Ordinary Work

We are a culture that is not good at resting, and if you want to talk about a Sabbath, forget it. Our world is on the go 24/7/365 and we have to keep up. 

Don't we? 

The idea of a day of rest seems old-fashioned, antiquated, out of touch with present reality. Nobody can rest for an entire day per week, can they? 

That depends, I guess, on your definition of rest. 

I have been observing a weekly Sabbath for 14 years or so, consistently. Not perfectly, but consistently. A big part of this is that I spend my Sundays disconnected (a little hiccup has been streaming online church, but that is an exception I'm willing to make). I don't turn on my desktop computer, and without social media on my phone, I am unplugged on Sundays. Period. I also try to limit my going out, my shopping, etc. Anything that can wait, does. If I am taking a day off of work, it is only right that I should not make others work on my day of rest. 

The Bible has plenty to say about the Sabbath, and most of us read it as a day of rest. Period. We have read the stories of the Law, and we have read Jesus push back. "If your livestock fell into a ditch on the Sabbath, wouldn't you pull it out?" So we have some inkling that the Sabbath is not about not doing any work. It's a little more nuanced than that. 

And indeed, when we read certain translations in English, we see that a distinction has been made. The Sabbath rest, we see, is not from work, but from ordinary work - the kind of work you do the other 6 days of the week. 

Actually, it's really interesting. In the same place in Leviticus where Moses is giving the Israelites commands about days of rest, he is also telling them about festivals, which start and end with days of rest. Sabbaths. And he says they are to do no ordinary work, but they are to go out and gather palm fronds and things. 

So here we are with an OT example right off the bat, right in the instructions about rest, that it means no ordinary work. But you can definitely do un-ordinary work. Like gathering palm fronds. 

Or pulling your livestock out of a ditch. There's something you wouldn't do every day. You'd only do that on a non-ordinary day when your livestock happens to get itself caught in a ditch. (Unless of course, you have extraordinarily dumb livestock and this actually is a regular occurrence for you.) 

The point is - your Sabbath day of rest sets the day apart in a special, meaningful way. It separates it from the other days by separating it from the things you would normally do on a regular day. Like spend several hours scrolling social media. It's not a prohibition against ordinary things as much as it is a creation of space for the extraordinary. 

So how are you creating space today?