I've been reading Eugene Peterson's book Working the Angles (which is a must read for anyone in ministry), and came across this passage on Sabbath. I wanted to quote it for a couple of reasons, not least of which because of the hilarious comment about Augustine and his mother: 

"We are, most of us, Augustinians in our pulpits. We preach the sovereignty of our Lord, the primacy of grace, the glory of God...But the minute we leave our pulpits we are Pelagians. In our committee meetings and our planning sessions, in our obsessive attempts to meet the expectations of people, in our anxiety to please, in our hurry to cover all the bases, we practice a theology that puts our good will at the foundation of life and urges moral effort as the primary element in pleasing God...Pelagius was an unlikely heretic; Augustine an unlikely saint. By all accounts Pelagius was urbane, courteous, convincing. Everyone seems to have liked him immensely. Augustine squandered away his youth in immorality, had some kind of Freudian thing with his mother [!], and made a lot of enemies. But all our theological and pastoral masters agree that Augustine started from God's grace and therefore had it right, and Pelagius started from human effort and therefore got it wrong. If we were as Augustinian out of the pulpit as we are in it, we would have no difficulty keeping sabbath. How did it happen that Pelagius became our master?"

Life has been a bit stressful lately. I’ve had to put in some extra work hours due to an advancing deadline. To mentally get myself through it, I told myself last week that I’d take a real Sabbath on Sunday. No work, no email, no computer, nothing. Only rest and play with my family. However, Sunday wasn’t all that restful. I struggled with the desire to do a little work here and there. When I sat down to read, I felt guilty for not working on the project. When I walked past the dirty clothes I felt the urge to do a load. When I saw my computer, I wanted to work on my inbox. My body and heart wanted to relax but my mind kept interrupting my peace. My inability to take a day off to relax kind of, uh, stressed me out.

I finally gave in at the end of the night and allowed myself to do “leisure work” on the computer. It was when I read a comment left by Adam on my Loggerhead, Lights and Landmark post, I was reminded of a lesson we learned in Germany. Adam left some great insight on rest as well as a link to the article (http://fulleryouthinstitute.org/2010/05/in-season/). So, I figure this was God’s way of showing me where to begin my Culture Clash series. So Germany it is…

Leave it to a group of Jewish hipsters to remind us Christians how important it is to observe the Sabbath for what it is: a day set apart for the Lord.

Shabbat--the Hebrew for Sabbath--is big with Jews, some would say the biggest Jewish holiday of them all. For Jews, Shabbat begins on Friday evening at sunset and ends on Saturday night "when three stars are visible in the sky." On Shabbat, Jews "remember that God created the world and then rested from His labors" (Genesis 2:2). Shabbat is considered a festive day to pray, read, eat, drink wine, spend time with family and friends, and basically rest.

But Shabbat is Jewish, right? So what's that to the rest of us? As it turns out, plenty. And it took a bunch of Jewish artists, thought-leaders and tastemakers operating under the banner Reboot to tell us Gentiles what we're missing. In their search for "a modern way to observe a weekly day of rest," the folks at Reboot created the "Sabbath Manifesto" as "a creative project designed to slow down our lives in an increasingly hectic world." 

My parents used to have us write a “Resolution list” for the coming year, but even at a young age, I found such attempts a waste of my time. "Being nicer to my sister," or "not eating candy," would last until about 2pm on New Year’s Day, and bear nothing but sweet investments in my failure complex. So I’d doodle on my supposed list, or make-up something to appease parental requests, but beyond that, spent my years resorting to a no-resolution approach.

In 2009, this changed.

My first three weeks of 2009 were spent on a three-week solitude retreat. I’d interact with a therapist/spiritual-director each morning, but other than that, was alone with the snowy woods of Washington. A handful of themes encased from this journey, of the more significant ones being “rest.” Debriefing in a friend’s living room, I remember asking her from thereon out to, “Remind when that I lost engagement with the Sabbath, that such is a sin* for me.” And what I meant by “sin” here was relatively unrelated to anything behavioral, and rather, resistance to something invitational—from God.

I read in a devotional recently this quote from F.B. Meyer:

"It is impossible to rush into God's presence, catch up anything we fancy, and run off with it. To attempt this will end in mere disillusion and disappointment. Nature will not unveil her rarest beauty to the chance tourist. Pictures that are the result of a life of work do not disclose their secret loveliness to those who stroll down a gallery. And God's best cannot be ours apart from patient waiting in His holy presence."

In April, I made a quick trip down to Virginia Beach to lead worship for a women's retreat there. The topic of the four sessions was Sabbath. I was very challenged by the excellent teaching of my friend Laura Shibut, who has learned the "hard way" how necessary the Sabbath is to the life of faith. My "take away" from the weekend was that I have been willfully and wantonly disobeying one of the Big Ten.