Sermon by Rev. Clare Butterfield
Preached at Unity Temple Unitarian Universalist Congregation
January 2, 2005
Reading:
from Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in our Busy Lives by
Wayne Muller
What
if, as Thomas Merton insists, we harbor a hidden wholeness? What if, as the
Buddhists insist, we are saturated with an innate natural perfection? What if,
as Jesus insists, we are the light of the world? What if, as God insists, it is
already good, very good?
...
On
May 30, 1996 a fire ravaged
Lama
Mountain,
home to many families in the hills of northern
New Mexico,
as well as to the Lama Foundation, a spiritual retreat center that had for
years been a place of meditation and refuge for pilgrims from around the
world. The fire was quick and furious. It destroyed dozens of homes and all
but a few of the buildings after the retreat center. Three weeks after the
fire, I walked the land with Owen Lopez, a close friend and director of the
McCune Foundation in
New Mexico.
We were hoping, along with Bread for the Journey, to provide some emergency
relief for the community including the quick restoration of water and
electricity. Everywhere we looked we saw the color of charcoal,
silver-gray-black, shiny, reflecting the light of the sun that filtered
through and charred and twisted branches. Just three weeks earlier, this was
an inferno. But on this day there spread out before us a sea of green. Small
oak seedlings, six to ten inches high, blanketed the forest floor without any
human effort to clear or seed, already the earth was pushing out life.
Creation creates life at every revolution; it is incapable of doing
otherwise. Were we to reduce the planet to cinders, a holocaust of ignorance
and greed, still the universe would create life from the ashes of our
clumsiness.
Sabbath is a day we walk in
the forest, walk among the fruits of our harvest and the ruins of our
desperations and see what lives. On the Sabbath, we rest. And see that it is
good. [pgs 44-45]
Sermon:
This
week unfolded after I wrote this sermon, and in some tragic ways quite
unexpectedly. What I was innocently thinking about when I tossed out a
title for the first Sunday of the new year, was that it would be the first
Sunday of the New Year. A good moment to draw breath and take Sabbath before
starting again.
The devastation we have witnessed this week will be unfolding for many weeks
yet, I fear. It is too soon to offer many words for an event of such
magnitude. Only silence begins to touch it. An ecologist would tell you that
this natural disaster is a foretaste of the world created by global warming – a
foretaste of the permanent condition of the world. But even the truth of that
observation invites us to pause on the threshold of the new year, and to think
for a moment before proceeding.
The reading for this week talks of the Earth’s Sabbath – a time of rest after
destruction, before life re-emerges. With the tragic news from the Indian Ocean
basin so fresh in our minds, it is well to remember that re-emergent quality.
And I’m someone who enjoys new year’s resolutions, and the chance to take a
few hours in the early days of the new year to let the old one with all of its
troubles go, and to think about how I’d like this one to be different. If I
forget to schedule Sabbath throughout the year, I try to remember to at least
take that day – the first day of the year – for rest and reflection. Sabbath is
a hard concept for people in our culture. It is not the first thing I think of
when I try to define my religious obligation. But Sabbath-keeping is in the
commandments, and it comes up toward the front of the list. Before “thou shalt
not kill” is “remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.
Throughout the mosaic law there are references to the responsibility to keep
Sabbath. The seventh year is the Sabbath year, the fields are to lie fallow –
the land to be given its rest. And in the 50th year – the seven times seventh
year – the slaves are to go free and all debts are to be forgiven.
The Sabbath is a day of rest, and a day for gratitude for what has been given
in the other six days. Sabbath traditions vary widely but they often include
special meals, time with family, reading scripture and services of worship.
And for those of you who know me, you must be thinking that this isn’t really
my sermon. I’m usually the one up here exhorting you to get out there – to do
something, for Pete’s sake – to practice your religion. But keeping the Sabbath
is another way of practicing. And I think it is necessary both for our souls
and for the earth that I spend the other six days trying to protect.
I have noticed over the course of my life, among other unfortunate
developments, the disappearance of the blue law. Blue laws, for those of you
who are not old enough to remember, were laws that required the closing of
businesses (or sometimes only certain businesses) on Sundays. I’m all for
religious diversity and recognizing that different people in our society observe
different Sabbath days, and so having a law requiring a business to close may
not be appropriate. But people who worked in grocery stores and bakeries and
butcher shops and clothing stores used to be assured of a full day off. Now
they work all week long. Some of them even worked yesterday – New Year’s Day –
which used to be a day that no one worked except policemen and firemen.
