The Walking Purchase (aka how indigenous peoples were cheated out of land that became Pennsylvania) and the Third Sabbath – Jubilee, Part 2

Have you heard of the Pennsylvania Walking Purchase?  I have lived in Pennsylvania nearly my entire life, and I took PA History in high school. I do not remember hearing about the Walking Purchase before this week, when a question came to mind, “How was Pennsylvania land obtained by the English?” I searched that question online and something called the Walking Purchase came back in the search results. Walking Purchase?

When I read about the Walking Purchase, I was deeply saddened. It was a devious method that William Penn’s son’s and a PA colonial leader used, after he died, to essentially steal Pennsylvania land from the Delaware Indians. 

If you’re wondering, “Why was he thinking about how PA land got in English hands?” it has everything to do with what we are studying this week. The third sabbath.

In Leviticus chapter 25, verse 8, God teaches his people Israel about keeping the third sabbath:

“Count off seven sabbaths of years—seven times seven years—so that the seven sabbaths of years amount to a period of forty-nine years. Then have the trumpet sounded everywhere on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the Day of Atonement sound the trumpet throughout your land. Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. [That’s the Liberty Bell verse! Remember that from the previous post?] It shall be a jubilee for you; each one of you is to return to his family property and each to his own clan. The fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you; do not sow and do not reap what grows of itself or harvest the untended vines. For it is a jubilee and is to be holy for you; eat only what is taken directly from the fields. In this Year of Jubilee everyone is to return to his own property.”

Let me try to put this passage into context. The Lord instructed Israel to keep three sabbaths. The most common sabbath was the sabbath day, the seventh day of the week.  The second sabbath was the sabbath year every seventh year, which we will study next week.  But then in the passage above we learn about the third sabbath, also called the Year of Jubilee, which was the year after seven sabbath years.  7 rounds of 7 years is 49 years.  That next year, the 50th year, was the Jubilee year, and it was extra special.  For Jews still to this day, the tenth day of the seventh month is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the most holy day in the Jewish calendar.  The Lord declared that on Yom Kippur of each 50th year, trumpets were to sound around the land, consecrating that year as the year of jubilee.

When we hear the word jubilee, we think of the idea of being jubilant, having a celebration, a party.  For the Israelites, there is certainly a celebratory element to the Year of Jubilee.  But as you heard in the verses 8 through 13, the Jubilee brings out a very new element of God’s heart for sabbath.  Look again at verse 10, the Liberty Bell verse, “Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you; each of you is to return to your family property and to your own clan.”

Freedom. Liberty. Specifically for slaves, as we will see in a future post this week.  The freedom, the liberty, was also for the land.  Skip ahead to verse 23, where God gives further Jubilee instructions.  I think that you are about to hear is wild.

“The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you reside in my land as foreigners and strangers. Throughout the land that you hold as a possession, you must provide for the redemption of the land. If one of your fellow Israelites becomes poor and sells some of their property, their nearest relative is to come and redeem what they have sold. If, however, there is no one to redeem it for them but later on they prosper and acquire sufficient means to redeem it themselves, they are to determine the value for the years since they sold it and refund the balance to the one to whom they sold it; they can then go back to their own property.”

Can you believe your eyes and ears?  For the ancient Israelites, when you purchased someone else’s ancestral lands, you were never to consider the sale permanent.  It was a temporary purchase.  You always knew that the 50th year was coming, and during that 50th year of Jubilee, the ancestral owner would come back and redeem the land.  The Lord says, “you must provide for the redemption of the land.” 

Redeem, redemption.  This is a powerful concept in both the Old and New Covenants.  When it came to the Jubilee Year, it meant that the ancestral family had the opportunity to buy back their land. 

That alone is radical.  In our contemporary mindset, we would say “I bought that property fair and square; you’re crazy if you think I am going to sell it back to you just because 50 years has gone by.  It’s my property now; you sold it, go away.”

In ancient Israel, the Jubilee year directly upends our contemporary viewpoint about ownership.  In ancient Israel, God says, “The land is not yours, it is mine, and you must see yourselves as foreigners and strangers.”  Do you see how radically different that is to our contemporary view of ownership? 

If Jubilee were the guiding principle of our land here in America, every 50 years, the ancestral owners of the land would have a claim to that land.  That means indigenous peoples.  In most cases, the tribal peoples who originally lived here had their land stolen from them by brute force, or by unfair trading or selling, like the Walking Purchase. 

