Day 6 - Letting Go of Judgment

Remember you are dust and to dust you will return. 

I did not write a blog post yesterday in order to have a day of Sabbath rest.   Well, true confession…I didn’t actually rest, I just didn’t write a blog. But I want to talk about what it would mean to rest on the Sabbath. Taking a whole day of rest each week is not a luxury, it frees us to let go of being judgmental. Track with me here…The fourth commandment (Exodus 20:8-11) instructs us to set aside one day in every seven days to rest—to stop working. Adele Calhoun insightfully quotes Wayne Muller on this point: ‘‘Sabbath is not dependent upon our readiness to stop. We do not stop when we are finished. We do not stop when we complete our phone calls, finish our project, get through this stack of messages, or get out this report that is due tomorrow. We stop because it is time to stop.’” This has always been a radical concept for humans!There are two main accounts of the fourth commandment—Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5. They are almost identical except for how they are grounded. The Exodus account is grounded in the account of creation. “For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it.” (Exodus 20:11). The Deuteronomy version is grounded in the account of the Exodus. “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day.” (Deuteronomy 5:15)These two versions of the fourth commandment give us a good picture of the full meaning of Sabbath rest. Mark Buchanan, in his book The Rest of God, says this, “The Exodus command, with its call to imitation, plays on a hidden irony: we mimic God in order to remember we’re not God. In fact, that is a good definition of Sabbath: imitating God so that we stop trying to be God…Sabbath-keeping involves a recognition of our own weakness and smallness, that we are made from dust…and that without proper care we break.”  The Deuteronomy version reminds us that we are no longer slaves. We no longer have to obey the evil taskmaster (be it the Devil or our inner critic) that tells us we can’t rest…we haven’t done enough…we haven’t done it well enough. In fact, God went so far as to drown all the taskmasters. Do we really want to resuscitate them?Observing Sabbath, then, frees us from trying to be God. When we are regularly reminded that we are not God, we stop being so judgmental. Keeping Sabbath not only gives us rest, but it releases us from being judgmental towards others, which, in turn, gives them rest from having to defend themselves against us at every turn.Wow…what would our world be like if we could stop judging others as if we were God? I think I would like that world.(Much of this blog post was taken from a paper written for a course I took at Fuller Seminary in the summer of 2013.)