rich’s blog

Christianity & The Weekend:

 

Preface:

Well.  Guess what?  Today is the first day…of the rest of your life.  (I’m kidding.  As far as motivating slogans go, that one just doesn’t do it for me, you know? I don’t know about you all.)  

 

What today really is, is the last message of that series we’ve been rolling through together for a long time, that’s been looking at what Christianity has to say about all sorts of things that matter to us–and not only to us, but to nearly everyone around us. Remember what we’ve talked about: We started by setting up some foundational things, summarizing the gospel, the ethical call of Christians–which is to become like Jesus–and we looked at how we partner with the Holy Spirit, with one another, and even with Scripture in our attempts to become like Jesus.  

 

Then it got fun, and we talked about Cash, Creation, Sex, Spirituality, Postmodernity, Social Justice, Information, Death, Noise, Addiction, Abuse, Technology–all sorts of things.

 

And we talked about ways we can engage these topics, these areas of our lives, as people who are becoming like Jesus, we talked about ways we can consider these things ethically, and think about our moral responsibility to these areas of our lives. 

 

So that’s what we’ve been up to; talking about real life, and figuring out ways we can live it well, as Jesus would have us live it.  And today we’re rounding out this series the way we in America round out our weeks: with the weekend.  

 

Let’s pray together. 

 

Prayer:

Jesus: Be with our hearts, and turn them to you.  Let the words I speak bring you glory; and take them away if I mislead.  Let the time we’ve used to be here be an offering to you, and a sign of our love. Build us and your kingdom for it.  In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Introduction: 

So I’ve been thinking about the weekend.  And we know what it is, don’t we, as a thing, as an institution.  It’s Saturday and Sunday, right?  The Sabbath day and the Lord’s day, packed together at the end of the work week that starts on Monday.  It’s part of the way our society–and most of us–order our time and our lives. Five days on, two days off; now of course, not everyone gets a “weekend,” but much of our society, and most of us, still sort of expect one, and our markets and public institutions and all sorts of things still order themselves around this idea of a weekend. We know what a weekend is, don’t we?  

 

But I’ve been wondering what the implications of the weekend are for our lives, because we’ve all been born into this way of ordering the days we have: we didn’t choose it.  What does it mean for our lives that this “weekend” way of living is so much a part of them.  

 

I hope that today we can look at the weekend and ask ourselves–as we’ve been asking ourselves about so many things–if we have been trained by the weekend to believe some things and behave in some ways that may not be as “Christian” as they could be, may not be all that helpful for us as we try to become like Jesus. 

 

A Tight Container:

Because it seems like for most people–maybe even some of us–the weekend is way more than just Saturday and Sunday, two days packed together at the end of the week. 

 

For a lot of people, I think the weekend is a tiny space of time, a little too-small container, that we try to pack full of everything that’s meaningful for us.  It’s a little bit of time that we claim as our own, to do whatever we want with.  It’s not so much that we live “for” the weekend, but that our “real lives” are the weekend.  The weekend is what matters, where we are ourselves, and all the things we want to do and be we try to cram into those two days.  

 

Spit-balling:

And I might be spit-balling here; but if we try to stuff everything that’s meaningful to us into a couple of days–and this may not be the case for most of us, but certainly is the case for some of our neighbors, co-workers, family, or friends–then I think some not-so-great things can come of it. 

 

Some not-so-great things can happen. 

 

Not-So-Great: Expectations 

If we’re expecting to do all this wonderful, meaningful, important-to-us stuff in just a couple of days, our expectations are bound to go unmet.  This is problematic; it’s been said that “unmet expectations crucified Christ,” and they wreak quite a bit of havoc in our lives, too.  I don’t know how many fights I’ve had with God, with Carolyn, with the dogs (I expect our Jute rug to be dry and odor-free, they have had different expectations of it).  But seriously–I wish I could count how many times I have been bitter and angry at the end of the weekend because the expectations I had for my time went unrealized. 

 

Not-So-Great: Our Rights  

Other things happen when we treat the weekend this way.  We might begin to believe that we have a right to the weekend.  This becomes our greatest expectation.  We begin to believe that we have a right to do with “our time” whatever we want, and so when our weekend things–those meaning-providing, most-important things–get interrupted, or when someone else makes demands upon our time, we respond with irritation.  