What would God’s heart for jubilee say?  Every 50 years we should give the ancestors of the original owners the opportunity to purchase it.  Especially considering that much of it was either annexed or stolen.

Now notice verse 28.  It gets even more astounding, “But if they do not acquire the means to repay, what was sold will remain in the possession of the buyer until the Year of Jubilee. It will be returned in the Jubilee, and they can then go back to their property.”

It will be returned.  No resale.  Just given back. Give back land?  Doesn’t that seem wrong?

Whether it sounds wrong to you or not, that is God’s heart for jubilee. Perhaps you think God is taking this idea of jubilee too far. We’re about to find out, his Jubilee heart goes even further. How much further? We learn more in the next post.

A fitting inscription on the Liberty Bell, but from a “strange” book of the Bible – Jubilee, Part 1

Have you ever visited the Liberty Bell? 

I have visited the Liberty Bell at least a couple times, but I could not have told you until this week that the bell has an inscription.  The thing that I remember the most about the bell is that it was cast by bell makers named Pass and Stow, and you know why I know that?  The film National Treasure, which my family loves and has watched many times.  In the film, the names of the makers of the bell is a clue in a treasure hunt.  Their names are also on the bell.

Let’s talk about that inscription, which is from the Bible.  Leviticus 25:10, in fact. 

I think it is quite amazing that one of the most iconic symbols of our nation has a verse from the book of Leviticus, of all books.  Why do I find that amazing? Because Leviticus can often talk about strange and confusing ancient rituals.

We’re going to talk about Leviticus this week.  In fact we’re going to talk about that very verse on the Liberty Bell.  And it is not strange.  At least in the confusing sense.  It might feel strange, though, because what we will learn from that verse will reveal to us the radical heart of God.  Frankly, you might not like it. 

In 1753, most all English speakers used the King James Version of the Bible, which translates Leviticus 25:10 as, “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.” Fitting verse for the Liberty Bell, wouldn’t you say? So why would I say, “you might not like it”? I’ll get to that in future posts this week.

We’re in week two of a three-week blog series about sabbath. Last week I mentioned that the Sabbath for Jews is the seventh day of the week, Friday sundown to Saturday sundown. Sabbath is a day of rest from work, so that people can participate in worship and spend time with family and friends. 

Did you now, however, that in the Old Covenant Mosaic Law there were other sabbaths?  In Leviticus chapter 25, verses 1 through 7, the Lord tells his people Israel to keep a second sabbath called the Sabbath Year.  We’re going to skip over that and come back to it next week, because it relates very closely to sabbatical, which I begin in August. 

But we at least need to know that every seventh year was designated by God as a sabbath year.  Just as there are seven days in a week, and the seventh day is the Sabbath day of rest, God also instructed his people to do the same with years.  The seventh year was a year of rest for the land.  We’ll talk about how that worked next week, and how it relates to sabbatical. This week, I want to start at Leviticus 25, verse 8, which tells us about the third kind of sabbath. 

Join me back here tomorrow, and we’ll start to learn about the third sabbath.

Photo by Joe Richmond on Unsplash

The conflicted history of American freedom – Jubilee, Preview

What one word comes to mind when you think of the United States of America?  

As I consider the past 250+ years since our nation’s founding, I propose that the one word that most defines our national project is “freedom.”  Consider this famous line from one of our nation’s most important founding documents, the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

You don’t see the word “freedom,” but you see its synonym, “liberty.”  We Americans are people of freedom and liberty.  How many times over the years, for example, have you heard the words, “It’s a free country, so I can _______.”?  Often people say that as an excuse to avoid accountability.  And in fact, that gets to the heart of one of the most complicated philosophical debates regarding liberty, that of liberty versus law.  Does freedom require anarchy, lawlessness, total liberty from all restraint or accountability?  Of course not.  But where does a society draw the line?  There’s lots of debate about that.

And what about the reality that in our nation’s history, we proclaimed freedom from the harsh taxation placed on our forefathers by the King of England, while at the same time those very forefathers stole land from the indigenous peoples who lived here first, or they cheated indigenous people out of the land.  Where is the freedom in that? Also, at the same time our forefathers shackled and trafficked men, women, and children from Africa, enslaving them to work for free here on our shores.  How is that consistent with liberty? 