Because I have watched this development with some alarm I would like to
propose that this year, as part of Sabbath keeping in our families, we try to
return to a self-imposed blue law. This would mean not engaging in commerce on
our Sabbath day (which is likely to be Sunday for people here). Don’t make
anyone work for you either. Do your grocery shopping on Saturday or some other
day. Don’t even go to the ATM. See no movies. Don’t eat out. Light candles
and keep the electric lights off as long as you can – let the evening come in
the windows and make only a little illumination to see each others’ faces with.
Play a game. Take your time over dinner.
If we got into the habit of keeping a Sabbath from commerce we would also, I
predict, get into the habit of thinking more about our participation in
commerce. We would ask whether we actually needed something before buying it.
We would not view shopping as an activity, per se, but only as a process to a
necessary end, such as having enough to eat at home. Because I am really a 19th
century kind of gal, who grew up in an era of party lines and small downtown
stores, I’m probably the wrong source for wisdom on this subject, but rumor has
reached me that America’s shopping malls are actually pretty busy places on
Sundays. I’m still surprised by this. Given that consumer activity accounts
for 2/3rds of the U.S. economy I guess I shouldn’t be, but though the economy
might falter I’m still going to stand by my suggestion. Take a Sabbath from
getting and spending, and spend the day with what you have. Give the earth its
fallow day. Rest.
I’m also someone who rides her hobby horses pretty hard most of the time. I
really care a lot about whether or not the Earth survives in any kind of
reasonable condition for future generations and I don’t let those thoughts go
far from my head very often. But there are times when I just sit on the couch,
you’ll probably be happy to hear, and read a murder mystery. Or I take a walk
in the park out my front door and look for birds. Nothing new will ever come to
you unless you make room. None of us will ever disconnect from the frenzied and
self-destructive pace of our culture unless we deliberately take time out for
Sabbath keeping. For those of us who worry about the Earth then, keeping
Sabbath is part of its restoration.
Take Sabbath from the worries of the world. Go home, be with your children
and the ones you love. Stay out of the stores and leave the radio and
television off. This week it has been tempting to sit here in our safety and
comfort and to keep one ear attached to the radio. It helps no one for us to do
that – and the media feeding frenzy might actually impede more constructive
activity. Sometimes it’s ok to skip the front section of the Sunday paper and
go straight for the book reviews. If you don’t put the weight of these issues
down, eventually you’ll just get too tired out to carry them. Rest from the
world so that you can go back into the world.
The act of taking Sabbath can be one that we resist for important reasons.
We can hesitate to be alone with ourselves because we’re just not sure that
we’re going to like what we find. Taking Sabbath requires a funny kind of
courage that we seem to be losing in this culture. It requires the courage to
admit that the world can get along perfectly well without us for a while, when
our egos would rather think that it can’t. Ego is a poor reason to refuse to
rest. Let me just break it to you now – none of us is essential.
Taking Sabbath requires that we be willing to live quietly with ourselves,
with our ineffectiveness, with the twinges of bad conscience, with our
loneliness, with all the things about our lives and the world that we would
rather stay too busy to spend time with. Increasingly, we live in a world of
constant distraction, constant noise.
Wayne Muller, in the book I read from just before, says that we are afraid
that “if we stop and listen, we will hear this emptiness. If we worry we are
not good or whole inside, we will be reluctant to stop and rest, afraid we will
find a lurking emptiness, a terrible, aching void with nothing to fill it, as if
it will corrode and destroy us like some horrible, insatiable monster. If we
are terrified of what we will find in rest, we will refuse to look up from our
work, refuse to stop moving….”
And yet, as he goes on to say, “all creation springs from emptiness.” (pgs.
50-51)
Taking Sabbath requires an ability to be still, to be quiet, perhaps to
listen to try to determine whether God is still speaking. Is that what is so
terrifying to our culture about silence? Are we afraid of what we would hear?
Or afraid that we wouldn’t hear anything? Then allowing that silence is an act
of faith. Let nothing be heard for a while in your life. And see what grows
out of nothing.
Taking Sabbath also requires a willingness to let things go. It requires the
courage to be hopeful about what is coming in spite of everything that has
come. When we come to the day of rest, when we take ourselves out of the world
for a few hours, we are clearing the way for our re-entry. This is an
inherently hopeful act. If it is to be effective, we must be willing in our
Sabbath time to shed old resentments, to forgive ourselves and others, to
provide a new opportunity for people who have fallen short for us before. If
you cross the threshold of Sabbath and carry all your grudges with you, you are
not really resting. You are burning all the energy those grudges require to
maintain.
