Monthly Archives: July 2015

Sabbath or Smartphones?

How to be human in a world of smartphones-over-sabbath

It was 1995, and he warned us. There was no smartphone then, not for 12 more years. Netscape, the first mass-market Internet browser, was barely ten months old. Facebook, Twitter… even MySpace  were still a decade away. He frets over the now quaint-seeming fax and car phone. But he saw it coming. He knew. There is the dad, sitting and lamenting how improved technology just speeds things up, increases expectations, when the little boy bursts in crying, “Six minutes to microwave this?? Who’s got that kind of time?!” If only we’d listened more carefully to that Calvin and Hobbes cartoon back then.

The fact is, for better or for worse, we now live in a 24/7 society. What then to make of God’s old-fashioned notion of Sabbath: that our lives, instead, ought to include a weekly rhythm of work and rest? That we ought to be, at most, 24/6?

We know there’s a problem

I will never cease to be struck by the irony, first observed by Sideshow Bob that time when he seized control of a television broadcast in order to demand the cessation of television broadcasts. Then there are the viral videos spread by social media about becoming too absorbed in viral videos and social media. This week’s New York Times editorial on screen addiction, nearly all of us read on some kind of screen.

We know society is moving too fast. At some fundamental level, we know that something’s gotta give, that something has to change, that we are being depleted, that we are bled dry. When I was a kid, it was still common for businesses to be closed on Sundays. It was a collective, socially enforced day of non-productivity. It was inconvenient, because you couldn’t get things done, but it was nice, because you couldn’t get things done.

Some of us long for a return to those days. But then again, we still wanna hit Starbucks on our way home from church. Others are outright antagonistic to the idea of a slower paced society. I have a coworker who boycotts Chick-fil-A, not for the reason you mention, but because he is so offended by the audacity of their being closed one whole day a week. Every year, Black Thursday erodes ever further into Thanksgiving, and while I personally celebrate efforts by “the good guys” like Costco to hold the line, I can’t escape the feeling of a desperate rearguard action.

We know God’s solution

Cultural change is usually contentious and hard-fought. In the past few weeks, the warning that God will judge America has been a favorite topic among some commentators. As evidence of our decline, some have cited court-enforced changes to US marriage law; others, an Oklahoma court order to remove a monument bearing the Ten Commandments.

So it begs the question: why has there been no hue and cry as God’s fourth commandment, listed right there on equal footing with “have no other gods before me” and “do not murder”, has gone gently into that good night? I have written in the past about the error we make in drawing distinctions among different kinds of sin, about the still very real capacity of any sin to harm us. It seems to me that the frenetic pace of modern life is at least as corrosive and damaging as other transgressions that seem to enjoy the front row seats of our cultural awareness.

Our culture’s craving for peace and calm is as much spiritual as it is physical or emotional. It should be one uncontroversial place where we as Christians can spend our precious, limited airtime to reach out with wisdom and healing, doing genuine good in the world. In our failure to do so, Madison Avenue has long since filled the void, and as a result, people whose actual desire is for love, meaning, wholeness, belonging— whose actual need is to cry out to God— are crying out instead to the likes of Calgon.

The voices inside

Observing the Sabbath day is hard. It has always been hard. Scripture goes on and on and on and on about all the exceptions you might be tempted to make, all the loopholes you might be tempted to find. “OK, I can’t work. Can I make my kids work? Nope. Servants? Nope. Animals? Nope. OK, what about some foreigner I met on the street who doesn’t even follow our laws? I can put him to work for me, can’t I? Nope. But, at least I can still work when it’s super busy, right? Like certain SUPER busy times of year? Nope.” All of this is how we know there were workaholics back in agrarian times too.

Many excellent books have been written on the importance of Sabbath and how to practice it. My personal favorite is Wayne Muller’s Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives. Unfortunately, I haven’t yet found one that addresses the biggest obstacle that makes genuine Sabbath rest an ongoing challenge and a still-elusive commodity in my own life personally: dealing with the internal critic. It’s that little voice inside your head the moment you sit down to rest: what you should be doing. How much time you’re wasting. How your to-do list is so long you can’t possibly stop to breathe.

Lift your hands

I first discovered my internal critic during the Silicon Valley “dot com” heyday when I was working between 80-100 hours a week. It would be time for my Tuesday night bible study group, and I would think, “Well, I can’t go.” Then a part of my brain finally realized: if I stay here and keep working, my week’s work hours will go from 80 to 81: negligible increase. If I go to bible study, my hours of nurturing my soul and slaking my terrible thirst for human connection and fellowship will go from 0 to 1. How much of an increase is that? Well anything divided by zero is infinity.

It’s very common to believe that we can take a rest once “we’ve earned it”… once every single possible item is crossed off our to-do list. To see this attitude in its proper perspective, remember that the word priority just means “how soon you do it.” Your “high priority” items are the ones that precede other, lower-priority stuff you may or may not ever get around to. So now your Sabbath agenda looks like: “Let me do all this high-priority stuff like washing the car and depositing these checks and returning this spoiled cabbage, and then if there’s time left I’ll get to the ‘low priorities’, like investing time in my marriage and my children, and replenishing my depleted emotional reserves.”

Is that really how we want our priorities to be ordered? The fact is, work expands to fill the time you give it, and the universe will not suffer too much if that spoiled cabbage never does get returned. God’s intent is not that we get everything done and then rest. It is that, right there in the midst of our work, we lift our hands from the keyboard, push the chair back from the desk, and walk away.

