with Holy Week and Easter. I noticed this a long time ago. It took a break during the pandemic, but this year October has been as busy as ever. I hope that’s a sign that covid is in retreat. One day a couple of weeks ago, I got up from my computer and discovered that standing upright was not easy. I had been sitting at my desk, reading stuff on my computer, answering emails, making phone calls and when I finally stood up, I realized I had been in one position too long. I had been productive. I had checked off a lot of things on my list, but my body was not happy. My back was stiff and sending out a lot of pain messages. It was not well, and it wanted me to know.
Wellness has been hard to come by in recent years. Even if we personally managed to avoid getting covid, it did not feel well with our souls. Even if we stayed physically healthy, and many of us did not, things were out of balance all across the world. It turns out that balance, a regular rhythm of work and play and rest is a key to wellness. When that rhythm is disrupted, we become unwell.
The Bible offers great wisdom about sustaining a rhythm of wellness. It is the rhythm of the Sabbath. Sabbath-keeping is the weekly practice of rest. Working six days but stopping work in order to rest and play on the seventh day.
The Sabbath was a marvelous gift for the formerly enslaved Hebrew people. Enslaved persons are never allowed to choose rest.
In ancient Israel, this day of rest included women as well as men. It included people of all social statuses, even the immigrants and foreigners. Men were not allowed to have Sabbath rest at the expense of women; citizens not allowed to enjoy it at the expense of immigrants. And it included the animals and the land, at least for a day, the fields were not to be worked or weeded or harvested. There was rest for all of creation.
That was the seven-day cycle. There was also a 7-year cycle in which debts were forgiven and the land was allowed to rest from production. And there was a 50-year cycle called the Jubilee when the earth rested, and debts were forgiven and also families returned to land and homes they had lost. The Sabbath cycles are all about maintaining balance for individuals and communities and the creation itself.
Walter Brueggemann says that “sabbath concerns the periodic, disciplined, regular disengagement from the systems of productivity whereby the world uses people up to exhaustion.”[1]
Periodic, disciplined, regular – Sabbath doesn’t automatically happen; it is practiced with intention.
Disengagement – it is counter-cultural. Our culture encourages frenetic work, frenetic exercise, frenetic recreation all aimed at producing profit or better bodies or winning teams. To disengage from those systems requires deliberate effort. Not to do so may leave us used up and exhausted.
Many of you know this. You don’t just know it in theory. You put it into practice. You step away from your computers regularly. You don’t respond to emails 24/7. You spend your day off work in the woods or in your gardens. You engage in a weekly Sabbath. Some of you extend the principle beyond that. Some versions of the American dream would say that you work hard for decades, earning the right to rest and play in retirement. But many of you have rejected that. You plan and take vacations across the year. You enjoy the life that is yours to live, balancing rest and play and work right now. Your Sabbath commitment has been instructive to me.
This week I remembered someone for whom keeping Sabbath had been transformational. I asked Liselle if she would share about that. This is what she said, “When I found my way to Emmanuel Baptist Church a few years ago, it was a very stressful period in my life, due to a fiscal crisis at Historic Cherry Hill, where I was Director, as well as a scary medical diagnosis of a progressive lung condition. Pastor Kathy’s sermons, benedictions and the supportive EBC community all gave me spiritual comfort.
I don’t quite remember when the topic of the Sabbath was explored during an Adult Faith Formation class, but that too offered me spiritual nourishment. It was then that I made a personal commitment to “keeping the Sabbath holy”, by not allowing myself to work on Sundays. Instead, I would focus on quality time with my partner Sheila, and our dogs Barney and Hermione, getting outdoors and enjoying the wonders of nature. There’s no better remedy for stress than experiencing the sheer joy of a dog romping through the woods and creek.
When Kathy emailed me earlier this week about sharing my perspective on the Sabbath and its role in maintaining a healthy work/rest balance, I realized I had lost my intentionality in keeping it holy, thereby losing its power of keeping me grounded and healthy despite new stresses of a now different professional position. When I do so, it puts everything in perspective, reminds me of what matters, and makes me grateful for every day.
