Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from the introduction of Sacred Time, which is a collection of academic essays focused on the Sabbath. Sacred Time was created with the hope that as modern readers learn about the Sabbath and its history, that sacred day will stay relevant both in our world and for years to come.
Time: sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, twenty-four hours in a day, seven days in a week. Time is a precious commodity. In mortality it is finite and, if we’re not careful, it ticks away almost imperceptibly. Even so, the demands on our time are many and trying to balance them all can sometimes feel overwhelming. These demands include family time, work time, sleep time, leisure time, service to our community time, and a multitude of other “times.” For the religious there is also a desire to include sacred time. Sacred time is different from the other “times” that compete for our attention. It is when individuals and communities intentionally create moments of set-apart time that transcends the hustle and bustle demanded by our busy mortal lives and that instead encourages us to slow down and spiritually “smell the roses.” Although this time is part of our mortal time, it also transcends it as we shift our focus from worrying about the things of this world and instead find time to learn about and better understand the possibilities of eternity. It is a time to create and strengthen our vertical connections with God. Many religious traditions encourage their followers to engage in some form of sacred time.
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For Christians and Jews alike, sacred time is centered on the Sabbath day. The Lord commanded Moses on Mount Sinai that the Israelites were to “remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God; in it thou shalt not do any work” (Exodus 20:8–10). Later the Lord taught that the Sabbaths were meant to be a “perpetual covenant. … A sign between me and the children of Israel for ever” (Exodus 31:16–17). In the ensuing three millennia since these commandments were first given, Jews and Christians have sought to keep the Sabbath alive in both their communal and individual lives. …
One of the difficulties that people have recurringly struggled with throughout the centuries is the question of how to interpret the Sabbath command for their particular time and circumstances. Commandments usually teach principles rather than provide direct and specific applications. For example, Jesus reiterated the importance of the two Mosaic commands to “love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might” and to “love thy neighbour as thyself” (Mark 12:29–31 and parallels; see also Deuteronomy 6:5; Leviticus 19:18), but Jesus did not immediately follow up those commands with specific directions on how to apply them. For the most part he left the hearers with the responsibility of working out how to make them relevant in their lives, just as he did with the command to keep or remember the Sabbath day. … Although the importance of the Sabbath command was well established in the Old Testament, there is limited evidence of specific direction on how it should have been applied, especially for regular Israelites who did not perform the Sabbath sacrifices at the temple. By the time of Jesus, some of those directions were no longer even applicable for Jews (such as not collecting manna on the Sabbath).
Therefore, over time people have had to consciously work to find meaning in and apply the Sabbath command in a world that is very different from the one in which Moses first received it. Efforts by the ancients are sometimes viewed negatively when modern readers encounter the Sabbath controversies between Jesus and the Pharisees and other Jewish groups. But it is important to remember that like us, in many ways, ancient Jews and Christians were trying to figure out how to keep the Sabbath day alive and relevant in a world where, if they were not careful, it could be consumed by the political, social, and religious environments where they lived. Jews and Christians were asking questions about how to live the Sabbath precisely because they understood its central place in maintaining their covenantal identity. In doing so they began to discuss the Sabbath commandment and to find ways to apply it to their situations. Much of our modern understanding of these applications is filtered through the lens of Rabbinic Judaism, where they eventually became codified. But it is important for modern readers to understand that during the New Testament period, these applications were still in a state of flux. They were not yet set in stone, and some groups interpreted them differently than others did. So it was with Jesus. Sometimes he agreed with Jewish interpretations, but other times he used his authority as “Lord … of the Sabbath” (Mark 2:28) to raise the bar for the people’s understanding of the ongoing eternal purposes of the Sabbath.
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The earliest Christians also found themselves struggling to understand and apply the Sabbath. Initially, like Jesus, they joined with their Jewish counterparts and continued to celebrate the Sabbath on Saturday. They attended additional Christian meetings to partake of the sacrament (see 1 Corinthians 11:20–22) and, presumably, to read the scriptures through the lens of Jesus’s teachings. But as Christianity began to split from Judaism towards the end of the first century, and as Christians sought to establish their own identity, some Christians continued to worship on the Jewish Sabbath while others began to distance themselves from it. … Only over time did Christianity transfer to Sunday many of the familiar aspects of “keeping the Sabbath”: Sunday as the Sabbath, Sunday as a day of rest, Sunday as a time of Church worship services, and so forth.
