Sermon: On Sabbatical

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On Sabbatical

By Charles Rush

April 21, 2002

is morning, because I could think of no other place to do it, I want to say a few things about sabbatical. I have been at the Church coming up on eight years and I will be leaving soon for and will return in September.

People have been asking me how this whole understanding of sabbatical came about, partly, no question out of envy that only Ministers and Investment Bankers can afford sabbaticals. I can't speak for Bankers but I lately have come to understand that Spiritual leaders can get spent after a certain point, not realize it, and burn out.

My sister tells a story of working at a bank in a college town. True story. A Co-ed came into the bank, very upset, because she had received a notice that she was overdrawn at the bank. My sister tried to explain the situation. The freshman said, “I can't be overdrawn, I still have all these checks.” It is possible to become spiritually overdrawn and somewhere in the middle of this year after standing with people going through so much deep sadness, I said to my wife, “I'm ready for sabbatical.”

We have a tradition at Christ Church of asking the lay people to preach in the summer from time to time. It has certainly been one of the best things going for helping the congregation appreciate what Ministers do. We asked Squire Knox to preach. I didn't hear him but I understand he was excellent. A couple years later, we asked him again. Long silence on the phone. He finally says, “You don't understand. I've already given my sermon. I only have one.”

People sometimes ask me how I come up with this stuff week in and week out. I never quite know what to say because the first thing that comes to my mind is, “well, those 9 years of education and the thousands of books that I read has something to do with it.”

I still read quite a lot but it is not possible to read like graduate school with all of the things going on at the Church, so part of sabbatical is branching out to fill up that reservoir of background material that eventually and indirectly finds its way into sermons in the future.

I would like to thank the Church for giving me some time away. I'm deeply appreciative. And I would also like to thank the Lilly Foundation and Eli Lilly, God bless him wherever he is, that great Presbyterian pharmaceutical maker that left part of his foundation for the advancement of religion and making Minister's better. A generous grant from them will allow me to really travel.

Our text this morning lifts up the idea of Sabbath. It is a time of rest, a season of allowing the fields to lie fallow. In the Bible the understanding of Sabbath was a radical step forward because it allowed servants and slaves a day off. In many ancient societies, slaves were just worked until they died. There was no consideration given of their human needs whatsoever. The biblical Sabbath applied to every person and even pack animals. And in the accounts of creation in Genesis, it is said that even God needed time to rest. I remember as a child the Blue Laws in many states that effectively closed all commerce until Sunday afternoon and even then only a couple places were open. When we were children, we were not allowed to go to the movies or watch television. My brother and I felt oppressed and got into quite a lot of mischief as a result.

But the biblical idea, probably rarely ever realized, is a re- creation, a creating anew. It is a break from the routine, so that you can grow in different ways and heal. That is a different shape for all of us, so you can't just prescribe a simple formula that we can all go and do.

The Lilly foundation asks you to describe what you find renewing and mine is terribly odd which comes as no surprise to some of you, I realize. But, whenever I can put a couple coins together and make the time, I want to go to some archeological site. I am fascinated by the development of human culture, the development of religion in particular. Originally, I asked the Lilly foundation for a grant so that I could study the religions that surrounded the Jews and the very early Christians by going to see these places first hand. I wanted to go to Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Tunisia, Sicily and Rome. The more you understand about these people and their religions, the more you are going to understand the significance of your own faith. You'll know what is distinctive and what were commonly held assumptions by people of every religion two, three thousand years ago.

And why visit these places? Because books have to be supplemented with vision and you have to stand there to do that. The great General George S. Patton understood this. He is driving the Army across North Africa fighting with Rommel and one day they came to the plain just east of the ancient ruins of Carthage. Patton had the troops stop. He had his jeep driver take him out over this plain and he said, “I've been here before.” And then he proceeded to describe a battle from the third Punic War in which the Romans defeated the Carthaginians once and for all. Patton thought he had been a foot soldier in the Roman army. I don't know about all that reincarnation but I am impressed that he was just a foot soldier. Everyone who reports to me that they were reincarnated always were Kings or Queens in a former life. Patton was a man that had read so much ancient history, so much about the history of warfare, he had absorbed it, digested it, so that when he was there he could see it. Patton got it.

A week after September 11th I sat up in bed, shrieked out loud, my proposal to the Lilly foundation is dead in the water. You can't go to Palestine right now. It is not safe in Israel. It is not really safe to travel in Egypt. But, they understood and let me amend the proposal, which I did. I will go to Egypt and Palestine another time, but not now. And in place of that part of the study, I add another, Celtic stone circles that are mainly in Scotland. Part of the time will be visiting Temples and ruins, part of it will be education, and part of it just plain old writing.

