Celebrating the Lord’s Day
A comment on the image: It looks pretty bleak and not particularly joyful, but consider this: you’re looking at a poor laborer who has probably exhausted himself during the past six days in his efforts to provide for his family. By modern thinking, he could probably get a bit ahead of the game if he were to work an extra day. But he would never do that, because the Sabbath belongs to the Lord and was given for rest. This is the high point of his week.
OK, here’s some background on the celebration of the Christian Sabbath or Lord’s Day. In the 1970s and 80s, Katie and I were members of a Christian community that had the practice of inaugurating the Lord’s Day with a home/family service. All households in the community were expected to gather together on Saturday nights, pray together using a set liturgy, eat a festive meal, and in general make the evening a time of fellowship and enjoyment. The practice was based on the Jewish tradition of inaugurating the Sabbath with nice meal and a home service on Friday nights. Since our family is Jewish, we have kept the Friday night Sabbath tradition and have celebrated the Sabbath home service continuously (missing only the occasional Friday night here and there) for the duration of our marriage, 28 years. It’s part of our life together, and we guard it very carefully — we almost never attend Friday evening events, for example, because they would interfere with our consecrated family time. The meal is the nicest dinner we eat over the course of the week, and we make an effort to make things special. It’s the only meal that we have a dessert with, for example, and we spend a bit more money and time on the meal’s preparation. We even try to dress a bit better for it (our pastor when we lived in Michigan used to say that you shouldn’t dress like a schlump for the Lord’s Day). In doing so, we honor the Lord for His goodness to us during the past week — the meal is a sacramental activity.
Because we had small children, we added some different ways of doing the traditional ceremony — with one song we included banging on the table and tapping on glasses with cutlery in time to the music, a somewhat raucous element that amused them. Another part of the ceremony included lighting some candles, but we made a big deal of having a child blow out the match. During another section, Marya would pantomime the things being described. With the final song, we competed on who could hold out the last note the longest — these are just examples of personalizing the service to meet the needs of our family, and should give you an idea of how the form can be adapted. Just because it’s a consecrated time doesn’t mean it has to be boring and staid. And it’s a fun time, too — we plan some kind of participatory family entertainment, like a mutually agreed upon game, or something similar. We try to avoid watching DVDs or the like, because that’s not very participatory.
So that’s how the Sabbath works in the Mendelsohn household. But what kind of biblical case can we make for doing this? In the Scriptures, we can see that specific days were set aside to remember specific events in history of God’s dealings with His people. Leviticus 23 is probably the most detailed discussion in one place of the biblical feasts and their significance, although it is by no means a comprehensive discussion of them. For the purposes of this discussion, we should take a look at the two versions of the Sabbath commandment as given in the two lists of the Ten Commandments (Ex. 20 and Dt. 5). The Exodus version tells us that the Sabbath has to do with Creation, while the Deuteronomy version states that it’s concerned with the deliverance from Egypt. God wanted Israel to remember that they were a created people and a redeemed people. Likewise, in the New covenant, we are both the redeemed and the people of the New Creation (Rom. 8:18-25; 2 Cor. 5:16-21). I’ll close with one more comment based on Pastor Scott’s most recent sermon. One of the things he mentioned was preparing for Sunday morning worship on Saturday night, and he gave us an example of a Puritan prayer for preparing for worship. The family celebration of the Lord’s Day serves much the same purpose, enabling us to enter into the Jewish people call Oneg Shabbat: The delight of the Sabbath (Is. 58:13).
August 27th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
This has real meaning for us as we enter our “sabbatical from projects”. Thank you. Wonderful.
September 9th, 2008 at 10:10 pm
lon… your my favorite jew ever !!!!