The Daily Guide. grow. pray. study. from The United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas, United States "God’s name and God’s day" for Wednesday, 14 September 2016 Exodus 20:7 “You are not to use lightly the name of Adonai your God, because Adonai will not leave unpunished someone who uses his name lightly.
ד 8 “Remember the day, Shabbat, to set it apart for God. 9 You have six days to labor and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a Shabbat for Adonai your God. On it, you are not to do any kind of work — not you, your son or your daughter, not your male or female slave, not your livestock, and not the foreigner staying with you inside the gates to your property. 11 For in six days, Adonai made heaven and earth, the sea and everything in them; but on the seventh day he rested. This is why Adonai blessed the day, Shabbat, and separated it for himself.
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Reflection Questions:
The third commandment warned against using God’s holy name (especially the personal divine name revealed to Moses—cf. Exodus 3:13-14) in any way that is trivial, profane or false. The fourth commandment taught the importance of rest, of one day in seven devoted to God for spiritual and mental renewal. Indirectly, it also called for humility—we must recognize that we are not carrying the whole world on our shoulders, and cannot do so even if we try.
• Did you grow up in a setting where people mainly spoke the names of God and Jesus in
reverent, respectful ways, in coarse or profane ways, or not at all? How have those early models influenced the ways that you speak God’s name(s)? In what senses is something like putting a COR.ORG sticker on your car another way to use God’s name for good or for ill?
• The fourth commandment’s principle was straightforward: remember the Sabbath (likely a reference to Genesis 2:2-3) and do not work on that day. Applying the principle was more
challenging. By Jesus’ day, it had produced a complex tangle of rabbinic rules about what was and wasn’t work which Jesus more often defied than obeyed (cf. Mark 3:1-6, Luke 6:1-5). Christians, too, apply the principle in many different ways—but, sadly, many Christians totally ignore it. How can you keep one day each week set apart for time with God, family and rest?
Prayer: Lord Jesus, let me honor your name with my speech, and with my way of life. And guide me to know how best to make the Sabbath rest you commanded a reality in my life. Amen.
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Insights from Wendy Connelly
Wendy Connelly, wife to Mark and mom to two kids, is Community Outreach Director at the Leawood campus, a seminary student at Saint Paul School of Theology, and leads the “Live and Let Think” dialogues at Leawood.Walter Brueggemann, one of today’s most insightful Hebrew Bible scholars, wrote a book titled Sabbath as Resistance. For Brueggemann, the choice between restlessness – embodied by the slave-driving figure of Pharaoh and his taskmasters – and restfulness, is “the choice of gods.”1
I’m a compulsive worker. Job, school, home – I never feel like I’m doing enough, for no lack of diligence. Take, for example, the 10-page research paper (“The Prophetic Gestures of Jeremiah”) that I turned in last month:
It isn’t due until mid-December.
I could chronicle countless more compulsive behaviors and artificial deadlines, but the point is: I capitulate often to the taskmaster god. And just as soon as I dust off my hands, I take up a new quota of straw idols and mud bricks.
Henri Nouwen confronted his inner taskmaster inside a Trappist monastery. In The Genesee Diary he recorded there, he writes, “I started to see how much I had fallen in love with my own compulsions and illusions, and how much I needed to step back and wonder, ‘Is there a quiet stream underneath the fluctuating affirmations and rejections of my little world? Is there a still point where my life is anchored…?” 2
I find revelation, synchronicity and dreams – the stuff of the God who whispers, “Be still” – hardens as I grasp at mud and straw. I need divine rest to revive my restless soul. To remember the world still spins without me trying to spin it.
Humbling is the choice between divine rest and “the endless restlessness sanctioned by the other gods.”3 It’s a battle of spiritual resistance. The choice of gods: YHWH vs. Pharaoh.
Today, who will you call “Master?”
1 Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance, Kindle loc. 291
2 Nouwen, The Genesee Diary: Report from a Trappist Monastery (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1976), p.14
3 Brueggemann, Kindle loc. 224
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