Speaker 1: What is up everyone?
Speaker 1: My name is Ryan Brailey.
Speaker 1: I'm the pastor of Central A Church and the people that I love in the greatest city of Minnesota.
Speaker 1: Of course I'm talking about Elk River.
Speaker 1: I'm here in the studio with Mike Lauer.
Speaker 1: What's up, mike?
Speaker 1: And this is our podcast, our midweek podcast called Reflections, and we're glad you're here with us today.
Speaker 1: We're talking about Sabbath, one of my favorite topics in the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible Sabbath.
Speaker 1: In fact, in the Hebrew, the word for Sabbath is the word Shabbat.
Speaker 1: Last week we talked about the word Shalom, and that was a part of a Messianic Jewish community in Denver that would begin all of their weekly worship gatherings with the phrase or the greeting Shabbat, shalom.
Speaker 1: It's like a peace.
Speaker 1: Be with you on this Sabbath.
Speaker 1: Now, mike, I'm going on vacation.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you this.
Speaker 1: I'm going on vacation with my family.
Speaker 1: Coming up pretty soon, in fact, by the time this airs, I will probably already been on vacation.
Speaker 1: But I'm going to go on family vacation, with my family, of course, and I'm just going to lay around and do nothing.
Speaker 1: And here's why because of Sabbath, on the first six days of creation in Genesis one, this beautiful book, the Bible, opens up with Genesis and Genesis one God creates.
Speaker 1: He creates everything.
Speaker 1: He creates the light, moon, the stars, the sun, trees, rivers, the duck build platypus, the chipotle burrito.
Speaker 1: Of course okay, maybe not that one in Genesis one, but either way.
Speaker 1: But of course, in the seventh day of creation, the last day of this creative, active work, god finishes the work they've been doing.
Speaker 1: The text tells us, and he ceases on the seventh thing from all the work he's been doing, and God blesses the seventh day and declares it holy.
Speaker 1: So check it out.
Speaker 1: On the seventh day, god stops working.
Speaker 1: Stopping working or ending working can be a godly action.
Speaker 1: Are you with me, mike?
Speaker 1: Absolutely, I remember.
Speaker 1: The seventh day of creation noticeably, almost brazenly, stands in contrast from the first six days.
Speaker 1: On the seventh day, again, god finishes this work he's been doing and declares it holy.
Speaker 1: Now the word holy in the Hebrew is the word kadosh.
Speaker 1: If you're listening online, let me hear you say kadosh.
Speaker 1: It's a wonderful word.
Speaker 1: This is the first time in the Hebrew scriptures of this word.
Speaker 1: Kadosh, or holy, is used.
Speaker 1: In the great Jewish writer and thinker Abraham Joshua Heschel is one of my favorites.
Speaker 1: He writes it was on the seventh day that God gives the world a soul.
Speaker 1: Now, it's clearly something sacred about this day that stands apart or is holy and independent from any human effort and that points to and celebrates the culmination of creative activity.
Speaker 1: Now, no one calls it Sabbath here in Genesis one.
Speaker 1: They don't.
Speaker 1: They don't use that word at all because the law of the Sabbath hasn't come into the story yet, doesn't come into much later in the book of Exodus, the second book of the Bible.
Speaker 1: But you do see hints and shadows of Sabbath here in Genesis one, but again it doesn't come up officially until Exodus, and remember Exodus?
Speaker 1: The people of God, the Israelites, are enslaved in Egypt, and life in Egypt for the people of Israel was filled with incessant work as slaves.
Speaker 1: They were afforded like little to no rest.
Speaker 1: Their value came directly from their production, and so if you produced as a slave, you had value, and if you didn't produce, if you failed to produce, your value and perhaps your life would diminish rapidly, if not altogether, and so your value came directly from your work and how much you could produce.
Speaker 1: I'm so glad that we don't have this problem today.
Speaker 1: You know, thinking that our value comes only from our work anyway, that's a joke, but it can be easy to see how people's worth and value can become so intimately linked to their production.
Speaker 1: Even today, this idea the Bible would suggest, this idea of our production being tied to our value is actually slavery.
Speaker 1: And so when God delivers the people of Israel, god gives them a new command of Sabbath rest.
Speaker 1: God commands them to take one day and remember the Sabbath and keep it kadosh, keep it holy.
Speaker 1: Here's what Exodus 29 and 10 says says 6 days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath, a Shabbat to the Lord, your God.
Speaker 1: On it you shall do no work.
Speaker 1: And the reason given for the Sabbath rest, according to the Exodus account, is that in the six days, god made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that's in them, but he rested on the seventh day.
Speaker 1: Therefore, the Lord blesses the Sabbath and calls it again holy.
Speaker 1: So where to rest?
Speaker 1: You and I, you and I, mike, and everybody listening.
Speaker 1: We are to rest because God rested.
Speaker 1: This, it would seem, is what the Bible might indicate is freedom, true freedom.
Speaker 1: Check this out.
Speaker 1: I was listening to an article.
Speaker 1: Actually, I read an article online that suggests that the US is the most overworked developed nation in the world.
Speaker 1: You might not be that surprised to hear this, but according to the article, which references the International Labor Organization, americans check this out work 130 more hours, 137 more hours more than the Japanese workers per year, 260 more hours per year more than British workers and 499 more hours per year than French workers.
Speaker 1: On an unrelated note, mike, I'm moving to France in about a week.
Speaker 1: All right, let's go, but many of us, in America at least, work longer hours to grasp for more value, earn more money, buy more things that we hope will make us more worthy and more valuable.
Speaker 1: It's this odd cycle that leaves us filled with not rest or security, but unrest and anxiety and this looming pressure to produce.
Speaker 1: It's truly an endless rat race and, as I always say, the winner of the rat race at the end of the day is still a rat.
Speaker 1: Now, here's the deal.
Speaker 1: God instead offers us a way out, as God often does.
Speaker 1: God offers us Sabbath, true real rest, security and being home within God.
Speaker 1: Again, jurgen Moltmann, this wonderful German theologian, writes this that Sabbath blessing does not spring from God's activity, it springs from his rest, even God rest.
Speaker 1: It doesn't come from God's acts, it comes from his present being.
Speaker 1: So God resting, stopping, slowing down, being present with the creative world.
Speaker 1: This is Sabbath blessing and rest.
Speaker 1: This is Kadoch.
Speaker 1: My friend, tony, puts it like this he says that Sabbath, quite frankly and simply, is an end of striving, even when I think about that.
Speaker 1: Just an ending of striving, stop striving and trying to prove yourself and earn something.
Speaker 1: Just an end of that and just take a breath and Sabbath this day, this act of ceasing the end of slavery, the blessedness of time itself, the eschatological peace and rest to come, is a reminder that you and I are not our work.
Speaker 1: Work is what we do, not who we are.
Speaker 1: And it's a reminder that we don't need to strive, we don't need to reach for or try to earn our value or our worth or even our love for God.
Speaker 1: And this rest, the Sabbath rest in the end of strivingness, we can rest and celebrate the presence of God's very being in time with us.
Speaker 1: And this, mike, is why I'm going on vacation.
Speaker 1: When I go out there, I'm going to do a whole other, nothing.
Speaker 1: Well, peace to all of you and we'll see you next time.