by Rev. Thomas Disrud

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Opening words

Come to this place, all who are seekers.

Bring all that you bring.

Your joys and your sorrows—

All that you carry in your heart.

We make this space sacred by our presence here.

It is good that we are here together.

Come, now, and let us worship.

Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy, the commandment tells us.

The story of the creation in the book of Genesis is a familiar one. “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said: ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness Night. And there was evening and morning, the first day.”

The creation continues for five more days as the sky, the seas, the land, plants, the sun, the moon, living creatures, including humankind, come into being. In each cycle of night into day, a new dimension of the universe is created and unfolds.

And in the end, when this work is finished, God blesses the creation, declares that it is good, and takes a day to rest, a day of Sabbath. One rabbinical comment goes that God stopped to show us that what we create becomes meaningful to us only when we stop creating it and start to think about why we did so.

I don’t know about you, but for me the concept of a Sabbath gets challenged all the time in our 24/7 world. It is rare anymore that stores will be closed any day of the week, let alone the Sabbath. Just what would we do if our cell phone capability were to be cut off for a whole day each week?

I certainly struggle with this. The nature of my work is such that every day is different. Depending upon the day, there are things in the morning and in the afternoons and in the evenings. And when I am not working more often than not I am thinking about the church. This week I had a dream about all the rugs in my house being moved around to different rooms. It was a dream that had its share of chaos. I’m not sure what all the meanings of this dream might be, but at least one is that a whole lot of things are moving at the church with our building project and plenty of changes. Through it all I’m not always sure whether I’m standing or slipping. The dream was probably a sign to slow down and to pay attention.

And I know that I am not alone in this. It is a theme I hear with a lot of people. We struggle with all we have in front of us. It might be work, it might be raising the kids and getting them to soccer and this and that and not really having time for the family. It might be the justice work that is just never enough. Or it might be living with the ongoing distraction of television or radio and really not having time to step back and be quiet. No matter what it is we find ourselves driven to do, the stuff of our lives can almost becomes compulsive. We are driven to go from one thing to another with little time for rest in between. We get so focused on this or that thing that we lose sight of just about everything else.

A colleague of mine, Amanda Aikman, tells the story of a woman she met who had a daily compulsion to vacuum her cat. Yes, you heard it right: A woman who had a compulsion to vacuum her cat.

She told the story of her neighbor, Betty. Betty had a rambling three-story house filled with knick-knacks. She had a gentle husband, Jay, who mostly stayed out of her way, tending his roses. And she had a cat. Betty also had some sort of compulsion that made it impossible for her to leave the house in the morning without first dusting or vacuuming every single item in it. And this included Reuben, a slim, black little cat whose elegance of gait and demeanor did not betray his humble origins: As a kitten, he had been rescued from a dumpster by Jay, who brought him home in his pocket. Reuben knew he had been rescued from a dumpster. He knew about the world outside Betty and Jay’s house—a harsh reality where there were bad smells, hunger, other cats, and noises even louder than the whine of a vacuum cleaner.

And so every morning, with a martyred expression on his furry face, Reuben would lie on his back and submit to being vacuumed. Betty used the Hoover’s upholstery crevice tool, determined to get every last scrap of fur and dander. Jay would sometimes come by and say (over the noise of the vacuum), “Now, Betty, why do you have to vacuum that poor cat?” Betty didn’t know. She just kept vacuuming. She had to do it before she could feel free to leave the house.

I have to say that this is a first time that I have heard of somebody vacuuming their cat. I can’t imagine there are many cats out there that would submit to such a thing. But are there things in your life that your find yourself doing every day, even if they aren’t all that logical to do? Even if it takes a lot of your energy and you really aren’t sure why you’re doing it? But there you are, doing them again, day after day.

But it is easy to get caught up in all kinds of things that don’t make sense in our culture. Because of the messages we get from somewhere, we get things we don’t need. And what about the way we spend our time. We frantically go from one thing to another thing, from work to play to the next thing. Have you noticed that even our leisure is something we plan for and get ready for and something that can, in the end, seem like one more thing that we are doing? Even our resting time gets programmed.

Our compulsions can take all kinds of forms. It might be checking out the latest goods at IKEA (coming soon to our fair city) or Home Depot or Nordstroms. But it might also be something more righteousness. It might be saving the world—whether it’s making peace or saving the environment. Good things—but at some point can we have too much of a good thing?

The thing that happens is that we get going so fast we might just miss what is most important for us to pay attention to. We lose any sense of the sacred because we aren’t really taking the time to step back and look at our efforts and have a sense of whether it is good, whether it is not, whether it is reflective of what our highest values might be.

In his book, Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal and Delight in Our Busy Lives, Wayne Muller writes:  “A successful life has become a violent enterprise. We make war on our own bodies, pushing them beyond their limits; war on our children, because we cannot find enough time to be with them when they are hurt and afraid, and need our company; war on our spirit because we are too preoccupied to listen to the quiet voices that seek to nourish and refresh us; war on our communities, because we are fearfully protecting what we have, and do not feel safe enough to be kind and generous; war on the earth, because we cannot take the time to place our feet on the ground and allow it to feed us, to taste its blessing and give thanks.”

In my life, I struggle with a sense that I spend too much time doing and not much time being. I get caught up in the violence of running from one thing to the next and in the process so often feel like I’m missing what is most important. But before I can even think about it too much, here comes the next big thing.

The time that I have that is probably most essentially Sabbath time is time around the house when I don’t have a specific agenda. It is time when I drift from one thing to the next, or maybe nothing. But it is open space time. It is time when my mind wanders and I can think about whatever it is I end up thinking about.

