Lenten Study on Sabbath: 3
Session 3: Freedom in Community and from Distraction
Citations below are from:
Ruth Haley Barton, Embracing Rhythms of Work and Rest: From Sabbath to Sabbatical and Back Again, (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2022), chapter 4 & 5.
Opening Prayer - Psalm 91: Where do you see Sabbath in the midst of this Psalm?
Barton begins chapter 4 by describing Sabbath as a gift that generally seems to go unopened in the life of God’s people these days. Let’s take a moment to savor a bit what it was like to try and dive in and do it this past week!
Opening Discussion:
Who tried Sabbath this week?
What went well?
What went poorly?
What was missing?
What was confusing?
What did you do?
What did you not do?
How did it feel?
What did you notice?
My Early Sabbath Stumbles
Early on in my embrace of a Sabbath practice, I chose Mondays for my day of rest. At the time, I was a relatively new lay minister serving on full time staff in my church. So the reason I chose Monday was that it was my day off from work, we often had activities on Saturdays, and Sundays were just really busy with ministry work. So Monday proved to be a natural choice for my Sabbath rest—at least on paper.
There were many things that were really nice about it. I would take a nice long hike in the wilderness around my home; I’d spend some extra time in praying my Daily Office, luxuriating that I didn’t feel I had to hurry through in order to get to work; I’d take an extra-long nap in the afternoon, enjoying the sense that I had no need to be doing anything else. I’m introverted, so I didn’t mind the time to myself. Most parents will understand what I mean when I say that a little quiet and solitude when you have young children is really nice.
However, after several months of trying to do this, I found that my Sabbath just wasn’t working out very well. The day always began by helping get the kids ready and then taking them to school. While packing lunches wasn’t exactly my idea of fun, I enjoy my kids so having a little with them in the morning was nice. Dropping them off at school was always reassuring, as well, knowing they were where they were supposed to be and were well cared for during their school day. But as I continued to work to enjoy a restfulness on those Mondays, I eventually began to realize that I didn’t want to be doing this on my own. I wanted to be with my wife and kids. They were something of my rest. And the bustle of getting to and from school, getting through homework, cooking meals, and other such activity served to really interfere with my sense of restfulness. Additionally, this was my wife’s busiest day of the week, so forget about us having any meaningful time to connect with all the demands on her those days. The reality was that it just proved to be a struggle for me to find a place of restfulness in the midst of the life of our close family.
Further, I seemed to really get in the way of the restfulness of their Sabbath on Saturdays. I used that day to try and get stuff done around the house: handyman fixes, other small projects, bill-paying, vehicle maintenance, and other such tasks. The bustle and energy of my industry also served to go against the grain of the peace and restfulness they were trying to enjoy on their Sabbath.
I bring this up to illustrate the idea that, in our ignorance, we were missing out on one really important aspect of the Sabbath: it is meant to be enjoyed with a community. In the community of my family, we were setting ourselves at opposition to one another in the way we were choosing to Sabbath. Furthermore, God had given us each other to embrace and enjoy, and we were simply ignoring that great gift by the way we were trying to embrace this other gift of rest. Needless to say, once we began to realize this by the experience of it, I made the adjustment to join them on their Saturday Sabbath. And that, of course, brought up a whole new set of challenges. I’ll come back to that below.
The Communal Nature of Sabbath
Barton speaks of this same concept when she states, “I am also struck by how many individuals and families are trying to figure out sabbath all by themselves when, in fact, sabbath-keeping is a communal discipline that needs to be led and practiced in community” (41). Later she states, “generally speaking sabbath is meant to be discovered in community; it is not something for individuals to stumble around and try to figure out for themselves, by themselves. It is a practice to be taught, led, and supported corporately so everyone can embrace it together” (43). Here I was an earnest dad who along with my wife wanted to enjoy this beautiful practice and even wanted to invite my kids to learn it with us. But we had to learn the hard way that we weren’t meant to do it alone or separately. God had given us one another, and enjoying one another on the Sabbath is meant to be part of our rest.
