A Sabbath Rest

Are Christians required to keep the Sabbath? That question has been on the back burner of my mind since my last visit with members of the Russian church I described in earlier posts. I know of those who say that the Old Testament Sabbath observance was a picture of the rest believers now have in Christ, and that Christ is the fulfillment of the Sabbath promise of rest. I believe that this is true. Yet I also believed firmly at one time that this meant that Christians were no longer under obligation to keep the Sabbath, as the Old Testament Sabbath observance was simply part of the ceremonial part of the Law of Moses, to which we are no longer obligated since Christ has fulfilled this Law.

Now I'm not so sure. Certainly, while the ceremonial law has been fulfilled and we are no longer under obligation to it, our lives are still to model God's moral law, embodied in the Ten Commandments. It's not okay for Christians to steal, to tell lies about each other, to murder, or to worship idols. But what about the Sabbath?

The Ten Commandments appear in two places, in Exodus and in Deuteronomy. The command to keep the Sabbath is in both places, but the reasons for Sabbath-keeping are different. In Exodus, God says to keep the Sabbath because in six days God created the heavens and the earth, and on the seventh day He rested and sanctified that day. That is certainly of prime importance. But the reason given in Deuteronomy is what struck me recently:

“Observe the Sabbath day, to keep it holy, as the LORD your God commanded you. You shall labor six days, and do all your work; but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God, in which you shall not do any work, you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your ox, nor your donkey, nor any of your livestock, nor your stranger who is within your gates; that your male servant and your female servant may rest as well as you. You shall remember that you were a servant in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out of there by a mighty hand and by an outstretched arm: therefore the LORD your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.” – Deuteronomy 5:12-15, World English Bible.

The thing about the Deuteronomy passage is that the Sabbath is a reminder to God's earthly people Israel that they were once slaves, and that they have now been set free. What better picture of freedom than the freedom to take a rest? And the enjoyment of that rest was to be a reminder of the God who had provided that rest to His people.

Everybody needs a rest from time to time – a time to sit back, relax, chill, think and get things together. Slaves who are constantly driven by slavedrivers never get such time. (This, by the way, is the reason why some totalist churches who emphasize giving Saturday or Sunday wholly “to the Lord” are so wrong, because what they mean by this is that their members should be frantically busy from sunup to sundown serving the church on its chosen “holy day.” When a person has already worked at least five days earning a wage and tried to cram a day in afterward to take care of house and family, how is he supposed to find “rest” in frantic daylong “church work”?)

Over the years, however, I have noticed the disappearance of seasons of rest in our society, and our transformation into a Sabbath-less society, and I have observed the effects of this transformation. The change began slowly. When I was a kid, I lived in several places where all stores, libraries, movie theaters and other such places were closed on Sunday. During the week, most grocery and drug stores closed around 9 PM (earlier on Saturdays), and most kids had to be off the street by 10 PM. This applied even to liquor stores. But as the culture of America secularized, merchants began toying with the idea of staying open later. When I was a teen, I could find stores that stayed open until 11. Later, some stores began to stay open until after midnight. When my mom was working swing shift and I was at home, during the last year or so before I left high school and joined the Army, I used to sneak out at night and argue politics with a friendly attendant at an all-night gas station.

In the Army, of course, we were able to find many places that stayed open 24/7, like the Denny's restaurants where many of us went after a night on the town. Yet there were occasional reminders of the culture we were all swiftly leaving behind. A somewhat hokey example: I was stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and we used to watch old re-runs of the Andy Griffith Show. I remember one episode where Andy and the local preacher were in a home, and Opie came in with another boy. Both boys' clothes were torn and Opie had a black eye, and Andy exclaimed, “Opie! Fightin'? On a Sunday?!” There were also the “blue laws” still enforced in many parts of the South, which resulted in most stores being closed on Sunday.

After the Army, I worked swing shift at a defense plant for a while as I tried to put myself through school. I was able to find a few 24/7 grocery stores, yet they were still rare. Later, when I was switched to the day shift, these stores fell from my notice. Putting myself through school was a hard journey with a few fits, starts and detours. When I transferred from a community college to university, and began to have protracted, difficult computer lab assignments, I found myself out frequently after midnight. I came to appreciate the convenience of the burgeoning number of all-night stores, but didn't stop to count the cost of this trend.

When I graduated from college, the Sabbath-less portion of society was still predominantly in the retail sector. While people in manufacturing would occasionally work overtime, including Sundays, to meet emergency deadlines, it was still almost unheard-of for people in the building professions and trades to work Sundays. But during all this time the Internet and home computing had begun to revolutionize American society, along with stores like Kinko's (now FedEx Office) and Starbucks, and trends like online banking and 24/7 cell phone access. Thus this trend eventually caught up to me as I became a design professional.

