Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
A sermon for Sunday 8th
October
Deuteronomy 5.1-21; 6.4-9
Just before Liz and I went away on holiday last month,
I preached the concluding sermon of our short summer series on the Sabbath,
and I spoke about the principle of Sabbath as resistance to coercion,
drawing on Walter Brueggemann’s excellent book ‘Sabbath as Resistance’.
Well, now I’m back we find ourselves in the lectionary readings for the autumn,
as they take us through the revelation of God in the Hebrew Bible,
and once again we’re in Deuteronomy 5, and at the ten commandments.
So today’s sermon is a kind-of follow on from the one four weeks ago,
and I want us to return to our exploration of the principle of Sabbath.
But this time, and again drawing on Walter Brueggemann,
I want us to think about Sabbath as resistance to anxiety.
In many ways, I think anxiety might be the defining feature
of Christianity in our time.
It’s out there in society beyond the church, of course:
the number people seeking help through medicine and therapy
for anxiety-related illness continues to grow and grow.
And if you’re part of that number, as many of us are,
I can speak from my own experience that help is available,
and it is worth seeking sooner rather than later.
But today I want us to think about anxiety as a communal,
rather than individual, response to stress;
and particularly to the way church communities,
including our own here at Bloomsbury, experience anxiety.
There is, after all, much to be anxious about.
The decline in church attendance is widespread
across all the historic denominations,
making it harder to be the churches that we once were,
harder to fill the rotas, harder to raise the money,
harder to do the good that we long to do.
I remember having a conversation with my former colleague Ruth a few years ago,
and we were discussing what personality Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church had,
imagining the congregation as a person
and thinking about what they would be like to be with, to talk to…
and Ruth’s diagnosis stayed with me:
she said that Bloomsbury personified
would be a person living with chronic anxiety.
This is not to say that this is true of every person sat here today,
although it will be true for some of us.
But rather, it’s to say that collectively,
the pressures on us as a congregation in central London are such
that anxiety is an entirely natural and appropriate response.
And so we come to Sabbath-keeping as resistance to anxiety. [1]
Now, you may not naturally think of Sabbath-keeping as an antidote to anxiety,
because in many parts of the Christian world,
it is precisely the opposite!
Largely out of a misunderstood Puritan heritage,
Sabbath-keeping has often become enmeshed in legalism and moralism,
and life-denying practices that contradict
the freedom-bestowing intention of Sabbath.
Such distortions, moreover, have led to endlessly wearying quarrels
about “Sunday activities”
such as the ‘Keep Sunday Special’ campaign (remember that?),
or debates about whether you can go to the cinema or pub on a Sunday…
I knew one family which decreed that no cooking should be done on a Sunday,
and so the wife (of course) had to do all the cooking on the Saturday night,
leaving it in the oven on a low setting overnight,
so they had food to eat when they got home from church the next day.
This is not freedom from anxiety!
Rather, it amounts to a pitiful misrepresentation of Sabbath-keeping.
But when taken seriously in faith by Jews—and derivatively by Christians—
Sabbath-keeping can be a way of maintaining and enacting
a counter-identity that refuses to be entirely subsumed
by the “mainstream” identity.
Too often society enacts what are essentially anti-human practices,
encouraging the worship of anti-human gods.
And understood properly, Sabbath is a bodily act of testimony
to an alternative way of being human;
it can be enacted resistance to the pervading values and the assumptions
that build up on people in anxiety-inducing ways.
And so, understood properly,
Sabbath can be resistance to anxiety.
The ten commandments, of which the Sabbath command is the fourth,
appear twice in the story of Israel’s journey from Egypt to the promised land.
They are there in Exodus 20,
when Moses first receives them from God on Mount Sinai,
and they are repeated in Deuteronomy 5, our reading for today,
as Israel stands at the gates of the promised land.
The context for these commands is Israel’s miraculous release
from the exploitative environment of Pharaoh’s Egypt.
These commandments are the new rule of life for the people of God,
replacing the absolutist demands of the Pharaoh,
and they stand in stark contrast to what came before them.
Pharaoh’s commands were oppressive,
but God’s commandments are liberating.
Pharaoh’s commands were based on hatred of the other,
but God’s commands are based
on the love of God and the love of neighbour.
Pharaoh’s commands were a source of constant anxiety
as his own insecurity led him to make impossible demands of Israel;
but the ten commandments are an invitation to a new way of living
which is non-anxious, based on a trusting relationship with God,
and drawing out gentle faithfulness in response.
If you read through the list of the ten commandments,
you find that the first three commands of God
are to do with God’s exclusive claim over Israel.
Never again shall they give their allegiance to any other ruler
whether human or divine.
And so they are told to have no other gods before the Lord,
to not make any idols,
and to not make wrongful use of God’s name.
And then the final six commands are to do with relating to your neighbour:
honouring your parents, not murdering, or committing adultery,
not stealing, or bearing false witness, or coveting.
And the bridge between the first three and the final six is the fourth command
– the keeping of the Sabbath.
There is something about the intentional reverence for time,
the setting aside of potentially productive hours,
that is key to allowing Israel to shift
from a world where every moment is demanded from them by the Pharaoh,
to a new world where life is a gift to be treasured before God.
