Sabbath is Not Self-Care
by Dr. Rob Muthiah
With the growing encouragement for pastors to think about self-care, it’s easy to frame Sabbath as another method for attending to your holistic health. Sabbath will indeed take care of you in deep and meaningful ways, but I’m sorry to break the news: Sabbath is not fundamentally about you; it’s focus is on God. (The Sabbath commandment tells us that the seventh day “is a sabbath to the Lord your God”). The day makes claims on our time, energy, and relationships, and seeks to orient all these toward God.
It’s not that you don’t matter – you do! – but Sabbath is about so much more than your personal well-being. Every seventh day Sabbath invites us to marvel at the beauty of the world around us like God did on the seventh day of creation. Sabbath turns our eyes to others by raising justice issues (even servants and foreigners are to be granted rest on this day). Sabbath raises systemic issues related to the underpinnings of our economic model by delineating time to work and time to not work. Sabbath forms people into a worshipping community. In these ways and more, Sabbath sweeps us up in the call for all of creation to reflect, praise, and glorify God.
Don’t misunderstand me though; I think there is a connection between Sabbath and self-care. Practiced well, Sabbath takes our eyes off ourselves and opens us to experience God and others more fully, and in doing so, Sabbath nurtures us, renews us, grounds us, and blesses us. So in the end, Sabbath does in fact contribute to our holistic health, but ironically it does so by not focusing on us.
I’m going to take a giant leap over other aspects of a robust theology of Sabbath and jump to four practical suggestions for celebrating the day:
- Worship with the body of Christ. I assume you already do this. Awesome! You already have some shape to your Sabbath observance; you’re not starting from scratch.
- Celebrate the day by choosing to prepare a favorite meal (I suggest beginning Sabbath with the evening meal on Saturday night). If you have kids, involve them by asking them to help choose the food. Consider inviting others to join you for the meal.
- Disconnect from intellectual technology for the day (phone, computer, tv). Or if that feels like too big a step, block out several hours of the day for this. Turn your phone off and put it out of sight. Keep the computer and the tv turned off. Some who have tried this have told me about amazing conversations that have happened because nothing else was going on, and others have told me about struggles with boredom in the midst of this time. I would suggest that both experiences might be significant in our spiritual formation.
- Don’t spend money for this 24-hour period. For 1/7th of your week, put aside your credit card and your cash. This aspect has a long history that derives from the idea that ceasing work involves ceasing from commerce. This can challenge us to think about how we situate money and the things money can buy in relation to other values and visions of the good life. This one takes some advance planning in the days leading up to the Sabbath!
- This all takes a bit of effort (another irony, I know, since Sabbath is about rest), but my hope is that Sabbath is not just a burden on your to-do list that makes you feel guilty, but that it is something you long for, revel in, and celebrate personally and communally in the midst of a culture that sees it as an inefficient use of your time.
Rob Muthiah is professor of practical theology at Azusa Pacific Seminary and the author of The Sabbath Experiment: Spiritual Formation for Living in a Non-Stop World). He sabbaths with his biological and church family at Pasadena Mennonite Church. For some other nuts-and-bolts ideas for Sabbath observance, check out these guidelines. Video clips of Rob talking on Sabbath as well as other resources can be found here.
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