It’s not.  

What I’m getting at is that the United States of America, though a free nation, founded on the good goal of freedom, has struggled mightily to live up to its founding creeds.  We’ve made progress, hard-won progress, but we are not perfect.  We could have been a lot more free, and we still have work to do.

I bring up the idea of freedom, because freedom is a very good thing.  In fact, what we will find this coming week is that freedom flows from God’s heart.  For these last three weeks before my sabbatical, my blog series is about sabbath.  This past week, we studied the weekly sabbath.  What we will learn this coming week and next is that there are two more kinds of sabbaths that God instructed the people of Israel to keep.  This coming week, we study that latter parts of Leviticus 25 to learn about the radical sabbath concept that relates to freedom.  Frankly, the sabbath we’ll study this coming week blows my mind.  I think you’ll find it quite challenging, as I have.  But we need to hear about it because it is God’s heart. 

We get started on Monday.

Photo by Luke Stackpoole on Unsplash

A few ideas for applying the principle of sabbath, without legalism – Rest & Sabbath, Part 5

This week, I’ve been blogging about sabbath. While the New Testament does not teach that Sunday is the new sabbath day, Jesus teaches the sabbath principle for us in Matthew 11, verses 28-30, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

Think about confidence that Jesus wants to give us.  We can lack that confidence.  We can turn off our phone, but then worry that we are missing out.  We can be off work, whether one day per week or on a vacation, but worry that we should be making money.  To that, Jesus says, “Trust in me, take my yoke upon you. Find your rest in me.”

Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann says that Jesus could be talking about the weariness of the Roman taxation system that meant people had to work nonstop to make ends meet. Or Jesus could be talking about the Jewish religious system that was filled with endless rules to follow, making it seem impossible for most people to think that God was smiling over them.

Do you feel those pressures? Endless work, paying off debt, paying bills, saving for retirement, paying for health insurance, and on and on it goes.  Life is expensive.  We can also feel tired about being a so-called good Christian.  We can question if we’re praying enough, praying the right way, serving enough, giving enough. To these frustrations and doubts, Jesus says, “Come to me all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”

Jesus is our source of true rest.  We spend time with him, rest in him.  One way is through contemplative prayer, where we physically sit with Jesus, listening for him, through his Spirit.  We are so accustomed to noise.  To having sound fill the air around us. We do well to follow Jesus’ example, as he often got away and was alone with his father.  We’ll never get away from all noise, and actually total silence is not the idea.  But we do well to take action to reduce the noise in our lives, and spend time with Jesus. Contemplating who he is, what he is like, how he acts and thinks, asking the Spirit to help us have rest in him, so that we can live more like him. 

What we find in this time with Jesus is that it comes back to our hearts.  He knows what is best is for our hearts to rest in him. 

That kind of time with Jesus is one way we can apply the principle of sabbath in our lives on a regular basis.  Not making a new law, as if we have to do spend thirty minutes each day in silent prayer. Nothing like that.  Instead, with a graciousness to yourself, and with a heart for God, try contemplatively spending time with Jesus on a regular basis.  Could be turning off all noise in the car when you’re driving.  Could be at night before bed.  Could be both.  Could be other times of quiet.  One small way I do this is when I am running.  I choose not to listen to music or podcasts.  Instead I run, listening to the world around me, thinking, sometimes praying.  I don’t always do it well, but when I do, it is running with Jesus.

You can practice this kind of contemplative sabbath individually and together with others.

How will you apply sabbath to your life?

Photo by Viktor Bystrov on Unsplash

The joy of giving your business and phone a regular break – Rest & Sabbath, Part 4

This past week I met friends for dinner.  They live two hours away, were in town, so we met up for dinner on Tuesday night.  We picked out a restaurant that we all liked.

A couple hours before we were to meet, I got a text from them saying that they just looked up the restaurant, and it was closed that day.  My first thought was, “Why would a restaurant be closed on a Tuesday evening?”  But as I thought about it further while working on this week’s emphasis on sabbath, I thought, “I bet the owners and employees appreciate the day off.”  Some establishments close on Mondays or Tuesdays because the weekend is so busy.

I have a friend who works at Chick-fil-A, and he is very grateful for Sundays off.  I don’t know if those business are closed because they are trying to implement sabbath in their lives, but clearly whoever makes those decisions knows that by closing their doors, they are forgoing the opportunity to make money.  That’s one of the reasons why sabbath is so counter-cultural, why sabbath is resistance.

