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| Curtil-sous-Burnand, France |
Today is Trinity Sunday according to the Christian calendar. It is a day to reflect on what God is like. How do we imagine God? The Trinitarian dogma – that God is a unity of persons in communion, a dynamic exchange of love that is creative, generative, and joyful – was the definitive statement of the early Church in its effort to describe God in the least inadequate way. It is a valiant attempt to communicate the incommunicable, to seek truth in the only way possible with respect to language about God: by refusing to resolve the paradoxes.
That is all I’m going to say today about the Trinitarian
dogma. The less said, the better. In the face of the Mystery of God, the most
appropriate response is silence. If we
are going to talk about God, a more biblical approach is to tell stories. And one of the best stories in the Bible
about what God is like is the first reading we heard today from Genesis.
Usually, this story in the Book of Genesis is taken to be
about the origin of the universe. It is
treated as a cosmological myth. Well, it
does contain elements of such creation accounts, but the story is more about
God than about the world. Like most
stories about what God is like, it is implicitly a story about how we should
live in the world given our understanding of what God is like. And the message of this story is really good
news, because its central proclamation is:
RELAX. Chill out. Take it
easy. Rest.
Jewish commentators have been much better at picking up on
this than have Christians. We tend
to focus on the “work” part of the story rather than the “rest” part. We don’t pay much attention to the climax of
the story:
And on the seventh day God finished the
work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that
he had done. So God blessed the seventh
day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had
done in creation.[1]
God does not bless the other six days in which he
worked. God blesses the creatures – as
intrinsically valuable quite apart from their use by humans – and the adam, the human beings, male and
female. But it is only the day of rest
that is declared “holy.” To be blessed
is to be infused with the life-force, to be made fully alive. Holiness describes being completely set-apart
for or consecrated to God; reserved to be used by God, so to speak. The
seventh day is set apart so that creation can rest and so become fully alive in
God.
What does this story reveal about what God is like? Creation is very hard work. It requires a great deal of energy and
imagination. It also requires a certain
capacity to go with the flow. Creativity
requires letting be, permitting things to develop, to emerge, to disclose what
they are becoming. This is not creation
on demand. It is creation by
invitation. God invites and trusts that
the response will turn out to God’s liking: “Let there be . . .” And, indeed, it turns out to be very
good.
God delights in creating and in creation, but God is not a
workaholic, anxious about getting it right, worried that everything will
collapse if God isn’t directly controlling things 24/7. God is “necessary” in that God donates being
to everything in existence, but there is secondary, contingent causality – real
creaturely freedom – within the created order.
And God is OK with that. You may
believe it is difficult to trust God. The
real challenge is believing that God trusts us! God trusts us enough to take a
break on the 7th day. God
trusts the ever-renewing cycles of nature, the rhythms and harmonies inherent
in God’s work and the participation of the creatures in that pattern of work and
rest.
It is not our work that defines us, but rather our capacity
to trust, to let go and let be, to relax into the loving intention of creation
so that we can really live. God created
us because he thought we might enjoy it.
Israel’s faith, and ours, is inextricably bound up with this sense that
we receive our identity, not from what we produce or acquire, but from our
willingness to rest in God’s love, to trust that there is a benevolent intention
beating at the heart of reality.
This Genesis story dates from the period of Israel’s exile
in Babylon. It is a story about
preserving one’s identity, one’s humanity, in a hostile culture that undermines
one’s capacity to trust and refuses the dignity of rest. Keeping Sabbath is a way of resisting
imperial claims to impose an identity that denies God’s image in us. Keeping Sabbath is a proclamation of faith that
there is a loving God who graciously donates being to creation, infusing it
with life-force, so that we may share in the eternal play of self-giving love
that is God’s own life. This God stands
over and against all imperial claims to power that would define us solely by
our work and deny us rest.
Israel’s experience generated a sophisticated critique of
ideologies that seek to define human beings by their work; which is, by
definition, slavery in the broadest sense.
The Torah defines Sabbath observance more precisely as work stoppage –
for adults, children, slaves, resident aliens, and even livestock.[2] Cessation
from all work is the means whereby the Sabbath is kept holy. If we really trust that our identity is
God-given and not a function of our own efforts, we can relax long enough to
discover and enjoy the intrinsic dignity and worth of creation.
