Scripture: Matthew 6:25-34
For at least the last couple of months people have been occasionally asking me whether I was looking forward to my sabbatical or getting excited about it yet. And for the last couple of months I have been saying, “Well, maybe a little bit, but there are too many other things on my mind from day to day for me to think very much really about the sabbatical. I honestly haven’t been thinking about it very much.” Today, though, I can finally say, “Yes, I’m thinking about my sabbatical.”
For those of you who don’t know or may have lost track of when this was all happening, tomorrow I will begin a three-month sabbatical and since I’ll be taking two weeks of my vacation at the end of that time, I will be away from Sojourners until July 30. I’m reminded of one of those bloopers, things that have reportedly appeared in church bulletins or newsletters and get passed around. I remember one that said something like, “This Sunday Pastor Harris will deliver his last sermon as our pastor, following which the choir will sing “Hallelujah, Praise the Lord.”
I have to tell you that this is a new experience for me. I have been in the ministry serving churches for 38 years, and I have never before had a sabbatical. Most, if not all, conferences of the United Church of Christ, as well as many other denominations, recommend sabbaticals for their clergy, but few local churches actually provide them. Not only have I never had one myself, I have not known very many clergy who have taken a sabbatical. All of which is to say that although sabbaticals are supposed to be standard practice according to denominational guidelines, they are far from actually being standard practice, and I am grateful to Sojourners that you saw fit to include it in my contract when I came here seven years ago. The contract called for a three month sabbatical after five years of service, but I was not ready when five years rolled around and it was a bad time in the life of the church for me to be away, as we were just moving into this building and in the middle of a capital campaign. But I am ready now, and I am grateful for the opportunity.
And now that the time for the sabbatical has come and it is very much on my mind, my thoughts for the sermon this morning couldn’t help but have something to do with sabbatical. Maybe some of what I have to say today is not really in what I would normally think of as sermon mode, but this is just where I am today. So, some thoughts occasioned by an approaching sabbatical.
I think Jim Gibson, in a congregational meeting when we were discussing this sabbatical, pointed out that the word sabbatical is related to the word Sabbath. Certainly that’s one way to look at a sabbatical as a kind of Sabbath time, and in fact that’s the way I am approaching it, and my thoughts this morning grow out of that framework of thinking about the sabbatical as a Sabbath time.
Maybe not, though, in quite the most direct way or the most usual way of thinking about Sabbath. To me the most usual way of thinking about keeping a Sabbath time is to think of it as a time of rest. The fourth commandment as written in Exodus says: “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work…For in six days God made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, but rested on the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it.” Rooted in the fact that even God took a day of rest after being in labor for six days giving birth to creation, the Sabbath day proclaims a day of rest for God’s people, and the principle has been used in many contexts. In ancient Israel any given parcel of land was to lie fallow for one year in seven, and the 50th year, the jubilee year, the Sabbath of Sabbaths, people were to be released from prison and forgiven their debts and have any land they had had to sell returned to them. The early labor movement in this country argued against the seven-day work week partly on the basis that it violated the Sabbath, violated the will of God, or at least violated the rhythm of work and rest that God built in to the nature of things.
Well, I am not against rest, and I can assure you that I intend to take it easy at least some of the time during the next three and a half months, but viewing the Sabbath as purely and simply a time of rest is not quite the way I’m approaching this particular Sabbath time for myself, or quite the way I approach the idea of Sabbath in general for that matter. So far as this sabbatical is concerned, rest is frankly not at the top of my list as far as the things I think I need to attend to. I continue to love my work at Sojourners and I don’t feel like I’m burned out or that I am fighting burn-out. I recognize that it’s a good thing to head off burn-out before it arrives and that rest is important in that way, but I see that as something that needs to be built in to daily life, not so much as something that needs to come around every five or seven years. So I’m not thinking about sabbatical so much in those terms.
That’s why I didn’t choose one of the scriptures that speaks of the Sabbath in that way for the scripture reading for today. The passage from the sermon on the mount that says “consider the lilies of the field”…well, I chose it partly because it’s one of my favorite passages and I don’t think we’ve read it in worship in quite a long time, but I also chose it because without mentioning Sabbath at all, it communicates something of the qualities I associate with Sabbath time and that I am wanting to have as part of this Sabbath time that’s about to begin for me.
By the way, I asked Ava to read scripture today because she is going on sabbatical too—not from Monticello but from Sojourners. She can use a break from church life too, at least from the usual routine of church life, and of course it will allow us to do things together for whole weekends at a time, which is not a possibility for us very often. So don’t call her either for the next three months…not about church business, I mean.
