In a recent Essential Community course, students were asked to engage contentious issues such as religion, race, gender, and war. These writings are the fruit of their hard yet unfinished work.

We, in the West, experience time linearly in the sense that we look to the future always planning, saving and dreaming- believing that more is better. So we acquire advanced degrees, better jobs, bigger SUV’s, larger homes- and in the getting our hunger becomes all the more insatiable and we again aim higher- what will finally stop us? We focus so one-dimensionally on the future that we spend little time remembering or being. We pretend to own time and forget that it is a gift and in response, time turns its back on us- we feel disconnected and disembodied. Our nutrition and eating habits are divorced from earth cycles; our livelihood has nothing to do with the natural seasons of planting, waiting and harvesting. There is nothing that paces our lives other than the anxious ticking of the clock and the continual onslaught of the work-week followed by evenings or weekends of exhausted dissociation. There is a sense that time mocks us even as it is getting away from us.

The task, oddly, is not to catch up with time or get it back, but to enter into it submissively instead of trying to control it. It seems as though the only spiritual category we know to give us access to a more humane experience of time is the Sabbath. In my Protestant/Evangelical tradition, Sabbath is handled rather loosely for being the fourth member of the Decalogue. I was taught that Jesus had abolished the Sabbath and Sunday replaced it as the Lord’s Day- a day to attend church and “rest.” Most Evangelicals know of Sabbath in two ways. First, we know that it bears deep cultural and historical meaning for the Jews as a day familial celebration and religious ritual. Secondly, we know that it has been legalistically distorted in many traditions that value it, giving us righteous justification for not participating in such a works-oriented and burdensome activity. For us, the true significance of Sabbath is for us theologically remote.

I do not believe the Christian can merely “import” the Sabbath as a spiritual discipline that will “fix” our sense of being overworked and at loss of time. Long ago we lost and no longer have the communal systems and theological categories around the Sabbath that can infuse it with meaning. We need a bridge to give us access to the Sabbath- and for that we turn to the sacrament of time- the Eucharist. But what does the Eucharist have to do with time? And what does the Sabbath have to do with the Eucharist? Our Protestant crisis regarding time is circular- we have an anorexic view of the Eucharist because we have an undefined view of time and we have an undefined experience of time because we have a shallow theology of Eucharist. We need something that times us and our lives so we turn to Sabbath through the only door available and find ourselves seated at a great and good Table.

Theologically, we cannot separate Sabbath from the Lord’s Day yet we find that in many Protestant traditions Sabbath is but a footnote, if that. In order to step towards a theology of Sabbath, we must first note that what is needed is a deepening, widening, or broadening (an increase of meaning) regarding our theology of Eucharist as an eschatological reality.

Two brief personal vignettes. My tradition taught that the Lord’s Supper is about remembrance, yet a cultural sense of the past remained unarticulated. As a child, I was instructed to prepare for Communion by remembering and confessing the sins of the week and acknowledge the action of Christ on my behalf. I remember feeling forgiven yet very much alone as I would eat my neatly parsed cracker and drain my tiny cup of juice. Somehow we are more familiar with remembering in the context of shame and regret than in the category of gratitude, much less joy or delight- we know memory only in the first person and ours is a culture of amnesia.

In Bible College I recall the many intense discussions around the elements; we would try to explain, argue or defend ideas about what “happens” to them. Even the term “the elements” conjures images of Scientists picking apart something natural in order to analyze and understand it. It seems preferable to refer to Christ’s body and blood, as Alexander Schmemann makes a point to do, as “the gifts.” Who tries to understand a gift? It has only to be received. We no longer try to understand- we merely enter and receive because whatever happens “to bread and wine happens because something has, first of all, happened to us, to the Church… we have entered the Eschaton, and are now standing beyond time and space.”

