A Sabbath Homily on Luke 6:1-16

 by Sister Rebecca

Today’s Gospel takes place on the Sabbath, when Jesus’ actions give rise to conflict with some of the Pharisees.  Jesus does not chide his hungry disciples for plucking and eating some ears of grains, and then later, in the synagogue, he heals a man with a withered hand. The Pharisees see these actions as unlawful on the Sabbath. Jesus replies, “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to destroy it?” Throughout the Gospels, Jesus teaches people to look deeply, to see beneath the surface of the rules and regulations.

His message is always this: “I have come to give life and life in abundance.” Jesus often does this on the Sabbath: renewing life, allowing life to emerge, and freeing people from bondage and from whatever snares their minds, bodies, and souls.

In Exodus 20 we read: “In six days God made heaven, earth, and the sea and everything in them. God rested on the seventh day.”

God blessed the Sabbath day.  God set it apart as a holy day. From the very beginning of time, God designed the Sabbath to give us, regularly, some time off the wheel, some Sabbath time when ordinary life, and pressures, are bracketed, and we give ourselves permission to stop, to shut down, to rest.

Thomas Merton commented on our lack of awareness of taking Sabbath seriously in our lives.  This is how he saw our busyness: “There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence [and that is] activism and overwork.  The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most modern form of its innate violence.  To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence.”

Does the psalmist in us still cry out: “My soul yearns for Living Waters”?

            A couple of Sundays ago, I was struck by an article by Timothy Egan in the New York Times: Week in Review: “One Cure for Malnutrition of the Soul.”  In describing his recent pilgrimage sabbatical from Canterbury, England, to Rome, Egan spoke of his deepest motive to get moving on foot over that sanctified pathway: “While organized religion may be dying in Europe, pilgrim trails are drawing crowds of all ages, including many young people.  We are spiritual beings.  But for many of us, malnutrition of the soul is the plague of modern life.  That is one reason 200 million people worldwide a year make some form of religious pilgrimage. On the trail I repeatedly heard the term “deep walking.” (I think our Br. Christopher may well have heard this term on his recent pilgrimage.) “And for the young, I heard it described, a pilgrimage is a way to ‘do religion.’”   Egan confessed that at first he “missed Wi-Fi, Twitter, e-mails and endless digital updates, UNTIL I DIDN’T.” 

On the sacred trail of 1000 miles, our Timothy describes how he began to see things in another dimension.  What dimension?  The Kairos time that Jesus and mystics of all time speak of.  Timeless time.   Toward the end of the article he asks this question: “Do we allow ourselves to be amazed?  Do we let ourselves be surprised?”

Isn’t this what our hearts are yearning for?  The experience of the Holy.

Might the Jewish traditions associated with keeping the Sabbath offer us Christians some insights into the re-creating and sanctifying power of keeping the Sabbath in this modern era?

Judaism fosters the vision of life as a pilgrimage to the seventh day: the longing for the Sabbath all days of the week, which is a form of longing for the eternal Sabbath all the days of our lives.  Sabbath is equated to remembering the Presence of God during our linear time of workdays.  I used to use the term 24/7 for chronological clock time.  From now on I will use the term: 24/6! The 7th being Sabbath.  Sabbath rest aligns our souls with the creative acts of God in timelessness.

Wayne Miller speaks of Sabbath as a time off the wheel when we take our hand from the plow and let God and the earth care for things while we drink from the fountain of rest and delight.  He goes on to say that Sabbath is time that honors the wisdom of dormancy.  If certain plant species, for example, do not lie dormant for winter, they will not bear fruit in spring.  A period of rest in which nutrition and fertility most readily come together is not simply a human psychological convenience.  It is a spiritual and biological necessity.  A lack of dormancy produces confusion and erosion in the life force.  We, too, must have periods in which we lie fallow and restore our souls. A time consecrated with our attention, our mindfulness, honoring the quiet forces of grace and spirit that sustain and heal us. Without Sabbath, maybe we are all going to wind up with at least partial attention deficit disorder!

At this point I would like to share a few lines of Mary Oliver’s poetry:

Leaves and Blossoms Along the Way

When one is alone and lonely, the body

gladly lingers in the wind or the rain,

or splashes into the cold river, or

pushes through the ice-crushed snow.

Anything that touches.

God, or the gods, are invisible, quite

understandable.  But holiness is visible,

entirely.

Some words will never leave God’s mouth

no matter how hard you listen…

All-important ideas must include trees,

the mountains, and the rivers.

To understand many things, you must reach out

of your own condition.

For how many years did I wander slowly

through the forest.  What wonder and

glory I would have missed had I ever been

in a hurry!

Beauty can both shout and whisper, and still

It explains nothing.

The point is, you’re you, and that’s for keeps.

Sabbath need not be an entire day.  Sabbath may be an afternoon, a Sabbath hour, a Sabbath “deep walk.”  Let us not allow restlessness to drive us into activity, but sit with it until it turns into quiet and solitude, and sheer delight!