It began with design firms competing against each other for market share, and promising ever more compressed schedules for completion of ever more complex projects. This fed clients' desires for instant gratification. As firms began to compete for facility maintenance and construction projects for continuous manufacturing operations, we were frequently warned of the extremely high cost of even the smallest interruption. Professionals increasingly found themselves burning the midnight (and weekend) oil to finish underbid projects on schedule, while project managers and executives walked around giving pep talks and spitting two word slogans: “on time,” “on schedule,” “under budget,” “fast-track,” “mission-critical,” “zero-defects,” “design-build,” “profit margin,” and so on. The pressure that was on designers of projects soon fell on construction crews, who now found themselves working round the clock in many cases to build or maintain facilities projects.

Nowadays, in my profession, it's hard to find stable work unless one is willing to make one's entire week (all 168 hours) available to management, and to frequently travel. Awards and speeches are given to celebrate those employees who routinely “go the extra mile” for the client; yet clients have come to regard these efforts no longer as extra, but as normal and customary, as they demand even more. (“I want to mention Joe, whose wife was pregnant and going into contractions, yet who chose to put the needs of the client above his family and drive 28 miles in the snow to fix a ladder logic program failure on one of our CNC lines. Joe, you saved the client $528,000! Atta Boy!!!”)As chickens on speed might frantically peck away non-stop in their search for grains and grubs, so we are trained to frantically and frenetically peck away in our search for ever more dollars.

Against this backdrop, people like me frequently go home on the weekends to find a pile of “personal maintenance” items left undone, and we try hard (and often fail) to catch up. And it's very hard under these circumstances to carve out one day a week in which to just chill, sit back, reflect, recreate and remember our Creator. Yet what better way to show that we are trusting in God than to take a day off once a week? Israel forgot the Sabbath as they became addicted to idols and material gain, and God forcibly idled them during the Babylonian captivity, a seventy-year period during which the Promised Land “enjoyed its Sabbaths” which it had missed. (Leviticus 26:34; 2 Chronicles 36:21) While I don't believe the United States is some sort of parallel to the Israel of the Old Testament, I do think that our exponentially increasing greed and our 24/7 pursuit of wealth is about to suffer its own curtailment. We (and the earth we have raped) may have many opportunities for Sabbath rest as the official economy of godless capitalism disintegrates. But the exploration of that theme is a topic for my other blog, The Well Run Dry...

As for me, where do I stand in relation to the Sabbath? I'm still working on that one. Meanwhile, here are a couple of things to chew on:

• http://www.cyclelicio.us/2009/01/blue-laws-and-fuel-consumption.html

• http://blog.christianitytoday.com/history/2009/02/byebye_blue_laws.html

Catching Up And Falling Behind (Again)

I am running a bit behind on my posting (my excuses are all on this week's post on my other blog, The Well Run Dry). However, for my next post on this blog, I intend to write about the significance of the Sabbath, both in ancient Israel and in modern society. Stay tuned!

Subconscious Right-Wing Angst

Anyone who regularly reads my blogs knows that I used to be involved in an abusive, aberrant church; that I suffered for a long time as a result of my involvement; and that one day the truth about the real agenda of this church and its leaders was exposed for all us members to see. Seeing this truth enabled most of us to walk away from this church and its corrupt leaders. It also enabled us to recognize the general dynamics of power abuse in religious groups – groups that ostensibly exist to worship God and to study His Word, yet which are too frequently hijacked by mortal human leaders who fool their members into serving and enriching the leaders instead of serving God.

Some of us who left went a bit farther in our realizations. We became able to recognize the patterns of power abuse in other human organizational settings, where selfish leaders of ostensibly selfless groups manage to hijack them in order to serve their own selfish ends. I myself was able to recognize these patterns in the workplace, in the re-ordering of corporate America, and in the political realm as well. That is what led to the changing of a lot of my political views, to my increasing disenchantment with the Republican Party, and my decision to register as an independent in 2006. I realized that the Right was guilty of grievous sins, and that the Religous Right was guilty as well, not only for supporting people guilty of great evil, but supporting them out of evil motives.

I discovered that such realizations and changes of mind regarding politics were common among many people who had left abusive churches and who learned to recognize the patterns of power abuse. But I noticed that there were varying levels of understanding and realization among the fellow victims of my old abusive church. Some still thought this church was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Others were willing to acknowledge that our old group had problems, but they were unwilling to see the larger problems in American evangelicalism. Yet others were unwilling to see the problems in the agenda and leadership of the Republican Party and the Religious Right. As for me, I think I've tried as hard as possible to see things accurately, and to be honest with myself. But I don't think that some of my brethren are being as honest with themselves as they could be – especially when I eavesdrop on some of their online conversations, in which they argue political issues which have already been argued to death, and for which plenty of evidence of Republican wrongdoing was supplied before the last election. I was in on some of the big arguments in 2008, and I dug up and posted much of the publicly-available damning evidence against the Republicans and the Religious Right, and sometimes I get the feeling that some of my brethren didn't read a word I wrote.