 

Not-So-Great: The Character of Our Days 

And a cycle can develop, in which we plod through “Monday through Friday,” in order to get to Saturday and Sunday, which leave us with disappointment and a sense that the 5 days ahead of us are “less than” real days, wastes of our time and our hearts, and we cycle through our weeks almost manically–excited and expectant all day friday, upset and anxious Sunday evening, and bitter and depressed while the week goes on. We begin to feel as if we have no control over our lives or our time or the emotional response we have to our days. 

 

Again: this may not be the case for you–I pray it’s not: but it might be.  

 

Is There a Solution? 

And what we need to wonder about, for our own lives and the lives of those we care about, is if there’s a solution.  How can we respond to a situation like this?  Especially, because “the weekend” and the expectations people in our society have for it were entrenched before we were born.  We have inherited “Monday through Friday,” and Saturday and Sunday packaged together.  

 

Usual Solutions? 

But if we are feeling this way; feeling this struggle that comes with the weekend, when we try to fit our lives into it, how do we usually solve the problem?  

 

Usual Solutions? Fix Monday Through Friday

It’s been my experience, as I’ve talked with people, and tried to deal with this myself, that we try to figure out how to deal with Monday and Friday.  We try to make these great days for us–we’ll look for a job that gives us a lot of meaning, or try to control the way we use our time after work a little more, and this isn’t a bad way to go.  But honestly, it is a rare thing for someone to love their job all the time.  It is incredibly difficult, no matter how great a job someone’s got–to not look forward with great expectation to the weekend, when we can finally do what we want, finally live. 

 

Usually Solutions? Fix Expectations

Sometimes we’ll try to wrestle our expectations to the ground…which most people are able to do for a little while.  But eventually The Question–capitalized–The Question overwhelms us. 

 

You know the question, right?  “What you doing this weekend?”  We muscle our expectations into reasonable shape for a while, and we do alright until we begin to be asked and begin to daydream, what am I doing this weekend?  What will I do?  It’s my time!  I can do anything!  I’ll build a fort, I’ll plant a garden, I’ll eat some candy or read three novels or write six, I’ll have some kids, I’ll learn some instruments.  I’ll run a triathlon. I’ll clean the garage: I’ll do everything!  And then Monday comes, and The Other Question happens (all caps, right?)  “What did you do this weekend? 

 

And we say, remarkably, “I don’t know.” Even though we try to shrink our expectations, it just doesn’t seem to work for most people. 

 

Usual Solutions? Check Out or Resentment

Sometimes, instead of living this manic expectation-disappointment cycle, people just check out of life.  They sort of accept the fact that they’ll never be able to fit their life in anywhere, and so they just don’t look forward to all that much.  Work–Monday through Friday–becomes their life, but not in an escapist, work-addiction way so much as a sad, diminishing way.  The weekend is what it is, not all that meaningful, but whatever.  I probably don’t need to highlight how unfortunate this can be.  The flip-side of this is that people become angry, bitter people, upset about the fact they can’t attain the life they want, and every weekend leaves them unsatisfied.  So they carry a resentment with them all the time, and weekends, if anything, make them angrier. 

 

I think we can do better than these; we need to have better solutions than these, as Christians; and we need to be able to share our better solutions with those around us who are caught in between “Monday through Friday” on the one hand, and “The Weekend” on the other. 

 

Toward Solution: 

So what do we have to offer the world? Or one another? What do we Christians have to say about the weekend?  And how can we say it in a way, and live out what we say in a way, that prevents us from packing all our hopes for our lives into a couple of tiny days? 

 

Toward Solution: An Ordered Life

I think one of the first things we can do is reclaim Saturday and Sunday.  

 

Although you wouldn’t be able to tell from the way of things today, Saturday and Sunday were not always stapled together at the end of the week.  Sunday was the beginning of the week, once: Saturday was its end.  And I really think that we need to separate them again, and reclaim them for what they really are. 

 

And here’s why: Life needs to be ordered, it does.  We do serve a God that ordered creation, instead of letting it be all messy and chaotic, right?  And I’m thankful.  I like being able to, you know, walk toward you and not end up being further away; I like that Autumn follows Summer, and that there are routines in the world that I can sort of count on, you know.  Order is a valuable thing.  And we have been born into a society that orders itself around the weekend: but we don’t have to order or lives in this way.  