Abraham Heschel speaks of the Sabbath as the window into eternity, even the source of it. When time is entered with such a degree of intentionality and ritual, it allows time past, present and future to become available to the participant in the sense that time opens itself up, or unfolds. In the Jewish tradition, time is seen as thick, layered, rhythmic and eschatological, it opens and closes and every moment is pregnant with promise and possibility. Jewish philosopher, Walter Benjamin once said the reason the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future was because “every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.” For this reason, it can be noted that time is the only thing that we partake of equally. To be preoccupied with time is to be preoccupied with inclusion for not a single moment belongs exclusively to one being- the heart of the Sabbath is communal.

Christian Orthodox theology uses similar language to describe the Eucharist. “In the Eucharist we are standing in the presence of Christ, and like Moses before God, we are to be covered with his glory.” The call to remembrance that is embedded in Christ’s Eucharistic instructions necessarily requires a communal and eschatological perspective. The mysticism of Orthodoxy requires this liturgical practice to be more than merely a symbol- the Eucharist is not the honoring of an event, but rather, the fulfillment of that event in present time. As much as it is an opportunity to contemplate gratefully one’s personal experience of being saved, it is “the sacrament of cosmic remembrance: it is indeed a restoration of love as the very life of the world.” As much as memory may be personal, an act of co-mmemoration is profoundly communal. As we participate in the Eucharist together, “we return each other, in Christ, to God” and enter his love.

A deepening theology of Eucharist will consist of an Orthodox understanding of joy as the primary category through which to engage the Table. Schmemann notes that joy cannot be defined or analyzed, rather, one has only to enter it, and the only way to enter into joy is through “one action which from the beginning has been for the Church both the source and the fulfillment of joy, the very sacrament of joy, the Eucharist.” Similarly, the Sabbath is the structure within time that requests our submission and requires us to let go in order to fully experience its power.

Both the Eucharist and the Sabbath hold as their central themes the deep notion of delight- joyful gratitude in response to the being and action of God on our behalf. Both are invitations to worship, both provide sustenance, both serve as counter-narratives that specifically address the drivenness and consumerism of our society. One author has said of the Eucharist, and I will say the same of the Sabbath, that its celebration “challenges some assumptions of contemporary American society. The demise of regular patterns of family dining in fact diminishes Catholic notions of sacramentality and the way we experience Christ’s presence at the table.”

The Jewish Day of Delight was a festal day, one that admittantly became clouded by tedious ritual in Israel’s post-exilic history that continues to this day, but nonetheless was profoundly connected to the time beyond time when one would feast eternally in and with God. The theological significance contained in the Eucharist for Christians parallels the theological significance of the Sabbath for the Jews because they are so theologically linked through a relationship in time that is no mystery, per se, but that often goes unnoticed. The Eucharist does not replace the Sabbath for Christians; it does however, join it in the category of the eschatological feast, through which the meaning and significance of the Sabbath bursts into Christian theology. Moltmann says plainly that the Lord’s Day (Sunday) does not abolish or supplant the Sabbath- “The Christian feast-day must rather be seen as the messianic extension of Israel’s Sabbath.”

“Time always points to a feast, to a joy, which by itself it cannot give or realize.” There is no question that both the Sabbath and the Eucharist are feast oriented, both propose a rhythm of the practice of communal feasting that is eschatologically unfolding. They move us forward and yet each time we participate, the experience is never the same for it is a rhythm that celebrates difference. Kierkegaard writes about the idea of “non-identical repetition” which David Ford applies to the Eucharist in that it can be understood as a repetition “recollected forwards.” Time in this sense is neither circular nor linear but something of both; time in Sabbath and Eucharist is eschatologically rhythmic and its destination is a feast.

Developing views of the Sabbath understand the command to rest as having more to do with ancient Hebrew notions of delight as opposed to our exhausted and dissociative modern notions of “rest.” Sabbath is far more about the creative engagement of the sensory in community that doesn’t shut us off from others but opens us up to them making possible a more just and sustainable world. For Heschel, it is the intentional engagement of the sensory in the context of feasting and delight that deepens one capacity to feast more deeply in heaven. Keeping the Sabbath is essentially a preparation for the feast of the Kingdom of God- the eternal and inexhaustible feast that “should be anticipated by a wealth of diverse forms of celebration.”