The sages of Israel appended a second “creation” story – the
one about the Garden of Eden – to the first “creation” story in Genesis, that
goes so far as to define work as a curse.
It results from seeking to make God into a rival, against whom we set
our own efforts to know, produce, and acquire.
Rather than gratefully sharing and enjoying the fruits of an abundant
creation, we experience the fear of scarcity and the burden of toiling in
rivalry with others to secure our lives.
This is the consequence of refusing to rest in God’s love, instead defining ourselves by our achievements or our failures.[3]
What Israel struggled to resist was the reduction of all of
life to the economic. Politics,
community, the family, and even the self becomes subservient to economics when
production and consumption is the touchstone of identity and value. It is a struggle we know well. We’ve internalized the belief that we are
what we own. We are anxious to provide
our children with “opportunities” for “success” – by which we mean economic success
– keeping them even busier and over-scheduled than many adults. What they really want is not more
opportunities, but more time for relationships – with their parents, families
and friends. We trust in wealth to
provide us with a security that can only be provided by community. It is the breadth and depth of our
relationships, not the size of our investment portfolio, that sees us through
the tough times – including tough economic times. And look at how wealth determines our
politics, rather than the common wealth being subservient to the common
good. People exhausted by the rat race
have precious little time or energy to act as citizens, and are far easier to
manipulate.
Sabbath rest was thought to be so essential to human
identity and sanity, that the Torah stipulates death as the punishment for profaning
the Sabbath; whoever does any work on that day is to be cut off from the
people.[4] This sounds like a text of terror. But, to my knowledge, this was never
literally enforced. It was taken to contain a deeper truth: If you don’t observe the life-giving pattern
of work and rest intrinsic to creation, you will die. If you don’t keep the Sabbath you will be
“cut off from the people” – you will lose your identity and, for all intents,
cease to be fully human.
Earlier this week, I had dinner with my family and a dear
friend of our son, whom we’ve known since he was two years-old. We were talking
about their freshman college experience and what life is like for their
peers. The scope of depression, eating
disorders, self-harming behavior, and suicidality among their peers was
shocking to hear. These are complex
phenomena, and individual cases are unique, but one factor they both felt was
relevant was the sense that their generation lives with enormous pressure to
achieve, a lurking fear of scarcity, and an insidious sense of inadequacy. According to The New York Times, drug overdoses are now the leading cause of
death among Americans under the age of 50.[5] This is the consequence of a culture where
identity is defined by achievement, productivity, and consumption. If we can’t compete, if we aren’t good
enough, we numb out until we die.
Observing the Sabbath is critical to our resistance to this Culture
of Death. It is in our resting, not our
working or achieving, that we realize God’s image within us. It is how we become fully alive and truly
free. In the Torah, we are told that “on
the seventh day, God rested, and was refreshed.”[6] Walter
Brueggemann observes that the word translated as “refreshed” is the Hebrew word
for “self” turned into a verb: literally,
God was “re-selfed” or got Godself back.
When we are defined by achievement or failure, we lose our self. We become so fearful, anxious, and driven that
we are literally beside our selves. Resting
in God’s love, in the beauty, joy and wonder sustained by God’s creative
self-giving, we are restored in the image of God, renewed in our sense of
identity, power, and freedom. Sabbath
keeping is essential to the politics of resistance to a Culture of Death that
seeks to reduce everything to economic winners and losers.
Refusing to be defined by work is a subversive act. It asserts an intrinsic dignity and worth
that cannot be quantified or managed. It
expresses a profound trust in the benevolent, abundant, and sustainable nature
of reality, and a willingness to surrender ourselves to the care of God and
others. It recognizes that we do not
need to “add value” to the world, as if the world and our existence in it were
somehow insufficiently valuable; as if we could improve on God’s
handiwork. We don’t need to make the
world great again. It already is. We are just too busy to notice. If even God took time out to rest, why can’t
we? Maybe, just maybe, we are most like
God when we relax and do . . . nothing.
[1]
Genesis 2:2-3.
[2]
Exodus 20:8-11.
[3]
The first eleven chapters of Genesis describe the unfolding of the consequences
resulting from the refusal of Sabbath rest.
[4]
Exodus 31:14-15.
[5]
Josh Katz, “Drug Deaths In America Are Rising Faster Than Ever,” The New York Times (June 5, 2017).
[6]
Exodus 31:17.
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