The Unforced Rhythms of Grace: A Reformed Perspective on Sabbath
by Tom Schwanda
[Tom Schwanda is Associate Professor of Christian Formation & Ministry at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois]
[This article first appeared in the March 1996 issue of Perspectives. Reprinted with permission.]
Shortly after beginning my first pastorate I discovered that Sunday was no different from any of the other six days of the week. I served a congregation in northern New Jersey that laid in the shadow of metropolitan New York City. Sunday was reserved for families. to complete household tasks and chores that could not be undertaken the rest of the week. Further both the schools and town recreation programs looked upon it as the only day to squeeze in their activities. Those young people who were members of the band or cheerleaders frequently traveled around the state for com... petition and other Sunday events. Likewise a full program of football and baseball games normally filled many Sundays for my parishioners. Those members whose children were not involved in these events often took advantage of the weekend to escape to their trailers in the Pocono mountains or cottages at the Jersey shore. More than once the town clergy and myself wrote letters of protest to the school board, recreation programs, and others expressing our dismay. However, the response was predictable and always the same: be like the Roman Catholics and worship on Saturday night. So much for resting on the Sabbath. But what does that mean? Especially within. the Reformed tradition what is our understanding as it relates to the Fourth Command... ment? As with manyother aspects of life and faith there is no unified Reformed position on keeping the Sabbath. In this brief article I will use three representatives from various periods of. time to sketch a Reformed perspective on the Sabbath. Our guides will be John Calvin, Nicholas Bound, and Eugene Peterson.
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While Calvin discusses the Sabbath theme in a number of places, the Institutes provide the most helpful resource. Within his treatment of the Ten Commandments he comments on the threefold purpose of the Sabbath:
First, we are to meditate throughout life upon an everlasting Sabbath rest from all our works, that the Lord may work in us through his Spirit. Secondly,each one of us privately, whenever he has leisure, is to exercise himself diligently in pious meditation upon God's works. Also, we 'should all observe together the lawful order set by the church for the hearing of the Word, the administration of the sacraments, and for public prayers. In the third place, we should not inhumanly oppress those subject to us. (John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles [Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960], 2.8.34)
Therefore, the Sabbath graciously offers us spiritual rest, calls us to worship God, and reminds us of our social responsibility not to subjugate others.
Since for Calvin God is at work within us through Holy Spirit we can recognize his underlying theme of grace, which is foundational to his understanding of the Sabbath. John Primus, perhaps the most articulate and scholarly Reformed historian writing on the Sabbath today, asserts:
Salvation is the gracious act of a sovereign God. The Sabbath is given as a reminder of this grace, for it calls us to rest from our own works. In Calvin's view, the call to a Sabbath rest is a call to abandon completely human works as a basis for a renewed relationship to God, a relationship grounded in grace. (John H. Primus, Holy Time: Moderate Puritanism and the Sabbath [Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1989], 121)
The Genevan Reformer contends that since Christ fulfilled the spiritual rest of the Sabbath there is a reduced importance on precise Sabbath observance in the New Tes.. tament. This is not to negate the importance of the Sabbath but to remind us of God's gracious working within the Christian. Further, for Calvin, this rest is not restricted to the Sabbath alone but is a redemptive rest that should be present every day. A significant distinction between Calvin and the later Puritans surfaces at this point. According to Calvin, the Sabbath is a sign of spiritual rest and, therefore, applicable only to God's covenant people. The Puritans, who held a strong moral view of the Fourth Commandment, would strongly resist this ceremonial interpretation. Primus records these words from Calvin's sermon from Deuteronomy that clearly set forth his position:
God saith, I have given you the Sabbath day to be a
sign that I make you holy, and that I am your God who
reigneth among you. This is not common to all mortal
men. For God granteth not such grace and privilege to
the paynims and infidels, as to make them holy. He
speaks but only to the people whom he adopted and
chose to be his heritage. (Primus, Holy Time, 123,
quoting The Sermons of M. John Calvin upon the Fifth
Book of Moses Called Deuteronomie, trans. Arthur
Golding, [London, 1583],207).
