Sabbath as Sacred Time
Sabbath as Sacred Time
August 2, 2026
Minister: Rev. JT Smiedendorf
Text: Luke 12:13-27 (Common English Bible)
Download a printable PDF of this sermon here.
CENTRAL FOCUS:
Sabbath time is different in its awareness and valuing of time, the blessing of now, the focus on non-commercial relationship, and an appreciation of kairos.
Someone from the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.”
Jesus said to him, “Man, who appointed me as judge or referee between you and your brother?”
Then Jesus said to them, “Watch out! Guard yourself against all kinds of greed. After all, one’s life isn’t determined by one’s possessions, even when someone is very wealthy.”
Then Jesus told them a parable: “A certain rich man’s land produced a bountiful crop. He said to himself, What will I do? I have no place to store my harvest! Then he thought, Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll tear down my barns and build bigger ones. That’s where I’ll store all my grain and goods. I’ll say to myself, You have stored up plenty of goods, enough for several years. Take it easy! Eat, drink, and enjoy yourself. But God said to him, ‘Fool, tonight you will die. Now who will get the things you have prepared for yourself?’ This is the way it will be for those who hoard things for themselves and aren’t rich toward God.”
These are the words of our ancient tradition.
May the Living Word of God in Scripture be alive within us, among us, and beyond us.
Fill in the blank: Time is _____. [money]
Not if you were W.K. Kellogg in 1930. It was then that he decided his cereal factory would move from three 8-hour shifts to four 6-hour shifts. Amidst the Great Depression, immediately, there were 30% more jobs available at Kellogg. Kellogg paid his six-hour shift workers for a 7-hour shift the first year, and for an 8-hour shift the second. Productivity rose significantly, not just from new technology, but from new work incentives and these new hours. When the US Dept of Labor surveyed the workers after a couple of years of these shorter shifts, the workers overwhelmingly preferred the time more than the money they might have made. Nothing could replace the time with family, for taking care of the home, and for leisure and civic activities. Relationships and the freedom of time were more important than money. After the Depression was over, Kellogg workers consistently voted to stay with the six-hour shifts for the freedom it provided them.
Time is NOT money.
In this morning’s Scripture story from the Gospel of Luke, Jesus is confronted by a man wanting money from an inheritance. As he so often does, Jesus does not respond with a simple answer or even agree to be in the role he is asked to be in. He chooses instead to tell a parable about a rich man who was having a good economic year. This man says to himself, “I will tear down my barns and get bigger barns to hold it all! I’ll never have to worry or be anxious.”
But what money and goods can’t buy him is time. His time for death comes and all the money in the world will not give him more time. Jesus follows up this parable in Luke by telling people not to worry about their material security, and that worrying does nothing to make it happen. Jesus says that the birds and the flowers do not worry, and they seem to do just beautifully.
We are exploring Sabbath for a few Sundays. Last week, we reflected on how Sabbath is a sacred exhale, an essential rest and renewal, imaged in the exhale of God on the seventh day of Creation. This week, we explore Sabbath as sacred time, for unlike the time that can be seen as money, sacred Sabbath time is not money. The keeping of Sabbath time, whatever day or time one does that, brings one into a different kind of time experience than that on a watch or a clock or on a timecard at a workplace. Our soul’s vitality comes in part from the perspective that Sabbath time brings. After the sacred exhale, a different quality of time can open up to us.
The Gospels and letters we have in Christian Scriptures—what we have often called the New Testament—were written in Greek. While the English translation can come out the same as simply “time,” Greek language can talk of both chronos, measured chronological time on a watch or calendar, and of kairos, or God’s time or sacred time. Unlike chronos, kairos doesn’t go in a straight line or at an even pace or move of its own accord. Kairos is a time like the seasons, moving in cycles, dependent upon the relation of things, waiting until the time is fulfilled, until its own conditions have come to be, until it is the ripe and right time. You can sense kairos time by the way something feels or by the way it is or is not in alignment, by the length of shadows, or by color and shade, or by how soft or firm a fruit is in one’s hand. Kairos certainly doesn’t respond to our schedules or wishes. It certainly cannot be bought.
