Sabbath is not merely a way to rest; it’s a way to experience God. In this sermon, I examine the problem of the Ten Commandments, the Sabbath in the legalistic religious tradition, and explore the way I believe the Jesus of the Gospel thinks about Sabbath. Based on this, Sabbath practice today invites us into the “prayer of repose” as a holy encounter with the Divine. Sabbath, therefore, can be practiced anytime and anywhere.

The sermon was preached on November 21, 2021 and is based on Matthew 11.28-30 and quotes from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.

Last week during the kids’ Discovery Time, Kate Boxeth, our Minister of Children and Youth, introduced our children to the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments have held a central place in Jewish and Christian religious practice, and in the shaping of western civilization.

The first four commandments have a particularly religious feel; they command loyalty to the God of the Bible and to a few practices, like the practice of the Sabbath, that the ancients considered necessary for keeping people loyal to the God of the Bible.

Commandments five through ten have a more universal feel; they’re the kind of rules that many people around the world have sensed are necessary to bring order and justice to human societies. “Honor your father and your mother,” for example, isn’t just a Middle-Eastern and Jewish custom—Islam values the honoring of parents, as do Asian, African, and Native American societies.

The eighth commandment, “You shall not steal,” is pretty universal too. As is the ninth: “you shall not lie;” and the tenth: “you shall not covet”—that is, “do not let your desire grow to the point where you are greedy to seize what belongs to someone else.”

In our modern world, we could do with a little more clarity about and adherence to the kinds of laws that could make for safer and more equitable societies.

Take greed, for example. The wealth generated by billionaires during the pandemic is not merely obscene, it’s robbery, an unjust redistribution, and it’s built on the backs of ordinary Americans who are feeling caught between an economic rock and a hard place. Did you know that Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, raked in $36.2 billion dollars in a single day in October? A single day! The trickle down theory of modern free-market economic orthodoxy isn’t working. What comes down from the wealthy is barely even a trickle. But our laws provide loopholes. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the middle-class, the economic engine of our societies, languishes. Societies built like this are not only unjust, they’re unsustainable.

We could use more Ten Commandment-like laws that protect our societies from a greedy economic aristocracy.

We need those laws, but we’re not likely to get them. We have too many billionaires leveraging inordinate political power.

We also need stricter laws that follow the sixth commandment: “you shall not murder.”

Take the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, the kid who took it upon himself to protect businesses in Kenosha, Wisconsin from protestors whose protesting he disagreed with. Rittenhouse murdered two anti-police-brutality protestors and wounded a third in the wake of the shooting of a black man, Jacob Blake, who was shot last year in the back by a white cop in Kenosha. Rittenhouse has been acquitted of all charges and there are fears throughout America that vigilantism has been rewarded by our justice system—the freedom to bear poorly controlled arms, mixed with the blindness of our courts, could mean open season on protestors and an end to democracy as we know it.

We need stricter laws that prohibit killing. But we need more than laws if we are to experience the justice, equity, and peace we want and need. We need a renovation of the heart, and there isn’t a law anywhere that can do that.

We may need stricter laws that create a safer society, the kind of society the Ten Commandments were intended to create. But there’s a problem with the Ten Commandments.

Laws like these in the wrong hands become as dangerous as the lawlessness we have without them.

Imagine if the likes of Michael Flynn had his way. Speaking last weekend to a conservative Christian audience at the ReAwaken America tour in Texas, the former national security advisor to Donald Trump said that the only way forward in this country is for America to have “one religion under God.”

The Taliban in Afghanistan have that kind of vision too, and, there, it’s a reign of terror. “One religion under God” for all Americans is not the kind of vision America’s Founders had; it is not the kind of America our Constitution and Bill of Rights imagine.

Commandments and laws, good as they may be, can be terrible things in the wrong hands.

Take the fourth commandment, “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.” Here’s a law that started out with good intentions. It was supposed to order society in such a way that no employer was allowed to keep people working relentlessly. It was designed to put the brakes not only on those who feel driven to work, work, work, but on employers who care little for the wellbeing of their employees and treat them like slaves or resources to be exploited. For one day every week, everyone and everything was to stop and rest and return to balance.

Endless work can become tyrannical, but so can a good law in the hands of tyrants.

By the time of Jesus, the law to do no work had become incredibly complicated to the point where an ordinary person felt that it was impossible to live up to. And to break the Sabbath could bring about severe punishment. In some legalistic expressions of early Judaism, there were as many as thirty nine categories of work prohibited on the sabbath including things like: carrying firewood, cooking a meal, untying an animal, starting a fire, extinguishing a fire, sifting flour, combing wool, and harvesting grain. And so you may remember that Jesus often got into trouble with the religious for performing “work” on the Sabbath when he healed a person or when he encouraged his disciples, hungry from a long journey, to eat some grain they’d harvested in a field.

When the legalists condemned him for breaking the law, Jesus said, “You’ve got things backward: the Sabbath law was made to help human beings; human beings were not made to be servants of the Sabbath.”

The Ten Commandments were supposed to help people, but over time had become hundreds of laws, each of those laws further distancing people from what the Commandments were supposed to do—bring people life. A law meant to help people can, in the wrong hands, become hurtful, tyrannical, even diabolical.