Given the work that I do, I have found that it is important to be away from the usual routines for a good chuck of time at least once a year. This summer I went back to Bali, a place where I have experienced as complete a Sabbath-like environment as I have ever had in my life.

This summer I got there and I found that I was still in right straight ahead mode. I hadn’t been there long at all before I needed to head out from the cottage where I was staying to check out the galleries, to see what was new. I needed to walk and walk and walk and make sure that I hadn’t missed anything.

But after about three days, I realized that that was not why I had gone there. Yes I wanted to see the wonderful and beautiful places, but I didn’t need to be in overdrive. But landing there from my native culture, I was aware how strong that pull was. Go, go, go. It was much easier to recognize, however, as I found myself more and more in the culture that doesn’t move at quite the same pace.

But there is something in that place that calls me to slow down. Certainly the heat and the humidity do that. But there is also something about the way people are together, the way they don’t seem so focused on acquiring things and on filling up every minute with rushing here and there. It took a couple days but slowly I began to move at a different pace and I began to pay attention to things in ways that I hadn’t been before. I found myself watching things as they happened: The villagers moving along the path, the children running around, the grandparents making their offerings to the spirits.

I happen to have the privilege to go to a place like Bali. Not everyone has that. And of course you don’t have to do far away to find it. Sometimes, though, it does make it easier.

But the essence of the Sabbath is a call to be in a different space. It is a call to be able to look at the world through a different lens. To put yourself in a place that is somehow not the usual place. It seems that it is in our most familiar surroundings that it is the most difficult to find.

It is not easy to actually keep ourselves away from all the voices calling us to do this thing or that thing. We get the message that we have to be on all the time—that we should be doing this or that. We get the message that if we aren’t doing something we are missing out. We get the message—subtle and overt—that one of our big jobs is to be a consumer—that that is a primary way that we should be in relationship with everything around us. But that doesn’t make space for us to hear that still small voice within.

Theologian Rebecca Parker has suggested that keeping the Sabbath is a radical act of resistance against the violence of our culture. Most of all she points to all those messages we receive that we are first and foremost consumers. It is an act of saying no to the message that tells us to fill the emptiness in our lives by consuming more. It is a model of consumerism that says when we are empty, we go to the marketplace to be filled. This is not food that sustains, but leaves us hungering for something more.

When we decide to keep the Sabbath and not consume for one day in seven, we take a degree of control back in our lives. We let ourselves know that we are not helpless in our culture, as I think we can sometimes feel. But we come to know that we have the ability to be independent from it, to make a decision about it, and not simply be swept up in the process.

It is up to each one of us to discern how it is we take time out of ordinary time. It is a time to open up space for God.

According to a Hasidic tale, there once was “a rabbi who disappeared every Sabbath eve, ‘to commune with God in the forest,’ his congregation thought. So one Sabbath night they [sent] one of their cantors to follow the rabbi and observe the holy encounter. Deeper and deeper into the woods the rabbi went until he came to the small cottage of an old Gentile woman, sick to death and crippled into a painful posture. Once there, the rabbi cooked for her and carried her firewood and swept her floor. Then when the chores were finished, he returned immediately to his little house next to the synagogue.

“Back in the village, the people demanded of the one they’d sent to follow him, ‘Did our rabbi go up to heaven as we thought?’ ‘Oh no,’ the cantor answered after a thoughtful pause, ‘our rabbi went much, much higher than that.’”

Only we can know what will call us away from our busyness, away from our compulsions and toward a space that will allow us to be in the presence of the holy as we understand it. What is that space that calls us to be our true selves and to know what is most important for us?

The story about the rabbi is a reminder that the Sabbath can take many forms. The rabbi left his usual routine—he even left his community—to spend the Sabbath giving to the old Gentile woman who needed help. It was not the usual form of Sabbath, but it was what he needed.

For us, it might be that we need our time in nature. It might mean that we set aside a time for family that is sacred time. It might be all of those things. But it is time that allows us to be in a different space and have a chance to see our lives through a different lens.

Living in these times, resisting the messages of what we should be—and what we shouldn’t be—takes courage. When we don’t work for a day, it means that the world can get along okay without that work. Keeping the Sabbath is also an act that takes courage because it is a time to open ourselves to the fullness of life—all the beauty, but also all the suffering, the loneliness, the loss, the grief we hold inside of us. We are asked to sit holding all of this together. But the same forces that can cut us off from the pain of the world can keep us from the joy. It is all part of a whole.

I think that is much of why we come together here every week. Even church has its challenges. You come in and it may be crowded. Finding your way around is anything but easy. We are working on that. But hopefully, most of the time, we are reminded that we are part of something larger.

I am reminded every Sunday to think about the roots that hold me close and the wings that set me free. I am reminded that I am not an isolated being, but connected to some mystery that is within me and beyond me. There is something that happens in the simple act of coming together.

“We are here,” wrote Annie Dillard, “to abet creation and to witness to it, to notice each other’s beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.”

It is up to us to put ourselves in a place where we can witness to life in all its abundance. In our being and in our doing, may we know that we are part of that creation and may we know that it is good and that it is holy. In our lives may this be so. Amen.

PRAYER

Great spirit of life, we give thanks for this day. We give thanks for the blessed moments of our lives. Call us to resist the violence that cuts us off from others and from our selves. For the people in our midst, for the creation we live in, for all that is our life. Call us to make space for the sacred, for all the beauty and tragedy that life has to offer. Amen.

Benediction

Make space, my friends. Make space and live with your hearts open. Go in peace.  Go in love. Amen.

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Copyright 2005, Rev. Thomas Disrud.  All rights reserved.