Sabbath Worship

I’d like to conclude this summer’s series of Church Chat columns on hurry-sickness and Sabbath-keeping by reflecting on the central importance of worship in a life of rest and delight.

We began this series (go to my website at StPetes.net to access each column) by diagnosing the symptoms of hurry sickness. Many of us have suffered them so long we’ve come to assume they’re our lot in life – as though we’re SUPPOSED to be frantic, rushed, empty and exhausted!

But there IS another way. There is an antidote to hurry sickness. God made us to live lives that are full, engaged, productive, purposeful…but not hurried. Since July we’ve been defining that life in terms of Sabbath keeping and we’ve explored several practical ways of adopting a Sabbath sensibility.

But there’s one vital aspect we have yet to examine closely: worship. Benedict XVI, Bishop of Rome, describes it in his sermon last Sunday in Vienna, Austria.

“Without the Lord and without the day that belongs to him, life does not flourish. Sunday has been transformed in our Western societies into the week-end, into leisure time. Leisure time is certainly something good and necessary, especially amid the mad rush of the modern world. Yet if leisure time lacks an inner focus, an overall sense of direction, then ultimately it becomes wasted time that neither strengthens nor builds us up. Leisure time requires a focus -- the encounter with him who is our origin and goal …Give the soul its Sunday, give Sunday its soul…. Sunday is ultimately about encountering the risen Christ in word and sacrament.”

Sabbath is more than a “day off”. At the heart of it is our response of delight and gratitude to God and enjoyment of the world he’s made. This is, in a word, about worship. We worship the God who created and minutely sustains all of life and who, through the death and resurrection of Jesus is restoring the world to its true wholeness, beauty and order.

Worship can and should pervade our day, every day, orienting our awareness thoughts and feelings – our “inner dialogue” – toward the Lord of All. We do it on the golf course, in the car, as we are falling asleep and waking up, as we work our way through the day, or pray when things get hard. This private, personal connection with God is a vital source of joy and strength and rest.

But it is not enough. It’s not enough to relate to God privately, individually.

We need community in faith with other people, gathering regularly arm-in-arm to delight in God and give our lives for the good of others. It’s worship…the liturgy…“the work of the people” where we work and pray, break bread and give strength to one another. We are each challenged and encouraged by retelling and reliving the ancient story of Holy Scripture and helping each one lift hands and hearts and voices to God. With each other we “encounter the risen Lord in word and sacrament.” It’s “the soul of Sunday,” how we connect with God moving in our midst.

A lot of people call it, simply, “going to church”. And that’s where many hit the breaks. In our cultural idiom it’s fashionable to distinguish sharply between “organized religion” and “being spiritual”. The former seems forced and artificial. The latter feels “authentic”. But I’d like to question the conventional wisdom.

Is a privatized faith and spirituality sustainable? Alone we are vulnerable to the intense pressures of surrounding society to believe, and live, and work and relate to others in ways that drive us to hurry sickness…and worse. Only by linking arms with others can we maintain our spiritual integrity.

Can we really grow alone? Our spirituality can take shape and grow only through the wisdom and care of other people. Personal faith feeds the community and feeds off of it, providing the dynamism and diversity, the friction and nurture necessary for a people to thrive together. In a worshipping community you’re rooted in a rich and ancient past, which (oddly enough) liberates you from the tyranny of the present to embrace a hopeful future. If you want to overcome hurry-sickness you’ll need to accept the help and support of others who are intent on the same goal.

Are you living in Christian community? If not, let me encourage you to try (or try again). Ask a friend to bring you to their church, or come, check out mine. At St Peter’s Episcopal Church,

We are a Shining City on a Hill that cannot be hid:

Drawing people near and far into deepening relationship with Jesus,

Welcoming everyone into life-transforming Christian community,

Helping each person grow to maturity as followers of Christ,

Serving the world sacrificially in Jesus’ name.

Come and see at 8 and 10:30.

A Labor of Love - What Are You Working For?

I hope you had a restful Labor Day weekend. We all work at something. We work because God made us to. Just as God worked to fashion the cosmos so we, who are made in his image, all labor in different ways to craft things that are beautiful and useful from his creation.

So what are you working for? What’s the aim of your labor?

In the Episcopal Church we have a prayer that recalls the ancient story of God’s purpose for humanity. “You formed us in your own image, giving the whole world into our care, so that, in obedience to you, our Creator, we might rule and serve all your creatures". The work of every human being derives from that original calling.

Labor in this context means doing "the work he has given us to do" and doing it well, playing to our strengths, enjoying the fruit of our labor and offering it all back to God for the benefit of the world.

