Category: sabbath

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Community, Justice, and the Sabbath

Pastor Ryan Bell makes the following interesting observation:

I am also concerned that the meaning of Sabbath will be limited to merely an internal, personal, and private experience of God’s “Shalom” and will fail to translate that into public and outward expressions of God’s reign of Peace.

The Sabbath certainly is at the foundation of our own theological enterprise as Adventists, but it is also one that we often do not explore as we should. As Bell notes in the comments section of the post, most of the time when we are discussing the Sabbath we are talking about the day. We are putting the Sabbath up against Sunday. We are defending the 7th day against all other days.

When it comes to actually keeping it, we often end up with a hodgepodge of Biblical and Cultural mandates. On top of it all the Sabbath’s main purpose seems to be, according to most of us, a day that we get to take off from work. That is an important feature as I have noted in previous posts on the Sabbath, but it sidesteps a couple of important compontents.

First the Sabbath is a communal celebration. We don’t keep it by ourselves. We keep it in a community.

Second the Sabbath eschatological looking forward to the coming kingdom. We participate and even live in that coming Kingdom more fully on the Sabbath.

My taking off from work barely scratches the surface. It is time for Seventh-day Sabbatarians to begin looking more deeply at the Sabbath so that we may teach “The Sabbath More Fully” and not be happy with taking a day off from work and going to church on the right day.

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Sabbath as Promise

Charles Bradford notes in his book Sabbath Roots: The African Connection that:

Sabbath is a promise of heavenly rest, a gift that brings with it a token or pledge of life in the escheton, the kingdom of God. It is God’s future experienced in the now. A portion of eternity set in the midst of time.

The Sabbath is promise, but it is experienced now. The Sabbath is the Kingdom of God experienced and brought to today. The Sabbath is our ability to catch a glimpse of what the future Kingdom will be about. The Sabbath is our proof that the future Kingdom will come to past. We are certainly called to talk about and preach that Sabbath.

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The Sabbath A Great Cathedral

The SabbathHere is an interesting quote from Heschel’s book the Sabbath.

Judaism teaches us to be attached to holiness in time, to be attached to sacred events, to learn how to consecrate sanctuaries that emerge from the magnificient stream of a year. The Sabbaths are our great cathedrals; and our Holy of Holies is a shrine that neither the Romans nor the Germans were able to burn; a shrine that even apostasy cannot easily obliterate

And

“When history began, there was only one holiness in the world, holiness in time.”

When God gave us the Sabbath, God gave us something that could not be taken away by others. The Sabbath is something that we can only take away from ourselves.