Sabbath as Resistance
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
March 30, 2025 (adapted from original 1/3/16)
“Let there be stillness in my heart for a moment,
the balance point between breathing in
and breathing out, like the pause of a dancer
between movements in the music.” (Mark Belletini, Slower and Slower)
The idea of Sabbath, of setting aside time for rest and renewal, is an ancient one. We first encounter it as part of the creation story in the Book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible. “And on the seventh day, God finished the work that God had done, and rested… And God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it…” (Gen. 2:2-3)
In some translations of this passage it is said that God ‘exhaled’. I love this image – of God sitting back and saying ‘Phew!’ But regardless of how God decided to mark the time, the important point of this passage is that God declared the seventh day to be holy. In fact, the seventh day, the day of rest, is the very first thing to be declared sacred. Not a place, not a person, not a deity, but a moment in time.
In his classic work, Sabbath, the late Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel explored the difference, the relationship between time and space. Heschel defined ‘space’ as the products of modern civilization: the realm of things – buildings, possessions, objects – things that we can see and touch and hear. Modern humans, he stated, labor to create things, to conquer space. Humans use time in order to obtain space; in other words, they trade time for increased space.
But time, according to the Bible and to Rabbi Heschel, is what is considered holy and sacred, not the things that exist in space. If we are not careful, we continue to trade time for space – for more possession, or more accomplishments. We work overtime to earn the money to buy things we want or need – a house or a car. We spend time to gain skills, or to help our children become more accomplished. It’s a continual trade-off, and the trade-off can become unbalanced. The products of space, the physical objects or accomplishments, can become more important than our sacred time.
The practice of Sabbath is a way to hold time and space in balance. It is a way to resist the headlong effort to acquire the things of space – possessions, skills, wealth. It is a way to reconnect with time as sacred, as holy. Heschel put it this way: “The meaning of Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week we lived under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time.” (Sabbath, Loc. 254) It is a way to resist conforming to social norms, to the drumbeat of today’s way of life, those constant demands that can overwhelm us if we do not find a way to balance them.
Sabbath, then, is not simply a day off, although frankly that in itself can be an elusive dream for some people. Author and minister Wayne Mueller writes that Sabbath, “is the presence of something that arises when we consecrate a period of time to listen to what is most deeply beautiful, nourishing, or true. It is time consecrated with our attention, our mindfulness, honoring those quiet forces of grace or spirit that sustain and heal us.”
Consecration. To consecrate means to make something holy. This goes beyond the basic idea of taking a day off. After all, if you’re like me you’ll use a day off to paint the bathroom or run errands. To observe Sabbath is to consciously step away from the demands made by the things we can hear, see, and acquire, to resist their call, and to step forward toward a better balance with time.
This is not an easy thing to do. At this point it would be helpful for me to offer you some tried and true solutions, to share all the magic that works for me, and then we could go down to coffee hour. But I might not be the right person. It is often said that the minister preaches the sermon that she most needs to hear. Tomorrow technically is my day off, and I have an exercise class, a dentist appointment, a meeting here at church, and an appointment with my spiritual director. It’s going to be an effective day, but not what you’d call consecrated.
The question becomes, ‘how do we know when it’s time to go to the fields to be lovely, to set it all down, as the poet urges us, to set down all the plans and papers and appointments?’
This question, one that we are used to addressing throughout our lives, becomes more urgent today, with the added demands of resistance to the attempts to destroy our Constitution and many of the most helpful functions of our government. How do we pause for Sabbath when we feel pressure to take action as quickly as possible?
Wayne Mueller says that the key is remembering what ‘enough’ feels like. We are surrounded by unlimited potential, unlimited options, myriad demands every day, every hour of every day. Trying to balance all this can feel like spiritual violence.
The Trappist monk Thomas Merton famously wrote, “The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation with violence.”
It’s easy to think that nothing we can do is enough. It is especially easy to think that here in 2025. Taking on a developing authoritarian regime is exhausting.
Now, more than usual, we need permission to stop, to rest, to decide that we have done enough. We need to relearn what ‘enough’ feels like, to listen to our bodies and our souls. We need to not wait for permission from outside ourselves, but to give ourselves permission from deep within. In other words, it becomes especially important to listen to the ‘still, small voice within’, our deepest, innermost selves, to remember what ‘enough’ feels like.
Do you ever feel as though you don’t have a choice? Wayne Mueller would tell us that we do. The choice, he wrote, is to ask “What’s the next right thing to do?” What should I do in this moment, what is the one best thing to do right now? And in this way we can intentionally and mindfully create our lives, one small decision after another. If we make our choice each time based on what we love, on what we need, on what is the single best thing to do in this moment, then gradually, step by step, we gain practice in hearing a quiet voice telling us what is enough. We can begin to feel the permission to rest, to feel whole, to resist the loud voices telling us we aren’t good enough, telling us we don’t do enough. Truly, this is a spiritual practice; a practice of deep listening, and making a series of careful choices.
Think of this as a process, this life of carefully making choices. Imagine a tiny stream arising out of a spring on a hillside, wrote Mueller. Imagine this little stream making its way slowly downhill, inch by inch at first, meeting obstacles such as sticks or rocks that turn it to the left or right, and then pausing, pooling, gathering itself to spill over when the next direction becomes clear. Imagine the stream widening as it joins other little streams, gathering momentum, flowing ultimately in the direction it should follow – downhill.
To achieve this, to be able to envision our lives unfolding in this way, flowing deliberately and mindfully downhill, we need to make time. Time to pause as the stream would pause in small pools, time to discern what we love, what will make us feel whole. And the hard part is that we have to set aside the time even before we have practiced this, or we’ll never have the chance to develop the skills we need in order to make our choices, one at a time, based on what we love. We begin slowly, finding a way to set aside the time, so that we can begin the spiritual practice of discernment. And the practice, once established, will give us back more time, and lead us to lives of more wholeness, more rest, and Sabbath.
These days, we are urged to “Resist!” There are many things wrong right now; oppressors are gathering, looking for passiveness on our part and weaknesses to exploit in order to gain power. And just as there are many problems, there are also many ways to resist: protest, strikes, calling and writing legislators. We can create art, or music, or poetry. We can seek out joy and pleasure. But we also resist when we care for ourselves. That might feel counter-intuitive. But the oppressors want us to be tired, to be dispirited, to lose energy, so they can take more power. And so, practicing Sabbath is its own form of resistance.
Last week, those of you who were here will remember that I led you in a humming meditation. It might have seemed a little funny. But I did it so that you would see what can happen when a group engages in an activity together, and what would happen when one by one, we each paused for breath when we needed to. We found that we can pause, rest, catch our breath, and the humming carried on. Had we all tried to continue humming without pausing, we would have stopped, tired and gasping, much sooner. Rest, observing Sabbath, turns out to be a key piece of sustaining resistance to oppression longer.
Discernment, listening for our inmost voices, and rest seem like an individual practice, but as we saw with the humming, it’s easily supported by community. As a community of faith, we can support each other, resist together, by creating a refuge and a different, kinder way of life.
My friends, may you know when it’s the right time to go to the fields to be lovely. And may you trust not only your own inner voice, but trust that others around you will be able to carry forward until you can take your place again, and allow respite for others.
May you hold the image of the tiny stream, flowing toward its destination, drop by drop, decision by decision, ever downward, ever toward the sea. And may we support one another in our decisions, to help sustain ourselves as a community of safety, kindness, and resistance.
Blessed Be.
Amen.
