Sermon: Establishing Sabbath

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Establishing Sabbath

By Charles Rush

May 15, 2011

[ Audio (mp3, 6.8Mb) ]

is is painfully quaint. The Aged and Ancient among us will remember the world of “Blue Laws” that closed most stores on Sundays until the 70's. In the South, we were not really allowed to play games on Sunday afternoons and we had to go to church on Sunday night. Indeed, my first brush with religious authority was to organize a boycott of Church so that we could watch the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. Somehow I won out and my Mother gave us an exemption from Church. It has been down hill ever since.

We've repealed the Blue Laws in every state -- too restrictive. And we've slowly expanded our sports programs, and expanded and expanded, so that now practically every kid plays on a travel team because, of course, all our children are elite.

Now we spend several hours every weekend driving to Flemington in search of a game, the pedestrian fare available in Chatham simply not exotic enough for the Travel team and our Elite children. If you multiply that schedule by three children in four different sports, you are buzzing this way and that most of the weekend, and when you get there, you are answering text from your spouse, on a sideline somewhere in Ridgewood, in a state of near constant movement and distraction the whole weekend long for most of the fall, spring, and half of the winter. You know more and more people more and more superficially, coordinating who is bringing the pizza and who is picking up the jerseys, but without any time or context to exchange more than a ‘how you doing?' ‘good to see you.' ‘Brad had a great header last week.' We're outta here. Be Good.

I remember being in King's running into one of the parents whose child was on my child's soccer team all the way through High School and I finally had to say to them, now that our children were in college, “You know, I don't believe I've ever actually asked your name.” Usually, I was quicker than that, start waving at a hundred yards like you used to do with Great Uncle Whatshisname at the family reunion. “How's everybody doing? You good. I'm good. You Good?”

It is not that you are a vain, supercilious person, you just don't have time and standing on the sidelines rooting for the same team is not necessarily a gripping bond. You can act like you are sharing a life, but sometimes you realize that what you are really sharing is a ‘to do list'. Of course, we actually have dear friends from those years also and most of my investment advice I got standing on those sidelines from people who are now partners at the bank, so I jest, but we are getting busier and busier every year, more longer tournaments. We have long weeks when we have almost no unstructured time, all week, all weekend. And then we do it again.

What you find yourself doing is running and running to keep juggling all these events and obligations, even fun time is kind of intense because we have exactly 90 minutes for beer and cutting up and then we have to go on to the next thing.

And every once in a while, you'll have this block of open time, maybe the morning of a family wedding, and you are out jogging (or walking) on the beach somewhere open, ready to drink in the moment… And there you are in the beauty of the morning, drinking it all in, and, strange, you are just swept with a wave of sadness, sometimes a startling sadness. What the hell is that?

You try to explain it to your spouse, who may get it or who may just wonder if they've done something wrong and aren't living up to their spouse job description. But it is not that… And you don't need Xanax… It is not that either. It is your soul in a state of neglect, crying for some reflection. Since you don't actually have time for that, what you sense is this powerful emotion from your subconscious rising up. All along, you have been talking to yourself about why you are doing what you are doing? What it is costing you? What gets compromised? But since you don't have time to engage this reflection, left alone in a reflective setting and whom, the doors burst open from underneath, awash in wistfulness, perhaps melancholy…

We know that time is passing by, that we are actually living the ‘good ol day's right now and it is concerning. Is this good enough? Apart from what other people think you should feel, how am I doing? Am I happy? Is this as good as it gets? Am I becoming who I am supposed to be?

God thinks we need to build some time into our schedules to simply reflect on what is happening in our lives, to simply reflect on where we are headed. So after the Israelites were liberated from slavery in Egypt, God encouraged them to take a day off every week. Change the channel. And you know what, let your family change the channel too. And you know what, give everyone who works for you a day off so they can change the channel too. The agenda on Sabbath day is some reflection, getting in touch with your soul, having a deeper conversation with yourself, with God.

And that is really why we worship together. We create a communal space for prayer, to sing in adoration, hopefully with a sermon that helps us get outside the box for a moment. And Jesus was right in our passage today, the Sabbath was made for you, not us for the Sabbath. Worship is important but we Clerics have a way to trying to tell you what to think rather than encouraging you to think for yourself. We Clerics have a way of presuming that what is meaningful to us is meaningful to you too. And that is not always the case.

Part of Sabbath is worship but that is not all of it. Sunday morning can degrade into another obligation, another item on the check list.

Deeper Sabbath is a little bit different. Deeper Sabbath puts us in touch with our creativity. It opens the door back into that perspective where you look at the dawn with eyes of wonderment, when you feel the radiation of goodness in the universe. It puts you back in imaginative mode. It feels great. It feels alive. It is full of hope.

What is it that wakes you up like that? What gets you dreaming? How do you get your groove back? God wants us to build this into our lives.

This changes as we age but most of us have a couple three things that will work every time. For me, it is travel, ever since I put that first backpack on in college, headed to Europe, landing in the Alps. Going through the passport line for me is the start of ‘adventure time' and I wake up in a more meaningful way.