What am I going to do? First, I am going to visit two Holy Islands- Lindisfarne and Iona. Lindisfarne is where Christianity first came to England. It is off the east coast of England, almost to Scotland and Iona is just off the western coast of Scotland. This is just a standard spiritual retreat for a short time. Both places practice a form of Christianity that predates the split between Catholic and Protestant and they meld Celtic and English spiritual themes with Christian ones in an interesting blend. We use the prayers for the Eucharist from the community of Iona.

Then I'm going to Cambridge just to read a little bit. I'm reading some books that I should have read in college and didn't, Milton's ‘Paradise Lost' since he wrote it at Cambridge and Goethe's ‘Faust' since I know quite a few people these days that are striking deals with the Devil. I read better in great libraries, like Sterling library at Yale. You walk in and you feel like a little erudition. Also, a couple of the faculty members are going to point out Churches in Great Britain that are vital.

After that I'm going to the British museum in London for a few days. If you can't go to Egypt, the English stole half of what was valuable and put it in the Museum. In conjunction with some books that I am reading now, I hope to have a better understanding of Egyptian religion and the function that religion had in daily life.

After that I am meeting Kate and Anne in Rome go look at some ruins and try to get a better understanding of Roman religious life, in order to understand how Christian piety shaped and was shaped by the fact that it's early years were in Rome.

What do I mean? Just one example. Roman religion had literally hundreds of gods and all of them had to be appeased or appealed to during the normal rhythm of the year. There was a god for finding a spouse, a god for getting pregnant, another half dozen divinities that looked over the stages of fetal progression in utero, another god of birth, and so on and so on. And it was very important to know the names of the divinities as well as the ritual that you were supposed to go through to obtain their favor. An enormous amount of work that took up quite a lot of time and encouraged quite a lot of superstitious stuff as well.

Knowing that, you can understand how early Christians developed the veneration of the saints- this saint looks over travelers, that saint helps you find what was lost, this saint takes care of mental illness, so on and so on. The whole development of saints is rather odd because there really isn't much of anything about this in the bible. But there was lots about it in Roman religion and when the Romans became Christians, they didn't just drop their old ways. No one ever does. They brought some of the old religion with them.

Likewise, I might add, Roman religion was really based on fear, guilt, and worry. The old Roman saying that children still use today, “Step on a crack, you'll break your Mother's back.” That is so negative. Religion was a prophylactic against even worse stuff happening. When you know that, and you sit down and read the gospels, you start to deeply appreciate just how positive the message of Jesus really was. And it makes you wonder about the parts of scripture that are still guilt producing, fearful, and worrisome. Was that really the intent of Jesus or is that the lingering religious perspective of writers who are still surrounded by a pagan Roman culture with this religious disposition? It is a good question.

This part of the trip, we are headed South, through the recent excavations at Herculaneum at the base of Mount Vesuvius, on down to the Greek Temples at Paestum and then to Sicily. Sicily has the best preserved Greek temples, particularly at Agrigento and Syracuse and I want to see those. In addition there are a couple of Carthaginian religious sites where they practiced Child sacrifice. I've read quite a lot about this and I want to see these first hand.

Then we are taking a ferry across the Mediterranean to Tunisia, the site of ancient Carthage. This will be a great trip because I have to believe that the sea route from Carthage to Rome was probably the most traveled route in human history, given their enormous scope of influence in the ancient world.

Why go to Carthage? Very short history, I promise. The Carthaginans were the same people called the Phonecians. They lived along the coast of Lebanon. Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos were their cities. By the way, these are some of the oldest cities in human history. In the bible, these people are called Canaanites. They were in the Promised Land when the Jews fled Egypt and settled Israel. They were also the people that the Prophets and other Jewish religious leaders continually warned the people to stop adopting their religious ways, stop intermarrying, stop going after other gods. All this is in the Bible, presumably, because that is exactly what ordinary people were doing day in and day out.

But we don't actually know much about their religion, so I hope to learn some more about it in the museum there. Their principal deity was the god Baal, referred to in the Bible, but I am also interested in another of their gods Molech, who received child sacrifices.

There is a veiled reference to all of this in the bible in the story of the near sacrifice of Isaac, where Abraham takes Isaac, builds an altar, raises the knife, and hears the an angel and stops. This story has provoked much learned discussion then and now for different reasons. But even in the Talmud, there was a discussion of what the angel said to Abraham because it was not recorded in scripture. One Rabbi suggested that the Angel said, “Stop killing your Children.” I love that. Even I have participated in very lengthy discussions on this subject, with other Ministers and Theologians around the country, and the obvious no one seems to know about. What exactly were the religious practices of the immediate neighbors of the Jews? What did they do? Why did they do it? I hope to have a better understanding. Once again, as I have reflected on these matters over the years, what strikes me about the direction of Judaism is the powerful impulse towards humanity and the reverence for life that it brings.

