Subversive Sabbath: The Surprising Power of Rest in a Nonstop World

by A.J. Swoboda

Our brains need a Sabbath, especially from a content-driven culture in which we are bombarded with more ideas and information than at any other time in human history. Because of this, we are drowning in a deluge of information yet craving the cool waters of transformation. The words of Abraham Heschel ring true: “The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments.”

The world’s healthiest religious group is arguably the Seventh-day Adventists. This is due, in large part, to restrictions on consuming meat and alcohol, alongside a religious commitment to regular exercise. But most critical is their abiding pledge to a weekly Sabbath.

Consider the averages: a Seventh-day Adventist will live ten years longer than North American life expectancy.36 Ten years! Perhaps obeying God is not a motivating factor for some, but living longer definitely is. At a time when Americans—for the first time since the 1980s—are living shorter lives, this stands out as a statistical anomaly. There is a direct, scientifically based connection between Sabbath-keeping and longer life expectancy.

Do not forget that physical rest is only one form of rest. Sabbath is about holistic healthy living, not just sleep or rest. God desires us to have spiritual,

physical, mental, social, and emotional health. One can get all the physical sleep and rest one needs yet still be deeply drained spiritually. Or vice versa.

Because a majority of my job is deskbound, I find that on the Sabbath day I need rest from my sedentary work by entering into some kind of physical activity. This may include spending time in the garden or playing basketball. I remember spending one Sabbath day picking up piles of wood that lay around our house. Such an activity, I agree, may seem ironic given the Old Testament admonition against picking up sticks on the Sabbath day. But that, for me, was the most restful thing I could do that day. The principle is this: the Sabbath is opposite day. By that, I mean that it is wise to aim our Sabbath activities around what we do not ordinarily do for work.

Sabbath, if one desired, could easily be utilized as an escape hatch from reality. But it is not an escape from the chaos of our lives; rather, it is

finding God in the chaos.

On the Sabbath, when you are no longer attending to the system of the world, you find that it keeps going on without you. There is a beautiful Christian tradition started early in the church that has often been called “holy indifference.” One might call it “anointed irresponsibility.” The Sabbath is an act of obedience to God to give up, for one day, carrying the burdens of the world and simply letting things be the way they are. When we enter the Sabbath, we become humbled by the fact that God cares far more for the broken world than we do. His lordship and care for the world do not cease when we choose to take a day to rest. We cannot help the world the way we are supposed to without moments of respite and holy indifference, when we turn our attention and compassion to the living God.

When presented with an emotional burden on the Sabbath, I ask, Can I put off caring about this issue for one day? Or does it require that I care today? When a friend had a heart attack on the Sabbath, I could not put off caring for another day. However, when a parishioner has an issue with last week’s sermon, I can postpone that emotional burden until the day after the Sabbath. This allows me, for one day a week, to not carry the emotional burdens that I carry the other six days. On the Sabbath, our irresponsibility to the whole world becomes anointed. We are returning to God the responsibilities that he has given us to hold for a time, and we are returning to God, whom our ultimate responsibility is toward.

Sabbath is escapism from emotional slavery to our world, but it is not escapism from caring for the world.

4 Sabbath and Relationships

Our madly rushing, neurotic society needs the therapy of the silence and quietness that flows from a day kept holy, really holy. A day when our thoughts are of God, our actions are tempered by a desire to serve God and our families, a day that is so different from other days that it could make us different in our relationship to God and to our fellow men. Ernest R. Palen, in Herbert E. Saunders, The Sabbath

Sabbath is first about relationship to God. But the Sabbath is also about our relationship to each other.

Leviticus 23 makes this crucial connection: “There are six days when you may work, but the seventh day is a day of sabbath rest, a day of sacred assembly.

Cultural philosopher Zygmunt Bauman has discussed the two kinds of community people often enter into in this modern world: “peg communities” and “ethical communities.” Peg communities, Bauman writes, are communities forged by disconnected spectators around a mutually loved experience like a rock concert or a sporting match. Their participation is a feeling or a sense around something shared. Ethical communities, in stark contrast, are long-term commitments that are marked by the giving up of rights and service. In short, ethical communities are built on relationships of responsibilities.7 These are relationships formed by commitment, love, covenant, and even familial fidelity. One of the fundamental shifts in our social matrix is that our relationships are increasingly made up of the peg communities rather than ethical communities. The latter, Bauman articulates, do not play the role they used to in the making of human society. Let me contrast these two kinds of community. A book club is a peg community. In this community, we gather with others around a shared commitment to something we all enjoy. As long as we like books and feel that the book club is delivering something beneficial to each of us, then the community will continue. A marriage, however, is an ethical community. I am in it “till death do us part.” If my wife were dying of cancer, I would stay. When things are hard, we work them out. We continue even when it is not the best emotional option. In peg community,...

