"Well, Mr. Paddock," I stammered, "I’m here being available to the congregation. I’m pretty much gone all week, at school every day, so Saturday I’m here in case anyone needs me."

"Let me tell you something," Mike said. "Nobody needs you today. If they do they’ll call you. Nobody wants to see you today. They’re busy. They’ll see you plenty tomorrow. So go home: cut your grass, wash your car, play with your little girls. Get outa here."

The seminar was over.

"Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy," we are instructed in Exodus 20, verse 8. "Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God: you should not do any work."

It is there in the Biblical tradition from the very beginning. In the creation story in the book of Genesis, God is busy creating for six days, separating land from water, creating light, fashioning sun and moon and stars, plants and animals, creeping and crawling and flying creatures, and then a man and a woman. And then it is finished. "And on the seventh day, God finished the work -- and rested on the seventh day from all the work that God had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it."

That is a different kind of God—a God who rests—and it is a very different notion of creation, which includes as 1/7 of the process, the specific activity of rest and enjoyment. The God of the Hebrews, Walter Brueggemann quips, says—on Friday night—"I’m not going into the office tomorrow morning. I’m taking the day off. I’ve put in long hours every day all week and tomorrow I’m putting my feet up and enjoying all that I’ve accomplished." That is a new and different way of thinking—that work is not finished until it is enjoyed in rest. There is a deep and profound and fragile wisdom in that.

Many of us recall a day when the culture itself supported the idea of a Sabbath, when on Sunday, for instance, the economy slowed and came to a halt. Stores, gas stations, restaurants were closed. Many of us experienced that as oppressive, I recall. We were not allowed to play, confined to the front porch. All of that is gone now. We live instead in a market place that is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Sunday morning is becoming crowded with alternate activities. Soccer leagues schedule games on Sunday mornings. So you and I live in a different time and place, but more critically, is the economic vicious cycle that is a pervasive force everywhere in our society.

Economist Juliet Schor wrote a bestseller a few years ago, The Overworked American, and reported that "work hours and stress are up and sleep and family are down for all classes of employed Americans. Wives working outside the home return to find a ‘second shift’ of housework waiting for them. Husbands add overtime or second jobs to their schedules. Single parents stretch in so many directions that they sometimes feel they can’t manage. Simultaneously, all are bombarded with messages that urge to spend more (and so, ultimately, to work more), to keep homes cleaner, to improve themselves as investors, parents, lovers or athletes. Supposedly to make all this possible, grocery stores stay open all night, entertainment options are available around the clock and the culture offers fast food, time saving devices and exercise machines that promise to burn off fat in a few minutes per day."

Dorothy Bass, Chicago theologian, in a fine book, Practicing Our Faith, worries about our ability to survive—as individuals, as families, as a planet—with finite resources. "How," she asks, "can we live faithfully and with integrity, here where the pace of existence is so fast"—with such high demands and expectations and a finite amount of time. We need Sabbath," she says, "even though we doubt we have time for it."

What has happened to us? Is it really so different today? Those who study us and reflect on the contemporary scene think so. David Brooks, author of an insightful new book, Bobos in Paradise, observes, "The hedonism of Woodstock mythology has been domesticated and now serves as a management tool for the Fortune 500. . .Americans haven’t adopted European style vacations. . . Instead they pull all-nighters at Microsoft and come in weekends at Ben and Jerry’s . . . they approach work with the fervor of missionaries."

But there is a rhythm built into us, a yearning to rest and enjoy what we have done; to stop working and breathe deeply. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, "On the Sabbath we specifically care for the need of eternity planted in our own soul." And John Calvin, the founder of what we know as the Protestant Ethic: "On the Sabbath we cease our work so God can do God’s work in us." On the subject of work, Calvin wrote, "Work is good, but when we work all the time work becomes a curse, not a blessing."

One time Jesus and his disciples broke a handful of Sabbath laws by picking and eating grain as they walked through a field on the Sabbath. Pharisees, who were watching for just such an infraction, caught him, accused him. He responded first by citing a kind of precedent. King David, after all, had done something similar. But then he said something very important. "The Sabbath is made for human beings, not human beings for the Sabbath." The whole purpose of this tradition, that is this commandment, is not simply to add another rule to the list of religious requirements and obligations. It is the nurture and restoring and healing and saving of human life. That’s what Jesus cared about—not religious legalism but whole, healthy human beings.

The purpose is not to restrict activity for the sake of restriction. His purpose was "never rule book religion" for the sake of documenting theological orthodoxy or moral purity. It is always the health and wholeness and happiness of human beings. Dorothy Bass thinks we can do it, and for our health and happiness we ought to receive anew this old gift of a Sabbath.

You really don’t have to shop on Sunday, she says, a heretical thought here in Chicago, this hub of consumer capitalism. It might complicate your week but it might also be delightful. You can’t stop worrying, but you can avoid on Sunday activities guaranteed to make you worry, like paying bills, or filling out tax returns, or making lists of things to do next week.

There is a wonderful prayer which observant Jews sometimes use on the Sabbath. It begins, "Days pass and years vanish, and we walk sightless among miracles." That’s the issue; being so busy we walk sightless among miracles.

It is finally, a deeply theological and spiritual matter. It is finally a matter of grace; a matter of acknowledging that the world does not depend on our activity, that we do not have sole responsibility for the grain growing, or the sun rising or the birds singing; that there is in and behind all things a steady, creative grace, providing for our needs, continuing the creation.