But in a culture of consumer capitalism the picture is very different. We’ve reduced work to a simple economic formula: produce in order to consume. Our economy is a well-tuned machine harnessing people’s labor to produce ever more “stuff”, for which we create a market with pervasive advertising to stimulate mass consumption so we can produce more. Consumers are motivated to be produces to earn money to buy all the stuff we keep producing more of. And so the great wheel turns.

It’s really quite brilliant. But there’s a dark side. What happens when you and I are reduced to mere “consumers” and “producers,” the moving parts of this machine? We’re chained to the wheel. Produce more so you can consume more. Consume more so we can produce more. It’s dehumanizing. And it makes us hurry-sick and estranged from the larger purpose for our labor, rest, delight and life.

So what are you working for? Is your ambition to work fueled by desire for more money? So you can buy more and better? Are you producing so you can consume? If so, I’ll bet you are showing symptoms of hurry-sickness.

This summer we’ve been talking about Sabbath rest and delight as the “alternative lifestyle” to a life of hurry-sickness. A Sabbath sensibility gives us a new vision of work, which changes our motivation and redirects our efforts and helps break the cycle of consumption-driven production.

It’s an ancient way of human life looking back to one of the oldest stories in the mists of the human past: Adam and Eve in the garden were given a job to do. They were called to go forth from the Garden into the world to labor creatively, like the Creator, to bring forth the world’s latent potential for usefulness and beauty.

Six days were they to work and on the Seventh Day, the Sabbath, they returned to the Eden Garden Temple with the fruits of their labor, offering it in gratitude to God and sharing it for the good of all. It’s a day of communal feast and rest and recreation.

They then went back out to do the work God had given them to do, only to repeat the cycle next week, week after week, all the days of their life. That’s the pattern of all human life and labor, rest and delight, generosity and care for one another, centered on Sabbath worship and fellowship with the Creator. Are you participating?

Your work and mine – cooking, eating, cleaning, preaching, teaching, parenting, building, repairing, healing, cultivating, creating – can be woven into this story. It has DIGNITY because of who we are, made in the image of the Creator. Our work has PURPOSE because it finds its inspiration and fulfillment in God’s own work of healing, restoring, strengthening, and maintaining the life of creation. Our labor has WORTH because it serves others by improving, sustaining, providing and protecting their lives.

This vision of life allows us to do our work – whatever it is – with diligence and care, creativity and joy, excellence and hope for great usefulness. Listen to an English servant girl who understood this well. She wrote these words, which hang over the sink in my wife’s kitchen, around the year 1740.

Lord of all pots and pans and things,

since I have not time to be

a saint by doing lovely things, or

watching late with Thee,

or dreaming in the morning light,

or storming Heaven’s gate,

make me a saint by getting meals

and washing up the plates.

Warm all the kitchen with Thy love

and light it with Thy peace.

Forgive me all my worrying

and make my grumbling cease.

Thou who didst love to give men food

in rooms or by the sea

accept the service that I do –

I do it unto thee.

First Things First

In two previous columns we diagnosed “hurry sickness” and suggested Sabbath keeping as its remedy.

At heart, Sabbath observance is about taking delight in God’s goodness, making time to notice the beauty and goodness of God’s works, and expressing our deep gladness in them. When our work and our play, our exertion and rest are animated by a disciplined desire to delight in God all our daily doing becomes a sustained act of worship and service to God and his creatures.

Do you want that? How do we get it? In July I promised an answer. Let’s begin with the goal of Sabbath observance: to arrange our schedules and direct our choices to express our deep gladness and appreciation, our celebration and respect for all God has made. It’s a scheduling issue, building in regular time away from the rush of activity, pressure to perform and relentless pursuit of accomplishment. We choose to make time for connecting with what’s most important.

Changing your schedule means changing your priorities. Think of life like a jar of stones. Can you picture a large glass jar? Beside it on the table is a pile of rocks, a pile of pebbles, a pile of sand and a pint of water. Your job is to fit it all in the jar.

How do you do it? Remember your priorities: first things first. Be smart and start with the rocks. You fill the jar with the big stuff, but is it “full”? Try the pebbles. You drop in handfuls and they tumble down between the rocks and fill the spaces in-between. The jar is full but you can still fit more. Scoop in the sand and shake it down between the pebbles. The jar seems “full” doesn’t it? Ah, but you can still fit more. You pour the water and it fills in all the tiny empty spaces.

What if you started by filling the jar with water? Or sand? Or pebbles? You’d never get it all in, would you? Your life is like this jar. How do you fit everything in? Start with first things first.

So what’s first in your life? What’s the FIRST THING that goes on your weekly and daily calendar? If it’s work, exercise, study, the kids, or the hour-long beauty routine…you are off to a bad start. The first thing on your calendar has got to be time to connect with God.

