Spiritual disciplines. The phrase can sound foreboding. This is our fifth week of discussing these practices that help us deal with the longing many of us have to go deeper with God. We’ve said that the disciplines are not superhuman feats for super-spiritual people, but rather are things we routinely do in order to respond to God and cultivate our relationship with Him.

Two houses, on the same street, in the same block of Anytown, U.S.A.

One house belongs to an observant Jewish family. Pretend you are part of it. Every Friday afternoon, every Friday afternoon of your life, the pace of your family life speeds up a bit.

• Extra trips to the grocery store so that you will not have to shop the next day.
• Extra preparation of food so that you will not have to prepare food the next day.
• Extra checking to ensure that the stock of candles is full.

By Friday sundown, all is in readiness. It is time for the pace to slow, and then to stop. It is the Sabbath. Until sundown on Saturday, things will be markedly different. Life slows. Work stops. Prayers, reflection, games, music, beauty.

The family gathers around the meal, candles are lit, guests are greeted. The sabbath is personified, welcomed in song. The sabbath liturgy and prayers often begin with a prayer of confession from a prayerbook: “Days pass and years vanish, and we walk sightless among miracles.” Did you hear the confession? “Days pass and years vanish, and we walk sightless among miracles.”

Down the block, another ordinary house. At 7 am the front door swings open. Mom sprints out of the house with briefcase in hand running for the bus and calling instructions over her shoulder. A moment later Dad hurriedly shuttles the three kids out to the mini-van. One is dropped off at middle school, one at elementary school, one at daycare. While driving to work, dad calls mom on the cellphone on the bus, making sure they have their assignments for the day:

“Okay. You pick Jack up at Freddy’s house after school, grab him something to eat and get him to youth group. I’ll pick Sonja up from soccer practice and make sure she starts on her homework. For heavens sake, don’t forget Eric at daycare again.

What about dinner? Pick something up.

What time will you be home? Can we switch cars so I can fit more soccer players in?

Which of us will drop by the school’s open house?

Oh, and the board meeting is tonight. Dang. I’ll have to skip.

And don’t forget I’m leaving tomorrow for L.A. I can pack tonight.”

At 10:30 pm the kids are barely in bed, field trip permission slips are forgotten, mom is on a phone call while she watches Gray’s Anatomy and dad has fallen asleep in the chair with earphones on. The next morning at 7 am, the front door swings open and mom sprints for the bus…

If this family had time to pray, it might sound very similar to the Jewish family’s sabbath confession: “Lord, we were in such a rush. Life was so busy, so full…that we missed you.”

How are you? Busy. How are you? Really busy. What is it about us that calls forth not just this answer, but this entire lifestyle? What is it about our culture that demands we be able to answer: Really, really busy.

The word “Sabbath” means “Stop. Cease. Rest.” This morning I want to invite you to think about sabbath, both a sabbath day but also a sabbath lifestyle. I perhaps erred in not making this the first spiritual discipline we talked about in this series, because it strikes me that much of our ability to practice things like scripture reading, prayer, or confession revolves around our ability to do this one thing: Stop. Cease. Rest.

From earliest times, followers of God kept the sabbath by not working on one day. Now, there are many opinions on exactly what “work” means, but Dorothy Bass says one answer is that “work is whatever requires changing the natural, material world. All week long, human beings wrestle with the natural world, tilling and hammering and carrying and burning” things that exist in space (even if it’s cyberspace now!).

On the sabbath, however, we let it be. We rest. Sabbath has to do not so much with space, but with time - the thing we all say we treasure the most, yet the thing which is consistently in short supply. We’re too busy.

I don’t think I have to convince you of this, but perhaps some of these things will resonate with your life:

- Studies say that Americans work longer hours than any other industrialized country…and that we’re proud of it. Nearly 40% of salaried employees will not use their full vacation this year.

- Generally, work hours are up, stress is up, sleep is down, relationships are down.

- Counselors are now treating people for being addicted to email. Between internet access in cafes, work, home and portable devices we are driven to check our electronics.

- We want our children to have every advantage, so we sign them up for sports, drama, music, tutors, volunteer opps. We get them computers for their rooms, and give them access to internet and cable TV.