In addition to a business closing for a day, there are many ways we can apply the principle of Sabbath.

In fact, Jesus continues this emphasis.  Not the rule, but the heart of sabbath.  In his sermon on the mount in Matthew 6 verse 24, he teaches, “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”

Sabbath is a radical concept in our world because it resists against our human cultural tendency to depend on money.  Or on what our work will get us. Or to depend on how valuable we feel when we work.  Our identity can be found in our work rather than on Christ.

The prevailing cultural impulse is to make more and more money. Or to feel like you are valuable because you work hard.  So we work like crazy.  Work on your day off, work on vacation. Because of our pastoral role, Michelle and I have wrestled with this for years.  Especially since the onset of the smart phone, texting, and being online all the time.

When I started at Faith Church, I did not have a cell phone.  Our internet here at the church was dial-up.  I was the youth pastor at the time.  The previous pastor and I shared the dial-up line.  If one of us was online, and the other person didn’t realize it, and we dialed-up to check our email or go on the internet, we would bump the other person offline. 

But we could go back further than that, way further.  Imagine being a pastor in the days when they literally rode horseback from house church to house church.  If you needed them for pastoral care, you had to physically go get them, and only if they happened to be in your town.  You could also write letters to them, but that could take weeks to get a response.

Now, the texts, emails, phone calls, etc, are nonstop, right there in my living room, in my office, all day long.  That is the reality of pastoral ministry in 2025. That is the reality of life in 2025.  All that to say, not just pastors, but basically all of us are always on-call.  In my years as pastor, rarely do I go to the hospital in the middle of the night.  Super rare.  What is far more prevalent is answering texts, calls, emails, messages, all the time. For some of you, your work is like that too.  For nearly all of us, life is like that.

How, then, do we truly apply sabbath to our ultra-connected world?  For one, we can turn our devices off.  I want you to do try it out.  Not just silence them.  Turn them off.  Seriously, get out your device and turn it off.  See what it feels like to be uncontactable, unnotifiable, for next hour. When I preached this at my church, I asked everyone to turn their devices off right then and there. Maybe that’s a habit you could try. For a meal, for a Bible study, for a worship service. Just turn your devices off and be present.

Do you turn your devices off on a regular basis?  Or do you keep them on all the time?  I turn my off every night before bed.  Yes, that means my church, family, and friends cannot contact me in the middle of the night.  If they need me, they are welcome to come to my house and get me.  And we do not have a land line phone anymore.  99.9% of situations can wait. Does that sound harsh? I don’t mean it to be. I don’t think it actually is harsh, though I understand how it might sound that way, given our connected culture. But remember that before the advent of the telephone, what I do was the norm, and people were okay.

The act of turning off my phone has done two things.  1. I can sleep better, knowing that I don’t need to worry about the phone.  2. It helps me break my connection to my phone.  I have it with me all day long, which is not healthy.  I need to break the connection to the phone. ((Bonus #3 benefit: turning off my phone daily is also good for my phone, especially in its battery life. My phone is five years old and still functioning fairly well.))

Practicing sabbath is more than turning off your phone regularly. Jesus has more to say. To learn what he has to say, check back to the next post!

Photo by Asif Ali on Unsplash

The gift of sabbath is sometimes very difficult to receive – Rest & Sabbath, Part 3

If you are used to working hard and putting food on your table by working hard, then it can be very difficult to learn to rest.  I am not just talking about ancient Israel.  I’m talking about American life now.  Especially in cultures like the one I live in, Lancaster County.  We are work-oriented.  Generally-speaking, we can have a hard time resting, relaxing, and feeling okay about it.  When our work day is done, in the evening, we’re often thinking what else we need to do around the house, or to try to make more money in a side hustle.  We can feel guilty if we’re not using the time by some societal expectation of production and consumption. 

That’s exactly what some of the Israelites do when God offers them the gift of rest. In the previous post, we looked at how God introduced the concept of sabbath to the newly free nation of Israel. In Exodus 17, verses 27–30, however, we learn that the idea of sabbath took some getting used to, especially for a formerly enslaved people:

“Nevertheless, some of the people went out on the seventh day to gather it, but they found none. Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘How long will you refuse to keep my commands and my instructions? Bear in mind that the Lord has given you the Sabbath; that is why on the sixth day he gives you bread for two days. Everyone is to stay where they are on the seventh day; no one is to go out.’ So the people rested on the seventh day.”

