Living the Sabbath
Student report by Katharine Arnold Luce (M.Div. ‘12)
I have to admit, I didn’t know quite what to expect during the Congregations Project summer seminar, but I knew from the start that it was going to be an exciting week. I had made my way through a torrential downpour and accompanying dazzling lightning display to the Congregations Project opening session–tested by water and fire, just like the Israelites!. What else lay ahead?! Even now, I keep coming back to the sense of electric energy that filled every individual in the room that week, keeping our eyes rapt with attention, and our words and songs earnest with excitement.
During the Congregations Project summer seminar, I got to spend some time with members of Trinity Presbyterian Church, from Denton, TX. For those wondering, Denton is in a small town of about 10,000 in North Central Texas. Founded in 1960, Trinity Presbyterian describes itself as an educated congregation that has worked toward social justice throughout its history. This concern for justice also informs their current work for interreligious dialogue in their community. Trinity has a wide range of age groups in its congregation, and an incredible variety of demographic perspectives that informs its ministry. Trinity Presbyterian has an equally diverse arts ministry, with youth and adult choirs, specially commissioned cantata compositions, and a visual arts program that supports local artists and displays their work in the church. In their evening prayer service, Trinity used a hymn commissioned for their church, entitled Drawn by the Myst’ry of Faith. One line in particular seemed to encompass the scope of their mission: “Nurtured in hope and in love, we then are bold to say: ‘Seeking yet found, broken yet blessed, called to action,’ we confess that we are the body of Christ, the dwelling place of God.”
Trinity Presbyterian’s project aims at appropriating the idea of “Keeping Time” as exploring the principles of Sabbath-keeping. Trinity’s pastor, Craig Hunter, spoke of developing a Sabbath practice that involved play, and restoration. Noting people’s increasingly busy lives, he sought ways that his congregation could define Sabbath as something more than simply “taking time” to rest, but rather as a principal avenue of prayer, discernment and growth. Similarly, Lenora McCroskey, organist and music director, saw Sabbath observance as beginning with one’s individual, daily practices, but also voiced concern about the older, retired members in her congregation who still needed activity and stimulation in their lives. Kerol Harrod, Trinity’s lay participant, had an eye toward the younger, adult members of the congregation, many of whom work one or more full-time jobs and who are accustomed to a schedule that is just too busy. Kerol articulated a desire to think about ways for congregants to prioritize their time, and not fall victim to a deeply rooted addiction to stress. The question of “What are you doing with your time?” seemed, for Kerol, a mentality that valued productivity as the highest goal, at the expense of all else. He also voiced a discomfort with the thought of Sabbath-keeping as reinforcing our obsession with scheduling every moment of our lives, and even controlling our times of “rest.”
This cultural obsession with efficiency, success, and progress can often thwart our best attempts at understanding how to take time for rest and nourishment. But the intensity of the Sabbath discussion throughout the week emphasized that for many, if not most congregations, the need for Sabbath is great. The question around our breakfast table on Monday centered around possible connections between Sabbath and ritual—little ways that the principles of Sabbath can be lived out in our daily lives that could become habituated, unconscious ways of restoring our relationship with time, and ultimately reflect God’s time on earth: a time of peace, justice, and mercy.
In describing these observations about Sabbath-keeping, Trinity Presbyterian also laid out the practices it hopes to adopt as a congregation, along the themes of worship, rest and play, art, community involvement, and social justice. As these themes developed throughout the week, it became clear that such an understanding of Sabbath would be nuanced, complex, and yet could become an all-encompassing principle that could nourish and invigorate their entire community.
Certain issues however, still remained: how does one teach and implement Sabbath principles without adding yet another “thing” on the to-do list? How do we move in the spirit of having “enough” and cease our striving for “more and more?” How can we remove and prevent burdens of cumulative stress from our shoulders, a stress that threatens our very health and well-being? Developing a Sabbath practice must involve reprogramming these addictive stress pathways, changing our source of nourishment, away from adrenaline and toward the energy of excitement and hope in God, and seeing the Body of Christ as an indispensable avenue toward a restorative time with the Lord.
Dorothy Bass, Trinity’s assigned faculty member, addressed these Sabbath principles in her plenary session, speaking of the mystery of living our transient, impermanent lives “in time”—through rhythms and patterns that embrace our life passages with grace. She also brought our attention to the ways in which our overwork (or lack of work) can dominate our relationship with time, in often complicated and frustrating ways. In addition, technology threatens to infringe on our time in ever increasing ways, consuming it, distorting our perception of it, and disconnecting us (at times) from the rhythms of time we find in nature.
Bass laid out different ways of constructing meaning in abstract time as a way to re-inhabit time itself: through music, discernment, and language. These three examples proved to be an effective way of grouping the ever-emerging ideas Trinity Presbyterian put forth for congregational Sabbath-keeping: a) strengthening a sense of Sabbath through aesthetics, music, and artistic production; b) incorporating Sabbath principles as objects and rituals for daily life; and c) utilizing language (and silence) in worship—prayer and Scripture reading—as a means of cultivating an aesthetic of simplicity, focus and rest.
Practically speaking, Trinity’s team members emerged from their plenary session equipped with new ways to widen their ritual repertoire, both inside and outside the sanctuary. To re-inhabit time through music and art, plans were made to emphasize spiritual reflection through music (through Taize services, for example); experiment with sermons interspersed with music, to conceive of the Word in nonverbal ways; and even create handheld icons or tactile objects to encourage everyday Sabbath-keeping principles.
Re-inhabiting time through discernment proved to be an exciting challenge, and Trinity offered plans to focus on ecological justice and community engagement through creation care—re-thinking our modes of being in order to care for the earth—as one way of incorporating social justice into Sabbath-keeping. Discerning how to incorporate aspects of Jubilee* such as debt forgiveness, resting farmed land, and freedom for the oppressed, seemed to map very well onto Denton’s community situation, which faces issues of racism, immigration, militarism, and Muslim-Christian interaction. Celebrating God’s gift of creation through shared community meals offered a simple, yet radical way of incorporating Sabbath-keeping into the fabric of Trinity life.
Times of worship offered ways to re-inhabit language, through the use of spoken word as well as silence, or rest from the cacophony of noise that permeates much of our everyday lives. Intentional speech and prayer, juxtaposed with times of silence, helps congregants get accustomed to periods of rest, meditation and reflection. Within moments of speech, articulated in varying moments throughout the Church year—prayer, sermon, creed, communion—congregants could inhabit God’s time in a way that offered peace, rest, imagination and fullness, without separating themselves from “ordinary” time. Don Saliers named the Church year as the way that we “keep time” with Jesus, day by day, week by week, in our rhythms of meeting, feeding, praying and singing. Imagining every moment as now for God allows us to think about our lives as God does, as ever-present and entirely full, a perfect mode of keeping Sabbath.
*This concept, found in Leviticus 25, articulates a Israel’s orientation to the land in multiples of seven years, with each 50th year celebrated as a year of Jubilee. During this year, the land was to lie fallow, debts were forgiven, land was returned to its original tribe, and slaves were returned to their families “This fiftieth year is sacred—it is a time of freedom and of celebration when everyone will receive back their original property, and slaves will return home to their families. “
—Leviticus 25:10