Rest Is Not a Thing to be Bought, but Received

In my growing up years I was blessed to travel often. Regular beach vacations; various youth group camps and even a missions trip taken with other young teenagers; a school trip to Greece and Italy; trips to England, Austria, the Bahamas, and other bucket-list spots before I was eighteen.

I learned many good things from these trips. But I learned certain mental habits, too: I learned to anticipate the excitement that colored my life as a trip approached. I learned to think about seasons and years as pathways to some more riveting place than my local suburbia. I learned to expect a certain pinch of homebound despondency.

Meanwhile, in all the years of my youthful travels, I attended a rigorous Christian school and participated in various extracurriculars and club sports such that “normal life” was a bustling one. All that I participated in was due to the generosity and hard work of my parents. But without anyone’s conscious intention or alarm, I, together with my peers, was treading as a teenager the waters of upper middle class American culture: the pursuit of excellence, the Protestant work ethic, constant busyness. A busyness whose best respite was vacation.     

The time between Memorial Day and Labor Day is, for many, the time of vacations. As spring approaches its close, vacation becomes a primary topic for small talk. “Do you have any travel plans for the summer?” the dental hygienist asks, as does the acquaintance one chats with after church. 

Around this time, too, refrains resound about the unshakeable busyness of the season and the great need for a break. Or one will hear church leaders promote various spiritual summer getaways—whether youth group camps or marriage conferences or women’s retreats—with similar language: let’s all depart to [some peaceful place by the beach or mountains], and there we can have fellowship and spiritual growth!

How we talk about our lives and desires is telling. Our speech about vacations and retreats reveals that Americans both in and outside of the church have accepted a particular mindset about work, life, and time. The mindset could perhaps be summed up this way: we are (and ought to be) busy all the time, and as such, we need a getaway from our ordinary lives in order to refresh ourselves and connect with others, particularly family members and close friends, or even to connect fruitfully with God. 

The problem with this mindset is not that it rests on false claims. Our busyness hardly needs to be proven: according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in the average American married-couple family, both parents work. Meanwhile, most American children attend school for about eight hours a day and give their evenings and weekends to sports and activities. It’s not surprising, then, that many American families don’t have (or make) time enough to eat dinner together. 

Still, the “getaway” mindset represents a departure, though a covert one, from the Christian understanding of rest and time. As such, Christians would do well to be wary of it, even while  appreciating opportunities to vacation. 

Our consumerist culture would have us believe that true rest requires spending money to abscond several times a year from our given places and vocations and revel in some other good (whether a legitimate good, like the beauty of the seaside, or not). Rest is, in this framework, to be pursued and purchased, not to be accepted as a gift. Rest and peace are always out there, away from the banality of the ordinary, not woven into it. Rest is perpetually incompatible with our callings and the consequent rhythms of our weeks and months—and our callings and routines are themselves perpetually burdensome, in part because rest is not a regular part of them. 

What we need for rest, however, is not a weekend at an isolated mountain Airbnb or at a conference away from our children, listening to the most engaging Christian speakers, though these things can have their places as blessings from God. What we need, rather, is the divine rhythm of the Sabbath. 

The getaway mindset echoes the concept of the Sabbath in its recognition of the human frame: we are limited; we require respite from our work. But the echo is only a faint one. The getaway mindset, unlike the Sabbath, flows from the pressures of a consumeristic and workaholic culture more so than from Scripture or tradition, and it proposes no limits on or order of acceptable restful activity and no clearly defined purpose for it. 

The Sabbath, meanwhile, springs from God’s Word: after exemplifying and instituting a day of rest at creation, God ordered the life of Israel around the worship and rest of the Sabbath, and he included the injunction to “remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy” among the moral laws of the Ten Commandments. Ever since the apostles began to worship and fellowship on the first day of the week in honor of Jesus’ resurrection, the church has in some fashion understood and taught that the “Lord’s Day” was to be a holy day of worship, fellowship, and rest distinct from the Jewish observance of Saturday. Different traditions deal with the specifics of the day differently, but a thread runs through historic Protestant and Catholic teaching: God still orders the time of his people such that one day in seven—now Sunday—is set apart for his purposes. 

