The Summer of God

Sermon manuscript for Green Lake Church of Seventh-day Adventists

Sabbath, June 1, 2013.

OT: Exodus 20:8-11

NT: Mark 2:22-28

Summer is magic.

Late Thursday evening I was at Forza's Coffee Shop a couple of blocks from here working on today's sermon. A young woman interrupted my concentration to ask if she could occupy the seat next to me. I was flattered until I looked around and realized that it was the ONLY unoccupied seat in the place. And since Peet's Coffee was already closed, it was, in fact, the only unoccupied seat in the neighborhood. She ordered her beverage then opened her computer to work. A while later I noticed she was busy typing. I asked, “You writing a book?”

She laughed. “No. I writing my very last paper for college. I just want to be finished with it. I've had enough of college. I can't wait to be done!” I told her I had heard similar words from my youngest daughter a few weeks ago.

The approach of summer at the end of spring term is always magic. The approach of summer in your senior year is wondrous beyond words.

Yesterday morning, I was at Cypress School for the final chapel of the year. The kids were wired. They, too, were ready for summer. Ready for school to be over. Ready for freedom.

It's not just kids who dream of summer as we crawl through the wet, gray days of the tail end of spring.

For some of us, summer is a wonderful, delicious respite from the grey, the wet, the cold. We can hardly wait for days of sunshine, mornings without clouds, hikes without parkas, bike rides without rain gear.

A cursory glance at our June newsletter demonstrates that summer is pretty special for Green Lake Church. I read the description of the Explorations art program. Wow! The softball team has games scheduled every Sunday all the way through July. Mark Haun and others have scheduled Sabbath afternoon hikes every other week into August. There is a church picnic scheduled for August 25.

These activities are available to us only in the summer. Summer is so brief, we want to make the most of it.

One last summer picture: About forty-five minutes drive southeast from our house is the turn off for a fantastically romantic road. Five miles in on this road, you come to the parking area for the trail to Summerland. This is the most spectacular segment of the Wonderland Trail which circles Mt. Rainier.

If you keep driving up and up and up, you come to the end of the road at 6,400 feet. The Sunrise Visitor Center. Beyond the visitors center you see the gleaming, almost blinding, white and blue glaciers on Mt. Rainier. In July the open slopes that sweep up away from the parking lot sparkle with wildflowers. To the south are the dramatic, jagged peaks of the Tatoosh Range.

It's glorious.

There is no better place to spend a Sabbath afternoon. You have your choice of hiking destinations: Fremont Lookout. Dege Peak. Grand Park. And my favorite, Burroughs Mountain. This year if you hike on Sabbath July 20 or August 17, you can hang out at the end of your hike on Dege Peak or Burroughs' Mountain until sundown, then do your return hike under the light of a nearly full moon. Almost the entire trail is out in the open. Bright moon light is sufficient lighting for the walk.

It's the perfect Seattle summer experience.

Summer is a magic time. The days are full of sunlight and twilight dawdles for half the night.

God has carved seasonality in the fundamental fabric of the cosmos. Cycles of dormancy and growth, the tides, day and night, winter and summer, times of drought and episodes of flooding. Birth and death, hunger and eating. The world is full of rhythms. They make up the fabric of life.

For me the most magical season here in the Pacific Northwest is summer.

Adventists celebrate another cycle, a distinctively human seasonality: The week. Unlike all the other rhythms I've mentioned, Sabbath exists only in human communities. Animal communities move and shift with ordinary seasons, of course. But the magic of Sabbath happens only in human communities. Not even solitary humans can sustain Sabbath over time. It is uniquely emergent in human communities.

When we are in school, the first thought associated with summer is freedom. Freedom from exams. Freedom from assignments, deadlines, pressure. We come to the end of the school year and go Ahhhh . . . How sweet it is. Of course, summer is more than that. Summer is trips to Disney Land and hikes and water skiing and planting flowers. But first, for students, school is release, freedom.

That vision of freedom is what got me thinking about Sabbath in connection with summer. Summertime—easy time. Relaxation. Lazing on the beach. Sitting back in a sailboat. No pressure.

Freedom is the central concept in the Sabbath commandment. (That's Number Four in the famous Ten Commandments):

Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you are to labor and do all your work but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you are to do no work. Not you. Not your kids or servants. Not even your animals. For six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth and on the seventh day he rested. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

Sabbath directs us to interrupt our efforts to produce, achieve, accomplish. We set aside our need to practice, study, create, clean, earn, strive, push and luxuriate in the freedom of Sabbath-keeping.

Sabbath creates a unique space in our lives. It makes available unique experiences.

It's the same with summer. At least here in the shadow of the Cascades. Summer is that narrow window of time when we are set free from gray and cold and wet. We are freed from the need to include in every plan for outdoor activity protection against the weather.

I mentioned the road to Sunrise. It's only a forty-minute drive from our house. But that's only in summer. Snow comes pretty early in the fall at 6000 feet. The road closes. Even if they plowed the road. Hiking to the top of Burroughs Mountain when there is several feet of snow on the ground . . . well, that is not a Sabbath afternoon walk. That would be an expedition!

