The Practice of Saying No

As the base of Mount Sinai God says to the people, “You shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.” And then, Moses disappears in a cloud and will later emerge with what we call the Ten Commandments, the first instructions from God that will shape the people’s new life together.

Let There Be by Lauren Wright Pittman, A Sanctified Art

 In the Exodus version of the commandments, the fourth commandment reads, “Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.”

When we hear the word “Sabbath” many things come to our minds. Perhaps we think about sitting in the living room, dressed in our Sunday best, looking uncomfortably around while doing absolutely nothing. Or perhaps it raises our anxiety levels, because all we can think of is how much there is to do or how long our to-do list is.

Whatever our reaction to the word “Sabbath,” many of us have simply decided that Sabbath is not for us. And I’ll admit, I’ve been there too. At times the practice of Sabbath, imagined as taking an entire day off to do nothing, has seemed too difficult, if not impossible.

And yet, rather than a burden, the Sabbath, like the rest of God’s commands, is intended to be a gift for the people. It’s meant to be a gift to us.

You see, Sabbath, or as Barbara Brown Taylor calls it “the practice of saying no,” is about reorientation. In a world that values busyness and productivity, Sabbath asks us to do the opposite of the world, to slow down and pause, rather than speed up and do more. It challenges us to reconsider our worth and value.

Consider the people at Mount Sinai. Their entire lives have been about producing bricks. It’s work that never stopped; they were required to just keep going. But now, God offers them a different way. Take a day off. Say no. Keep the Sabbath.

Why? Because at creation, after creating the heavens and the earth, God rested.

In other words, the basis of sabbath isn’t what we’ve accomplished, after all the seventh day of creation is the first day of human existence, but it is about what God has done. To put that another way, we aren’t defined by what we do, but we are defined by who God is and what God has done.

And so, perhaps it’s worth reclaiming the practice of Sabbath.

Grace and peace,

Kimmy