Then we are flying back to London, driving across Ireland to the northwest corner in County Donegal, where we will be staying for an extended time at the home of Brett and Judy Hare. I hope to write some, cool off. Their home is an old farm. The town nearby has only 35 people and one pub. If you've seen the movie “Waking Ned Divine” you have a pretty good idea of remote, rural, and quiet. I think the idea here is to try being at peace, something I will probably find quite a challenge.

The final piece of this journey will involve another ferry across to Scotland to the town of Uig. Can you believe there is really a town Uig? From there, we are going to meander up the West Coast of Scotland, through the Outer Hebrides islands, across the Highlands and up to Orkney Islands above the Scotland. That is as far north as I'm likely ever to go. The next stop is Iceland.

All across Britain are these stone rings, the most famous being Stonehenge in England. I've been privileged to visit a couple already and they are marvelous to behold. These were the religious sites of my ancestors, so I am very interested in what they did and thought about God. I simply like to just stand where they stood between 3000 and 5000 years ago, and see if I can make a connection. I've read quite a lot about these sites and the scholarship is scant to be generous. Most archeologists are content to simply describe what they find. But the real question is what did they do there? And what were their understandings of the gods, our world, of life and death? Many of them were burial sites near by. Some of those burial sites, underground, had openings that you had to crawl into practically. Once inside there was an altar in the middle and crypts for the bones of different clans. On the winter solstice at the crypt at Brodegar, the sun aligns in such a way that the entrance to the crypt lights up the altar in the middle of it. These people may have not been technologically advanced but they were quite sophisticated to design and carry out such a structure. But what did it mean?

Likewise, many of these sites were designed in such a way that certain stars were singled out for orientation. There was a lot to this. What I find, so often, is that you can't really understand things, you can't really get what was going on unless you stand out there, open your imagination, and things come to you. And if nothing particularly great comes to mind, they are almost all in very remote places with no tourists and you can sit and meditate.

A number of people have pointed out that this later part of the trip just happens to veer near some of the best golf courses in the world. Is that coincidence? I like to think of it as providential synergy. Scotland that time of year has a long day, from 5 a.m. until 11 p.m. There is time for lots of things. And it seems to me that great respites involve the 4 G's. God, Golf, Gaelic stone circles, and of course the fourth one is Glenfiddich.

It will be quite healing, imaginative, and open my eyes. I am grateful for the time off.

Sabbaticals are also for the Church as well. You need a break from me as well and that is important to remember. After being here for a number of years, for better and worse, I have left an imprint on you. More than that, as the years go on, I have assumed more and more responsibility for the life of the Church.

But as someone once put it aptly, Christ Church is an owner/operator place. The congregation really runs itself. And it is good for the Church to do that again, every so often, to pick up the reins and run itself. A colleague of mine warned me that changes will be made while I'm gone. People may well decide, we're going to do that this way from now on. That is part of why we both need to do this.

Which means that we will need you. Don't disappear until September. We have a lot of people visiting the Church every week, even through the summer. I need you to welcome them, be a neighbor to them.

We are going to have our committees in the church change over in June, the usual time. Tom and/or Julie will be part of that but I will not. I expect that it will be different and good.

Part of me is worried about leaving when this building is going up but we have such outstanding leadership, starting with Tim Bland and Dave Graepel and David Bunting but encompassing a great group of other people to numerous to name. So far, we have solved every problem and I'm actually confident we will continue to do so.

My hope then is that you will step up to the plate, do a few things better, and be priests to each other and when I get back the place is stronger and more vital than when I left. That would be quite a gift.

Again, thank you for the time off. You know life is short, a lot of it is spent sitting on the Garden State Parkway waiting for the traffic to move. But the world is full of mystery and wonder, awe and marvel. You have to stay in touch with that. A few years ago, I was sitting in the middle of a stone circle, doing a morning prayer time. The fog was moving up off the loch, across the heather towards me about three feet off the ground and when it covered me up to my shoulders, only my head was visible. That was a tingling moment the fullness of the mystery of the world becomes manifest, made all the more poignant knowing that my ancestors have seen the same things thousands of years ago. I hope that on this adventure, more of that happens. That will heal, grow, spark the imagination. So thank you. And may Sabbath rest be upon you too. Be in peace and stay in peace.

Amen.