Summer offers a small, sweet window of opportunity for experiencing the wonders of Sunrise and Grand Park and Burroughs Mountain and Fremont Lookout. The first way to describe this window is through negation. In summer the snow disappears from the trails. The rain and clouds disappear from the sky. The absence of cold and wet makes available a special freedom to easily experience the mountain.

Sabbath, with its absence of demands to produce and perform and succeed offers a unique freedom to easily and casually experience the presence and grace of God.

The first facts of summer and Sabbath are negation. Absence. This absence is the indispensable first condition of the enjoyment of both summer and Sabbath. But this absence of pressure, absence of strain is just the beginning. The absence of cold and wet on the one hand or the pressure and demands of performance on the other hand open opportunities for creating rich experiences.

In Mark 2, Jesus gets into an argument with religious experts about proper religious observance. Jesus responds that they are applying antiquated and outdated rules.

"And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. For the wine would burst the wineskins, and the wine and the skins would both be lost. New wine calls for new wineskins."

Then the religious scholars scold Jesus for allowing his disciples to violate one of the traditional rules about Sabbath keeping.

Jesus answers,

"The Sabbath was made to meet the needs of people, and not people to meet the requirements of the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord, even over the Sabbath!"

Sabbath was intended to enrich our lives. Sabbath is supposed to make life better. In our crazy, pressurized world, the Sabbath offers decompression. In a world of frenzy, Sabbath offers calm and tranquility.

Jesus reference to new wineskins is especially relevant when it comes to Sabbath-keeping.

Traditional Adventist rules for Sabbath-keeping came from the Puritans, rooted in the English culture of the 17^th and 18^th centuries. Some of the traditional rules remain wise and helpful. Others of those Puritan rules are goofy. Some people respond to the apparent goofiness by imagining the best rules are no rules. No differentiation between Sabbath time and ordinary time.

If we take this approach Sabbath will disappear. We will lose the uniquely human rhythm of Sabbath-keeping. The week itself as a sensed, experience cycle will disappear. Time will be homogenized pressure and demands. We would be impoverished. Imagine a climate pattern where all variation is removed. Instead of summer, imagine that rain and sun, heat and cold were evened out uniformly through the year. How dreary! Part of the magic of our natural world, at least here in the Northwest, is the movement of seasons.

And part of the magic of our live as humans, as distinct from the lives of jays and elk and orcas, is the rhythm Sabbath gives to our lives. We would be dreadfully impoverished without it.

Of course, we need to come up with rules that fit our lives and our society. Summer in Phoenix and summer in Seattle call for different observances. So Sabbath-keeping in 2013 calls for different practices than Sabbath-keeping in 17^th century England or 18^th century America.

The seasons of the year will not disappear even if we do our best to ignore them. Summer and winter will keep rolling along. We can fail to go hiking at Sunrise for ten summers. Sunrise and summer will still be there. But if we ignore Sabbath, it might disappear. Sabbath-keeping has already largely disappeared from the rest of Christianity. Most Christians do not observe Sunday as a holy day. It's up to us to keep the Sabbath season alive.

In doing so, we are performing a service for the larger society. There are increasing numbers of books being published about the importance and beauty of Sabbath-keeping. Almost all of them are written by people who are not part of Sabbath-keeping communities. And all of them that I have seen so far are vapid and hypothetical. Not one of them has a vivid picture of rich, effective Sabbath-keeping, because Sabbath-keeping can only survive when it is held in community.

Summer is a wonderful, glorious treasure here in the northwest. I'm glad we as a congregation give it special attention. But even if we didn't, it would still happen. Sabbath is far more fragile. It needs the protection and wisdom of a committed community. Part of our special mission as a Seventh-day Adventist Church is to keep Sabbath alive and vibrant. To keep it available. If we creatively and resolutely schedule Sabbath-keeping practices our lives will be enriched. Our spiritual life and our human relationships will be blessed. And we will bless the world.

A final illustration:

Monday is farm day at our house. For both Karin and me it is our day off. “Day off” is, of course, a euphemism for power washing the fence, weeding the flower beds and vegetable garden, washing the car, fixing the post the horse has knocked lose on his shelter, paying bills, balancing the check book, taking clothes to the dry cleaner, mowing the lawn, cleaning the garage, organizing the workshop. Did I mention doing taxes?

On a perfect August Monday, Karin and I will spend most of the day weeding, powerwashing, fixing, etc. Then at some point in the evening, while there was still warmth in the air and energy in our bodies, we will sit on the front porch and sip icy lemonade and wait for the sky to redden and the stars come out.

Whether or not we stop our pursuit of the endless undone tasks, the sky will redden. The stars will come out. The evening will be magic. But if we fail to stop, we will miss it. And in missing that lingering, magical hour at the end of a summer day, we will have missed each other.

It is not enough to dream of an idyllic evening sitting on the porch. The only way for it to happen is to embrace rigid, non-negotiable plans. Without such plans, the demands of unfinished work will never allow us to rest. We will miss the magic. We will miss each other.

On the other hand, if we embrace the stern demands of the clock and force ourselves to quit on schedule, our lives, our relationship will be touched by the evenings' magic.

So it is with Sabbath-keeping. Allow it to interrupt the pressure and demands. Experience Sabbath as a magical, weekly summertime.