“I came that they may have life,
and have it abundantly.”
~Jesus (John 10:10b)
You are invited to practice Sabbath this Lent. You are invited on a journey of restoration, joy, delight, and coming back to yourself. Now, bear with me here, because I know that this invitation might not be one you are eager to accept. Because, if you are like most of us, we struggle with sabbath. We don’t rest easily or well. We are depleted and struggle to truly feel restored. And many of us have felt the weight of restriction and even shame around keeping the sabbath.
In fact, maybe you have memories of blue laws or a list of forbidden activities on the sabbath. Maybe sabbath evokes boredom, or stricture. Maybe you experience guilt about how difficult it is, perhaps it even seems impossible, to have a sabbath practice at this point in your life. Maybe you struggle to get the point of sabbath and wonder if it’s an outmoded practice that doesn’t fit into our modern existence.
And so the invitation to practice sabbath is first to rediscover and reclaim sabbath around its deeper, more original intentions, and to do so in a way that is actually life-giving, free of guilt, shame, and stricture.
Sabbath is all about our flourishing and experiencing the fullness of life, and indeed that of all creation. Sabbath is about delight, joy, peace, and praise. Sabbath is about our liberation and has the power to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in our world. Sabbath practices help to fill our physiological, psychological, spiritual, and social needs. It can even make us more creative and innovative. Sabbath seeks our salvation and wholeness, and that of all the world.
A further part of the invitation into Sabbath Practice is to try it out, build some “sabbath muscle”, knowing that there is little in our culture that encourages us to practice sabbath. So we need each other on this journey we are undertaking, so we can encourage each other in this way of living in this world that is quite foreign to most of us.
We’ve named sabbath as one of the “jubilee” practices in our church’s vision. We further claim it as a gracious, restorative, healing space within each of us, and among us collectively. Sabbath can be thought of as occupying one whole day a week, but sabbath can take many forms. Just as Jesus showed us in the sabbath stories in the gospels, sabbath doesn’t fit so neatly into a one-size-fits-all box. Sabbath is for us and for our wholeness and delight. So on this journey, you are invited to experiment to find a sabbath form that fits this season of your life.
What’s at stake, you might ask, as we consider this invitation into Sabbath Practice? At one level, given that sabbath is so difficult for most of us to practice, we could say that nothing is at stake. If we choose not to take this sabbath journey, things will stay much as they are. However, if we take a closer look at the way things are, we might decide that our levels of burnout, our struggles with anxiety or worry, our collective struggles with compassion, our overall health, the health and justice of our societal systems, and the health of our planet aren’t what God intends for us and aren’t moving us toward the fullness of life. Sabbath practice holds within it the possibility for restoration for ourselves and the way God intends us to live, individually, and collectively. It will not change overnight, and possibly it will take longer than 40 days to see signs of new life. Yet 40 days is a start, a solid one, in fact.
And so, in this Lenten season of repentance, focused on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, let’s go on this Sabbath Journey together. Within these pages you’ll find wisdom and ideas from others in this community, along with daily Sabbath practices that invite you to bring sabbath into your worship, your work, your community, your well-being, your work for justice, your basic human needs, and your experience of delight and joy. This booklet is your map, but it’s not the only map. Bring in your own resources, wisdom, insight! And share it with your travel companions!
Come along the journey, and let’s see together how sabbath brings restoration and new life. May we have life and have it abundantly!
Peace and love,
Pastor Jenny
