"If you refrain from trampling the Sabbath,
from pursuing your own interests on my holy day;
if you call the Sabbath a delight
and the holy day of the Lord honorable;
if you honor it, not going your own ways,
serving your own interests or pursuing your own affairs;
then you shall take delight in the Lord,
and I will make you ride upon the heights of the earth;
I will feed you with the heritage of your ancestor Jacob,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken." (Isaiah 58:13-14)
At some point, you've got to decide if you would rather have money be your god, or let God be your god. At least the folks who bow down to golden idols are honest about the real object of their adoration. All too often, folks who talk the right religious talk and say they are devoted to God also look for ways to give their allegiance to their pocketbooks and bank accounts at a time when they think that God isn't watching (which is, of course... never). And here, the prophet we've been listening to this week (since many of us heard this passage in worship on Sunday) just reminds us that God isn't fooled by any of that game-playing. God is fully aware of every time we mouth the right religious words on Sunday while putting our hearts and energy into the endless quest for "more" that is the hallmark of the worship of money. God invites us here to abandon the impulse to only look out for "Me and My Group First" and instead simply to rest in the assurance that God will give us what we need, even when we haven't made more widgets or earned more profits for the company today.
Today's verses conclude the section we've been looking at from Isaiah 58 this week, and once again, they are words offering clarity. Earlier in this passage, we heard the prophet say that what God really wants of us is to care for the most vulnerable around us rather than putting on a religious show (whether in our houses of worship or in the public square--God is impressed with neither). Then we heard yesterday the reminder that the kind of legacy that really matters is a life spent rebuilding and restoring community rather than looking to get statues or monuments built in our honor or our names in gold letters on towers. Today, the prophet turns to a central practice in ancient Israel's faith--the sabbath.
Sabbath, of course, was remembered in Israel's storytelling as God's gift of rest that completes the rhythm along with work and play. We need times to be productive--to build, to grow, to harvest, to cook, to plant, and so on--and we need times to rest. As the ancient Israelites remembered it, part of the reason God instructed them to have one day of rest in every seven-day week was the rhythm of creation itself, and part of it was as a response to the slave-labor conditions they had in Pharaoh's Egypt (when they never received rest, and when their worth was entirely based upon how many bricks they made, how much straw they cut, and how much they added to the Gross Domestic Product of ancient Egypt). Before anything else, sabbath was meant to allow everyone--including farm animals, delightfully!--to be renewed, and to learn anew that the world didn't fall apart or stop spinning just because you took a day off. Sabbath was meant to prevent work from becoming an idol, as well as the subtle idolatry of "But We Can Make More Money If We Never Take A Day Off" thinking. Before anybody added the layer of going to public worship, before there was any expectation of corporate chanted prayers, sung hymns, or listening to sermons, there was simply the calling for everyone to cease from work. The cost was clear, too: if you don't work for one day out of the week, collectively, you are not maximizing profits. You are potentially leaving one whole day's worth of earnings left unattained. God knew it, and commanded it anyway. That was actually part of the whole point of sabbath--to say that resting in God was more important than maximizing profits. It was money left on the table, because God knew that there is a better quality of life for everyone when nobody has to work themselves to death.
And at their best and most faithful moments, the people of Israel and Judah understood that about the sabbath. They saw it was a gift, and they honored the day by collectively stopping their work, giving each other the space and time for renewal, and not scrambling incessantly to make a buck. Work stoppage on the sabbath was a way of valuing human beings more than the money we can make at our jobs or the profits we can store in a vault. And again, at least some of the time, the covenant people understood that it was a better way of life to give one another rest by practicing sabbath, rather than constantly trying to one-up your competition by taking fewer and shorter breaks than the next guy. That mentality is just a death wish dressed up in a business suit.
But somebody always has to ruin a good thing, it seems. And over enough time, there came to be voices who wanted to give less and less rest for their workers, their household staff, and their animals, so that they could make more and more in profits. There were sellers in the marketplace who wanted to reduce the hours they had to be closed in order to increase their window for making sales. There were more and more people who wanted only more profits and didn't care what the loss of rest time did to their happiness, contentment, health, or over all well-being. It became easier and easier to profess that you were devoted to God (saying the right prayers, going through the right motions) while still only caring about seeking the interests of Me-and-My-Group-First, and only caring about making more money. And those are precisely the folks that the voice in Isaiah 58 has complaints about.
Here the prophet calls the people away from the relentless chase of Bigger Profits, directing them instead to receive the gift of rest and to trust that their worth was not reducible to how much money they made for the company today. Isaiah 58 calls all of us away from the merciless impulse to work ourselves (and our neighbors) to death in the quest for "More," and to leave behind the mindset that only seeks our own interests. And instead, the prophet calls us back to receiving the practice of sabbath rest as a gift to be savored, not an obstacle to get around. When we rest from work and allow others around us to rest as well, we collectively dethrone the idol of Profit, and we allow the living God to renew us as a gift of grace apart from the tyranny of having to outdo one another. That's what the prophet speaking in Isaiah 58 is calling us into--a life in God's economy of grace as opposed to the eternal hamster wheel of unending profit-seeking work.
Sometimes being a disciple of Jesus means doing more and going to extra lengths because Jesus is calling us to do what he does. But sometimes being a disciple is also about allowing the living God to give us rest, and to give one another rest as well--as a way of preventing the impulse for More from becoming our god. Will we allow God to give us sabbath rest in a culture like ours, which is built on the need to constantly "get ahead" of the next person? That's the challenge in front of us--simply to rest in God.
Lord God, enable us to rest and to give space for others to rest as well, even if that runs counter to a culture that often only cares about profit margins.
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