Sabbath - why re-member?

Remembering the Sabbath to be Re-membered The Dover Church
February 2, 2014 Scripture: Genesis 1-2, Exodus 20, Matthew 5:1-12

Any conversation about Sabbath has to address economics as well as theology. So, this morning, we begin with capitalism which preaches that competition driven by rewards and punishments is the most effective economic stimulus. Those who excel receive rewards and those who do not excel are punished by not getting those rewards. Capitalists believe that anyone can succeed through effort and ingenuity, with a little luck and timing thrown in. And what drives that "any one" to succeed, what motivates him or her, is compensation, greater potential rewards translate into greater motivation to succeed.
That’s the theory, but behavioral scientists have discovered a huge wrinkle in the application of these theories in the real world. Increased rewards do stimulate increased performance, but only on straight mechanical tasks like moving nuts and bolts from one box to another. With work like this, increase potential rewards and performance will increase.
For non-mechanical tasks, task that require cognitive engagement, like deciding how to sort the nuts and bolts, how to make them more accessible to future users, etc., anything that requires creativity and conceptual abilities, scientists have found that increased rewards actually decrease performance, markedly. For the simple reason that rewards narrow focus and concentrate the mind, which is why they work for simple tasks. Narrow focus and concentration are not helpful when you have to figure out what to do in the first place, when the answer or solution your are seeking is out on the periphery or requires different perspectives, like getting up from your work bench and looking at the boxes and parts from different angles and suddenly it dawns on you that the bench is all wrong.
The fascinating thing to me, and this is where we are creeping into spirituality and theology, is that we are living in a time of disconnect and dissonance, when we who have complex work environments, complex life environments, know that increased rewards do not increase our creativity and solution finding, BUT  we also want to believe that rewards equals performance which leads to more rewards model to be true because we are locked into or have locked ourselves into a model of putting in more and more time trying to do and achieve more and more. We believe in extrinsic rewards, carrots and sticks, bonuses and lay offs, while we respond to intrinsic rewards, like a sense of autonomy in our work, a feeling of mastery, and serving a purpose greater than ourselves.
There are workplaces that practice this intrinsic reward model in which autonomy, mastery and purpose are the motivators as opposed to straight money, companies like Google. You may have heard that Google has something called 20% time in which their people spend 20% of their time, one day a week, working on whatever they want to work on, essentially what most of my employers would have called “goof off time,” except for the fact that innovations like Gmail, Adsense, Google transit, Google Talk and Google news are all ideas which germinated during that 20% time, all while the Google folks were goofing off.
Which brings us to theology. God took a “goof off” day when he finished beginning creating. I say finished beginning creating because the Hebrew is not as definitive as the English translation makes it sound. We read, “in the beginning when God created, etc., etc.,” but Hebrew scholars read “when God began creating.” So God finished beginning, had all the pieces and parts on the work bench of creation if you will, saw that they were good, that he could with them, and then walked around, looking at it from different angles, asking himself, “what’s next?” What’s next being everything since, which has been pretty amazingly creative.
If living our lives is anything, it is a purely cognitive activity involving conceptual abilities and solution finding. Our lives are not purely mechanical, no matter how much we wish they were or how often we schedule them on our smartphones like they were and wondered why we’re so wasted and exhausted after a while of living them like they were. The truth seems to me to be that the more we run after extrinsic rewards the less satisfied we become, whereas the more we seek intrinsic rewards the more whole we feel.
Which is why God commands us to re-member the Sabbath and keep it holy. Because God knows we forget, we forget because our primary theology is one of progress in which more and more, and faster and faster, and better and bigger, and let me just try to fit one more thing in this afternoon and that will put me over the top and my work will be done, except it never is.
Wayne Muller observes in his book on Sabbath that “medical science has a very specific name to describe unrestricted cell growth in the human body: cancer.” We are so careful about what we eat and other environmental factors surrounding us for fear of cancer, while we blindly rush on, smoking through our days, not nurturing large parts of our lives while we eat up life until our lives feel cancerous and we see cancerous symptoms all around us in the world we are creating, whether it be criminality and the collapse of the family, to poverty and failure of schools, to wars and global warming. And gradually we go to pieces, get splintered, rushing here and there, living ADHD. We are dis-membering ourselves with our progress.
The truth which God knows and which God wants us to remember is to live our lives fully we need a goof off day, that the real ingenuity and creativity and richness of our lives comes from a goof off day. Now God’s not some left coast nut job like the folks who run Google who give 20% time. God is only offering 17%, one out of seven days, to just enjoy being alive, to enjoy the people in our lives, to allow our hearts, minds and spirits to goof off enough for us to look peripherally and creatively at our lives as the most precious things they truly are. We need to remember the Sabbath to re-member our selves, to put our selves back together. We still do have six days of work before us. We need that day to breathe freely enough to see the blessings.
When Jesus gave us the Beatitudes, he was not giving us another honey-do list or achievement test or annual performance review, as in do this and be blessed, do that and be blessed, do the other thing and find blessing, and have them on my desk by five so that we can get to the gym in time for a workout before we run over to the church for an important committee meeting. No, Jesus didn’t want to add to our burdens. Jesus said, "come unto me all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, for it is easy." Our faith is one grace, not achievement. If God loves us and there’s nothing we can do about it (remember that one?), well then our faith is not a question of what more we have to do but rather what less we can do so that we might see what is already there that we cannot see because we’re trying so hard and running so fast and working so much to get somewhere else than where we already are. The theology of progress tells us that the promised land is a good and perfect place and where we are right now is imperfect and defective and our main task is to get the hell out of here. But what Jesus is saying is you are blessed, right here, right now, right where you are, doing what you with the people you are with. We think of being poor in spirit, mourning, being meek, hungering and thirsting for God, being merciful, making peace, being persecuted as conditions to escape from, but they are exactly where the blessings are. Aren’t we all making peace all the time in our families, amongst our friends, at work, everywhere, because relations are the blessings? Don’t you need someone to love in the first place to mourn their loss? And would you rather never have had that love in the first place, missed out on that blessing, to avoid having to mourn? Aren’t all of us by definition meek? We’re neither kings nor queens and we live out our lives, not on the heights, but right here at 17 Springdale Avenue...and blessed are you when you savor the blessing.
The real question about Sabbath seems to be this: do you want to really know how much God loves you unconditionally? Not know as an idea but as a lived experience like falling in love? It seems to me that telling us to take a goof off day so that we might more fully and creatively and enthusiastically live into our lives is all the proof you'll need. Take a goof off day and watch how your life transforms. This is the good News.