Just look at the Ten Commandments. Number Four addresses personal time management: “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy” (Exodus 20:8-11). In a week it takes a day to cultivate a Sabbath sensibility of rest and delight, gratitude and service to God. Worship God in Christian community. That’s one rock in your jar. God also invites us to time away every day: 20+ minutes set apart for periods of prayer, reflection and study that orients the rest of the day in a God-centered way.

Let’s broaden the focus a bit and consider some other ways (suggested by Norman Wirzba in his book Living the Sabbath) of cultivating a Sabbath sensibility and connecting to what’s most important.

Family Connection. Make regular time to break bread together…and turn off the television-radio-iPod-computer-PDA-telephone-videogame-pager. Preparing, eating (and even cleaning up) our daily meals can be occasions for rich communal life together. It’s like a little Sabbath, a primary means of living in love and delight together.

Community Connection. Extend the family circle to welcome others – an elderly neighbor who lives alone, the kids down the street, a good friend, a weary traveler – into your home. Your home can be a haven of blessing, peace and hospitality for others, a place of …Sabbath sensibility.

Creation Connection. Plant a garden, cultivate, hunt and eat. Pre-packaged, processed, mass-produced food breaks a chain that once bound every person to God’s good earth through our food. So go homegrown. Pick your own. Buy local at the Farm Market. Learn to notice, participate, delight and trust in the natural, community-based ways God gives us “our daily bread.” And give thanks.

Consumption Connection. Curtail your consumption habits. How much junk do you have in your closet, yard, garage, basement, attic, Pod and purse? Do you still want more? Recognize creation as a gift of God given for all to enjoy. Go through your junk and give a bunch away. Ignore the advertisements offering more. If it catches your eye, decide NOT to buy it. Learn instead to thank God for giving what you need, for contentment is at the heart of Sabbath observance. To “need” less is to be free indeed.

You are busy right? You have many demands on your time. With these rocks in the jar your can still fit so much more. It’ll all fit in much better when you get your priorities straight. First things first.

Rhythms of Rest and Delight

Are you hurry-sick? In my last Church Chat column we explored what that means with some excellent material from John Ortberg. Symptoms of hurry sickness include speeding up, multi-tasking, clutter, sunset fatigue and love impairment…as well more mundane maladies like nausea, heart palpitations, high blood pressure, insomnia, obesity, irritability, and occasional halitosis.

In that piece I sought to name and diagnose this pervasive spiritual illness. I suggested that, at its heart, hurry sickness is a matter of disordered priorities. We all have plenty of time and we invest it in things we value most. Our time management problems are, therefore, VALUE problems.

In this column and the next I’d like to offer useful therapy for addressing these problems. This therapy involves reevaluating our values and reordering our time investments. Here’s how in two words: Keep Sabbath.

Sabbath observance an ancient spiritual discipline dating back at least 3500 years, designed to liberate people from the crushing pressure of work. How does that sound? I’ve been reading a book by Norman Wirzba called, Living the Sabbath: Discovering the Rhythms of Rest and Delight. He describes Sabbath observance beautifully. I make liberal use of his words to describe it below.

What It Is

At its heart, Sabbath observance is all about delight. It isn’t just a “day off” from our busy routines. It’s about joining in the delight God shared on the first Sabbath, surveying the work of the previous six days and declaring it all “very good.” The key to our Sabbath observance is aligning ourselves with God by participating regularly in the delight of God’s own response to a creation wonderfully made.

Look around you. Delight begins with taking time to simply notice the beauty of God’s works, the marks of divine care all around us, and expressing our deep gladness in them. This isn’t a command performance, but flows naturally from a life that is attentive and responsive to God’s grandeur and goodness everywhere on display. Do you see it proclaimed in the beauty of the world around you?

We serve a God whose generosity and care for us simply knows no bounds. When you notice the little blessings of life all around you’re moved to gratitude. When our work and our play, our exertion and rest flow seamlessly from a deep desire to give thanks to God, all our living – cooking, eating, cleaning, preaching, teaching, parenting, building, repairing, healing, cultivating, creating – becomes one sustained and ever-expanding act of worship.

The practical goal of Sabbath observance is to arrange our schedules and direct our choices so they may manifest at all times deep gladness and appreciation and celebration and respect for all that God has made. It is sharing on a daily basis in God’s life of love and peace.

Where It Went

This lifestyle stands in sharp contrast to people’s relentless obsession with personal accomplishment and advancement, and a lifestyle of accumulation. When we value these things above all else, anxiety, fear, entitlement, insensitivity, distraction and presumption prevent us from adequately considering and enjoying “the convivial life God so much wants for us.”

In a more humane time in our society Sabbath time was once mandated in most communities by “blue laws,” which discouraged commerce, sport and non-essential employment on Sundays. Since the widespread removal of those laws American Christians have, by and large, moved with American culture into a sustained high gear of work, entertainment, commercial and athletic activity, extending the work week and all its hurry, labor and exhaustion into Sunday.