 

By looking at what Saturday and Sunday really are–bookends around the week, and discovering ways to integrate what they mean for humanity into all our days, we’ll be able to reorder our lives, live out a different rhythm than society around us, and be a witness to a different sort of life, one not squeezed into two tiny days. 

 

Toward Solution: Reclaiming Saturday

Reclaiming Saturday.  Let’s just be straightforward about something: Saturday is, biblically, the Sabbath day.  In the Jewish reckoning of the days, Saturday was the last day of the week.  One of the easiest to find sections of the Bible, Genesis chapter 1, talks about how God made the world, gave it shape and order, and really you know, punched creation out in six days (and some of us might need a reminder that no matter how hard we try, our weeks will not be as productive as the first one). 

 

We read at the start of Chapter two: 

 

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. (gen 2:2-3 tniv)

God rests.  And this first rest of God, the first Sabbath day, remembering it, and making sure it gets practiced, is enmeshed in what it means in the Old Testament to be one of God’s faithful people.  It’s in the big “rules for life” section-the Ten Commandments, people are called to other passages to give their whole households rest, their slaves and animals and even their fields a rest.  Saturday was the Sabbath day: a day of rest.  God’s people were to keep the day holy. 

 

And all sorts of things happened, but by the time Jesus rolls around, Sabbath keeping is highly regulated and guarded by people with good intentions, who were just trying to help, but who have long forgotten the principle of the thing: Mimicking and living out the holy rest of God. Rest like God rests, at the end of hard work: and if God worked harder than any of us to create days and string them together, and fill them with life, I sort of feel like God probably rested more completely and wonderfully than any of us have ever rested, too. 

 

It’s into this situation, that Jesus speaks: 

 

On a Sabbath Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues, and a woman was there who had been crippled by a spirit for eighteen years. She was bent over and could not straighten up at all. When Jesus saw her, he called her forward and said to her, “Woman, you are set free from your infirmity.” Then he put his hands on her, and immediately she straightened up and praised God.

Indignant because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath, the synagogue ruler said to the people, “There are six days for work. So come and be healed on those days, not on the Sabbath.”

The Lord answered him, “You hypocrites! Doesn’t each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or donkey from the stall and lead it out to give it water? Then should not this woman, a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has kept bound for eighteen long years, be set free on the Sabbath day from what bound her?”

When he said this, all his opponents were humiliated, but the people were delighted with all the wonderful things he was doing. (luke 13:10-17 niv)

 

This passage is so sad, right?  The synagogue ruler just wanted the Sabbath to be honored; just wanted some religious order: come back tomorrow, you know, get healed: what’s one more day to this lady anyway. 

 

Geeze–can’t we all just fill out our bulletin tear offs and put them in the basket?  

 

Wait a second, where am I? Ah. But it’s also so wonderful, so wonderful: Jesus delights people; and not just people, but the “daughter of Abraham” who he was “setting free,” as he puts it, after 18 years of captivity.  And she praises God and people praise God because of what Jesus has done!  The Sabbath is for setting people free, he says; and freedom is wonderful.  

 

We need to split apart Saturday and Sunday and begin to remember what they are.  Saturday is the day God rested after harder work than any of us have had; the last day of the week.  It’s ending.  And God’s people were called to remember it, and keep it set apart for the purposes of rest, rest that sets people free.  Hold onto this, because we will come back to it. 

 

Toward Solution: Reclaiming Sunday

Reclaiming Sunday. So: for us, Sunday is the day we go to church; probably most of us think of it as the Sabbath, even though Saturday–as we’ve seen–really is.  For our society, it’s just another day: the last day of the week, the last day off before the dreaded work week, and the one day that we can float our checks.  It’s the day we can sleep in without missing much and most places close early, and if you have to work people pity you. 

 

But for us, for Christians, this day is so much more than just “church day.” Sunday was, for the Israelites, the first day of their week.  It was just another day; nothing special, nothing worth proclaiming.  

 

But there was this thing–you may have heard of it–called Easter.  Jesus died and rose from the dead: and he rose from the dead on Sunday.  In Spanish, this is “Domingo,” right?  “The Lord’s Day.”  Sunday is the Lord’s Day, and the earliest church gathered not just on Saturday, to rest together and reclaim God’s Sabbath: but they also gathered together on Sunday: The Lord’s Day, week after week, remembering Jesus’ resurrection.  For the early church, every single week replayed and reinforced easter week, and every week’s Sunday was the day when they remembered Jesus’ resurrection.  They celebrated the miracle God had done, and praised God for the resurrected life they looked forward to. 