In this sabbath rest, God says, “Stop. Trust in me.”  He is desperate for the people of Israel to receive the good gift of rest that he wants to give them.  He knows what they need and what will be good for them.  It is for their best.  Rest is a gift.

But the people don’t trust him enough to provide them.  Their fear that they won’t have enough wins out.  They don’t want to receive the gift of rest. 

There in the wilderness desert, there is no Israelite alive who could remember rest like that.  A whole day off.  They had been enslaved in Egypt for so long that hard work, every day, is all they knew.  What a wonderful gift that God gives them.

The gift of Sabbath is so important, God enshrines the gift as teaching in the Ten Commandments.  In Exodus 20, the Ten Commandments chapter, we read about the Sabbath command in verses 8–11, “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.”

For the nation of Israel, the Sabbath was a day.  A period of 24 hours.  It was part of their covenant relationship with God.  The Old Covenant. 

You and I, as Christians, are not bound to the terms of that covenant, as we are under the New Covenant.  That means we are not bound to abide by a 24 hour period of rest each week.  A Christian can certainly choose to have that 24 hours of rest per week.  It can even be on Sunday.  But no Christian should attempt to make a new law suggesting that Sunday is the sabbath day for Christians.  That is simply not a part of our new covenant that identifies us as Christians, as followers of Jesus. 

The only reason most Christian churches meet for worship on Sundays is because that is the day of the week that Jesus rose from the dead.  Eventually, this practice of Christians having worship services on Sundays became so prevalent, especially in countries that were majority Christian, that it became a day off work.  Some people, interpreting the Bible incorrectly, declared that Sunday is the new sabbath, and tried to make new laws, like the Blue Laws (which we learned about in this post), to make it easier for people to go to church on Sunday and rest. 

But there have always been people who needed to work on Sundays.  Pastors.  Worship leaders.  Law enforcement, medical personnel, etc. 

Instead of making blue laws, what Christians should have done, and what we still strive for today, is to implement the principle of sabbath in our lives regularly.  Not a 24 hour period of rest each week, though that can be a very good thing if you are able to do that. 

Instead, the principle of sabbath is radical trust in God.  Walter Brueggemann calls it resistance.  By practicing God’s principle of sabbath, we are resisting the pressures the world places on us to go, go, go, always doing something, multi-tasking, earning. 

One of the things I love about my extended Kime family vacations to PA state parks is that they are often in cell phone dead zones.  No cell service means we are not getting phone calls, alerts, text messages, emails, and we cannot be on social media.  On those weeks, I turn my phone off, put it on shelf, and let it be.  I give my phone a rest, and in turn I rest from my phone. 

That is sabbath. A week of phone sabbath.  A week of no longer being enslaved to the taskmaster that is the constant noise from our phones that says, “Pay attention to me!”

There are many other ways we can apply the principle of Sabbath. In the next post, we’ll talk about one of those ways Jesus introduced.

Photo by Fab Lentz on Unsplash

What do we do when we come to the end ourselves? – Rest & Sabbath, Part 2

I was outside this past weekend splitting firewood, and a very uncomfortable feeling came over me. The feeling was one part sick in the stomach and another part unsteadiness. I was afraid I was going to faint. I walked inside my house to get a drink of water, closed my eyes, and I saw a bright light behind my eyelids.

I was having a migraine, but not the kind that hurts. That migraine was from heat exhaustion.

We’ve been in a weeks-long heat wave here in the northeast USA, with near nonstop heat and humidity. That morning I had run/walked with my dog for four miles, totally soaked with sweat. I got cooled down in the a/c, got breakfast, and relaxed.

After a few hours, with dry clothes on, went outside again and mowed our grass. That took about 90 minutes, and again I was dripping with sweat. Back inside, I enjoyed the a/c, got lunch, and watched some TV.

A couple more hours later, with new dry clothes on, I went back outside to split wood. I have a lot of splitting to do to get ready for winter. If you’ve ever split firewood by hand with an axe, you know it is great exercise. I filled up a wheelbarrow with logs needing split, split them, and stacked them. I filled up a second wheelbarrow, but after whacking a couple logs, my body started having the symptoms of heat exhaustion. My body was telling me, “You’re done.”