In recent years, the emphasis on the Sabbath as a holy day distinct from the other days of the week has been on the decline in western culture. A 2016 Deseret News poll found that in the 38 years from 1978 to 2016, “the personal importance of the Sabbath Day to Americans has dropped by 24 percentage points.” Only 50 percent of the US adults surveyed said that the Sabbath has personal spiritual meaning for them, which is down from 74 percent in a corresponding 1978 Gallup poll. Further, the 2016 poll found that only 41 percent of millennials consider Sunday to have any religious meaning.1 In contrast, the poll indicated that 83 percent of members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (identified as “Mormons” in the survey) answered that Sunday does have particular religious or spiritual meaning for them. At the other end of the spectrum, only 38 percent of Jews answered the question affirmatively (with Sunday being replaced with Saturday in the question).2
These statistics reinforce what many already know: the sacrality of the modern Sabbath is increasingly being marginalized and secularized in favor of work, sports, shopping, and leisure activities. Even so, not everyone considers this decline inevitable, and many have sounded calls to reemphasize the Sabbath in both Jewish and Christian circles.3 Walter Brueggemann has described these calls as attempts to maintain “‘mindfulness’ in a society that is increasingly mindless” about the place and importance of the Sabbath in the modern age.4
Even though Latter-day Saints “are 28 percentage points more likely than average to spend time in religious meditation [on the Sabbath] and more than 40 percentage points more likely to attend church,”5 Church leaders have still sought to reemphasize the Sabbath as a cornerstone of both public and family worship. Church members around the world have been urged “to improve their observance of the Sabbath day,” particularly regarding individual and family “worship at Church and in the home.”6
But how does one live a three-millennia-old commandment in the modern world? Life today is admittedly different. The command was given long before the industrial revolution, and long before inventions such as air and space travel, twenty-four-hour shopping, televisions, computers, smartphones, smart watches, Sunday sports, and Amazon’s seven-day-a-week delivery. While the Sabbath command may have originally been written on stone tablets, it has survived because of the fluidity whereby generations have continued to engage in the command within the context of their own needs and circumstances.
Latter-day Restoration scripture reinforces the biblical emphasis on observing the Sabbath (see Jarom 1:5; Mosiah 13:16–19; 18:23; Doctrine and Covenants 59:9–14; 68:29), and Church leaders have asked members to strengthen their Sabbath worship both at church and in the home. President Russell M. Nelson reminds us that Exodus 31’s description of the Sabbath as a perpetual sign of the covenant between God and humans (see vv. 13, 16) continues to be relevant in the modern world,7 and he has urged members to “keep on the covenant path.”8 The recent changes to the Latter-day Saint meeting schedule and curriculum were designed, in part, to honor “the Sabbath day, with a focus on the ordinance of the sacrament” and to enable Saints to use the Sabbath as a time of “gospel learning and teaching at church and in the home.”9 These changes place greater emphasis on the increased responsibility of both individuals and families to determine how they will remember and keep the Sabbath day as a sign of their covenant loyalty.
While the specific cultural and economic circumstances that modern Saints face are different from those in the ancient world, … there is still a sense of shared experience. Latter-day Saints, along with other Christians and Jews, also face the challenges of determining what constitutes work in their modern context and of discovering ways to find meaning in the Sabbath day.
At its heart the Sabbath is meant to help people connect with God by strengthening their covenantal relationship with him and rejoicing in that relationship. Jonathan Edwards, one of America’s greatest philosophical theologians, reminded his congregants that “if [the Sabbath] be the day on which God requires us especially to seek him, we may argue, that it is a day on which especially he [God] will be found.” Further, “The Sabbath-day is an accepted time, a day of salvation, a time wherein God especially loves to be sought, and loves to be found.”10
… For the Sabbath to remain vibrant and meaningful across time, no generation can passively live it based on another generation’s interpretations of it. The command has always compelled people to actively find ways to understand it and live it within their own circumstances. Ironically, that takes work; journalist Judith Shulevitz wrote:
Most people mistakenly believe that all you have to do to stop working is not work. The inventors of the Sabbath [rules] understood that it was a much more complicated undertaking. You cannot downshift casually and easily, the way you might slip into bed at the end of a long day. ... The [Sabbath] rules did not exist to torture the faithful. They were meant to communicate the insight that interrupting the ceaseless round of striving requires a surprisingly strenuous act of will, one that has to be bolstered by habit as well as by social sanction. ... Only a Sabbath that you have to work for will appear worth keeping.11
To listen to more thoughts from Gaye Strathearn on the Sabbath, check out her interview on the All In podcast in the player below.