Our brother Jesus, in his sermon on the mount said, about worshipping at the
altar, “If you remember that your brother or sister has something against you,
leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your
brother or sister and then come and offer your gift.” He knew. It’s not really
Sabbath if we’re carrying grudges. It’s not really Sabbath if we do not make
the regular practice of forgiveness a part of our day of rest. We might be in
here pretending that we’re at worship, but really we’re thinking about that
thing our brother or mom or cousin or spouse or child just said yesterday that
still burns. What our brother Jesus said is still pretty current, isn’t it? If
you’re still burning over that thing that was said go and be reconciled, then
come here.
For a social activist, who tends to keep her eye on some pretty devastating
information that might incline her to be rather crabby at humankind in general,
this is a good teaching. To know what I know about rates of glacial melt, to
know what I know about rising temperatures and rising sea levels, to know what I
know about species loss, all due to human activity, and to a refusal by some
powerful humans to change their behavior so that others might live, I might come
to my day of rest very crabby indeed. But then I’m not resting. I’m just
nursing grudges ‘til I get back to my office.
If any of you have ought against your brother, leave your gift on the altar
and go and make peace with him. Then come back and worship. Come back and keep
Sabbath when the flow of love in your heart is unimpeded by anger and carefully
preserved resentments. It is the unimpeded flow of love that will make things
better, if anything can.
Sabbath is a small jubilee in the week, a marker for the jubilee of the
seventh year and the seven-times-seventh year. It is an act of faith in God’s
abundance to observe the jubilee. To let the land lie fallow in the seventh
year is a trust in providence. But we are learning, to our sorrow, that to fail
to let it rest is actually more to our peril. Providence is tricky that way –
when humans try to control things they generally go worse than if we just let
them alone. Natural systems, it turns out, are pretty sophisticated things.
And the fallow year is wisdom, probably based on observation. And based in the
law that we don’t own the land, we tend it for others.
Keeping Sabbath is an act of courage. Letting the old bitterness go and
starting again, putting down those angers and resentments and holding the day
open, blank, clear. Letting the disappointments of 2004 go by, and holding
ourselves out to the hope that 2005 will be better. What a set-up, huh?
We have to be willing to make ourselves vulnerable to all the same stuff all
over again. We have to be willing to do that every week. We have to let old
betrayals go and trust again. And we learn to trust by trusting – which,
ironically enough, is also how we sometimes learn not to trust. Sabbath is the
re-enlivening of trust and love, and faith in God’s generosity. It takes nerve
to open ourselves up to that again and again, no matter how the previous week
worked out. It takes a hardiness of spirit to come in here celebrating every
Sunday. It may even take a triumph of optimism over experience to stand here
today and hope for a peaceful, loving and ecologically sensitive 2005 after
living through 2004 and any number of years before that.
It takes a crazy kind of hopefulness to go on being human in this inhuman
world. I just don’t know any other way to live.
Keeping Sabbath sounds like a rest, but it is always a brave thing to rest.
We are never more vulnerable than when we are sleeping. The wisdom of our
forefathers is confirmed once again. Even before “thou shalt not kill” is the
keeping of the Sabbath day.
Rainer Marie Rilke wrote a poem called Gratefulness which says: “If the angel
/ deigns to come / it will be because / you have convinced / her, not by tears
/ but by your humble / resolve to be always / beginning; to be / a beginner.”
[Quoted in Muller, Sabbath at pg.128.]
Taking Sabbath is taking time to be empty, to see what grows from emptiness.
It is taking time to be still, to hear what is still speaking. To trust that
the world does not need us, and that we do not need the world and so our coming
together must be an act of mutual generosity, intense, precious and brief. One
to be appreciated in its passing. And in that very recognition that we do not
have to be here, that we are not necessary, to return the astounding generosity
of the gift that we are here at all by living our lives between Sabbaths as much
for others as for ourselves.
This is the fallow day – the day of the earth’s rest – the first Sabbath of
the new year. Let’s take this time together this morning to renew ourselves –
to see the good world – to listen – to say thank you. Make a new year’s
resolution with me now that this year you will practice keeping the Sabbath to
let the Earth rest from your ceaseless activity, and to take time yourself for
listening, hearing, forgiving, trusting.
It is true that the world will never need us any more than it does at this
moment. But it will never need us any less, either. Deep engagement requires
deep rest. Step back from the sorrows of 2004 with me for just a moment. Then,
together, we can begin again.
Amen.
Pastoral Prayer:
We stand on the brink of a
new year
With gratitude, with joy and with sorrow
With a world that is not at peace
With an Earth that is troubled by our presence.
May we take the opportunity of a new start
To be more gentle with one another,
To be kinder to friend and stranger alike,
To be careful of life.
May this be a year of healing for the sick,
comfort for the sorrowful,
And may joy come to all of us.
Amen
© Copyright 2005 Clare
Butterfield, All Rights Reserved.
