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The holy comes in a moment when we are captured by beauty, and a dance of delight swirls us beyond the moment to taste the expanse of eternity in, around, and before us.
The holy usually comes in unexpected, utterly surprising moments where the gift of goodness opens our heart to wonder and gratitude.
Delight doesn’t require a journey thousands of miles away to taste the presence of God, but it does require a separation from the mundane, an intentional choice to enter joy and follow God as he celebrates the glory of his creation and his faithfulness to keep his covenant to redeem the captives.
Sabbath rest is entered when we refuse to be bound by complexity or drowned by despair.
We enter delight only as we gaze equally and simultaneously at creation and redemption, in spite of the darkness that surrounds us and constantly clamors to be truer than God.
Many who take the Sabbath seriously and intentionally ruin it with legislation and worrisome fences that protect the Sabbath but destroy its delight. For many Sabbath keepers, it is a day of duty, diligence, and spiritual focus that eschews play and pleasure for Bible reading, prayer, naps, and tedious religious services that seem designed to suck the air out of the soul.
A feast is a rhythm of listening and learning together. A feast is a ritual or remembrance that involves food, music, dancing, and stories; we remember the time when we dined with God in the garden, and we anticipate the day when we will dine with God in the new heavens and earth.2
what would I do for a twenty-four-hour period of time if the only criteria was to pursue my deepest joy?
The choice to go—to Sabbath—in the face of uncertainty and struggle is the true war with Sabbath. We often fail to create a day of delight because to do so compels us to stand against the division, destitution, and despair that often holds us captive the other six days of the week.
My friend’s day was merely time off from work. Eugene Peterson calls this version of a Sabbath a “bastard Sabbath.”1
We are afraid of joy—and the Sabbath is welcoming God as our host who intends to bless us with delight on this day.
Many of us are afraid of delight. It seems to stand in such contrast to our harried multitasking.
Delight stands counter to grief. There is so much uncertainty and loss in our lives, from the death of a parent to the rising cost of gasoline. To consider what delights us is to stand accused by the countless moments of onerous obligation and unfulfilled dreams. Instead, we would rather settle for distraction than open our hearts to what seems beyond our wildest dreams. We have learned to manage our disappointment with God, and we don’t want our desire for delight to seduce us again.
We are driven because our work brings us power and pride that dulls our deeper desire for delight. We are far more practiced and comfortable with work than play. We are far better at handling difficulties than joy.
Joy is lighter than sorrow and escapes our grasp with a fairylike, ephemeral adieu.2 Sorrow settles in like a 280-pound boar that has no intention of ever departing. One calls us to action and the other to grace. Which is easier: to work for your salvation with the self-earned power of self-righteousness or to receive what is not deserved or owed, but freely given and fully humbling? Humanity is not made for Sabbath; Sabbath was made for all God’s creation: male, female; slave, free; Jew, Gentile; believer, unbeliever; beast of burden, and the ground itself.3 And Sabbath is not merely the
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It is suggested by many Jewish commentators that God created menuha on the seventh day. Menuha is the Hebrew word for rest, but it is better translated as joyous repose, tranquility, or delight. “To the biblical mind Menuha is the same as happiness and stillness, as peace and harmony. . . . It is the state in which there is no strife and no fighting, no fear and no distrust.”4
God didn’t rest in the sense of taking a nap or chilling out; instead, God celebrated and delighted in his creation. God entered the joy of his creation and set it free to be connected but separate from the artist.
No wonder we are so afraid of the Sabbath. It is nearly impossible to believe that God wants us to have a day of wonder, delight, and joy. It is more than unbelievable; it is often a burden to consider the Sabbath as a play day with God and others.
For six days, I wrestle with a world under the toil of the curse, soiled by the oil of humanity’s commerce, deeply longing for the bright wings of the coming dawn. And each day, at best, is a repetition of the day before, unless the next day is the Sabbath. It is the queen of all days, the day in which division, destitution, and death are put aside to celebrate our union with God, the abundance of his love, and the wild hope of the coming kingdom.
The Sabbath is routinely rejected because it is one of our most profound tastes of grace.6
The core of delight is our capacity to worship, to create and enter beauty as a reminder and anticipation of God’s goodness.
Whenever I enter another person’s space, I search for beauty. I have been in single-wide trailers that felt like I walked into a Van Gogh painting. I have been in multimillion-dollar homes that felt plastic and hollow. Beauty cannot be purchased from a catalog or selected by the most sophisticated designers; holy beauty must be crafted from material that is loved.