 

Scholars have called Sunday “the eighth day of creation”–the day when God re-created the world, when new creation broke through the door of Jesus’ resurrection, and out into the cosmos. Paul saw in Jesus’ resurrection the renewal of creation: and could say, triumphally, ” everything old has passed away…see, everything has become new.”

 

 

And If Saturday is the day at the end of the week that calls us to intentional, freeing, life-giving rest as God rested.  I think Sunday should be the day at the very beginning of the week that calls us to take part in intentional, life-promoting, celebratory re-creation. 

 

We could pronounce “re-creation” differently, if we wanted, right? “Recreation.”  “Recreation.”  And what is recreation, anyway?  It is all the stuff we do to renew ourselves, to invigorate our lives.  The things we do for fun.  It is play.  And there aren’t too many passages in the Bible where Jesus is playing kickball or running around with his dogs, but people did call him a drunkard and a glutton and a friend of sinners because, apparently, they could get away with calling him that. 

 

He probably enjoyed the pleasures of life, eating and drinking and hanging out with friends.  And people slandered him through caricatures the way we always slander people through caricatures.  He must have known and claimed the principle Paul lays out that as long as you don’t cause someone to “stumble” in their faith, do enjoy life: as long as you aren’t positioning yourself or someone else to turn away from God, then enjoy life, then “whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.” Enjoy life: just remember to seek other people’s good as you enjoy it. 

 

In fact, the passage that was read to us this morning about bringing glory to God in everything we do was written in a context about table fellowship, meals together, and we should remember that part of what we celebrate in our new-creation lives on Sunday, part of what we remember, is that when the resurrection really comes, we are going to have a great big party, and big family meals full of all the all the noises and messes and joking and laughter, and maybe a retreat into the living room to play cards afterward, or chat over dessert wine or coffee and just play with our ever-increasing circle of friends. 

 

Part of reclaiming Sunday means remembering that it is not just another day, but the first day of our weeks: the day when we remember the very first day of God’s re-creation of the world, Easter Sunday.  And on this of all days we should be celebrating, and “recreating,” and playing and enjoying the new life that God offers us.  And, as we do these things, drawing others into the celebration and the play we’re taking part in. 

 

Toward Solution: Splitting up the Weekend

So part of the solution to all the problems the weekend can pose is to split it apart, put Saturday at the end of the week, and Sunday at its beginning, seeking a freedom-giving rest after a long Monday through Friday, and beginning our week on Sunday with a day of celebration, and life-building recreation that sets the tone for all the days to follow. 

 

Because most of us will have a “Monday through Friday”–if not in fact, in principle.  Most of us will have to work, right?  And if we don’t, our neighbors do.  In the passage from Thessalonians that was read to us today, Paul is honestly as upset about people being lazy and gossipy, as he is reminding us to be hard workers.  

 

But he is at least pointing out that work has to happen.  Life requires hard work. And this is important to remember. But not too important to remember, right?  Let’s put it in it’s rightful place.  Work has to happen.  Nothing is always wonderful.  Some things are “work” in the most pejorative term–they require effort and energy and they are not always fun, no matter how much meaning and sense of satisfaction they provide a person.  

 

At the same time, life is not only work.  It is also rest, and it is also play.  And even if we want to focus on work all the time, or focus on play all the time, or focus on rest, all the time, and make one of these more important than the others, we need to remember that it is tough to tear apart a cord with three strands. 

 

And what we need is a cord with three strands. 

 

Solution: A Three-Stranded Cord:

We need to acknowledge that Monday through Friday is real: life contains work, and sometimes it’s hard.  But we need to be people who reclaim Saturday, and it’s rest, and say: God made me for rest that gives freedom from the toil that precedes it.  We need to be people who reclaim Sunday, and say, with celebration, it’s time to play!  It’s good to do recreational things, with others, that metaphorically create new life in us even while we look forward to our resurrected life to come. 

 

We need to begin to take this first day of the week, which proclaims celebration and fun and play.  And take the days that follow it, which are so often ones of toil and effort.  And we need to take that last day of the week, which calls us to rest, and enter into freedom from work, and we need to re-order our lives, live our lives in such a way that each of these things is part of them, on a weekly basis: but even on a daily basis.  

 

We need to take the principles of rest and play and work, and braid them together into a three-stranded cord that is our life.  

