Kyle Dresback

“This is what the Lord commanded: ‘Tomorrow is to be a day of sabbath rest, a holy sabbath to the Lord. So bake what you want to bake and boil what you want to boil. Save whatever is left and keep it until morning.’”
—Exodus 16:23

“He who wants to enter the holiness of the day must first lay down the profanity of clattering commerce, of being yoked to toil… He must say farewell to manual work and learn to understand that the world has already been created and will survive without the help of humanity.”
—Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath

Friends,

I’ve often wondered what the early Christians would find most surprising about Christians in the modern West. For years my guess was, “Why don’t you fast?”

But I wonder if, instead, it might be, “Why don’t you observe the Sabbath?”

Heschel’s phrase, “the profanity of clattering commerce” captures the background hum of so much of what makes up our days—even 75 years after he wrote it. 

Moments ago, in my attempt to copy and paste the text of today’s reading, I had to thread the needle between a flashing Amazon ad on one side of my screen, tickets to that big event on the other, and a scrolling pharmaceutical ad across the bottom. And these were only the largest ads of the six on a website that is ostensibly for reading the Bible.

When “clattering commerce” is this pervasive—when the allure of the profane has been all but perfected—the subversive thing is to insist on our humanity. 

There’s a humanizing simplicity to pausing my striving; to stepping off the wheel. Sabbath both reminds me of my own worth (I am more than an economic actor) as well as my own dependence (I am less than God). That is, it reminds me of my humanity. 

We are regularly surprised at how slow Israel is to learn these things in their wilderness wanderings, yet from day to day we are slow learners ourselves—insisting that we are both less than and more than what we really are. 

Sabbath, like fasting, builds in us the muscles to trust in a gracious God. Jesus, having been in the wilderness himself, taught us to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread.” Maybe the ancients have some wisdom for the clattering commerce of our anxious striving.

In Christ,

—Kyle