Ritual and repetition are not Evangelical words, in fact we are bored with ritual. We anxiously await the latest fad book around which to construct a sermon series instead of submitting ourselves to the Lectionary. We want new songs because we long ago tired of singing the same old Psalms. We pray our own prayers because the prayers of the Saints are not personal enough. Yet, in our resistance to ritual, we create new ritual because we cannot live without it- it is a most anthropological phenomenon. In fact, it has been suggested that “every time we encounter something that transcends the human person we ‘humanize’ it with ritual.” It is ritual that protects us from “unmediated religious experience.” Ritual and repetition decelerate and delay the numinous so that we are not consumed in the encounter- perhaps we have this to keep in mind when we become bored by the monotony of ritual- we are grateful that it ensures our survival while at the same time we want nothing more than to be consumed by the Divine.

The beauty of ritual is that it is never truly the same. Ford argues that the more “decisively and gloriously” the ritual is completed each time the more it is able to compel us to a deeper and more precise articulation of praise. This is why Kierkegaard is able to say that ‘repetition is always transcendence’ and the by definition, the Eucharist “is the eternal repetition of the great act of love accomplished for us” that forever moves us closer to God. Such is the language of love in that it “remains endlessly unvarying yet it is experienced as fresh and new each time it is spoken.” We move closer to the heart of God, indeed, as Orthodox theology will articulate, the hope of humanity is to be united in Christ and it is the Eucharist that connects us most deeply with the eschatological union of all in Christ. The Feast is the context of love, a space for the development of a human freedom and free play that liberates the people of God because what we move towards is not a retirement or payday, but a rich celebration of diversity.

Ritual must exist in order for a community to come together and celebrate. The rhythm offered in the Sabbath and the Eucharist in the context of feasting and worship make community possible. We often forget that we come to a table that is not ours to host or lay out- we attend at the invitation of God. It “is not a feast we laid out for ourselves, according to our own personal preferences. It is God’s feast. We attend by invitation and not simply to satisfy our own particular needs.” The community can only unite around a ritual to which we all submit. In this repetition we delight in each other in the presence of God because at His table, we are at leisure.

Joseph Pieper writes in his seminal text, Leisure as the Basis of Culture, that humankind is most human in the context of leisure, a condition that he articulates with precision as one that finds it’s locus in the religious festival, whose foundation is worship and sacrifice. Similarly, I argue that it when we are leisure in this sense that we experience time in such a way that we are timed not by the endlessly inhumane rule of the clock but by the seductive, non-identical repetition of the Feast that doesn’t leave us feeling disconnected but integrated. One Orthodox theologian has referred to this table as “the eternal repetition of the great act of love accomplished for us.” Love invites, whispering a command through which Sabbath and Eucharist give us the ability to sit down and resist the demand of the world of work upon our souls as resources to be used up. “When we sit down to eat, we are consciously removing ourselves from the world of work and means and industry, and facing outwards, to the kingdom of ends. Feast, festival, and faith lift us from idleness and endow our lives with sense.”

If ordinary time leaves us feeling disconnected, than the Feast does the opposite because if it is a table “spread by God and hosted by Christ, it must be a table with many connections.” We find ourselves, each other and God in the integrative spaces of the Sabbath and the Eucharist. The habit of feasting is the beginning point for the healing of the world. It is because of this that the Evangelical tradition needs to increase its theological meaning around the Eucharist as only then will we be able to harness the healing power of the Sabbath. Together, these gifts impact our experience of time and offer us the possibility of hope in our driven society that there is a deeper rest beyond the dissociative down-time of the weekends- there is a great and good Table that awaits and this is an invitation to prepare ourselves, deepen our capacity for joy- so that we will know how to feast with God. Come, the table is ready.

Phillip Nellis is a recently graduated with his MDiv from MHGS. This paper was birthed out of his research work for Dan Allender’s recent book, Sabbath.