The fields will still be there to plow in the morning.

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God, condemnation, and the “unrepentant sinner”

We all have sin. Scripture says so. Christians say so; even conservative Christians say so. Why, then, is there so much talk nowadays about how people are “in sin” and therefore condemned to God’s judgment? Do we have to quit our “sin” in order to be Christians? Do we have to quit our “sin” in order to be saved?

What is an unrepentant sinner?

A major idea of modern Christianity in America, non-controversial in even the most conservative circles, is that “ex-sinners” are welcome. “Ex-sinners” are non-problematic for us; many of us think of ourselves as “ex-sinners”, and rightfully include our deliverance from sin as a cornerstone of our personal testimony. “All have sinned” is thus held to be a thing primarily of our personal pasts, and our term for people who meet this test is “repentant sinner.”

What, then, of the “unrepentant sinner”, whose “sin” is still acknowledged to be in the present? People quote verses like “wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of heaven” to show that his choices are: (1) to desist from a certain list of sins (see below) or (2) be condemned to eternal hell. But then, in effect, his salvation stems from his behavior and we are back under the law; Christ did not come simply to change up the line of reasoning by which sinners are condemned.

If we only welcome “ex-sinners”, then another way of phrasing our message to the world is: “Go clean up your act, and then you are invited to join us,” or at least, “You may join us provisionally so long as you clean up your act.” The line of reasoning is that we must protect ourselves from the unrepentant sinner (often quoting the warning of 1 Corinthians 5:11). But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Whereas we, in our imposition of prerequisites and conditionals, are like the early days of Alcoholics Anonymous, turning away the “unrespectables” to protect their program, only to find in the end that, “We were intolerant. How could we guess that all those fears were to prove groundless? How could we know that thousands of these sometimes frightening people were to make astonishing recoveries and become our greatest workers?”

In the parable of the sowerone major point lost on our non-agricultural generation is the shocking wastefulness; Christ as the sower makes no distinctions about where he spends himself. He scatters as liberally to the poor soil and the thorn bushes as to the good. If he made no such distinctions with his grace, if he made no such judgments about who is worthy to receive his largess, then why should we make such distinctions? I think Christ’s point is that you and I, as we are out there sowing, have no idea where is the good soil and where the bad. Sometimes the most radiant Christians (e.g. Paul) come from the most surprising and least worthy places (e.g. Paul). Christ himself said, “Whoever is forgiven much will love much.”

“Acceptable” sin

In our contemporary Christian culture, we have come around to a conventional wisdom that breaks down “sins” into three categories:

  1. Acceptable: Those that can be freely practiced without reflection, hesitation or misgiving. These include eating unclean food, breaking the sabbath, and (increasingly) remarriage after divorce.
  2. Borderline: Those that can be practiced now and again, so long as it is due to “weakness” and you feel shame (aka “repentance”) about it. This covers pretty much the whole range from alcoholism to sexual sin.
  3. Horrifying: Those that are so egregious they must not be practiced, ever. This category is largely theoretical, used as a debating tactic when shock value is needed; it’s mainly just murder and bestiality.

It is adherence to this conventional wisdom that fuels our entire modern culture war. People whose “sins” fall into the “acceptable” category are readily welcomed and embraced by the church, whereas those who are relegated to “borderline” status are offered a false correlation: between being acceptable to Christians and living in constant shame.

Here is the problem: it’s all a cultural construct. Even conservative churches now readily take in those who would have caused a great scandal just a generation or two ago. Rightly so. The weight of scripture is overwhelmingly against the drawing of niceties between different kinds of sin. James says “Whoever obeys the whole law yet breaks it at just one point is guilty of breaking it all.” Paul makes a similar point when talking about circumcision. And Christ himself equates one of our “horrifying” sins (murder) with words spoken in anger and contempt, a practice so common among contemporary Christians that it is seen as totally “acceptable” (if not “encouraged”!)

Christ’s plucking grain on the sabbath, Peter’s vision of eating forbidden food, Paul’s railing against the need for circumcision: these are not meant to be line-item deletions of three specific legal requirements, leaving the rest of the law in full force. They must be read as they would have seemed to the original audience, as wild and revolutionary, sweeping and scandalous, not chipping away at the cornices of the law, but swinging at the foundation stones with a pickaxe.  If we are to tolerate unrepentance towards the “acceptable” sins, then we ourselves are the transgressors when we refuse equally free welcome, grace and acceptance to all.

Errors of judgment and license

Unfortunately, many instinctively revolt against this line of reasoning because it is open to abuse. Always has been. That doesn’t make the theology wrong. Paul was God’s pioneer for grace-instead-of-law, and he was constantly having to defend it against the legalists on his right and the licentious on his left. Sin still has the power to destroy, but so does the knee-jerk, unthinking, reflexive application of the law.

As brothers and sisters, we are not to stand idly by when we witness destructive sin at work in a person’s life. Simple human mercy demands that much, to say nothing of scripture’s commands that we care for each other and bear one another’s burdens. But we must remember: there is more to knowing what needs to change in a person’s life than simply knowing whether or not Hebrew law is being obeyed. It is the blanket application of law— without love, without reflection, without relationship— that cannot survive in the heart of the true Christian.

Related Links

What is sin? It’s not that simple.