As far as I can tell, in the Gospels, love leads to crucifixion. I am convinced that the kind of community that we yearn for and need most is severely lacking in the church today—a place where we learn to love even the people we do not like.

In that ethical community, Democrats and Republicans worship together, men and women serve together, and majority and minority can be reconciled.

The Sabbath is the gateway to God’s dream community.

I have preached widely on sexuality, marijuana, polyamory, refugees, immigrants, and the unborn, alongside other topics that naturally make people upset. Still, I have never seen my people as hostile to my preaching than during those three sermons on the Sabbath. What is so threatening about a day of rest?

I have come to the conclusion that the topic of Sabbath-keeping is so hostile to American Christianity because Americans often worship their time. We think time is ours.

Following these experiences, I reflected a great deal on the hostility of American Christianity toward the Sabbath. In the midst of our Sabbath experiment, I was in a meeting with our church’s financial board. Sitting there, it dawned on me that were I to cheat on my wife, I would lose my job. If I stole from the church, I would be run out of town. If I lied about the church finances, I would be in huge trouble. If I worshiped another god, I’d be removed. There are nine commandments that, if I chose to break, I might lose my ministry over. But if I did not keep a Sabbath day, I would probably get a raise. We have forgotten we have Ten Commandments. Again, for the person who says that we no longer need to rest, I would be curious which of the other commandments they think are antiquated.

We have basically changed a commandment into a suggestion.

Youth pastors especially should Sabbath because it is they who pass our current model of Christianity to the next generation.

Not to mention we should be training them for lifelong ministry. Sabbath-breaking, of course, cannot sustain lifelong ministry.

What if the church became the best place in the world to learn how to rest? This is an exhausting world, friend. Everyone is weary. Anxiety is rampant. Whenever I’m preaching and I catch a glimpse of someone nodding off in the back, I cannot help but celebrate a little inside. That’s okay. Nod off. This is the church. And there should be no safer place to rest than this. As pastors, we need to be okay with people actually resting while we talk about resting.

often fear what will happen when we are absent. But we fail to recognize that our absence is not the absence of God, and that God loves his church more than we do. Jesus is the head of his church. Sometimes, in order for God to accomplish what he wants to accomplish, he needs us to get out of the way.

Years ago, a series of studies sought to determine how a fence, a boundary, affected the cognition and behavior of children in a playground. The researchers constructed a playground with no fences. During the experiment, the children stayed in the center—almost in fear—and never ventured out beyond the playground structure. Then the researchers put up a fence. Immediately, the children’s behavior changed. Instead of fearfully staying in the center of the playground, they roamed with freedom all the way to the fence, exploring and enjoying the entire space.16 Ironically, fences brought freedom. It was the absence of fences that created fear and apprehension.

I have had to come to terms with the reality that what is restful for me is not always what is most restful for my wife. And that difference is sacred.

In the Gospels, we can see clearly that there was great disagreement over what was an acceptable Sabbath activity and what was not. For instance, on one occasion Jesus walks with his disciples through a field, picking heads of grain to eat on the Sabbath. The Pharisees stand there watching, disapproving. Jesus confronts them for their narrow religious perspective (Matt. 12:1–8). Two lessons can be learned from this story. First, it is not the work of the Spirit to stand and critique other people’s activity on the Sabbath. If we ever spend our day of rest judging everyone else’s activity, we have improperly understood the heart of the Sabbath. And second, what looked like work for some was actually rest and nourishment for others. Only Jesus is the judge.

The work of Jesus is very different from the work of this world. This is seen in Luke 13:10–17. Jesus heals a woman. He says, “Woman, you are set free from your infirmity.” The synagogue leader is angry because Jesus “worked” on the Sabbath. Jesus then criticizes the religious leaders for having untied their animals while he was willing to untie a woman. This is true: what is work for one is not work for another. What was work for the Pharisees was not work for Jesus.