We humans have our limits. As we age, we feel those limits more quickly. We need rest.

Given what Christians historically believe about God, he does not need to rest.  God has unlimited energy.  God could work unceasingly, and it would never affect him.  Ever.  24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year, every year.  He is omnipotent, all-powerful. 

But he rested anyway.  Why? 

In Genesis chapter 2, we read the famous story of the God who rests after his six-day work week creating the universe: “Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array. By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.”

Why did God “bless the seventh day and make it holy.”  After working on the previous six days, his act of rest on the seventh declares that rest is a very good thing. 

God rests as an example to us.  He knows that we humans do not have unlimited energy.  We humans are not omnipotent.  Though we sometimes think we can go and go and go, we can’t.  Caffeine sure helps.  But we need rest.  God knows that.  He wants us to have an abundant flourishing life.  One of the ways we experience that flourishing life is by rest, pausing to see God’s character, his goodness.  So God sets an example for us to follow.  We do well to follow the example of God, resting.

Sabbath, then, is quite loving and gracious of God.  He knows that we need rest, a break, and he does not require us to live in a way that is impossible for us. He cares for us.

God’s care shows up in the Exodus account when he rescued the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt.  After they journeyed into the wilderness, however, things got intense.  In Exodus chapter 16 and 17, we read that people of Israel grumble against their leaders Moses and Aaron, accusing them (and God) of leading them out into the desert to die. Though they were enslaved in Egypt, they say, at least they had food.

Can you imagine being a working people who are now unable to work?  For all your life, you’ve worked in order to put food on your table.  You’ve worked hard.  Slavery actually.  It was brutally hard.  The Egyptian Pharaoh squeezed every ounce of energy out of the Israelites.  If you are a Hebrew enslaved in Egypt, of course you hated it, and cried out to God for it to stop.  And God did stop it.  But now you’re in the wilderness desert now.  There is no work and no food. 

Just then God steps in.  In Exodus 17, verses 4-5, God says to Moses,

“I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. In this way I will test them and see whether they will follow my instructions. On the sixth day they are to prepare what they bring in, and that is to be twice as much as they gather on the other days.”

God provides!  And did you notice how God provides not only new work and new food, but God also lays a foundation for rest.  Each day they are only to collect enough of the bread from heaven, the manna, for that day.  So each day has a bit of sabbath rest built in.  You’re not supposed to work 24/7. 

And then each week has a longer rest.  On the sixth day, the people were to gather double bread, manna.  Why?  In Exodus 17, verses 21-23 we learn that,

“Each morning everyone gathered as much as they needed, and when the sun grew hot, it melted away. On the sixth day, they gathered twice as much—two omers for each person—and the leaders of the community came and reported this to Moses. He said to them, “This is what the Lord commanded: ‘Tomorrow is to be a day of sabbath rest, a holy sabbath to the Lord. So bake what you want to bake and boil what you want to boil. Save whatever is left and keep it until morning.’”

What a beautiful system of work and rest, a system that depends on God.  The people can’t solely depend on themselves and their abilities.  The people work, but they don’t overwork, and instead, God provides just what they need. 

Except that some people didn’t seem to place their trust in God’s system. We meet them in the next post.

Photo by Jennifer Lim-Tamkican on Unsplash

Playing sports on Sundays, and hunting, is now legal in PA – Rest & Sabbath, Part 1

The headline reads, “Bill that would end Sunday ban on football and baseball passes Pa. House.”

Take a guess at what year that headline was published.  Believe it or not, 2022.

The article goes on to report, “The state House passed a bill Monday [September 19, 2022] that would repeal a…law that makes it illegal to play football or baseball on a Sunday, except between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m.”  In other words, no Sunday morning or evening games.  What was happening on Sunday mornings and evenings?  Worship services. 

When do you think the law they were trying to repeal originally went into effect?

The PA Legislature Act 49 was approved in 1933, titled the “Sunday Baseball and Football Law”.

There are fines involved, if a sports team would disobey the law.  And as you know, the Phillies and Eagles have been playing Sunday evening games for years.  Guess how much the fine is?

$10.

The Sunday Baseball and Football Law is part of a series of laws in Pennsylvania called The Blue Laws.

Blue?  Why blue?  I found a source that suggests two options: 1. Related to the use of the word “blue” for sadness.  The didn’t say if the laws made people sad, or if the laws were intended to cure sadness.  Either makes sense to me.  2. The laws were originally printed on blue paper. 

