God's Via Positiva #15 | Say Amen to Sabbath

5:03 Then the Lord said to Moses, How long will you refuse to keep my commandments and instructions? See, the Lord has given you the Sabbath, therefore on the sixth day he gives you food for two days. Each of you stay where you are, do not leave your place on the seventh day. So the people rested on the seventh day. The house of Israel called in manna. It was like coriander seed, white, and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey. Moses said, This is what the Lord has commanded. Let an omer of it be kept throughout your generations in order that they may see the food with which I fed you through the wilderness when I brought you out of the land of Egypt. And Moses said to Aaron, Take a jar and put an omer of manna in it and place it before the Lord to be kept throughout your generations. As the Lord commanded Moses, so Aaron placed it before the covenant for safekeeping.

6:01 The Israelites ate manna for 40 years until they came to habitable land. They ate manna until they came to the border of the land of Canaan. An omer is a tenth of an effeth. Friends, this is the word of God for you, the people of God. Thanks be to God. Thank you, Siri. Thank you, Cielo. Now, I'm pretty sure I've shared this story before, but a few years ago, April and I were at a holiday party, and we were talking to this couple who had a three-year-old. They were telling us how they were having trouble getting their child into the right preschool. So I assume they meant they were trying to get their child into a school closer to their home or perhaps closer to their job. I was wrong. They were trying to get their child into an elite preschool. So they hired a tutor to help give their child the best chance to get into those schools. The tutor resigned and said to the family, I cannot work with your child.

7:01 It cannot pay attention for more than 30 minutes. This baffled me. I'm 39 years old and I cannot pay attention for more than 15 minutes. Now, I understand wanting the best for your child, but pressure like that cannot be healthy. And to be honest, the same pressure is no different than the grind culture of this country and this city. I wonder what kind of burnout we are headed for because of our lack of willingness to simply be human and rest. We know how this culture has exacerbated our land and is making our earth tired and sick. But what if it didn't have to be this way? what if a three-year-old could be allowed to be a three-year-old what if we were able to simply be human and allow our bodies and our mind to rest which brings us to the passage that we just read we see the Israelites hungry and tired and complaining to God for food but a little context Before their dramatic exit out of Egypt in Exodus 12, we read from Exodus 16, the Israelites had been in Egypt for 430 years.

8:21 Yes, the first generation of Israelites under Joseph's leadership lived with some privilege in Egypt. But as they grew larger in size, they were taken captive. They were enslaved and they were put to work. They made bricks and bricks and bricks. They cried out in anguish because of their oppression. They cried to God for help. And God hears their cries. Yet Pharaoh did not want to give them up so easily. In Exodus 5, Pharaoh takes away their materials to make bricks with. He takes away their straw. But they still had to produce the same amount of bricks. So now they are required to find their own material and still make their daily quota. To Pharaoh, they were not people. They were brick makers.

9:17 Their worth and identity was not based on something larger, but purely on how many bricks they can make. They were what they produced. Yet we know that God rescues them out of Egypt in dramatic fashion. And Moses spreads his arms and the seas part. And the Israelites leave Egypt and they head towards the promised land.

9:41 But it's not happy ever after as soon as they leave Egypt. They are still a traumatized people. All they've known was being beaten down and making brick by brick. so what are they supposed to do now there is a scarcity of food and instead of trusting god they said why on earth are we here we were better off being enslaved in egypt we were better off when we were slaves we were better off being brick makers and god hears them god is compassionate it. God gives them manna and quail and each day they collect enough food for the day, but just for the day. If they collected more, then it would go rotten. The worms would eat it up and on the sixth day they were to collect double the portion so that they rested on the seventh day. This was the command from God. Now I have to imagine how incredibly hard this must be for them. They had to fully trust in God in this situation. Each day they could only collect enough food for that day and trust that God would provide them the next day.