Many modern Christians have no concept of the Lord’s Day as the Christian Sabbath. Or they apply the fourth commandment individually, maintaining that they can choose a day for personal rest or that they can celebrate it on Saturday apart from the gathered people of God. Others insist that because “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath,” we ought not burden ourselves or others with the concept of a moral injunction to cease. 

If only we took that language seriously instead of using it to support our favored conclusions. The Sabbath was made for man, which means that it is a gift. And, as Jesus’ interactions with the Pharisees show, it is a gift which God designed to bring life. Gifts cannot be recast into whatever we would like them to be. Gifts are defined by their giver, even though recipients may enjoy them in different ways.    

As a gift, the Sabbath asks of us reception, not ignorance. It does not require purchase either, unlike the vacation. In fact, many in Christian history would maintain that it requires us to not spend money—to be entirely free from the world of commerce and consumption for the sake of worship. 

The gift of the Sabbath is, in some ways, a paradoxical one. The Sabbath principle requires the devoted action of man, yet that action is one that looks like inaction to the world: the actions of ceasing and of worshipping seem entirely useless. It enjoins us to rest yet prescribes how we ought to rest: “not going your own ways, or seeking your own pleasure, or talking idly,” but by delighting in the Lord, as Isaiah 58 teaches.

The Sabbath is a routine, one day in seven, yet it is an invitation into things that are decidedly not routine but sacred: the sacraments, the preached Word, the fellowship of believers, and other things which fall into the category of what the Westminster Catechism calls “holy resting.” 

Where the getaway is an occasional, temporary departure from ordinary life altogether, the Sabbath, as an ordinary departure from otherwise ordinary commitments, orders our lives in a sacred rhythm. 

Theologian Alastair Roberts discusses this aspect of the Old Covenant Sabbath as follows: 

The daily cycle of work and rest, the weekly cycle of six days of labor followed by the Sabbath, the annual cycle of feasts, and the larger cycle of sabbatical years both punctuated and variegated Israel’s time. Time was meaningfully articulated, structured, ordered to new ends, and differentiated in its character. Through such an articulation of time, Israel was granted the possibility of transcending a flat quotidian grind. Time was “redeemed”... In such a manner, work could be bounded, differentiated from rest and leisure, flowing from a higher source and being ordered toward a higher end. Bitter toil and cruel bondage could become good work and sacred service…

Sabbath presented work with an end, being both a cessation of otherwise unrelenting toil and a purpose: an orientation of work to something greater that upholds its goodness.

By placing the Lord’s rest at the heart of Israel, the entire realm of man’s times and labors was reordered.

Though the calendar of the New Covenant church is appropriately different from that of the Old Covenant, our time is still “meaningfully articulated, structured, ordered to new ends.” To us, too, God graciously extends the “possibility of transcending a flat quotidian grind.” Here the possible becomes actual not if we are wealthy enough to afford a beach house or if we are “spiritual” enough to take a silent retreat but if we are humble enough to submit ourselves to God and accept, through Christ, his gifts.  

It goes without saying that some vocations such as those of firefighters or emergency medical personnel regularly require Sundays to be taken up with, in the words of the Westminster, “works of necessity and mercy.” But most of us can in fact submit our Sundays to this divine order if only we have the courage to welcome certain limits. If we were to allow our lives to be ordered by the Lord’s Day, we would not feel the overwhelming need for a break from them. A life that is centered around and satisfied in the transcendent worship and festivity of the Sabbath cannot be subsumed by the busyness our culture presses on us. Neither can it be overcome with the desire to flee from one’s given place. 

In his famous work Leisure: The Basis of Culture, philosopher Josef Pieper contrasts the world of total work with that of religious festivals like the weekly Sabbath. He writes: 

It is in the nature of religious festival to make a space of abundance and wealth, even in the midst of external poverty in material things... Thus in the very midstream of worship, and only from there, comes a supply that cannot be consumed by the world of work, a space of uncountable giving, untouched by the ever-turning wheel of buying and selling, an overflow released from all purpose, and an authentic wealth: it is festival-time. And it is only within such festival–time that the reality of leisure can unfold and be fully realized. 

Perhaps this year, as summer wends on with its various gifts, we should not so yearn for our getaways and inwardly mourn when they are past but instead seek after that “space of uncountable giving… and an authentic wealth” that flows from the worship and rest of the Lord’s Day.