Warren Wirzba observes what we have lost in the process. “Frantic and competing schedules make it much more difficult to keep a Sabbath focus. Some of us are required to work on the formal day of the Sabbath or feel we need to use the day to catch up on the myriad tasks we failed to complete during the course of the week. A ‘free day’ or ‘day off’ constitutes a luxury many of us simply cannot imagine, let alone afford. Who will do the laundry and the grocery shopping, or prepare the lesson plan or meeting agenda?”

What’s To Come

We’ve so filled our lives with work it’s clearly difficult to move into practical Sabbath observance. But we can begin by building daily practices, alternative Sabbath rituals into our lives and families that help us cultivate a “Sabbath sensibility”.

In my next Church Chat column we’ll explore some concrete ways of transforming our daily and weekly habits for the practice of delight, thanksgiving and praise – which are quintessential indicators that we are “at rest”. We’ll explore how Sabbath observance has the potential to reform and redirect all our ways of living.

Hurry Sickness

Are you in a hurry?

Are you too busy to add anything new to your life? Do you work when you should be resting, and when you rest are you still agitated and hurried and trying to multi-task? These are some symptoms of what John Ortberg, popular speaker and writer, calls “hurry sickness”.

He identifies the following symptoms of this rampant disease.

Speeding up. You are haunted by the fear that you don’t have enough time to do what needs to be done.

When listening you nod more often to encourage the other person to accelerate.

You chafe whenever you have to wait. At a stoplight, if there are two lanes and each contains one car, you read the year, make, and model of each car to guess which will pull away most quickly.

At a grocery store, if you have a choice between two checkout lines, you note the number of people in each line, and multiply this number by the number of items per cart. Once you’ve made your choice, you compare where you “would have been,” and if the alter-you leaves the store while you’re still in line, you feel depressed.

Multiple-tasking. You find yourself doing or thinking more than one thing at a time. Psychologists call this polyphasic activity (it could be called doing-more-than-one-thing-at-a-time, but that would take too long).

The car is a favorite place for this. Hurry-sick people may drive, eat, drink coffee, listen to tapes for ideas, shave or apply make-up, direct business on the cell phone – and all at the same time.

Clutter. Take a look at your desk. One researcher noted that the average desk-worker has 36 hours worth of work on the desk, and spends three hours a week just sorting through it. The hurry-sick lack simplicity. They often carry around a time organizer the size of Montana.

Sunset fatigue. We come home after work, and those who need our love the most, those to whom we are most committed, end up getting the leftovers. This is part of what author Lewis Grant calls “Sunset fatigue” – all those end-of-the-day behaviors that signal hurry sickness:

• You rush around at home even when there’s no reason to.
• You speak sharp words to your spouse and children, even when they’ve done nothing to deserve them.
• You hurry your children along. You set up mock races (“Okay kids, let’s see who can take a bath the fastest”), which are really about your own need to get through it.
• You tell your family that everything will be okay in just a week or two. (A pastor friend of Ortberg’s says how, in a busy season, he found himself living for “two weeks from Tuesday” because then his schedule would lighten up, at least for a few days. But he realized this had become a way of life. He was always living for “two weeks from Tuesday.”)
• You indulge in self-destructive escapes: watching too much TV, abusing alcohol, or scanning the internet too much.
• You flop into bed with no sense of gratitude and wonder for the day, just fatigue.

Love impaired. The most serious sign of hurry sickness, though, is a diminished capacity to love. For love and hurry are fundamentally incompatible. Love always takes time, and time is the one thing hurried people don’t have.

Many people in Loudoun County find themselves way over-extended in their commitments. Do you? We seem to think that we should do far more than we are realistically able. We feel driven to exhausting feats of accomplishment that would make our grandparents gulp with astonishment.

Hurry sickness and its symptoms are a huge SPIRITUAL danger for us (though we’re probably too hurried to recognize it). Ortberg urges us to “ruthlessly eliminate hurry from our lives”.

How? I’d like to dedicate my next couple of Church Chat columns to answering that question. But let me tease you now with a hint of what’s to come. I recently surprised people at St Peter’s by declaring, “Each of us has PLENTY of time!” How can this be so when we feel so pressed and busy in our busyness?

Here’s what I mean. We each have 24 hours in a day. That’s a lot of time! Each of us chooses to invest that time in the things we value most. What’s your time invested in? Your daily calendar of time commitments shows you what you REALLY consider most important, what you love and value most. If it’s out of whack, that’s not so much a “time-management” problem as a problem of disordered loves and commitments.

In my next couple of columns we’ll explore how to address that, ordering our lives in order to replace hurry with rest and delight. Stay tuned.