- Edward Hallowell, a psychiatrist and author of a book called “CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked and about to Snap,” writes that he knew he had crossed into the dark side from “busy” to “crazybusy” when he was staying at a vacation house he had rented and got furious at a rotary phone (Remember those?!). His cellphone wouldn’t work, and he just about went nuts waiting for the dial to return to start position! In a calmer moment, he timed how long the dialing actually took: 11 seconds.

- You have seen (or been) people regularly walk out of school plays, worship times, piano recitals and concerts to take phone calls…or stay in them and text message on their phones.

We choose to make ourselves available to all people, all the time, for any reason, routinely, without even thinking about it. The sabbath question is: Are we making ourselves available to God? That, after all…is the intention of the sabbath.

If you read the scriptures, you will notice that sabbath, a regular time of rest, is part of the rhythm that God built into life from the very beginning. In the Genesis passage that we read earlier, the story of creation, after six days of impossibly creative work, God rests. He blesses the seventh day. He makes it holy. Karl Barth says that by resting, God declares as fully as possible just how good creation is: He simply rests, and takes pleasure in what was made.

In the Ten Commandments, the fourth commandment says “Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy,” a holy-day, a “holi-day,” that’s where we get the word.

Lest we think that sabbath-keeping was only an Old Testament practice, remember the story we read from Matthew in the New Testament. Jesus did not eliminate the sabbath. But in Jesus’ day, sabbath practices had become rather absurd. 600 laws, 39 categories of activities were forbidden because they qualified as “work.” One extreme school of thinking “literally went so far as to prohibit any attention whatsoever to the sick on the sabbath, making it illegal even to console or visit them.”

The religious leaders Jesus argued with in our story felt it illegal for Jesus’ hungry followers to pick grain to eat, and illegal for Jesus to heal someone on the sabbath.

Rather than abolishing the sabbath, Jesus returned to why it existed. The sabbath was to allow people to rest and enjoy God’s presence. The sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the sabbath. What should Jesus say to the man with the crippled hand: “I feel your pain, but I’m busy obeying God’s commandments. Talk to me about your arm after sundown.” Or “I’ll help you get your sheep out of the pit if it’s still there tomorrow and the coyotes haven’t eaten it?”

Of course not. “I desire mercy and not sacrifice.” The sabbath commandment looks to the welfare of people and communities. That’s why God established it, not to set up a legal system on. Jesus returns them to this, with a new word as well…that He Himself is Lord of the Sabbath.

In the time we have left, let me give you three reasons why we don't practice sabbath. And three things that might happen if we did.

Three Reasons We Do Not Practice Sabbath

1. Some of us have experienced the abuse of a sabbath day.

Rather than being a delightful day of rest, it is a restrictive, legalistic set of rules. Christians can build these systems just as easily as the Pharisees ever did. You can’t dance, you can’t work in the yard, you can’t listen to music, you can’t play sports, you can’t you can’t you can’t. We have seen, or heard about such things and we run the other way. We want no part of that.

It’s exactly what Jesus saw, isn’t it? But rather than flee, or quit observing sabbath, Jesus directed people back to what was intended. If you grew up in a legalism that missed the point of sabbath…then find the point. And if you need an easy way to remember what is good to do on a sabbath, here’s what Eugene Peterson says sabbath is for: “praying and playing.”

2. We don’t practice sabbath because we are not sure of who we are.

Our world tells us that our value comes from what we produce. Our self-image is based on production, and we are responsible for justifying our existence. What did we get accomplished today? Spending a day, or an hour, without “producing” scares us. We get lost. But if our value, our self-image is from God, and is not dependent on what we do, then sabbath can set us free to rest.

3. We don’t practice sabbath because we are scared of the quiet.

Sabbath practice is not a vow of silence, but it does create some spaces for listening and reflection and thinking. Many of us don’t know what to do with that. It’s why we go from cellphones in the car to televisions on for background noise to IPODS and headphones while we run or bike or walk down the street.

A group of mine met last week, and we were charged with taking 2 minutes of quiet time and reflecting on where we might have seen or experienced God in the last week. Two minutes of total quiet seemed like an eternity.