11:00 I don't know if I could do this. I don't know if I could trust all of that with so much scarcity of food. On the sixth day, they had to trust that the food they collected for the Sabbath, that that wouldn't spoil. In essence, they had to trust the giver of the food. They had to trust the giver of their labor and not in the labor itself. You see, for hundreds of years, they were told that they were what they produced. You are worth how many bricks you make. Yet they were, yes, they were physically enslaved, but they were also mentally enslaved as well. And now that they have left Egypt, God is telling them a different story. Slowly but surely getting them out of the system that told them that they are worth what they produce. In a sense, God is telling them, you are not the bricks you made, you are not the manna you collect, but you are mine.

12:04 The command to keep Sabbath is not an odd legalistic command, but it is a gift to the people of God. It is grace to remind them that they are beloved children of God. Friends, if you hear anything, hear this. You are not the bricks you produce. You are not how much money you make or don't make. You are not the grade on that test. You are not that time on your track meet. You are so much more than that. You are loved and you are enough right here and right now. And the command to have Sabbath is to have rest. It is grace. It is a gift given to you so that you remember that you are more than what you produce. but accepting this is easier said than done.

13:04 The word Sabbath literally means to desist or to stop, but how on earth do we do that in the city that never sleeps? How do we do that in a culture that tells us go, go, go? To Sabbath, to rest is truly counter-cultural, and taking a Sabbath can be a struggle. It was a struggle for the Israelites. It was a struggle for the Pharisees to understand. And it's a struggle for us today to even take. So can we accept this disorienting grace? I think we can. But like anything, it takes discipline. And it takes practice. And it takes a community to help make it accessible. The Israelites were in the wilderness for 40 years. it takes them a whole generation to try to get them out of the mentality they are worth more than the bricks they make. How long will it take us? Will it take us a whole generation?

14:10 If so, we better get started now and we can begin by teaching our children what it means to Sabbath. It pains me to see the anxiety and the pressure that we have put on our children. Grades, sports, and activities are all put into place, not for fun, but in order to get them to succeed and get them into the right high school or the right college or to get that right job. And yes, hard work is something that we must teach our children, but is it coming at the cost of their identity? Are we turning our kids into brickmakers and valuing them simply but what they produce? I'm afraid that at times we are. And the pressure to succeed must be suffocating. It must be exhausting. Actually, I know because they've told me.

15:01 What if the remedy of that exhaustion was to let them know with our words and our actions that they are enough right now? What if we modeled for our younger generation that we need to rest as much as the dragonflies need the wind? in this passage the people have to trust in God that there would be enough and at times they didn't and they would hoard their manna and quail and I think we run into a similar mindset and do and we do not think that there's enough resources for everyone so we hoard resources and then we simply just become greedy we hoard food and we waste food we hoard oil and wealth and I wonder if we even hoard education as well. And because of that, it leads to a mindset of scarcity. I wonder if our fear of scarcity is directly related to our lack of rest. Our culture has made it so that we rely on ourselves and our own work, and we forget to trust our creator.

16:09 I wonder if rest can break the chains of that mindset. And when we remember that we are loved and enough that we also remember that there's enough food and resources for everyone. Remember in the passage, the Israelites are commanded to simply gather enough for each day. What if we harvested and gathered simply what was enough? Tricia Hersey, a womanist theologian and founder of the nap ministry. You heard that correct. The nap ministry. She preaches that rest is resistance and that rest can help us liberate us from the mindset that we must always be on the go. That same kind of mindset was forced on the Israelites in Egypt and that same kind of mindset was forced into slaves in the United States working 20 hours a day, seven days a week. I highly recommend that you check out the NAP ministry, or if you're a podcast kind of person, her interview with Glennon Doyle on the We Can Do Hard Things podcast is really, really great.

17:15 Hersey describes that rest is not to rejuvenate ourselves so we can go back and do the same work over and over again and become the same machine. But rest gives us the imagination on how we can do better for this world. In her words, when we rest, we also dream. What if when we rest and dream, we're able to think of more creative ways in which we love better? What if in our rest and in our dreams, we come up with a better system for our teenagers so that the pressure to succeed does not drive them to depression and anxiety? What if our Sabbath can actually help us change the world? She says on the podcast, exhaustion is not going to be generative to get us, allow us to be imaginative, inventive, subversive, and all the true things we need to move our culture to be freedom for all people. We cannot get there if we are exhausted.

