“WE NEED TO TAKE SABBATH MORE SERIOUSLY.” Those were the words that I have heard over and over during my life as a seminarian and as an ordained teaching elder. Considering the overwhelming rates of people who abandon ministry due to burnout, or those in our congregations who cannot volunteer any more hours because they already spend 15 hours each week in the church and the scary percentage of people who are addicted to being busy, it totally makes sense. We live in a culture where rest and simple delight in God’s creation are not common practice. And professors, pastors and church leaders are right: We need rest.
But as nice as this idea is, I have a problem with this view of Sabbath. And my problem is that Sabbath is not about our individual rest. Sabbath is about everyone. Sabbath is a day of justice, a day born out of the experience of slavery of the Jewish people, a day to remember those who are still in bondage, a day to remember God’s desire for the whole of creation to receive rest.
So as I speak to most of my friends and colleagues who are advocates for a rebirth of the culture of Sabbath, it seems that it is all about “my rest, my mental health, my Sabbath.” It is all about self-care. So we embark on hikes and trips to Six Flags, we go to the movie theater or go to an international grocery store to buy fresh produce so we can eat a healthy, homemade meal in order to find well-deserved rest. We forget that “you shall not do any work — you, or your son or your daughter, or your male or female slave, or your ox or your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you” (Deuteronomy 5:14). We forget that Sabbath is about us and every member of creation. We forget (or decide to forget) the hundreds of refugees who work at our local international grocery store, the California fields that are going through drought so we can have the creamiest avocados, the immigrant lawn crew that keeps us from having to cut our own grass, the underpaid maintenance staff who cleans the bathroom at the movie theater or the server at the restaurant who has to work two or three jobs in order to pay rent and utilities. Suddenly, “self-care” becomes “I don’t care.” It becomes an excuse to ignore others.
And we completely forget about the source of our rest: God, the deliverer of Israel, who brought us out from Egypt “with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm” (Deuteronomy 5:15). We forget that this day is to celebrate the grace of God, to rejoice our Creator’s marvelous works, to celebrate the existence of every being. It is a day to say “Black Lives Matter,” to protest the supermarket that refuses to pay fair prices for tomatoes, to clean the creek that runs by our house, to break the Sabbath to give health to the sick and work at a soup kitchen, to visit men in the detention center waiting to be deported. It is a day to seek rest for the whole of creation.
So, yes. We need to stop spending more hours in the office during the weekends, checking our phones every three minutes to see the latest Facebook status updates, responding to emails in the middle of the night, signing our children up for more extracurricular activities than their bodies can take. But as we do, we need to see that Sabbath is not about us. Sabbath is about everyone.
CLAUDIA AGUILAR RUBALCAVA is associate dean of student services at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia.