Three Things that might happen if we practiced sabbath

1. We would make more choices about what is important.

One thing that trying to practice sabbath does…is convince you that you cannot do everything. You just can’t. You have to say no to some things, even some good things, if you are to choose sabbath.

2. We would become more humble people.

People who choose to take seriously the practice of sabbath rest are inherently admitting something. That the world can do without us. Tilden Edwards says it well: “Stopping work tests our trust: will the world and I fall apart if I stop making things happen for awhile?”

Sabbath practice provides a consistent reminder that we are dependent people. We practice living gratefully in the creation God has wonderfully given to us, and we become more aware that ultimately, our human effort is not what keeps the world turning.

3. If we were to practice sabbath as a way of life, we would see more of God.

The simple fact is, we would see more of God if we took time to rest and reflect. To go back to my small group, I think our “two-minute drill” was really a rather profound time, because upon reflection…God had showed up quite a bit.

Finally, just a quick word on what it would take to practice sabbath. There are lots and lots of good books on sabbath. Abraham Heschel, Dorothy Bass, Tilden Edwards, Marva Dawn have all written well on sabbath. Lynne Baab, our friend and former Associate Pastor wrote a very practical and helpful book on Sabbath. But let me just offer mainly one thought on living a sabbath lifestyle. And that is reflected in the sermon title: Intentional inefficiency.

In our culture, with our backgrounds, the deck is entirely stacked against taking sabbath time to regularly be with God. This could be the most countercultural thing we do. It could be the best witness we give to people around us. We will have to be ruthlessly intentional, choosing (and thereby saying no to some things) to set aside time as sabbath time.

And part of that intentionality will need to be a choice to be inefficient. Take the time to walk somewhere, even though it takes longer. To read instead of catch up on emails, to play instead of get ready for the work week. To not worry about “producing.”

Let me give you one silly example. Last spring, I was off on Monday, which is my sabbath day (I have this Sunday commitment). I ended up by myself out at a coffee shop near Greenlake with a journal and a couple books and my IPOD, and a nice window seat.

I was interested in a closer look at the lyrics to a song I had just bought, which were rather thought-provoking. My first thought, my very first reaction was “Well, when I get home, I’ll go online and do a search and find these lyrics and quickly read them and be done with it.” And I could have done that, it would have been fine. And in fact, it would have been a lot more efficient. But I suddenly had this thought: “What was I in such a hurry for? It was my sabbath day. I didn’t have to be anywhere for hours.”

So I sat. I would listen to a couple lines of the song, then pause the music and write down those words. Then I would start it again, pause it and write down the next line or two. I probably had to stop it 15 times, and I ended up with the whole song scrawled out on a sheet of yellow paper. Took me about 20 minutes to do it.

But do you know what? I really read that poetry along the way. Had time to reflect on each word, think about it. When I was done, I think I understood what the writer was getting at. But it was horribly inefficient. If someone had said, “Dan, what did you do today?” And I said, “I listened to a nice song and wrote out all the lyrics by hand,” they would have thought I was crazy for wasting time.

Maybe I was. But for many of us, it is choosing exactly that inefficiency that will begin to reclaim the time we are to set aside as sabbath. I believe we need some minutes of it each and every day. I believe we need a day of it every week. I believe we need some of it every year.

For many of us that will mean unplugging, and being less available to people and media. We’ll have to be intentionally inefficient. And if we practice, just take a small step…I believe that we will know more of God. What we will find is not just the sabbath, but the Lord of the Sabbath. And I think that’s what we’re after.

Listen once more to the prayer from the Jewish prayerbook. I will read again the confession, but then some of the rest of it as well:

Days pass and years vanish, and we walk sightless among miracles.

Lord, fill our eyes with seeing and our minds with knowing;

let there be moments when Your Presence, like lightning, illumines the darkness in which we walk.

Help us to see, wherever we gaze, that the bush burns unconsumed.

And we, clay touched by God, will reach out for holiness, and exclaim in wonder:

How filled with awe is this place, and we did not know it!

Blessed is the Eternal One, the Holy God!