There had been no Sabbath in Egypt:
no work stoppage for Pharaoh who worked day and night
to stay atop the social pyramid of Egypt’s elite;
and no work stoppage for the Israelite slaves
who had to gather straw for bricks during their time off;
in fact no work stoppage for anybody in the Egyptian world,
because frantic productivity drove the entire system.
Does that sound familiar to you?
I fear that we drive ourselves back to Egypt,
as a society and sometimes also as Christian communities.
The push to productivity, to more and more effort:
to achieve, to stay afloat, to keep going…
And yet in the ten commandments,
the Lord God nullifies all such systems of anxious production.
There is a better way to be human.
So God places limits on how much work it is right for a human to do,
God commands times of rest, of recovery, or relaxation,
and those who obey this command break the anxiety cycle.
We, like ancient Israel,
are invited to an awareness that life does not consist
in a whirlwind of frantic production and consumption,
that reduces everyone else to threat and competitor.
Many of you will know that I enjoy swimming,
and I’m a regular visitor to the Oasis pool, just round the corner from the church.
Some days, I look at my to-do list for the day,
and the pile of emails that has come in overnight,
and I think to myself I just need to power through without a break.
Does that sound familiar to some of you?
What I have discovered, and I need to constantly remind myself of this,
is that if I take an hour out,
go to the pool and swim for half and hour,
I end up reviewing the day far more positively than if I had stayed sat at my desk.
As I often say to myself,
the hardest part about swimming a mile is picking up your kit bag.
My point is that sometimes it takes effort to stop,
it takes a decision to break the cycle of productivity,
but taking that decision also breaks the spiral of anxiety, stress, and pressure,
and creates a place in our lives for a more balanced existence.
The divine insight behind the Sabbath command
is that work stoppage permits a waning of anxiety,
and allows energy to redeployed to elsewhere:
in acts of neighbourliness, in caring for the other.
The Sabbath command is designed to counter anxious productivity
with committed neighbourliness.
And whilst neighbourliness doesn’t produce so much;
it creates an environment of security and respect and dignity
that redefines what it means to be human.
The world envisaged by the Sabbath-command
is an anxiety-free world of well-being,
based on the fact that God is anxiety-free.
God is not a workaholic. God is not a micromanager.
God is not a Pharaoh.
God does not keep hiking up the production schedules.
The Protestant work-ethic is not a divine command.
The ten commandments do not contain the advice,
that if at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again.
To the contrary, God rests, confident, serene, and at peace.
And God’s rest, moreover, bestows on humanity
a restfulness that contradicts the “drivenness” of the system of Pharaoh.
And so humans are commanded to rest,
and while they rest, to be sure that their neighbours rest alongside them.
This means creating a system of rest,
that contradicts the world’s systems of anxiety.
We are no longer subject to Pharaoh!
We are instead called to creative restfulness,
which finds its basis in God,
which is politically viable, and economically significant.
Rest is not just for the privileged few,
Sabbath is rather for all – for sons and daughters,
for slaves and cattle, for immigrants and asylum seekers.
The Sabbath command calls us to do more than just take one day off per week,
it calls us to work to build a society
where all are released from the anxious burden of productivity,
where enough is enough, and where life is more than commodity.
God invites the people of God
to a new life of neighbourly freedom
in which Sabbath is the cornerstone of faithful resistance to anxiety.
Sabbath declares in bodily ways
that we will not participate in the anxiety system
that pervades our social environment.
We will not be defined by busyness and by acquisitiveness,
and by the relentless pursuit of more,
in either our economics or our personal relations,
or anywhere in our lives.
Because our life does not consist in commodity.
It is no wonder that Jesus invited his disciples
out of the anxiety system:
Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life,
what you will eat or what you will drink,
or about your body, what you will wear.
Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?
Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns,
and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.
Are you not of more value than they?
And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?
And why do you worry about clothing?
Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow;
they neither toil nor spin,
yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory
was not clothed like one of these.
But if God so clothes the grass of the field,
which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven,
will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith?
Therefore do not worry, saying, “What will we eat?”
or “What will be drink?”
or “What will we wear?” (Matt. 6:25–31)
Behind the sermon away from anxiety by Jesus is the good word of Moses:
Six days you shall labour and do all your work.
But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God;
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. (Deut.5.13-14)
The “other gods” that the first three commandments call us to resist,
are, it turns out, the agents and occasions of anxiety.
But we, by discipline, by resolve,
by baptism, by Eucharist, and by passion,
resist such seductions.
And in so doing we stand alongside the creator
in whose image we are made.
Sabbath, you see, is a school for our desires;
taking a break is an exposé and critique of those false desires
that focus on idolatry and greed.
When we do not pause for Sabbath,
these false desires take power over us.
But Sabbath is our chance to embrace of our true identity,
and find our rest in the God of love.
To conclude, a poem by Wendell Berry,
quoted by Nicola Slee in her book ‘Sabbath’
I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.
Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.
Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.
After days of labor,
mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
and I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move.
Wendell Berry
[1] The sermon that follows draws extensively from Brueggemann, ‘Sabbath as Resistance’
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