Tuesday 5 June 2007

Once again we will use Walter Brueggeman's comments about sabbath.



Sabbath - actual, concrete, visible, regular discipleship - is a sign. It signifies an alternative life. It is an invitation to get our public performance in sync with our inner selves so that there is no need be no gnashing of teeth or self-hatred or sense of failure. But it is more than public and personal congruity; sabbath is an invitation to get our public performance and our personal brooding both in sync together with our true self in the Gospel:

To come to trust in assured abundance that characterizes our creation;

To embrace freedom that is given that our culture resists.



I not sure when and how we arrive at this vitally important time - this sabbath rest that renews our mind and our spirit. I do know that it is so important to kkeeping me in touch with what is noted here as "our true self in the Gospel." I do know that setting aside a specific time as a "sabbath" time is not always the way to move into this space and this life. Set aside times, can often be nothing more than time that does not refresh and refocus and renew. I think about the times I go to read on a Sunday afternoon. I do it to relax or to be challenged or to be taken up into another realm of thinking about my life.

Sometimes I sit at the coffee shop and simply fall asleep...going over the same paragraph or sentence...again...and...again...and... Trying to force a time to serve as a sabbath time in the way I want it to be sabbath time seems to contradict the very spirit available in such a gift of time.

Then again, I remember a grown man talking about his mother when she would go to worship. She worked a long week. In worship she fell asleep - every week. At her funeral he acknowledged that he was embarrassed of her sleeping. He then said he learned that this was just what a gracious God would accept. God would not care that she was sleeping. In fact, I recall thinking about Jesus urging those who are heavy burdened to come and rest in him. She did...and her son "got it."

Within the Reign of God we are offered this time to rest and to be assured of how the abundance of our God's creation allows us to rest and sleep and dream and imagine. All this takes place in contrast to a world that pushes for precise logic and patterns and strategic plans for success as it is defined by the ways of our world.



Connection: We all need some time to enter into a forgiving and life-respecting rest so that we will be able to experience how God grants us vision and pulls us into God's hopeful Reign. Let yourself rest and review all things.



Blessed Lord of Vision and Hopefulness, it is by your assurance that we can let go and begin to experience the wide open and welcoming arms that you extend to us so that we can enter the peace of your promised Reign and then walk out into this world in your name. We give you thanks. Amen.