Author’s Note: Our sermon on Sunday was on the commandment to the Israelite’s to cultivate and preserve the Sabbath. This week, we’ve got two different sections to offer another touchpoint with the topic. The first below is a poem written by one of our congregants, Brenda Zook. She calls it “Resolution Revolution.” It is a piece that has to do with slowing down and pausing, especially in light of starting off a new year. New Year’s sesolutions have a way of putting additional pressure to earn more, be more, do more, prove more, improve more, etc. Sabbath reassures us with one word: “enough.” The second portion in this post is a small section from a chapter I wrote in my dissertation on the Sabbath which I think relates to Brenda’s wisdom, and on the “enough” of us in the Sabbath.

Resolution Revolution

by: Brenda Zook

Don’t just do something,  

stand there. Be aware.  

Breathe in. Before the rushing begins.  

Look up, look around, look out at the night, 

But don’t say you weren’t warned – that’s right,  

Doing nothing…gonna change your life.   

And you need that change, you know you do,  

Rushing around like it all depends on you,  

As if you can get it all right,  

every day, every night, 

Savior of the universe,  

But every day you’re feeling worse. 

Don’t just do something,  

stand there. Be aware.  

Breathe in. Before the rushing begins.  

Look up, look around, look out at the light, 

But don’t say you weren’t warned – that’s right,  

Doing nothing…gonna change your life.   

And you need that change, you know you do,  

Need to slow it down, way down,  

so you can see  

just what you need,  

so you can hear 

and let go of fear.  

It’s the resolution revolution,  

Not “do this, do that, do the other.”  

Pause, wait, and discover  

All the places you can be  

when the destination is nowhere – you see,   

it’s the challenge to do nothing.  Every day.    

Little bit of nothing, you’ll find your way. 

Every day.  

WHAT IS SABBATH

There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God. (Hebrews 4:9)

There are ways in which Sabbath brings with it a foretaste of what is to come in the eternal future. The first gift Sabbath brings us from the New Creation is a single word: enough. In the now, we are stretched thin by the pressure to increase. The push for us to constantly produce and progress takes something meant to be beautiful and makes it oppressive. It is a gift for us to experience growth and change, to explore new things, and to be productive and creative. Whether it be increasing knowledge through study, building skills through practice, or finding beauty in the arts, we were meant to experience growth as a way to love life deeply. But the industrialized need to increase takes the beautiful, intrinsic nature of human growth and creativity, and it perverts that experience to convince us that there is never enough. We become commercially enslaved to more and the pressure becomes internalized, building an engine for increase within us that is hard to shut down. 

But in Sabbath, we stop.

We do not go into the workplace which pays our bills. We turn off our phone. We let the dishes and the laundry wait a bit. We linger around the flowers and offer our senses natural refreshment. We engage in an enjoyable hobby. We play. And yet, despite the fact we laid our responsibilities down, we continued to live. Life did not end, and we exit Sabbath cataclysm-free. Sabbath assures us that we have enough. But where does this enough come from? It is brought to us from a promise in the future that sends gifts ahead of its arrival. 

In the New Creation, we will never be in need of anything. At least, not in the same way we are now. Now, we experience need and there are consequences if we do not get enough. Fear of hunger, poverty, or social failure perpetuates a lie that enough is a lot more than we have, no matter how much we have. Sabbath not only assures us that we have enough, but it teaches us to redefine what enough is, building a contentment within us which offers resilience to the pressure to increase. It reminds us that having everything we need is not the same as having everything. By becoming people who are quick to rejoice when we have enough, we become people who experience work and growth and change as the gifts they are. They are no longer tyrannical forces in our lives constantly pushing us past our healthy limits. 

SABBATH GIVES US ENOUGH

Sabbath brings us a reorientation of our priorities from the way that our priorities will be in the New Creation. It reminds us not to sacrifice what truly matters for the sake of increase. Sabbath is not simply a stopping, but it is about delighting and experiencing communion with God and each other. Sabbath is a moment that covers us in the grace of enough, alleviating anxieties and offering a perspective of the troubles of our life. We come to see them in comparison with the majesty of God’s eternal future, and we are given the gift of our own smallness.