Sacred Time: The Sabbath as a Perpetual Covenant
Notes:
- The poll was conducted by YouGov from April 13 to April 15, 2016, and analyzed by Y2 Analytics, and “the results carry a margin of error of +/− 3.1 percentage points.” “Sabbath Day Observance in the U.S.,” Deseret News, 2016, 1, https://www.deseretnews.com/media/misc/pdf/DNN-Ten-Today-Sabbath.pdf.
- Additionally, a 2013 Pew poll of Jews living in America reported that 94 percent of participants believed that a person could be Jewish if he or she worked on the Sabbath. The phone poll questioned “3,475 Jews across the country from Feb. 20–June 13, 2013, with a statistical margin of error for the full Jewish sample of plus or minus 3.0 percentage points.” “A Portrait of Jewish Americans,” Pew Research Center, October 1, 2013, http://www.pewforum.org/2013/10/01/jewish-american-beliefs-attitudes-culture-survey.
- Judith Shulevitz, “Bring Back the Sabbath,” New York Times, March 2, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/02/magazine/bring-back-the-sabbath.html; Richard Louv, “Sacred Time for a Family Sabbath,” Baltimore Sun, January 8, 1993, https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1993-01-08-1993008188-story.html; and Adrienne Scrima, “Why You Need a Sabbath,” Relevant, published June 18, 2014, updated September 20, 2019, https://relevantmagazine.com/god/practical-faith/why-you-need-sabbath. Even without the religious aspect, some people are now advocating a “secular Sabbath.” See Pico Iyer, “Why We Need to Slow Down Our Lives,” November 4, 2014, https://ideas.ted.com/why-we-need-a-secular-sabbath.
- Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to The Culture of Now (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2014), x; see also Michael Fishbane, Sacred Attunement: A Jewish Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 124–28.
- Kelsey Dallas, “New Poll Finds Americans Less Likely to Keep Sabbath Than in 1978, But Majority Still Say It’s Important to Society,” Deseret News, April 27, 2016, https://www.deseret.com/2016/4/27/20587346/new-poll-finds-americans-less-likely-to-keep-sabbath-than-in-1978-but-majority-still-say-it-s-import.
- “Church Leaders Call for Better Observance of Sabbath Day,” Church News, July 15, 2015, https://www.lds.org/church/news/church-leaders-call-for-better-observance-of-sabbath-day. See also Henry B. Eyring, “Gratitude on the Sabbath Day,” Ensign, November 2016, 99–102; and Linda K. Burton, “Our Sabbath Day Gifts,” in At the Pulpit: 185 Years of Discourses by Latter-day Saint Women, ed. Jennifer Reeder and Kate Holbrook (Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2017), 323–30. For more examples of this imperative to better observe the Sabbath, see the fourth Sunday lessons for January through April in the 2018 curriculum for Priesthood and Relief Society.
- Russell M. Nelson, “The Sabbath is a Delight,” Ensign, May 2015, 129–30.
- Nelson, “A Message from the First Presidency” (worldwide broadcast, Salt Lake City, January 16, 2018), https://www.lds.org/bc/content/ldsorg/church/news/2018/01/19/2018-01-1000-a-message-from-the-first-presidency.pdf.
- Quentin L. Cook, “Deep and Lasting Conversion to Heavenly Father and the Lord Jesus Christ,” Ensign, November 2018, 9–11.
- Jonathan Edwards, “Sermon XV, The Perpetuity and Change of the Sabbath Day,” in Works of President Edwards, in Four Volumes (New York: Leavitt and Allen, 1852), 4:634.
- Shulevitz, “Bring Back the Sabbath.”