Calvin's second Sabbath principle recognizes our need for communal worship. In reality, Calvin desires that Christians gather daily for the hearing of the Word of God. However, the one in. seven gathering serves as a minimum due to our human weakness and resistance to God. To encourage this worship, Calvin desires all recreation should cease, shop windows be secured, and travel eliminated so as not to compete with worship. While Calvin appears to see recreation as inappropriate for Sundays, a strong oral tradition often repeated insists his actual practice was less severe. I have endeavored to trace the authenticity of this reference to no avail. However, the most frequent references indicate that when John Knox visited Calvin in Geneva he finally found him lawn bowling that Sunday afternoon. Once again it must be acknowledged there are no footnotes to substantiate this possibility. Common to both Calvin and the Puritans was the conviction that all of Sunday belonged to God. To use the Lord's Day fully meant gathering for public worship as well as devoting the remainder of the day for personal worship and family prayer. However, it appears that Calvin's view of Sunday was not as strict as the later Puritans.
The third purpose of Calvin's Sabbath delineates the social implications inherent within this commandment. Rest is the privilege not only for the Christian but for his or her servants and animals as well. While others are to be given permissionfor physical rest, it is primarily to serve as a reminder to the Christian of his or her need for rest. Primus summarizes Calvin's view in this fashion: "When beasts of burden are released from their labors on this day, they serve as a reminder to God's people of the need for rest. With the "stables and stalls shut
up," there is a "monument before our eyes" calling for Sabbath observance" (Primus, Holy Time,131).
In following Calvin's development, we recognize that his Sabbath thought does not include 'the human need for physical rest. Rather the central focus is service to God and maturity in obedience. Recalling the Jewish experience of slavery in Egypt should challenge Christians to treat others with greater charity and sensitivity. That is to say, God's people must not oppress others but provide for them even as they are providing for themselves. In short, Calvin's view reveals "the sweeping, spiritual, redemptive conclusion that Christians are only keeping the Sabbath when they rest from their evil works and let God work in them by his Spirit all the days of their lives." (Primus, Holy Time, 134).
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As we shift generations and continents we see both continuity as well as a hardening of positions. Nicholas Bound produced the first full Puritan treatment on the Fourth Commandment. Hisfirst edition was issued in 1595. Eleven years later he produced a mammoth, expanded version numbering 459 pages. The Puritans have never been known for their brevity, and Bound was certainly no exception. Unlike Calvin, Bound advances a Sabbatarian interpreta.. tion to the Fourth Commandment. There are two essential features to Sabbatarianism. First, since the Fourth Commandment finds its origin in creation, it predates both the Fall and the Decalogue. Therefore, the Sabbath is not cere .. monial, as in Calvin, but a moral law binding upon all humanity. Second, Saturday or the Jewish day of rest is trans.. ferred to Sunday as the Christian fulfillment of the Sabbath. Further, this transfer is seen as coming directly from Jesus Christ and transmitted through his disciples. Inherent within this thinking is the unyielding conviction that Sun.. day is the only appropriate day on which Christians may worship God. Bound favors the term the Lord's Day as the proper title for the first day of the week.
Much like Calvin, the Puritans devoted Sunday to public and private worship. The early hours were to be spent in preparation for corporate worship. The individual was en.. couraged through self..examination to review the previous week both for the sins committed and the blessings re.. ceived. Once the individual and family returned home they were instructed to meditate and further extract the spiritual insights from the sermon. The remainder of the day was to be given to personal prayer, singing of Psalms, and works of mercy.