So when Christ Church gave me some time off for sabbatical a few years ago, that is exactly what I did. But I knew what I needed to grow into as well, so we let that set the agenda. Many moons ago, when I was in Divinity School, one of our Mentors, John Claypool, made a comment to me that really stuck. A group of us boys, all flush with confidence at our futures, said, “Just remember that you can never take your congregation any further than you have actually been yourself.” I just received this news, somewhat soberly… I knew he was right.

And I've never done much with contemplation. I've been to monasteries probably 6 times in my life for a weekend retreat of some kind but I would say that I play golf better than I meditate. I presumed it was as painful for God to watch me fidget in meditation as it is for God to watch Shaquile O'Neal shoot free throws. Ugly… Wicked ugly…

But I am older now and my focus is different. And I still don't like it but I can do it if I know that Kate is near. So for part of our sabbatical, we went to Brett Haire's family house in Donnegal in the far North of Ireland. It was a wee farm house in a town of 20 very friendly folks.

Brett's place is up a dirt road. And if you look one way, there are a few sheep farms. But if you look east, it is ten miles of open ground to the next farm. And that next farm was right near where Bill Campbell grew up. It is a free range and different herds of sheep graze there. No TV. No phone. I could get the BBC on the radio in the car.

And every day I would walk with the sheep for several miles. And in the evening, the sun went down around ten. We had an outcropping of rock not so far from the farm house. We would bring Mr. Jameson's potion with us and sit on that outcropping of rock with my daughter and niece and watch a pair of Badger's and their children. Badger's, as you probably know, are very shy of humans, so it was quite a quiet treat. And, you know, when it is just the four of you, you don't talk so much. We could embrace the silence and just watch the sun go down. Of course, in Ireland, you embrace the rain. And the other thing they don't tell you about those wonderful photos of the Old Country, you embrace the bugs that are everywhere.

And I was quiet. We would walk down the country lane in the dark. The girls were in their last few weeks of being girls and they played fairy. They goaded me to sing hymns and Irish ballads in the dark while they fell asleep.

Sure enough one day, I was walking down a fence line, so far from anyone, so far from home and I was overwhelmed with how brief life is, with how puny I am in the great population of our world, with how fleeting our accomplishments. I was almost faint and so filled with fear. Death and anxiety had drawn near.

And with it at the same time, a deep gratitude about life, gratitude about the life that I have made with Kate… It was a deep emotional moment. I should suppose that it wasn't so much that I was changed, but just that I was experiencing existentially that the spiritual life begins in gratitude and appreciation and it circles back to gratitude and appreciation and wonder.

Part of it is just has to be sad because unconsciously, you are reflecting on your own mortality. But I found myself getting more comfortable with silence and meditation and I realized that this piece is supposed to grow in us more as we mature. It is important that you understand and live the spiritual dimension of life through our life cycle, more so in my role.

So now, when we bought a place to retire to, we had this in our mind also. And Kate thought that this is a gift that we could give the next generation, suspecting that they will need it even more than we did because of the busy lives that they seem destined to live, so we got a place right off the Appalachian Trail, that is about as quiet as it gets in Greater Gotham.

Only you don't have to take a plane and a passport to get there. And starting last summer, I changed my life some. We live out there mostly in the summer, Kate all the time. I get up before dawn. I have an Adirondack chair next to the pond and another couple chairs in the overgrown pastures that are full of overgrown trees. I take a couple mugs of coffee and I sit still and watch the forest at dawn. Some mornings I'll fly fish at the dawn, other days at the dusk. I like the sound of the water, and the four stroke rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise…

Some days I come to the office, some days I read and write, and some days I do physical labor. All of the time, I'm learning how to use new tools: how tractors work, how you fix a chainsaw, how to build a shed. What I am trying to do is actually live a more balanced life, a more reflective life because I believe that the spiritual way in is this way.

I'm slowly learning all the species of trees and how stuff grows. Who knows where it goes. I'm not worried about running out of ideas. Last year, I realized that for me, and probably my whole generation, books are a good thing. It is a longer, sustained involvement than the internet, facebook, twitter. And I read a wonderful article on being 50 that said that this decade our brains have better powers of synthesis and putting the big picture together. That is what we need to do in that long chapter before and just after retirement.

As Verlyn Klingenborg at the New York Times has discovered in the little article that he writes on “The Rural Life” for the op-ed page, this way of being is an antidote to sarcasm, cynicism and manic stress that are the leitmotif of our life in the World's Capital.

Julie, that is what we hope for you as you take your leave on an extended Sabbath. We hope that you stumble on what you need spiritually in the phase of life that you are in, that you are able to explore that fully, that you access some of the deeper reaches of our life, and that you actually experience the transcendent that we talk about week in and week out.

We hope that you tap your creative, imaginative side.

And if you get really lucky, you incorporate some of that in your regular life and hopefully, you can be a better guide to the younger generation coming along and our congregation will be made stronger for having stronger leaders. Does that sound like a plan? It does to me. Amen.