As for how I am approaching this Sabbath time for myself…John Corlett used an expression at the end of a meeting we were involved in recently. We were talking about some things that don’t get done or thought about because they don’t seem urgent and so they get put off and put off and put off until one day they become urgent and it’s too late to give them the attention they should have had. John said, “That’s the tyranny of the everyday.” Or maybe he said “the tyranny of the immediate.” I think the phrase was something like that. That’s the gist of it anyway. It’s the idea that the things that are at the top of your “to do” list are those things that need to get done today or tomorrow or this week and there may be very important things that deserve to be paid attention to but that are not anything that needs attention today or tomorrow and therefore they never make it anywhere near the top of the “to do” list and if we aren’t careful we end up putting those things off indefinitely. It’s not inevitable of course, but it’s a real danger.
For me sabbatical will mean being released from the tyranny of the everyday. It will mean reading some novels that have been waiting for me for a while and that never seem to make it to my everyday to-do list. It will mean, as most of you know, some time to educate myself by reading and by personal involvement about the past and present of Virginia Indians, an interest that’s been growing in me over the last couple of years and that I’ve been able to devote some time to but not nearly enough. Other than again some books that I’ve put on a reading list for myself, I’m not quite sure where that will lead me, but I know I’m headed at least partly in that direction. And I can tell you that I’ll be participating in a public worship service on May 20 in Chesterfield, Henricus Park, that will involve tribal leadership and some leadership from the African American religious community— part of what are being referred to as the Jamestown Signature Events. There will be a weekend of them in Chesterfield May 18-20. I’m not sure what I’ll think of that, but I’ll let you know. We’ll see where all that leads me, and we’ll see where else the spirit may lead me when I’m not being directed by my usual everyday to-do list. I’m also thinking that Sabbath time for me in this instance, and in general for anyone anytime, means being de-programmed, and not substituting one to-do list for another. So I am trying to be intentional about not being too intentional in my approach to this time. I think of it as leaving room for the spirit.
It’s interesting that in Deuteronomy, where there’s a second listing of the ten commandments, instead of connecting the Sabbath to God resting on the seventh day of creation, it says, “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt and the Lord your God brought you out with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore you are to keep the Sabbath.” Deuteronomy connects Sabbath not with rest but with release. They’re not necessarily completely different from each other, but they’re not exactly the same either.
And similar to the need to be released from the “tyranny of the immediate” is the need, especially in the church, to be released from the tyranny of institutional needs and demands. The church has this kind of double life it leads. On the one hand the church is an institution and has the same needs any other institution has to be on sound footing from an organizational standpoint. One sure way to have institutional needs become way too important in the life of the church is to pay no attention to them. So there is certainly a need for the church—meaning us—to be honest and realistic about this and to pay attention to the church as an institution. At the same time it is important for the church—meaning us—to know that its heart and soul is not in the institutional aspect of its life, that paying attention to the needs of the institution is not what we’re all about. A Sabbath time for me will be a time to be released from the institutional side of church, not so that I won’t need to think about the church at all for three months, which is unrealistic, but so that I can step back from the institutional life of the church and think and pray about it from a different perspective. Right now I don’t know exactly what this means, but the different perspective, whatever is involved in that and whatever it turns out to be, I know will be a good thing for me. And I should say that I believe the church too is in need of some Sabbath time, stepping back from its everyday and institutional needs and having some time for reflection and conversation from some different perspectives. Some of that is already being thought about and I’m anticipating that there will be some of that kind of Sabbath time for the church too after I return and maybe some before I return.
Let me come back to the “lilies of the field”. As I started to say back toward the beginning of this sermon, it is a passage that brings to mind some of what I am associating with Sabbath time. In a way it suggests a release of the “tyranny of the everyday”. “Considering the lilies of the field” is not something that is even on most people’s to-do list, much less near the top of it, although it could be, and maybe it should be. It also doesn’t particularly advance any institutional or organizational interests. So to me considering the lilies is a kind of a Sabbath time activity. Not only is it not about lists and tasks and institutional needs, not only does it offer a different perspective to schedule-driven, anxiety-filled, goal-oriented lifestyles, it suggests that we stop to take sheer delight, not just in birds of the air and lilies of the field of course, but sheer delight in God, in God’s world, in the gift of life, in the people who delight us and maybe even those who don’t. You don’t need to take three and a half months off to do that of course, but I do hope that my sense of delight will be nurtured during this Sabbath time that is about to begin. Meanwhile, may the rest of the people of Sojourners, may you also find ways to nurture delight in God, in God’s world, in one another. See you soon. Amen.
Jim Bundy
April 15, 2007