That is not to say that we never enjoy any alone-time on the Sabbath. Barton encourages us to “incorporate solitude and silence into [your] sabbath practice” (43). And in my family, pretty much every sabbath afternoon is spent enjoying a long time of quiet in the house. (Note: this is MUCH easier now that the kids are teenagers; our attempts to enforce a “quiet time” or nap into our family life when they were little was much rockier!) However, even as a bunch of introverts, we have found that part of the joy of sabbath is connecting more deeply through our liturgical welcome of sabbath, and times of enjoying playing games, watching movies, taking walks, and other such communal activities. Further, what we learned as we continued to embrace this as a practice was that we were creating space that could relatively easily be shared with others. In particular, our ushering-in of Sabbath on Friday evenings with our candle-lighting liturgy became an easy moment to invite others into. We’ve shared that evening with other families from church, single friends, extended family, and more. It has proved to be a great time to connect with people in a different way and invite them into the restfulness we have come to treasure with our Sabbath practice.
The Challenge of Sabbath
But let’s return to me having to move my Sabbath-keeping to Saturdays. This new schedule really asked something of us. Barton speaks about something similar for the people of Israel in their wilderness-wandering. In that context, she states that, “in its earliest iteration, sabbath was about learning to trust God’s provision, and the people’s capacity to follow God in this rhythm was actually a test of their obedience” (45). I can say that as we continued to learn to Sabbath in our family, this idea really proved to be true. Because we found it really important to get away from our phones on Sabbath, we found it started to create some real tension with some of the other people in our lives. Friends from church really didn’t like that it was difficult to almost impossible to get a hold of us on Saturdays. While we understood their concerns, we also knew that leaving space for such communications would influence our restfulness. Add to this that more often than not, these communications are about planning or other such work and there was just no place for them on the Sabbath.
So what was the solution? Well, people eventually learned not to try to get a hold of us on Saturday. Some complained about it. But this was a crucially important aspect of one of the best lessons we’ve learned from our regular practice of Sabbath: the world continues to spin; things still get done; and everything does not, in fact, start to fall apart just because we set everything down for a day of rest each week. We learned, deep in the core of ourselves this important truth: the world does not depend upon us. As disappointing as that may be to some of us, this has proved to be an immensely liberating lesson to learn. And the fact that it came through this practice of Sabbath means that it was learned through the experience of it.
Technology and the Sabbath
Barton devotes the entirety of chapter 5 to the interaction between Sabbath and technology. She describes its ubiquity on our lives with a sort of litany:
Scheduling and confirming important appointments is now accomplished, for the most part, through automated notification by text. Now most people do not even go to the bathroom, go for a walk, or go to bed without their phone within arm’s reach. Most people use their phone to tell time, wake up in the morning, check email, get the news, find out the weather, get directions, report on how well they slept or how many steps they took, and keep track of friends and loved ones on social media. And that is not to mention the ever-present temptation to fill up every spare moment with listening to podcasts and scrolling social media apps, news feeds, and text messages. The problem, of course, is that keeping our phones with us or strapped to our bodies so we don’t miss anything “important” means we are plugged in all the time, open to all manner of interruptions that come any time of the day or night, whether we have asked for them or not (52).
This description gives voice to the ways our devices demand so much of us even as they help us in so many ways, too. What they do probably more than anything else, though, is make us accessible at nearly every moment of every day. Whatever we are doing, “every moment of our lives—important or not—is now subject to intrusion and interruption” (52). She goes on to contend that our devices and the social media apps that run on them are actually “designed to be toxic, addicting, and manipulative, depriving users of choice and free time through habit-forming feedback loops where the reactions and notifications become the reward to using social media” (54). And her whole point is that all this militates against the sort of peace and rest God is offering us with Sabbath.
Her call in the midst of the above reality is to consider a “technology shabbat” as well as a few other practical ideas for getting space from the incessant demands of our always-on culture these days (56). She also mentions a “sabbath box” where everyone places items that might distract or symbolize work or stimulation as a way to combat the “constant connectedness “ that “keeps us from any real psychic rest” (56).
Discussion or Reflection
How might conceiving of Sabbath as a community practice give it a particular shape or feel?
What have you noticed or are you concerned that a Sabbath practice might cost you? What might God’s invitation be to you in that?
What do you struggle to trust God about as you consider embracing Sabbath? What have you learned if you already do practice it?
What is your relationship to your phone? To social media? How do you react to putting it down and it being totally out of sight for a whole day?
As you consider a Sabbath practice, what might really excite you to let go of? What will be more difficult?
Barton speaks of the problem of Sundays at so many churches: that these communities invite us into busy-ness rather than restfulness. In what ways does your own church help or hurt the idea of restfulness on the Sabbath?