 

The weekend can never become our whole life, a time into which we try and pack all the meaningful things we can imagine, asserting our own right to do whatever will make us feel satisfied and whole before terrible monday rears its head.  

 

But we can together discern ways to bring into every single day rest and work and play, so that our whole lives become, simply, our whole lives, full of each of these three things in balanced measure. 

 

Before we talk about what we need to be able to do this, though, we should remember something. 

 

Reminder:

We should remember that not everyone gets to rest.  And not everyone gets to play.  And not everyone gets to work.  And fewer and fewer people know what it’s like to even have two days in a row in which they don’t have to work. The opportunity to even have one strand of the rest, work, and play cord is a blessing; all three is rare, in our society, and in many others.  

 

So while many of us may know intimately the monday through friday, here comes the weekend thing: some of us do not, and many, many of the people who have worshiped God in this space over the years, or who will in an hour, work every day whenever they can, because they have to to survive: and that is their life.  And many people call our church because they can’t get any work at all, and are desperate for food.  

 

So for those among us who are better positioned because of any number of things to braid up our lives into ones of rest and work and play, we should be not only thankful to God, not only respond well with the responsibility we’ve been given, but remember that our rest and our work and our play should promote, somehow–and it’s up to each and all of us to figure this out–the chance for those without these things to get them. 

 

Toward Conclusion: Summary  

So we’ve talked about how so often people in our society, and even us now and then, try to pack our whole lives into the tiny little container we call the weekend.  And it can take us all sorts of bad places: we live with disappointment, bitterness, we build huge expectations that go unmet, and we get upset when it happens.  I’ve suggested that we need to remember what Saturday and Sunday and the days in between are really about, are really for.  Rest and Work and Play.  And we need to at least reorder our lives such that each day has rest and work and play in it, because so many of our lives do not follow the five days on, two days off pattern of our society. 

 

We need to take the principles of rest and work and play, and bring them into our daily lives.  

 

But how? 

 

Toward Conclusion: Suggestions

All along, in this series about how to live in the world, how to become like Jesus in our world, with so many things to navigate that have ethical implications for us, we have in every case come back to the fact that we must rely on one another, on the Holy Spirit, and on Scripture.  That these are our partners in discerning a way forward.  

 

I can suggest things, right?  I can give you so many suggests.  What is your weekly schedule like?  How does it change?  What are your favorite ways to rest?  Do they bring you freedom from the toil that work can be?  What are your favorite ways to play?  Do they celebrate life, and the resurrected life we look forward to?  What is your work like, because it will be part of your life; you can’t escape it.  Something will always be work.  How can your work bring glory to God?  Evaluate where your time goes, evaluate the effects it has on others, ask those who love you if it seems like you’ve been trying to cram all your life into your weekend, and ask them to help you live differently.  Begin braiding your days with rest, and work, and play, begin praying about your days and how you can stop waiting to live, but begin living, become present, show up to your life that is going on right now. 

 

But these are just my suggestions.  You have the Spirit: and, I pray, the time to rest with God, rest before God and seek God’s wisdom.  You have one another: we have one another, and we are a creative bunch, we smoky rowers.  We can talk in our small groups and share in our parking lot ways we’re playing and resting and working, ways we’re bringing balance to our lives, and depending on God to braid the cord of our lives around these three critical things.  And we have Scripture to guide us, to draw us into habits and practices that put us right in the path of rest or recreation or work that is less than drudgery.  

 

I mean, we could turn to the Spirit and each other and Scripture to discern a way to live well, couldn’t we?  A balanced, rest/play/work life?  If we wanted to.  In fact, with one another, with the Spirit, and with Scripture, we can discern a way through anything at all, and no problem than comes our way won’t have a solution that brings glory to God. 

 

Conclusion:

The way many people in our society treat the weekend isn’t good.  It is unbalanced and unhealthy, and does not take God into account.  And sometimes we look a little unhealthy and unbalanced ourselves.  And sometimes we don’t take God too much into account.  But our neighbors need to see us living differently from them, not angry when Sunday ends.  

 

So let’s try, if we can, to turn to one another, and scripture, and the Spirit and discern ways to braid our lives into one whole, a cord of rest and play and work that is not done in our own interests, but done because we long to live a life that seeks the good of many, so that many might know who we have come to know, the God to whom we strive to bring glory.