The intent of the Blue Laws goes way back into PA history, to legislation in 1676 called the Duke of York Laws.  That’s pre-William Penn.  Barely.  Does anyone know when William Penn got the territory?  1681.  Do you remember what kind of Christian Penn was?  A Quaker.  Quakers were quite strict in their view of what a good Christian should or should not do.  Work hard, yes.  Engage is diversion and enjoyment, no.  Apparently, Anglicans were not so holy as Quakers.  At the time, because of our English heritage, there were a lot of Anglicans in PA, and they liked a good party.  But Penn and the Quakers were in charge, so the Quaker leadership of the state enacted laws banning a whole slew of activities

In 1682, the Quaker-led law code prohibited, “Cards, Dice, Lotteries, or such like enticing vain and evil Sports and Games.” Eleven years later, in 1693, the law was expanded, banning on Sundays, “stage plays, masques, revels, bull baits, cockfights, and bonfires.”  In other words, living in PA in colonial days…not very fun. 

Why, though?  What was the purpose of the laws?  One scholar writes, “Pennsylvania’s blue laws” were instituted to give people time to honor the Lord on the Sabbath. Individuals were expected to worship the Creator by attending church meetings and reading the Scriptures. Both work and play were unacceptable forms of behavior on the Lord’s Day.”

Three hundred years later, in 1978 the PA Supreme Court found these laws unconstitutional.  But some of them remain on the books to this day.  No car sales on Sundays at dealerships, for example.  Still can’t do that.  But now, at least, the Phillies and Eagles are in the clear to play sports on Sundays.  And for all you hunters, did you hear that Gov. Shapiro repealed the Sunday hunting ban? That was just last week!

The question I’m getting at is this, how did the people who enacted Blue Laws believe that those laws helped people observe the Sabbath? We’ll talk about that in the next post.

Photo by Ryan Carpenter on Unsplash

My Amish neighbors and their nonstop leaf blowing – Sabbath, Preview

My Amish neighbors are out there with their loud leaf blower at all hours of the day, blowing every speck of rubbish.  Nearly every day. And their blower is loud.  Why?  They absolutely do not need to do that.  Yet they do. I love Lancaster County where I’ve lived all my life. But I have to admit that sometimes it’s a bit much when it comes to work.  

Just ask most Lancastrians the question, “How are you doing?”  

“Busy.”  “Tired.”  “Ready for the weekend.”  “Ready for vacation.”

We Lancastrians aren’t good at rest. In fact, getting rest is an difficulty for most Americans it seems.

An article from the National Institutes of Health reports that, “According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 1 in 3 adults in the United States reported not getting enough rest or sleep every day. Nearly 40% of adults report falling asleep during the day without meaning to at least once a month. Also, an estimated 50 to 70 million Americans have chronic, or ongoing, sleep disorders. Sleep deficiency can lead to physical and mental health problems, injuries, loss of productivity, and even a greater likelihood of death.” 

Does that relate to you or anyone close to you?  We Americans tend not to be good at rest.  I find myself sitting on the sofa falling asleep, pretty much any time of day.  The older I get the more I find this happening.  But in the middle of the night, when I’m actually supposed to be sleeping, I can toss and turn, get up to use the restroom, and struggle to find that long deep sleep.  So I wake up in the morning still tired.  

Here’s another way to look at it: I call it seminary guilt.  When I was in seminary for both my masters degree and my doctorate, there was always reading to plow through, research, assignments, and papers.  I would feel guilty if I took any free time off and wasn’t doing seminary work.  The deadlines were looming large over my head, and I hated the feeling of knowing that I tons of reading yet to do, assignments to complete, papers to write.  But I would eventually work through all of it, get it done, and the semester would be over.  A weight was lifted, and I was free.  I had no more seminary work to do.  But a funny thing happened.  I still felt like I should be reading, producing, creating.  I couldn’t just rest and enjoy the time off.  I felt guilty for doing nothing.  

Maybe you’ve felt something like that.  Production guilt is embedded in our American cultural psyche.  Some call it the Protestant work ethic.  In the Lancastrian culture where I live, that guilt is rooted in our PA Dutch farming heritage.  Even if a family has no farming in their ancestry, even if they are not from Lancaster, that work ethic, that guilt, is in the air.  It gets in your mindset without you even knowing it.  Leaves you feeling like it is normal to be working nonstop.  Like leaf-blowing every speck of dust from your property, every day.