To be candid, my own marriage may not have survived had it not been for our Sabbath commitment, which has helped us rethink boundaries with the world and each other and even helped us cultivate intimacy. Sabbath is a gift to marriages. But one would not learn this by reading many of the Puritans who came to America. Many of their writings reflect a strict prohibition of sexual contact on the Sabbath. To “sanctify” a Sabbath, one must not kiss, fondle, or make love. There is one particular minister in Massachusetts who refused to baptize babies who were born on the Sabbath, being well aware that if they were born on the Sabbath, they probably were conceived on the Sabbath. His policy continued until the minister’s wife delivered a set of twins—on the Sabbath.17 Some Christian traditions, sadly, have offered a tepid view of the connection between the Sabbath and sex. The Council of Rouen in Gaul (650 CE) articulated the belief that sex on the day before the Sabbath was prohibited. If a married couple had sex the night before the Sabbath, they were not allowed at the Lord’s Table.18 Harsh, indeed.

The rabbis, thankfully, were not as prudish. In the Jewish tradition, Sabbath was a day to enjoy marital sex.

Sex does not count as work, praise God. Anecdotal evidence suggests, in my experience, that Sabbath sex is the best. I imagine it has something to do with the fact that it is the one day in a week that our hearts and minds are fully present to each other.

A recent study found a linear relationship between frequency of sex and reported happiness up to a frequency of once a week. In other words, couples’ happiness and well-being increased with the frequency of sex, but that level of happiness maxed out at the frequency of having sex about once a week.21 Perhaps we might keep the Jewish tradition going: let there be lots and lots of Sabbath sex. You can just tell the kids it is “nap time.”

The Sabbath is good news to children. Recently, I was preaching at a nationally known church. The pastor was taking a sabbatical to rest and care for his soul. A number of families in the church had been taking public pot shots at him for being lazy and unfit for ministry. I preached on Sabbath-keeping and its importance for spiritual formation. Unbeknownst to me, the wife and children of the pastor had decided to come to church that Sunday. After the service, they approached me in the pastor’s office. With tears in their eyes, the children hugged me and thanked me for granting their dad permission to come home and be with them.

While I am not single, I do have many single friends and single parishioners. What I have seen is that the most daunting part of a Sabbath for them is the idea of spending the day alone when they have felt alone all week long. What the single person can learn is that one has freedom to do on the Sabbath what one’s spirit and soul needs. If being with people is life giving, be with people. If being alone is life giving, be alone.

A single person should not feel obliged to Sabbath in the same way others do. Resting and enjoying the Sabbath day should not entail a slavish commitment to solitude if it does not bring life. Again, ask, “Is it life giving?”

5 Sabbath, Economy, and Technology

In a rat-race world where one is expected to climb over the dead bodies of those in competition, the church is called to holy simplicity and contentment.

While not all of us have a business that we can shut down one day a week, we all have the power to

take a day a week from spending and purchasing. Such a practice, as difficult as it may seem, not only serves those who work in business but also helps to guard our minds and souls against the corrosive dangers of consumer idolatry.

Jesus’s first sermon—preached on the Sabbath day—was about freeing the oppressed (Luke 4:14–30). Jesus knew he was the second Moses. The exodus foreshadowed a time when people would no longer be slaves. Jesus came to lead this exodus. Sabbath helps us undo the common consumer drives that keep people in slavery. Sabbath allows us to walk in the freedom that Jesus offers.

The negative impacts of social media on our psychological well-being, for one, are becoming clearer and clearer. Reputable studies are suggesting, for instance, that constant social media use has the same effect on our brains as gambling. In gambling and social media, the user seeks a hit of some kind from the external reward.32 What was once the chime of a slot machine is now a notification of a post that has been liked or retweeted. This can lead to a whole new kind of addiction and obsession.

Consider this Sabbath technology principle: the Sabbath prefers natural light to artificial light.43 Have one day a week free of light bulbs and screens that do not respect natural life rhythms. The Sabbath returns us to natural light—to the established rhythms of God—and honors sunlight over iPhone light.

Set up email auto-reply for the Sabbath so others will not have to worry about your whereabouts.

Relentlessly “eliminate hurry from your life,”

“Hurry is not just a disordered schedule. Hurry is a disordered heart.”

have one day each week that you are not reachable by phone