So to the ordinary people around him, burdened by the trouble of trying to live up to an impossible legal code of personal conduct, Jesus said,

“Come to me all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

Jesus was steering the weary and burdened back to the true intent and practice of the Sabbath.

In 2007, I’d been a pastor for fifteen years. I’d served a congregation in Pennsylvania and was pastoring another in central California. But I was burned out—exceedingly “weary” to use the language of Jesus. The burdens of guiding people through one crisis after another, running meetings, organizing congregational life, and managing a staff and a budget had taken a toll on me. That May, I found myself in Egypt, in a great basin of palm trees and sand dunes in Egypt’s western desert, at a Coptic Orthodox monastery called Saint Macarius. It had been there, in one form or another, for sixteen hundred years.

I’d come by myself and was beginning a deeply needed sabbatical, provided by the Clergy Renewal Program and funded by the Lilly Foundation. A year before, I’d told God in prayer that unless I could find a way to find wisdom, I didn’t have the foggiest idea how to lead the church through the turbulent white water of the twenty-first century. I’d come to Saint Macarius Monastery because it was one of the oldest continually-functioning Christian monasteries in the world. If wisdom was to be found, I figured I’d find it there, where countless pilgrims over the centuries had braved the blazing, barren sands of Egypt to find wisdom for their lives.

I prayed with the monks before dawn and again at dusk. They eyed this strange American who’d come among them. I was obviously not Coptic, not even Orthodox. But they were generous and warm, and those who spoke some English were eager to try it out on me.

My cell was a little cubicle adorned with nothing more than a lumpy mattress, a fan, and a spray can of Raid. “Enter your cell,” a desert father said long ago, “and your cell will teach you everything.”

In the desert, I was stripped down to nothingness. No one knew me. My degrees, my accomplishments, my skills meant nothing to these monks. I had come to the edge of the known world, maybe even stepped off the edge. Here in the desert, I had nothing to offer that mattered.

All I could do was to be. There was nothing for me to do. And frankly, that was terrifying. It felt like it would undo me. But it is what, in the end, saved me, and pointed the way to the wisdom I needed.

This not-doing. This just-being. Hard, intensely hard, was what I needed.

One afternoon, in the half-drowsy state of napping in the heat of the Egyptian desert, I had an encounter, a mystical experience, a connection with the divine presence that changed my life.

A voice within me finally got through to me: “You didn’t need to come this far to learn what I want to teach you. The wisdom you seek is within you. And you don’t have to leave home ever again to find it. It is as near as your next breath, close as the beating of your heart.”

I was suddenly fully awake, full of light.

The next day I was talking in the shade with Father Zeno. Drinking tea. He’d taught French in Cairo before coming to the desert. “God made us each different from each other,” he said. “So our seeking of God must be according to our individuality. At the monastery, we meet twice a day for prayer, but there’s no law that you have to attend. We each find our own way into divine rest. No one needs a monastery like this to find the rest of God. Some of us come here. But it’s better to find that rest wherever you are. A mother at home can find it. A shop owner. An airline pilot. Christ is the monastery in every human heart. You don’t have to leave home to enter it.”

Those were the words I’d heard the day before. “You don’t have to leave home to find it.” There is a monastery in every human heart—exactly as Jesus promised.

This monastery of the heart is what the fourth commandment tried to force people to find. But no law has the power to open the heart, only love can do that.

Like Jesus long ago, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel recently said that an experience of Sabbath can’t be legislated. “We enter not simply a day,” Heschel taught. “We enter an atmosphere.” We enter a state of being. A consciousness. An experience.

In the months after my mystical experience in the desert and the guidance of Father Zeno, I learned a form of prayer I now pass on to you. In the early church it was called the “prayer of repose,” or hesychia in Greek. When you hear the word Sabbath, I want you to think: “repose,” deep resting in the divine presence, an inner presence which is always as near as the beating of your heart, close as your next breath.

Nearly every morning for the past fifteen years I’ve practiced the Sabbath, through this ancient “prayer of repose.” Depending on the amount of time I have, I stop and do nothing, set a timer and sit silently. Twenty-one minutes is my standard time. But if time is limited I go for whatever I can get. I try to think of nothing in particular. I rest my body. I rest my thoughts. I dwell in Christ. And I draw near, inwardly, to the Loving presence that dwells in me. I abide in the sheer wonder of being alive. And I don’t do this because I’m commanded to. I do it because I want to. At least most of the time. And when I don’t want to, I’m kind to myself, just as the presence within me is kind to me.

This is the wisdom I sought long ago. This is the wisdom that can save us all.

Someone once asked Mother Teresa, “Mother, when you pray, what do you say?” “I say nothing,” she replied, “I only listen.” “Ah,” said the seeker. “And what does God say?” “Nothing,” Mother Teresa replied, “God says nothing, God only listens.”

Let us now grow very still.

Let us enter the Sabbath as an atmosphere.

Let’s experience repose, a deep and holy rest.

Shhhhh. . .

Do nothing now. . .

Just let God love you. . .