Holy simply means set aside, not lost in the sea of everything else.
The war involves guilt and shame-based demands that we “do it right” so no one can accuse our motives or deeds, including God. We think, If I obey the rules, then not only can I not be accused, but I win the self-righteous “reward” of boasting in my rightness. We may not exercise that right, but in our perspective, we can at least store up our self-righteousness in an account to be withdrawn to pay the daily incurring debts of failure. We hate the demand of rules; we refuse the freedom of parameters that allow us nearly infinite room to play.
God stood back from each day of creation and declared that it was good. God called what he saw beautiful in that everything he created revealed something different about his glory.
Creation is not God, nor is it merely an extension of the God presence; it is distinct and other.
One must stand before creation in awe and with gratitude if one is to see, taste, smell, hear, and touch God.
Creation is not a concept; it is a work of art—like a fragrant and tasty stew, a roiling and radiant van Gogh, or a soft and tender touch of a mother—and it can’t be known without sensual wonder.
Awe must propel us to gratitude. To whom will we give thanks for the breathtaking beauty of Mount Cook,
Worship is a knowing that transforms us because we can barely take in the beauty, let alone speak to the Creator and hope to be heard.
What intrigues, amazes, tickles your fancy, delights your senses, and casts you into an entirely new and unlimited world is the raw material of Sabbath.
The only parameter that is to guide our Sabbath is delight. Will this be merely a break or a joy?
We need time, as if God has not allotted to us all that we are meant to have. We make time, as if we had the power to create it. We steal time, as if we could add more to our lives. We spend and use time, as if it really were a commodity.
Abraham Heschel writes, “Space is exposed to our will; we may shape and change the things in space as we please. Time, however, is beyond our reach, beyond our power.”7 We
time doesn’t have to be redeemed or used or stolen or made or spent; instead, we are called to submit to time as the medium in which we live.
The oddity is that the more we treat time like an extension of a machine, called a clock, the more we are bound to time as if it is the boss and we are the slave.
Time is not lost or gained, spent or used—one can only do that with space: time can only be honored as a gift.
Alexander Schmemann exposes the darkness of our frenzied labor: “The joyless rush is interrupted by relaxation, but such is the horror of the strange vacuum covered by this truly demonic word, ‘relaxation,’ that men must take pills to endure it.”13
We rush at great speed; and the faster we move, the less human we become.
Madeline Bunting writes, “The harder you work, the longer and the more intense your hours, the more pressure you experience, the more intense is the drive to repair, console, restore, and find periodic escape through consumerism.”14
We ride this bullet at increasingly intense speeds. Speed becomes a drug that helps us escape seeing our empty, dull, time-addicted lives.
David Whyte wrote, Speed is the ultimate defense, the antidote to stopping and really looking. If we really saw what we were doing and who we had become, we feel we might not survive the stopping and the accompanying self-appraisal. So we don’t stop, and the faster we go, the harder it becomes to stop. We keep moving on whenever any form of true commitment seems to surface. Speed is also warning, a throbbing, insistent indicator that some cliff edge or other is very near, a sure diagnostic sign that we are living someone else’s life and doing someone else’s work. But speed saves us the pain...
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Time is to be submitted to, honored, and enjoyed. And all views of time that fail to do so are doomed to never receiving the Sabbath.
Sabbath stands at the end of the week and at the beginning of the next as the bridge between past and future. Far more, it is the day that bridges two great events in time: creation by God and the re-creation of the new heavens and earth by God.
Sabbath remembers creation and anticipates re-creation.
The most commonly held view of time in the Western world was developed by Augustine. In his highly subjective view of time, the present doesn’t exist—there is only the past and the future. The past is entered by memory and is spent, gone, and mostly regretted. The future cannot be known or remembered; therefore, its uncertainty causes us worry.16 Time, for Augustine, is not a matter of joy; it is wearisome and hard.
African tribes see time as episodic rather than chronologically linear.17 Consequently, keeping time is not the goal as much as being in the rhythm or the flow of time.
Time and I are not at odds; we are not competitors, enemies, or even friends; we are lovers.
We are not to work on the Sabbath because it takes us out of the play of joy.
To spend the day entirely inside on the Sabbath is to forget the sounds of bird twill, the rush of the wind, and the warming fragrance of the dawn.