The result is that rest is not only hard to come by, but it can seem wrong.  With only a few weeks till my sabbatical starts, I am starting a blog mini-series about rest, sabbath, sabbatical, jubilee, and what God has to say about it in his word.  Check back here on Monday and we’ll get started.

Photo by Callum Hill on Unsplash

The second movement to bring peace – Jesus’ love and peace, Part 5

As I’m typing this, my wife is at Refreshing Recreation. The program is an effort her organization started to provide a place for local families living in hotels to have a delicious meal and a gym for their kids to play sports and other games. Our school district has so many families living in local hotels that school buses stop their to pick up the kids during the school year.

Imagine being a young family with only the amenities of a hotel to raise your kids. While there are wonderful community parks about a mile or so from some of the hotels, what do you do when the weather isn’t conducive to the park? So Refreshing Recreation provides a once per month reprieve. I bring it up because someone had to think of it. Someone had to have awareness of the difficulty of living long-term with kids in a hotel.

But so often we are busy with our own lives, and we don’t see the need. This week, I’ve been trying to answer the question: “How can we allow the love of Jesus to bring peace to America?” In the previous post, I suggested that Philippians 2:1-11 describes two movements that can help us answer the question.

In addition to movement that is heading outward (see previous post), in Philippians 2, verses 4-8, Paul describes peace as movement that is downward.  Our attitude should be that same as that of Jesus, and Paul says Jesus moved down. 

Jesus started at the top.  In heaven.  The pre-existent Christ, the second person of the trinity, God the Christ, living a life of perfect glory in heaven.  It gets no better than that. 

But Jesus, Paul reminds us, was willing to give up all of that.  Not for him, but for us.  The movement of verses four through eight is downward movement.  Jesus just keeps lowering himself, emptying himself.  From heaven to earth, he took on a body. 

God took on a body.

For God to leave heaven is one thing.  For God to dwell on earth is another.  Gods visiting earth is a fairly common story across various world religions. What is not common is the idea of gods continuing that downward movement by taking on a body. God who leaves heaven, comes to earth, and then takes on a human body, is significant. 

But notice the downward movement doesn’t stop there.  Jesus is willing to go to the cross and die.  God dies. 

That downward self-sacrificial love of Jesus is the second movement of peace.  Downward action is how we ourselves as individuals and together as local churches express ourselves to the community around us to bring peace. 

Jesus calls us to follow his downward example of sacrificial love.  During the three years he spent with his disciples, he taught that kind of love.  He called them to look outward, beyond themselves to others.  And he taught them to look downward, to those who were considered to be below them in society.  See Matthew 25 and his parable of the sheep and the goats.

Downward sacrifice is precisely how Jesus lived.  Follow his example, he taught his disciples and us, “Die to yourself.”  Take on his heart, his attitudes, his sacrificial ways, and serve others.

That’s how we allow the love of Jesus to work in us and through us, both as individuals and together.  To bring peace to our local communities, we sacrificially give of ourselves to love the people and communities around us. 

I’m not saying downward sacrifice is a guarantee to bring peace.  If we love enough and love rightly we are not guaranteed to bring peace.  But that kind of sacrificial love is the pattern of Jesus.  It is how he brings peace.  Jesus pursued people with love.  He welcomed people with love.  He sacrificially gave his life.  He spoke truth and matched his words with kindness and sacrifice for others. 

Peace comes through looking outwardly, beyond ourselves, and being willing to go down, to share ourselves sacrificially, especially with those on the margins, the oppressed, those mistreated, the poor, the hurting. 

Jesus came to bring the peace of his Kingdom.  It is a much richer, deeper, holistic peace than a Pax Romana.  Jesus’ way is not peace through strength, it is peace through sacrifice.  Sacrificial, relational, costly love. 

Who do you need to love with that kind of selflessness?  Where is there a lack of peace in your life?  How can you lovingly reach out to the person who has a bumper sticker on their car or banner in their yard promoting an ideology you disagree with? 

If we want to bring peace in our land, Jesus teaches us that it starts with us where we live.  It starts when we pursue outward, downward peace through sacrificial love like he did.

Photo by Randy Laybourne on Unsplash