18:14 We cannot do justice when we are exhausted. We must learn how to rest. Our work and our culture has kept us from Sabbath. but there's another force quieter sneakier that may be keeping us from honoring sabbath and it's not just our obsession with productivity i also think it's our phones these little glowing rectangles that promise connection entertainment and efficiency but often leave us feeling more anxious fragmented and disconnected than ever jonathan height our very first Godot lecturer here at Fifth Avenue in his book The Anxious Generation which came out last year named something many of us feel but haven't quite put two words around it. That a phone-based life pulls us downward. It fragments our attention, disrupts our stillness, and often replaces grace with judgment. Haidt observes that the digital life is deeply incompatible with spiritual life because it keeps us locked in the realm of the profane, where time is shapeless, self-focus is constant, and we are rarely present to the sacred.

19:29 For height, the sacred is where we are lifted beyond ourselves through beauty, ritual, community, and silence. And if you've ever caught your breath at a piece of music, or shared laughter at coffee hour or a potluck, or felt the tug of the spirit in a quiet sanctuary, then you know what hype means. In that light, maybe Sabbath isn't just rest from our work, but it's also rest from the noise, a rest from the feed, the ping, the endless updates with terrible news. What if part of the invitation of Sabbath in our digital age is to put down our phones and to turn our hearts to awe, to be present to God, to one another, to the world that is brimming with beauty if we only looked up.

20:25 In a time where our devices constantly demand our attention, Sabbath dares to say, your worth is not what you produce or post. You are beloved, you are held, and you are free to rest. Religious traditions have long understood the power of shared ritual and embodied community, singing together, eating together, moving together, sitting still together. These things ground us. They reorient us. They open the space in our souls where awe has room to land. A phone for all its usefulness can't do that. Awe doesn't come in pixels. It comes at presence. It sneaks up on us in a shaft of sunlight through stained glass windows or a quiet walk through Central Park or a moment of unexplainable peace at the end of a prayer.

21:28 I wonder what if Sabbath, if we Sabbath not just from our calendars but from our screens as well and I am preaching as much to myself as I am to you. I'm not talking about stopping watching worship from our online community or stopping FaceTiming our family. You should see Augie and my parents on FaceTime. But what if we pause the scroll and open our eyes to the wonder already in our lives? In the words of the psalmist, be still and know that I am God. Heitz says that's not just good theology, but that's good neuroscience. And maybe, just maybe, it's a path back to awe. So friends, take a break. Remember to breathe. It takes the Israelites a whole generation to move this mindset.

22:23 And it might take us a whole generation as well. So let's start today. Rest with your children. Rest with your friends. rest yourself. Let's do it together because Sabbath rest is not self-care, but it's community care. And this is going to look different for different people. For some of you, Sabbath is hiking, or cooking, or exercising, or hanging out with friends. For all of us, it's a healthy amount of sleep. In my application for my sabbatical grant, instead of asking me how do I rest, they asked what makes your heart sing? I'll read you my opening paragraph to them. What makes my heart sing? I'm glad you asked. The sound of sizzling carne asada as my dad throws it on the grill.

23:18 Rejoice. The laughter of my family as we share a feast around the table. Rejoice. The clinking of glasses as we cheers to great conversation and friendship. Rejoice. The warmth and tears of a long-awaited reunion with family from Guatemala. Rejoice. The shouts of ghoul and hugging strangers next to me when my beloved LA Galaxy soccer team scores. Rejoice. Conversations with the people whom God used to nurture my faith and call to ministry. Rejoice. All of this makes this pastor's heart sing. If I could summarize all of it in one word, it would be home.

24:05 Family, there is no rush to get Sabbath right. But God has given us a commandment to rest as a gift to you. Receive it and may it allow us to dream a new way of being. So my question to you is, what makes your heart sing? and whatever it is, receive it as grace. May rest be the gift you need to remind yourself that you are loved.