Considering the Sabbath

For the next five Sundays we will consider the theme of sabbath at Florence. This will provide a safe container for us to rest in God in our on-going grief. The theme of sabbath also anticipates the sabbatical that Florence Church and I will be experiencing beginning on February 14. After a celebration at Florence I will be leaving for eight weeks in Costa Rica and a total of ten weeks away from my pastoral role. The congregation will be preparing for Rural Revival Days in the summer and a congregational retreat in the fall. And for finding ways to keep sabbath in their own way.

So, you are invited to enter into sabbath with us. Consider taking two hours per week of sabbath rest beginning in January. In February, consider taking four hours. In March, eight hours. If you add it up, by December and the end of 2010 you will have the opportunity to experience a full day of sabbath per week. How might God transform your life in these times?

Here are words from Tilden Edwards...

“The Christian sabbath is a practice of receptive time that balances and permeates our active time…The need for such a receptive quality of time has cropped out in recent years in…greater concern for rest, meditation and celebration. These concerns point to the abiding yet obscure human hunger for intimacy with the deep transpersonal Horizon of our lives. It is a hunger that cannot be fully satisfied apart from spacious times of restful presence. I use the world presence to mean both our presence before and to God. It is a presence that compliments the intimacy that arises through our active ministries. This dim awareness of our need and the attempts to satisfy it have often been either fragmentary, overly privatized, or strictly utilitarian, and unconnected with the sense of a gifted and historically grounded corporate rhythm of life for the whole church and, in its rudiments, for all human life.”

Tilden Edwards, Sabbath Time (Seabury Press, NY: 1982) ix.