Good morning. Today we start “ordinary time” in the church, time without special church feasts or occasions that break up the rhythm of the weeks or demand extra liturgical or aesthetic feats. I know the altar guild is grateful for that, as are the clergy. Musicians, too.
In our own congregation, we’re celebrating today this year’s Audrey Davies award recipient -- so we do have a special event in that. The Audrey Davies award is given annually to a woman in the parish for outstanding service. We’ll say more about that at Announcements and then coffee hour, though I do want to say here how very excited I am about this year’s recipient. I can’t think of anyone more deserving, and I know you’ll all agree once you learn who it is.
So we have that today. But as far as the church calendar goes, we’re beginning to slow down now, and rest, and give thanks for those times when ordinary life just trucks on. It’s fitting that our first reading in ordinary time has some things to say about Sabbath, from the Hebrew word for “rest.”
We know, all of us (I trust) that the first Christians were Jews, or they were Gentiles who were drawn to Jewish practices. They would, most of them, have observed the Sabbath in some form, some more strictly than others because Jews were diverse then just like they are now.
Coming to Scarsdale eight years ago gave me a lesson in that. I hosted in the Great Hall our first ecumenical clergy gathering after I arrived. I worried to no end about what food to provide--only to have the conservative rabbi show up with his own food, and all the others ask me if I’d never heard of a Reformed Jew. I’m embarrassed admitting that now.
But we see differences in religious practice all over our Gospels: Jesus was a Jew with more relaxed notions of what you could eat, and when, and what you could do on the Sabbath. Other Jews in his orbit had stricter notions. It’s really not anything unique to that time and these stories, and if there’s one lesson we can draw from the Gospels it's that our lives are enriched by giving a wide berth to others’ practices. So much of the tension then and now, in our religious institutions and culture, could be kept in check if we stopped insisting other people do things the way we do them and think the way we think. But I digress!
Eventually the early Christians who observed the Sabbath drifted away from their Jewish roots, or others were brought into the fold who never had that as their first faith, and the sabbath day became less and less an obligation for Christians. What Christians did have that was unique to our movement was what we called the “Lord’s Day,” Sunday, the day of Resurrection. It was separate from the sabbath at first, but over time and as the early Christians stopped observing the Jewish sabbath, the Lord’s Day came to take its place and Sunday became our day of rest, and refreshment.
All of us who descend from Judaism have, with varying degrees of strictness, kept this practice going. Because Sabbath rest is a fundamental human need. It’s also closely connected to what religion cares most about: living a moral life.
In the Hebrew Scriptures, and we hear this in today’s reading from Deutoronomy, Sabbath wasn’t just for people. It was time for the rest of God’s creation to get a break from us: the fields from plowing, animals from their labor. It had broader importance for the earth and its creatures. Also for those who tended it: servants, slaves, those of lower rank who weren’t at liberty to seek rest for themselves.
For humans, one of the primary purposes of rest is to orient us towards others. I listened last week to an interview between Ezra Klein and Judith Schulevitz. She wrote a really good book on Sabbath in 2011.
At one point, Shulevitz talks about a study done in the 1970s, the Good Samaritan Study. Some researchers wanted to parse out why people stop to help others. They selected seminary students from Princeton as their research subjects.
These students (who didn’t know the terms of the study) were all training to become Christian ministers. They were asked to write a sermon on the parable of the Good Samaritan from Luke’s Gospel, where three men pass by a person in physical distress lying on the side of the road. Two of the men who pass by without helping are actually religious leaders. The third, the Samaritan (and not a religious leader), does stop and gives his time and some money to the wounded stranger. That’s the Biblical parable.
So these Princeton seminarians in the Good Samaritan Study were told to write a sermon on that, and on the day it was due, they were to deliver it in the chapel. They were divided into three groups: the first group was told they were running late and had to get to the chapel as quickly as they could. The second group was told they were on time and they didn’t need to rush, but they couldn’t dawdle, either. The third group was told they had plenty of time to get to the chapel to deliver their sermon.
Meanwhile, the researchers had planted along each seminarian’s way to the chapel a person in visible distress lying on the side of the path.
Every single person in the first group, the group that was worried about running late, failed to stop to help the man. One person in the second group stopped briefly. Those were the seminarians who were told they’d have enough time but barely.
But in the third group, the group that was told they had plenty of time to spare, every person stopped to help.
In other words, what determined whether these students stopped to help someone in need wasn’t how well they grasped the story of the Good Samaritan, or what their own background was with helping others; many of them were generous people. It was simply, in that moment, how much time they had.
Shulevitz uses this to show how living a life that isn’t hurried, building Sabbath into our routines as our faiths tell us to do, actually makes us more compassionate, less self-centered, more likely to help another in need. I think this distinguishes religious sabbaths from secular ones. It’s important to care for ourselves. But to care for ourselves so that we can help others, that’s what religious sabbath is concerned with.
So if ordinary time, summer, gives you any reprieve, time off, rest--sabbath--in your life (and I hope it does), use it. Come to church on Sundays, our communal Sabbath. So much depends on whether you take this tradition to heart -- it’s about you, but not just you. It’s also about those you could be helping, noticing, listening to. The needs you miss, in your haste, that you don’t need to miss, if you just learned to build rest, and time, into your life.
I pray we can all learn better how to do that -- starting today.