Now, it’s just Hermione showing pure joy chasing after gigantic sticks in the creek—sometimes on a Sunday, sometimes on a weekday afternoon—but remarkably, despite the lungs, I’m able to keep up with her over hill and dale and experience joy right along with her.”
Sabbath has short-term and long-term implications. The weekly Sabbath, the sabbatical year and the Jubilee year weave together to sustain healthy individuals and communities. It is one of the most powerful ways for human communities to move towards physical, social, economic and ecological wellness. That might be why Jesus chose to proclaim Jubilee in his inaugural sermon in Nazareth.
There is evidence of wellness here at Emmanuel. We practice Sabbath by showing up for worship every week. There is a generosity of spirit as we share the concerns of our daily lives with each other. Sabbath is for everyone, so we seek to make that experience available to everyone. We have invested in the technology for Zoom and for the hearing loop. There are concerns for long-term wellness, so we work to maintain a building, a shelter for this community in the future. And we give priority to teaching children, passing on our faith to the next generation.
But feeling really and truly well has been elusive for us. Many of us are tired. Some of us have been asking how long we can go on as we are since well before the pandemic. On the other hand, some of us are feeling new energy and creativity. One thing about Sabbath is that it is best practiced in community. We grant to each other freedom to rest, encouragement to play, that we might not grant to ourselves.
I wonder how we might more intentionally engage Sabbath here at to balance our work and rest and play, to sustain a sense of well-being into the future. I want to tell you how one congregation did it. Please hear me carefully. I am not suggesting that we need to do what they did, but I am inspired by how they applied Sabbath principles.
In 2008, the Rev. Kara Root was called as pastor of Lake Nokomis Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis. The church was not well, by their own definition. Nobody had joined the Minneapolis church in seven years. It had no children's program, because it had no children. All the kids had aged out. On a good Sunday, maybe 30 people attended services in a sanctuary that once routinely held 300 worshippers. And the church's once-comfortable endowment had just enough funds to last two more years -- if they really pinched pennies.
The church believed that it was dying, and perhaps from that belief came a willingness to risk. So, when Rev. Root made a radical proposal, they agreed to change their pattern and make Sabbath keeping the heart of their life. This is their new pattern: On the first and third Sundays of the month, they hold regular morning worship. On the second and fourth Saturday nights, they gather for contemplative services which draw upon the same Scripture and sermon as the previous Sunday’s worship. And on the second and fourth Sundays they practice Sabbath by taking a rest from work, from obligations and even from formal worship. In months that have five Sundays, the congregation spends the extra Sunday participating in a community outreach event with a local nonprofit that offers mental health and educational services to children with emotional and behavioral issues.
It took a while for people to be OK with this pattern. Some felt that they were shirking their church duty. But within six years, the congregation had gained 18 new members and another dozen adherents. Sunday morning attendance rose to 70 with as many as 25 in the Saturday evening services. Their finances stabilized and they started donating 10% of their annual budget to neighborhood projects. What was proposed as a 1-year experiment totally caught on. Fourteen years later, the church is alive and seems well, with the same pastor and a congregation of all ages that enjoys its own Sabbath worship and rest rhythm.[2]
That is how one church applied Sabbath principles. I wonder what imaginative possibilities this opens up and how we might learn from them for our own well-being.
An archaeologist once hired some indigenous people to lead him to an archaeological site deep in the mountains. After they had been moving for some time, the guides stopped and insisted they would go no further. The archaeologist grew impatient and then angry. But no matter how much he pleaded and cajoled, they would not go any further. Then all of a sudden, they picked up the gear and set off once more. When the bewildered archaeologist asked why they had stopped and refused to move for so long, the guides answered, "We had been moving too fast and had to wait for our souls to catch up."
Friends, many of us have traveled too fast for too long. We are not well, and we need the deep rest and restoration of Sabbath. May we find it together. Amen.
[1] Walter Brueggemann, New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume 1, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), p. 846.
[2] https://faithandleadership.com/minneapolis-congregation-finds-new-life-through-the-ancient-practice-keeping-sabbath?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=A%20Minneapolis%20congregation%20finds%20new%20life%20through%20the%20ancient%20practice%20of%20keeping%20Sabbath&utm_campaign=faithleadership