Poet Wendell Berry, one of my favorites, a deeply spiritual man, takes a walk every Sunday morning and then goes homes and writes a Sabbath poem. Sabbath poems they’re called and they are wonderful. Here is one he wrote a few years ago:

So, make a Sabbath. Entertain the revolutionary thought that your work includes the necessity of stopping, stopping what you have done, enjoying what you have done. Create a Sabbath. Keep a Sabbath. God’s holy gift to you is time. Cherish it. Rest in it. Enjoy it. Keep it holy.

Amen.

Interview with John Buchanan
Interviewed by Lydia Talbot

Lydia Talbot: John, remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. One of the original Ten Commandments. It's hard to do these days. How can people really create that kind of rest you talk about?

John Buchanan: Well, Lydia, it is important. It's there from the beginning of our religious tradition. And the Judeo-Christian tradition values the notion of a time away from work very highly. In fact, it makes this interesting proposal that your work is not done until you have rested and enjoyed it. I think that requires a big commitment living in the economy and the pace of life we do. I think people simply need to say, "We need this for our health and well being and our work isn't finished until we've stopped it and enjoyed it."

Talbot: John Buchanan, you are one of the busiest people I know. Not only senior pastor of the Fourth Presbyterian Church, but editor and published of the Christian Century magazine. How do you manage to keep the Sabbath?

Buchanan: Well, I probably talk about it better than I manage myself, but my family and I—my wife and I do—in fact, take time together and we do that as a discipline. We try to get away from the city, away from the noise and spend time just relaxing and enjoying. I've done that all my life.

Talbot: Five children and grandchildren are part of that Sabbath time I suspect.

Buchanan: Yes. In fact, from my dear friend, Mike Paddock's, lesson I determined early in my ministry to make sure that Saturdays, for instance, were not cluttered with professional activity. That's hard for ministers to do. Many of us work hard all week and then all weekend as well, but it seemed to be important to reserve as much of Saturday as everybody else was doing for my children and I tried to do that.

Talbot: Mike Paddock, who was the person you mentioned in your message, who really taught you initially about keeping Sabbath. That was a long time ago, John, and forty years ago you were a student pastor, a student at the University of Chicago Divinity School. How has your capacity to keep the Sabbath the way you describe changed in forty years?

Buchanan: Well, I think we each have to establish our own pattern. Early in my career and in my life it was determined by the children's availability and their availability and their activities on Saturday. Now that they are out of the house, we can be a little more flexible and do it at other times and perhaps the rhythm isn't one out of every seven days. Maybe it is two out of fourteen, or three out of twenty-one. The point is that your work is not finished until you've stopped it to enjoy it.

Talbot: Reflection has got to be a piece of that.

Buchanan: That's right.

Talbot: You know, the Jewish prayer that you cited in your message, "Days pass, years vanish, but we walk sightless among miracles." That's an amazing, dramatic image for us. Reminds me of the hymn Amazing Grace. " I once was blind but now I see." How can we regain our sight to really receive miracles around us?

Buchanan: I think we each have the responsibility to determine what it is that feeds our souls. Is it reading, is it a walk in the woods, is it listening to great music? We've got that gorgeous lake right in front of us, we Chicagoans, and simply a quiet walk along the lake every now and then, I think, would be therapeutic and spiritually fulfilling for all of us.

Talbot: You say that we as individuals don't have sole responsibility for all of this. It implies a bit of humility here.

Buchanan: That's the basic message. The message of grace that we live in a world full of miracles; that we're not in charge of the sun rising or the grain growing. In fact in point of fact, we can sit back and relax and enjoy God's work as well.

Talbot: John, in one of the last programs you did with us, you spoke about an amazing set of doors in Florence, Italy, where you stood with a friend. You were changed by looking at the life's work of a Florentine artisan and inspired to think, "Wouldn't it be wonderful to be able to look at something and say, `That's my life's work.'" Tell me now, since you appeared on this broadcast last, how you have been shaped by that revelatory moment?

Buchanan: That was a helpful moment to witness doors that a great artist had worked on his entire life—50 or 60, 70 years. That helped me to try to think about what is my life's work or what is yours, and that each of us has a life's work, a project to do. It may be our children and it may be the profession, the book we've written, the job we've done. It was helpful for me to reflect on what it is that I have been called to do and what it is I can do, my project.

Talbot: And that had to have been a part of your decision to accept your role as editor and publisher of the Christian Century magazine. And this last year in that new role, how has your life changed?

Buchanan: I hate to admit it at the end of this program, but it has gotten busier. I've loved my work with the Christian Century. I love the notion of faith encountering culture and exchanging ideas. I love the life of the mind. I love to be part of the encouragement of the theological reflection on the meaning of life in these interesting and wonderful times. The Christian Century has allowed me to do that on a regular basis. I have loved the association with people who live in that world as well. I think they feed us all and we very much need them, so it's been a great honor to be affiliated with them.

Talbot: You are a leader in thinking about the place where faith and culture intersect. Tell us as you look to the future, what do you think is the major issue that we face in looking at that connection?

Buchanan: Well, I think we are, in fact, in the middle of a spiritual or theological renewal; a renaissance, if you will. I think it shows itself in many ways. I think people are asking profoundly important theological questions in the arts and entertainment and literature and certainly in the churches. I think we are in for a very interesting time of renewal.