While these restrictions may 'seem unduly rigid to us today, we perhaps might form a more charitable opinion if we understood the context of late sixteenth..century England. Sunday worship more often resembled a rowdy half-time celebration or boisterous gathering at the local tavern than the gathering ofGod's people. Bound catego.. rizes three different types of commotion that created chaos amid Sunday morning worship. First, some men insisted on bringing their bows and arrows and falcons to church. Whether they were going or returning from a hunt, the results were the same: mass confusion, squeals, and disruption. Next, people often came to and departed from church whenever they felt the urge. Bound describes this disorderly matrix of movement:
For all the people, nay the severall households come not together, but scattered, and one dropping after another in a confused manner: First comes the man, then a quarter of an houre after his wife, and after her, I cannot tell how long, especially the maidservants, who must needes bee as long after her, as the menservants are after him. (John Primus, "Calvin and the Puritan Sabbath: A Comparative Study" in Exploring the Heritage of John Calvin, ed. David E. Holwerda [Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1976]: 54)
Yet a third major disturbance centered around almsgiving. It was not uncommon for men to roam the aisles during the service, seeking, exchanging, and passing money. Many times they generated so much noise that they drowned out the preacher. It does not require a very vivid imagination to recreate the commotion and confusion amid this sort menagerie. Therefore, the desire to regulate Sunday was actually a means of creating a proper atmosphere for the worship of God. Unfortunately the Puritans had a certain penchant for regulation that often was taken to excess. Leland Ryken captures a few illustrative vignettes; a woman who was fined "for wringing and hanging out clothes," a New England soldier also fined for "wetting a piece of an old hat to put in his shoe" to protect a sore foot, and two young lovers who were tried for "sitting together on the Lord's Day under a tree in Goodman Chapman's orchard" (Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1986]: 191).
Lest we think Sabbatarianism permitted only corporate and private worship, the Puritans demonstrated a flexible sensitivity for lawful works. Lewis Bayly enumerates three basic tasks that were permissible on Sunday: works of piety (which directly concern the service of God), works-of charity (required to save another person's life), and works of necessity (protection from enemy attack or fighting a fire, etc.)· (Lewis Bayly, The Practice of Piety [Morgan, Penn.: Soli Deo Gloria Publications, org. pub. 1611],202-3). However, for the Puritans there was no room for recreation on the Sabbath. Charles Hambrick-Stowe summarizes their thinking succinctly: "It was a day of rest from all secular work and a day for the spiritual work whereby the soul could find rest. The Sabbath was a day for the recreation of the soul, not the recreation of the body" (Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventh-Century New England [Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 1982]: 97). Emerging from that, the argument of Richard Baxter raises an interesting question. Baxter contended that people who had exerted themselves physically all week were weary in body and not mind. Therefore, recreation would only add further exertion to their bodies and do little to provide the much needed rest. Baxter as well as countless other Puritans asserted that people should play during the week not on Sunday. This raises a significant question. In the agrarian society of Baxter as well as Calvin the average person earned a living by physical labor. Obviously this was long before the advent of computers, the service industry, and other less physical means of employment. Therefore, can we take his argument and ap-ply it to our own contemporary context? Since fewer people earn their livelihood through physical labor does, or can, a proper Sabbath rest or observance of Sunday now include physical exercise and activity (swimming, biking, walking, playing tennis, etc.)?
