Texts: Deuteronomy 15:1-18; John 12:1-8

This is week five of Lent, and so the fifth angle we’re taking on Sabbath.  So far we’ve focused mostly on Sabbath as a personal practice.  To review: Sabbath is a sanctuary in time, a certain sort of space-time sacred architecture.  Sabbath is a way of practicing freedom by ceasing from all that tries to enslave us: to-do lists, consumerism, self-importance.  The invitation into Sabbath is not so much like an exasperated Voluntary Service worker ripping up the creations of a persistently active child with the words “this is what happens when we don’t follow the rules,” as it is a way of enjoying that which has been created.  And Sabbath is a way of remembering, remembering original blessing.  That we are blessed and beloved not because of what we do and what we produce, but because of who we inherently are, children of the Creative Spirit whose image we all bear.

If you’re just now joining us, that’s the last month in summary.

Sabbath is personal, but it’s not merely private.  Sabbath practices have broad implications on our collective life.  Sabbath shapes the economy of relationships between people, plants and animals, oxygen and carbon, soil and sun.

Sabbath very much has to do with one of the most under-reported themes of Scripture, and Jesus’ ministry: Economics.  Sabbath economics.

One of my go-to gurus on the topic of economics is an old farmer who lives down in Henry County, Kentucky.  His name is Wendell Berry.  Maybe you’ve heard of him.  It’s difficult to lift out just one thing he has to say on the matter, but this past week I thought of a collection of essays he published in 2010 titled What Matters?  Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth.  In one of the essays he makes an observation about our Anabaptist…

Texts: Genesis 1:1-13; 1:26-2:3; John 3:14-21

Long, long ago, before you and me – before people – before animals, plants and bacteria, before the earth, and stars, before anything.  When the universe was just an unrehearsed verse in the mind of God, all was dark and unformed.  Only a breath from the Creator swept across the void.

The breath gathered into a shape, a word.  That word was “light,” and when it was spoken, there it was – light.  And the Creator saw that the light was good.  The light was separated from the darkness, and thus began the dance of night and day, evening and morning.

The generation of light was assigned to the stars, and with it the power of creating the full range of elements.   Stars were born and stars died, and in their death they seeded the expanding order with these elemental gifts out of which the rest of creation would be formed.

The Creator spoke again.  Rocks clustered and crashed and formed a planet, a dome with waters above and below, sky and seas, and dry land.  And the Creator saw that this was good.  To the land and sea was given the power to bring forth life.  Plants of all kinds grew and flourished.  To them was given the ability to catch the sun, to splice molecules and rearrange elements to create food for themselves and enrich the atmosphere.  Animals of all kinds grew and flourished, fed by the plants and air.  The land and the sea teamed with life.  The rhythm of evening and morning continued, as life improvised a melody.  And the Creator saw and heard that it was good.

The Creator spoke again, the most daring word yet.  “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them” have self-reflective consciousness…

Texts: John 2:13-22; Exodus 20:1-17

I want to start off this morning by telling you a story.  It’s a story that happened about six years ago, and before I can tell it, I feel like I need to give a disclaimer: when you hear the story, some of you are going to laugh, some of you are going to cringe, and some of you are going to do both but feel bad about it. 

Before I moved to Columbus, I spent three years as part of Mennonite Voluntary Service where I volunteered full time for the Boys and Girls Club in Hutchinson, Kansas.  During my third year I was promoted (as much as a volunteer can be promoted), and I was put in charge of an entire afterschool site where I oversaw a staff of 11 adults and around 100 Kindergarten through sixth grade students every afternoon. 

It was a very sink-or-swim kind of situation and I still have regular nightmares about standing in front of a gym full of unruly elementary school kids trying to get their attention.  I tell you this to build sympathy about how stressful the job could be.  Remember that.  And if it helps, remember I wasn’t really getting paid. 

Every year, the Boys and Girls Club participated in the national Lights On Afterschool celebration to raise awareness about the importance of afterschool programs.  Oftentimes this meant a day filled with extra activities, special guests, and sometimes even local media might show up.  So to sum up, once a year, we threw aside all our well-oiled routines and clear expectations, and, instead, all the adults spent the day trying to herd confused yet overly excited groups of children through new situations with unclear expectations; all the while there might be a photographer ready to capture a perfect moment of chaos. …

Texts: Deuteronomy 5:1-7; 12-15; Mark 8:31-38

Before Sabbath was a holy day, a noun, it was a verb, with nothing particularly holy about it.  To sabbath means to cease, to desist, to rest.  Verbs are action words, and sabbath is an action word meaning, basically, to refrain from action.  Sabbath is the un-verb.

The first four times the word appears in the Bible it is in verb form.  It’s mentioned twice in Genesis 2, where the Creator Elohim famously and somewhat mysteriously ceases, rests, sabbaths from all creative activity.  This happens on the seventh day, which is not yet called the Sabbath.  The seventh day is declared holy because on it Elohim sabbathed.

It’s mentioned nowhere else in the book of Genesis, and so we’re on to Exodus, chapter five, where Pharaoh is scolding Moses and Aaron for daring to ask for a three day holiday for the Hebrew slaves.  Holidays and paid vacation leave were not a part of the slave memorandum of understanding.  Rather than give them a break, Pharaoh makes their work more difficult, demanding the same quotas for brick production, while making them provide not just labor, but some of the materials.  From now on, the Hebrews will have to gather their own straw to mix with clay.  Pharaoh says to Moses and Aaron, “Why are you taking the people away from their work.  Get to your labor!  Now they are more numerous than the people of the land and yet you want them to stop working!”  It’s that very last phrase that translates Sabbath.  To sabbath = to stop working.  Pharaoh is anxious about the demographic shift of the foreign slaves starting to outnumber native born Egyptians, and yet Moses wants them to sabbath?  How could this possibly help Pharaoh’s bottom line?  In Pharoah’s economy, sabbath is…

Texts: Mark 1:9-15; Exodus 16:1-5; 13-26

Over the years I’ve watched my fair share of TED talks.  One that left a big impression was also one of the shortest.  It’s a talk by Jessa Gamble from way back in 2010 titled “Our natural sleep cycle is nothing like what we do now.”   Rather than the standard 18ish minute TED talk, this one is only three minutes and 55 seconds.

Her talk goes something like this: Humans, like all other multicell organisms, plants and animals, have an internal clock.  It’s part of our chemical make up, linked to the daily cycle of light and darkness.  Humans evolved close to the equator, where days and nights are about equal, so our body clocks are most naturally equipped for this kind of cycle.  But we’ve spread to every corner of the globe, where daylight and night time hours are not evenly split, and of course our modern world of abundant artificial light throws another curve at our sleeping patterns.

But we seem to have a fairly persistent body clock, even when we don’t know whether it’s night or day.  Jessa Gamble cites studies of people having their watches taken away and living in a bunker underground for weeks and months at time, with a combination of darkness and artificial light.  After the initial disorientation, participants settled into a consistent sleeping pattern, what Gamble and others refer to as our natural sleep cycle.  It matched up with what we know about pre-industrial sleeping patterns.

It turns out we most naturally sleep twice, rather than once.  Participants would go to sleep around 8pm, wake up around midnight, have about a two hour span of alert wakefulness, and then go back to sleep from about 2am until sunrise.  Eight hours of sleep in a ten hour window…ish.  During…