I could try to post all of the evidence again, but just the thought of doing so makes me tired. Why bother if people are determined not to listen? Suffice it to say that you can find it on the first blog I ever wrote, TH in SoC (http://thinsoc.blogspot.com), under the posts, “The Anatomy of The Religious Right,” “Fighting With Broken Weapons,” and “The Sins of the Right.” Mine is by no means the only blog or source of information documenting these things. Many have documented the lies behind the Iraq war; the rape of Iraqi natural resources in the aftermath of the American conquest; the attempts to start a war with Iran; the capture, imprisonment and torture of people without due process of law; the hijacking of government at all levels to serve the rich masters of corporations and banks; the abolition of environmental and human rights laws in order to facilitate the gaining of profit by any means while destroying the earth; the removal of governmental protections from the poor; the attempts to overthrow Latin American national leaders such as the president of Bolivia; and so on – and all of this in order to “promote greater economic prosperity and to keep America strong!” All of these things were done under the presidency of George W. Bush.

I could suggest that many of the signs of abusive churches described by sources such as Ronald Enroth in his book, Churches That Abuse, could be applied quite accurately to the Bush presidency, especially such things as control-oriented (read, dogmatic, arrogant, assertive and inflexible) leadership, the fostering of unhealthy dependency, harsh discipline of dissent (Guantanamo and other places), and surveillance of members (think the Patriot Act). And the 2008 Republican presidentian standard-bearers would simply have been a continuation of Bush had they been elected.

Yet the leaders of the Religious Right told us all that we must support the Republicans because they have “Godly values” - or, “their values are at least more Godly than those of the Democrats,” – or, er, um, “Well yeah, I guess they do have their struggles (especially those of them who are now in orange jumpsuits), but at least they go to church!” In the aftermath of the Republicans' significant losses in 2008, there are Religious Right mouthpieces demonizing Obama and the Democrats as the group who will destroy our nation.

When one tells these people that the Religious Right is mistaken in thinking that laws prohibiting two sins are enough to make a nation Christian, they respond by saying that they are trying to be “salt” and “light” in the political arena, and that since the Republicans condemn these two sins, they are more godly than the Democrats. When one mentions the sins the Republicans actually encourage and practice – oppression of the poor, destruction of the earth, murderous wars of conquest, greed, and other forms of materialism, these sins are brushed aside or swept under the rug. Anyone who attempts to prevent the practice of these sins is accused of “Socialism!!!”

I believe this gives us a clue as to the real motivation behind the Religious Right and those evangelicals who are still cheerleading for the Republican party as the party of “Godliness.” On a deep, unconscious level, these people see the Republicans as the party most likely to maintain the priveleged place of the United States in the world, and the priveleged place of these people within the United States. Therefore they support the pro-business, laissez-faire, small-government, individualistic policies of the Republican Party, while doing all they can to portray these policies as “Christian.” They portray wealth as a sign of godliness or of God's blessing, thus justifying their willingness to use any means to get as much wealth as possible. Meanwhile, they are utterly unwilling to recognize the effect their greed and consumerism has on others, and on other peoples and nations. They point to the Pilgrims at Thanksgiving, and extrapolate the thankfulness of those Pilgrims to conclude that it is entirely due to the blessing of God that the United States has such an elevated standard of living.

But they are unwilling to ask hard questions, such as, “If the U.S. has only five percent of the world's population, yet consumes 40 percent of the world's energy, where does the 40 percent come from? How do we get it?” They don't dare to face the real story behind much of our material prosperity. And they demonize anyone who suggests that they might have to share their wealth with others, or – horror of horrors! – to learn to live on less. Thus one former acquaintance of mine, when asked why we don't just get out of Iraq since our war there is unjust, responded by saying “Do you want Iran to get all that oil?!”

Look at the political agendas of many Religious Right organizations during from the 1980's to the 2008 election. See how much of these agendas had to do with economic issues or immigration or environmental issues instead of moral issues. When the world sees this, are they not correct to conclude that many who call themselves Christian in this country are selfish materialists who don't share well with others? As Ken and Peg Balcom once sang,

We have enough

to almost last forever;

Add up our stuff -

The sum is ordinary love.

Ordinary love is nothing new;

We ordinarily love ourselves.

Those lyrics are meant to be a rebuke of the materialism practiced by so many Americans. Let evangelicals hear that rebuke as well. If we were less materialistic – evidenced by a willingness to play fair with the rest of the world and to share what we have – such a testimony might induce more people to repent of their sins (including homosexuality and abortion) and to believe in Christ.

Evangelicals, take a look at yourselves in these mirrors:

http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2008/10/torture_and_evangelicals.html

http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2008/09/frc-racist-obama-waffles-flap.html#more

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/13/conservative-political-fo_n_126243.html