From Slavery to Freedom

By Kara Root

Imagine you are a people enslaved for generations, never in conscious memory having been free, and then suddenly you are. Free. Completely, unequivocally. And you’ve no idea how to be free, because you’ve never been free. You’ve been defined as slaves for as long as you can remember. You’ve never not had other people dictate your worth and structure your life and tell you how to spend your hours, days and years. So how do you now be free? How will all these hundreds of thousands of you create a free society? How will your lives be structured, and what will they look like?

Thankfully, Yahweh steps in and gives you some instruction. The God who delivered you out of slavery, who created you and claims you, now tells you what a free people lives like, how life works best, and what allows human beings to be most fully who God intended them to be all along. So Yahweh starts by giving a few guidelines on how to relate to God as free and whole people. The instruction ends with some obvious directions about how to relate to each other as human beings. And it turns out, there are about ten big instructions in all. But right in the middle, between these two movements – relating to God and relating to each other – is this hinge point:

Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. For six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.  Exodus 20:8-11 (NRSV)

What in the world is this doing here – alongside not killing or stealing – in the top ten most essential things to live by? And what does Sabbath-keeping have to do with us today?

Sabbath reminds us who we are. Sabbath removes doing from the equation and invites us to just be for a while. Sabbath refuses to let us be defined by a lifestyle of slavery: relentless production, your worth coming from what you can contribute, outside forces dictating the terms of your existence. You are more than what you buy or sell, consume, produce or purchase, Sabbath says, you are free.

Also, Sabbath is when everybody rests – nobody is ahead of anyone else. Divisions between poor and rich, ruler and slave, weak and strong, healthy and sick, old and young disappear. We are equal in our identity as God’s beloved children. Sabbath empowers us to relate well with one another and ourselves.

Sabbath restores us to our humanity.

Sabbath reminds us whose we are. You belong to the God who brought you out of the land of Egypt!  And this God who delivered you is the God who looked on God’s creation and called it good, who rested and enjoyed what God had made. And that rest in itself was part of creation’s cycle. It is part of how God created everything to function. We are made in God’s image and called to participate with God in the world. How can we do that if we never stop to rest? If we never pause to enjoy what we are part of in this short life, and to call it good? We belong to God, the creator, sustainer, enjoyer of life. When we stop doing and allow ourselves the space to be, we often become aware again of God’s presence in the world and our own place within it. And our capacity to praise our creator, and to delight in life, grows deeper.

God is God and you are not, Sabbath says. And neither is any one of the thousand other things that would seek to dominate your lives, clog up your minds, soak up your attention and eat up your time. This is God’s world! So relax and enjoy what God has made. Sabbath empowers us to relate well with God and God’s world.

Sabbath returns us to God’s care.

I am pondering all of this as I lay on a dock at the lake while my kids are splashing around next to me as though time itself doesn’t exist. But I feel distracted, and all I can think of is getting back up to my grandmother’s house to help get dinner started, stopping on the way to the kitchen to check my email and ticking off the mental list of things I should accomplish before the week is over.

So I get up and start to leave. But my kids call me back, begging for time to just splash in the water a little longer. And I look at them there, wet and happy, while the sun is still bright and the breeze is still soft and perfect and the insects are still buzzing in the flowers nearby and my children are still young and free. And I notice. So I lie back down and close my eyes and listen.

And I begin, once again, the journey from slavery to freedom.

Kara Root is pastor of Lake Nokomis Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis.  This article was written for the Clayfire worship blog in August of this year.  You can find out more at www.clayfirecurator.org.

 

Category: InPrint, Presbytery News