This past Sunday, I made this claim before we jumped into our passage from Matthew 12:1-14.
“The Sabbath is the most over resourced spiritual discipline in the West.”
My hope was on Sunday was not to “add” to the already growing resource list but to re-orient our understanding of the Sabbath not around the practices but the person of Jesus. He is the Lord of the Sabbath! This means we have unbelievable freedom to explore what the practice of rest looks like in our lives.
However, my hope is that you don’t hear Missio saying: “You don’t need resources, you should just figure it out on your own.”
For someone who currently pays the bills creating resources for the Church, I do believe we need pathways to learn how to sabbath well.
So in follow up from the teaching, here are four helpful resources for me when it comes to becoming a person who practices the sabbath well.
-Charlie-
1. PRACTICING THE WAY SABBATH COURSE
This is a really helpful and simple resource on the sabbath. It contains teachings, concrete practices, and ways to engage with this BLESS rhythm. You could even consider using this course as a pathway for your MC, network or neighbors.
2. Sabbath as Resistance by Walter Bruggemann
There are a lot of great books out there on the sabbath. I personally think this one is one of the best. In this book, Bruggemann unpacks how the Sabbath is not just a helpful practice for exhausted people but an act of defiance and resistance. This didn’t make it into the sermon on Sunday, but here is one of my favorite quotes from the book:
In our own contemporary context of the rat race of anxiety, the celebration of Sabbath is an act of both resistance and alternative. It is resistance because it is a visible insistence that our lives are not defined by the production and consumption of commodity goods… It is an alternative to the demanding, chattering, pervasive presence of advertising and its great liturgical claim of professional sports that devour all our ‘rest time’”. – Walter Bruggemann
3. Introduction, Sabbath, Abraham Heschel
The introduction to this book is worth the price of admission. It’s written by Dr. Heschel’s daughter who shares her family’s weekly sabbath rhythm as a Jewish family. Abraham Heschel was a brilliant writer, teacher, and activist who literally walked with Dr. King during the Selma to Montgomery March. He’s the second guy to the right of Dr. King with the amazing hair and beard.
4. This Day, Wendell Berry
Different than a book, this is a collection of poems by Wendell Berry. Each of these poems was written during Wendell Berry’s weekly sabbath walk in the woods of Kentucky. Here is my favorite poem from the book below. Don’t like to read? Listen to it here ready by Berry himself.
Whatever is foreseen in joy
Must be lived out from day to day.
Vision held open in the dark
By our ten thousand days of work.
Harvest will fill the barn; for that
The hand must ache, the face must sweat.
And yet no leaf or grain is filled
By work of ours; the field is tilled
And left to grace. That we may reap,
Great work is done while we’re asleep.When we work well, a Sabbath mood
Rests on our day, and finds it good.
These can all be helpful pathways to practicing the Sabbath. But don’t overlook how brothers and sisters can help you imagine how the sabbath might look in your season and stage of life.