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As we reach our contemporary age, we discover the in-sights of Eugene Peterson. Peterson, who for many years was a Presbyterian pastor, has in recent years become a professor of spiritual theology at Regent College in Vancouver, Brit-ish Columbia. He writes with eloquent passion of his own renewed discovery of keeping the Sabbath as an essential spiritual discipline for a weary society. Peterson asserts that we need first to understand the biblical and not cultural foundations of the Sabbath before we can practice it. One common facility that permeates both church and culture is that Sabbath is a "day off." While Peterson appreciates the benefits of such a day, the Sabbath is much more. To reduce it to this trivializes and secularizes it beyond its gracious biblical purpose. He continues: "Sabbath means quit. Stop. Take a break. Cool it. The word itself has nothing devout or holy in it. It is a word about time, denoting our non use of it, what we usually call wasting time." (Eugene H. Peterson, Working the Angles [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987]: 47). Peterson returns to the creation account in Genesis to construct his Sabbath understanding. Even a casual reading of the biblical text reveals the uniqueness of the Hebrew conceptof time. After each of the six creative periods of God, the Scripture records that "there was evening and there was morning, the first, second, etc. day." Unlike our American practice of beginning the day at sunrise and concluding it at bedtime, the Hebrews perceived the sequence differently. Their day begins at sundown as one stops work and prepares to sleep and ends the following sundown. This creates a very different perspective. That is, the day begins as we stop and go to bed. It begins with God and grace. Then as we awake the next morning we enter into what God has already been in the process of shaping through the night. Peterson describes this "rhythm of grace" in the following manner:
We go to sleep, and God begins his work. As we sleep he develops his covenant. We wake and are called out to participate in God's creative action. We respond in faith, in work. But always grace is previous. Grace is primary. We wake into a world we didn't make, into a salvation we didn't earn. Evening: God begins, with-out our help, his creative day. Morning: God calls us to enjoy and share and develop the work he initiated. (Peterson, Working the Angles, 48)
What is obvious daily, of our need to stop and rest for sleep, requires our intentionality as we approach the Sabbath. Now we must exercise the discipline to continue the same daily pattern as we transfer this rhythm to the entire day and rest from our efforts.
Further, as Peterson continues his biblical exploration of the Sabbath, he discovers two essential elements that should compose our Sabbath-keeping. These twin foci emerge from the distinctive themes that are present in the two different biblical accounts of the Decalogue. The Exodus version focuses on the reality that we rest because God first rested (Exod. 20:8-11). God's keeping of the Sabbath reminds us of the importance of prayer and contemplation. However, as we examine the Deuteronomy account (5:1215), we see a very different picture. The Israelites were slaves for four hundred years in Egypt and never had a rest or vacation. This insane preoccupation with production reduced them to little more than machines. Therefore, this second form of the Fourth Commandment breathes liberation and social rest into the human fabric of life. While prayer is the proper response to the Exodus account, play is the appropriate activity to Deuteronomy. Those are the two keys according to Peterson for keeping the Sabbath: praying and playing. Additionally, he suggests that children are the best guides to show us how to practice both of these Sabbath activities. Unlike adults who often struggle with either one or the other of these Sabbath practices, praying and playing come naturally to children.
A related question that arises from Peterson that is particularly germane within the context of this article is the practical question: Can a pastor take Sunday as his or her Sabbath? Sadly the church is often guilty of using Sunday for more than worship. Increasingly in our fast-paced mo-bile society some consistories and sessions feel it necessary to conduct business meetings on Sunday if they desire to gather enough members for a quorum. Unfortunately this may be the only day that church leaders are not scattered around the globe during the week. Peterson-himself while serving as a pastor kept his Sabbath on Monday. His ritual was simple. Each Monday he and his wife would drive to a hiking trail. After reading a-psalm and praying they would hike in silence for the next two or three hours. They would break the silence over lunch and discuss their observations and impressions. The remainder of their day was spent in reading, writing letters, and tackling odd jobs (Peterson, Working the Angles, 56-57).
Perhaps within our own frenetic society we need to re-claim not only these Sabbath principles of praying and playing but also to foster a "Sabbath spirit" in all we do. That is to say, as we and our people fulfill our vocations we can seek to follow Jesus' pace rather than our own compulsive treadmill. Peterson's rendering of Jesus' words in Matthew 11:28-30 reflects such a Sabbath spirit and provides a fitting summary and challenge to the rest and worship that is waiting for us:
Are you tired? Worn out? Burnt out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you'll recover your life. I'll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me-watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won't lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on' you. Keep company with me and you'll learn to live freely and lightly. (Eugene H. Peterson, The Message [Colorado Springs, Colo.: NavPress, 1993)
