“Once in a Blue Moon”             Vance L. Toivonen

READING                   Amos 8:4-7

Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land, saying, "When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain; and the Sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale? We will make the ephah small and the shekel great, and practice deceit with false balances, buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat." The LORD has sworn by the pride of Jacob: Surely I will never forget any of their deeds.

READING                   Matthew Fox, The Reinvention of Work

We have lost a sense of Sabbath in our lives – a sense of joy and delight, a sense of what we do when we come face-to-face with the mystery of existence itself. Jesus berated his religious tradition for legalizing the Sabbath and making the strict code of laws surrounding the Sabbath be the object of veneration rather than the miracle of the people themselves. “The Sabbath is for the people, not the people for the Sabbath.” But in our day we have reversed the process. Today the issue is not the Sabbath and its laws; we have effectively done away with them. The Sabbath serves, in our secularized society, as one more shopping day – perhaps the shopping day of the week, and thereby religion not so subtly legitimizes the idolatry of work and spend that a consumer economy demands of us…Were we to return to the wisdom of Jesus’ saying, we might paraphrase him thus: “Work is for the people; people do not exist for work.”

SERMON

First of all, let me say how proud I am to live in the drunkest state in the country. All kidding aside, this is a serious allegation. What is it about us that causes us to turn to chemicals in order to cope with life? In spite of my sarcastic volley, I am deeply concerned that we are a society that is over-stressed and dysfunctional. And if Wisconsin is the most chemically altered state in the country, other states cannot be far behind.

I was talking with a friend of mine the other day about this very thing. He wondered whether or not we as a country have been in a kind of depressing funk since 9/11/01. Add to this the pressures of an out-of-control healthcare system, an environment that is equally stressed and dysfunctional, an unending war, and the hint that a recession, or even a depression lurks around the corner like a thief on a dark city street, and we have a  potent cocktail for, well, the drinking of more cocktails.

I don’t use alchohol, or drugs recreationally. I have a bottle of rarely used hydrocodone on my shelf. I eat and spend; these are my dysfunctional coping mechanisms. And I don’t understand this, really, because my job isn’t stressful at all. Ooh, another sarcastic volley. That’s another thing that comes from stress – sarcasm.

Amos’ words point us to a source of stress. The prophet rails against those who would use deceptive practices in order to obtain more wealth. That phrase about making the ephah small and the shekel great suggests that the measure of wheat being meted out to the consumer is diminished ever so slightly. An ephah was roughly two-thirds of a bushel. In a time when digital scales had yet to be invented, it was very easy to tell the consumer that they were indeed buying a full ephah, even though a handful or two of wheat were likely missing from the container. The shekel being great, the dishonest merchant charged more for less.

How many of these business practices are prevalent today? We are all, it seems, trying so hard to get, and to keep our pieces of the pie. The fact that healthcare costs have skyrocketed and forced people to stay in the work force longer than they would have in the past also adds to this societal pressure we all feel. The Jewish merchant that Amos addresses knew about Sabbath law, as well as the law of the new moon. Business was to be halted whenever a new lunar cycle began, and every week on the Sabbath.

This is where I am headed with my thoughts this morning. We have, it seems, lost altogether the spirit of the Sabbath. It was, and still is, for Jews both ancient and orthodox, a legal reality. Business must be stopped on the occasion of the Sabbath, and the new moon. I mentioned here not long ago the blue laws I encountered in the mid-eighties in North Dakota, laws which are now a distant memory in that region.

Sabbath is, plain and simple, rest from work. It is rest from making a buck. It is rest from spending a buck. It is rest from cares and anxieties. It is rest from being over-burdened. It is rest from stressful activity. It is rest from saving the planet. It is rest from over-extension of the self. Sabbath is a time to simply be, to be still and know that God is God, and that we are not God. We touch God. We embody aspects of god-ness. Sabbath is a time to listen to the God who is other than us telling us that the world and the universe are in the hands of a loving and benevolent Creator with whom we have the privilege of co-creating. The Sabbath is meant to be pure gift, a time for renewal and refreshment, a time for attending to soul work, a time for being a child again; a child resting in the arms of God’s unconditional love, grace, and mercy.

Writing in the New York Times last year, Alain de Botton suggested that we have become misguided about our work. And let me say that when I use this word, I mean it in the broadest sense, for work can be exchanged for both financial remuneration and personal satisfaction. Work can be profitable financially, but it can also be voluntarily offered as a means of self-satisfaction. In other words, the nature of the pay-off for our work can vary, but it is pay-off nonetheless.

What Alain de Botton points out is that we have come to confuse work with self-fulfillment. He confronts, and  I quote, “the Western world’s widely held belief that our work should make us happy.” He proposes that we are misguided in our notions that work should lead to self-actualization, or that a career should complete us as human beings somehow. He reminds us that work was seen by the Greeks and Romans “as a chore best left to slaves.” Work and its accompanying toil, he also recalls, were the direct results of our sin in the garden of Eden. Work is a curse in the Old Testament, not a blessing. Solomon also bemoans work and toil as an endless evil in Ecclesiastes.

For de Botton the idea that work is this rewarding, fulfilling, wonderful gift to the human creature is a relatively modern concept, and one that likely adds again to our depression and stress. When we come to our work with such expectations and return home empty, we suffer not only great disappointment, but sometimes even despair and angst.

Work is stuff that needs to be done, plain and simple. If it is something that is done purely for the joy of it, then it is not work, but a hobby, an avocation. Very few human beings have the good fortune to combine these two; and let’s not fool ourselves into thinking otherwise. We are up against this right here at Hope right now. Nobody here wants to spend money on a roof and windows. We are facing work that has to be done. It is work. It is not a pleasurable, joy-inducing project. What would we spend these tens of thousands of dollars on if we could do whatever we wanted with it? A new piano, perhaps; or a new sound system; or air-conditioning for this old building. Or we might just do like the church down the street and build a whole new worship space. But no, we are facing work, work, work that has to be done.

Every day people in our society are engaged in work that has to be done. My service here, privilege that it is, is about work that has to be done. So, to return now to the concept of Sabbath let’s be mindful of the fact that Sabbath is the polar opposite of work. It’s roots lie in the ancient creation story in Genesis, when even God Almighty rested from work. If God Almighty needs a day off, we certainly do. I am aware of families in this congregation that have adults working 2, 3 and even 4 jobs in order to make ends meet. This is neither pleasurable nor humane.

Perhaps we have gotten to the point where our capitalocracy is as out-of-control as our environment. Just as we might need to enact laws to govern our relationship with our natural environment, so might we also need to enact laws to govern our capital environment, by getting healthcare under control, for one; and perhaps even shutting down stores and businesses occasionally to suggest that there is a natural need for human beings to stop – to just stop and be still, to be passive, to listen, and to take-in instead of putting-out.

The Sabbath is something we need to celebrate more often than once in a blue moon. The Sabbath is God’s big, cosmic stop sign. The Sabbath is the Tao Te Ching reminding us to “practice non-doing, and everything will fall into place.” The Sabbath is embodied in those words from Psalm 46, “Be still and know that I am God.” I want to close with those words in the form of a kind of poetry whose structure I cannot identify. It begins with the phrase “Be still and know that I am God.” It then removes a word or two from that phrase until we are left with just one word. I invite us now to close this time of preaching by sitting quietly, closing our eyes, resting in the moment, and hearing this regression of words. I will speak them. All I ask of you in this moment is that you sit and do nothing.

Be still and know that I am God

Be still and know that I am

Be still and know

Be still

Be