In the Scripture passage, Jesus says to not hoard things, or, in the next passage in Luke, to not worry or be anxious. Allowing ourselves to be in kairos time of Sabbath means we have faith amidst the present unfolding of things. We rest in God. We remember our relationship to life and each other, grateful and humble. We let go of production time and getting more done or making it happen. We get out of social media and the news cycle and repetitive cycles of anxiety. Instead, we rest underneath the fruit tree and trust that things will ripen in time. We let go of obsessing about tomorrow’s outcome and let ourselves be held by God in the eternal now, releasing anxiety and worry of tomorrow. In this Sabbath “kairos” perspective, we remember and live not in chronos and as consumer and commodity, but as image of God, part of the earth and human community.
During World War II, the British wanted to know how they were doing in producing enough stuff to fight the war. They decided to measure the sum of all goods and services produced. They called this the… Gross Domestic Product. The U.N. and the rest of the so-called developed world adopted this standard. Whenever we hear on the news that the economy grew by 2% or shrunk, it is this measurement to which they are referring. And we all seem to cheer when it goes up as if this is good for us all. But the GDP doesn’t discriminate between social activities. Indeed, you could make more bombs or build and staff more prisons or clean up after disasters, and the GDP would go up. There could be more income inequality, yet the GDP goes up. More is better as far the GDP is concerned, and it is only more if it can be measured in money, or ‘bigger barns’ as our Scripture story describes it.
But what about the things that money can’t buy?
What about the effort of any volunteer or family member who takes the time and energy to care for family and the home, to parent, to help a neighbor, or serve the community? The GDP won’t recognize this, let alone value it.
Wayne Muller’s book, Sabbath: Restoring the Sacred Rhythm of Rest, references those who bemoan the lost values of our society. Muller notes “All these ‘lost’ values are human qualities that require time. Honesty, courage, kindness, civility, wisdom, compassion—these can only be nourished in the soil of time and attention, and need experience and practice to come to harvest.”
Keeping Sabbath time means taking the time to honor and nurture these kinds of values, values that a GDP or a ‘time is money’ perspective cannot do. Money and chronological time have their place, but it is keeping Sabbath time that can keep us from neglecting the other kinds of value and time and rhythm that are not as valued by the culture at large. These are the values that live in keeping with kairos, with sacred time.
As our Scripture story suggests, one of the great interrupters of chronos and business as usual is mortality, death. And, just as those humans nearing death will say, those moments with death near put things in perspective. Bronnie Ware is an Australian nurse who spent several years working in palliative care, caring for patients in the last 12 weeks of their lives. She put her observations into a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. Ware writes of phenomenal clarity that people gain at the end of their lives.
Here are the top five regrets of the dying, as witnessed by Ware:
- I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
- I wish I hadn’t worked so hard (such that they missed their children’s youth or their partner’s companionship).
- I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
- I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
- I wish I had let myself be happier. (They did not realize until the end that happiness is a choice. Old patterns and habits got in the way.)
I invite us all to look at our lives and see if we are experiencing time that regularly connects us to what is deeply valuable so we don’t have these regrets. Jesus called that connection being rich toward God.
Recently, I was reading an article about adapting a Western approach to a substance abuse intervention to the Indigenous Maori community of New Zealand. One of the major adjustments that had to be made was time. The Western approach did not allow enough time for human relationships to develop enough trust, enough familiarity, and enough consensus in the process to generate the necessary social conditions for the adaptation to happen. The article used a phrase, striking to me, “time-poor environments.” Perhaps, we are so accustomed to thinking of our country as a rich country, we have forgotten that we are often poor in the realm of time—the time that matters, the Sabbath time that opens us to the sacred.
Practicing Sabbath as sacred time means exhaling deeply and making time for what truly matters, those things that mortality makes clear, those things that can’t be measured by the GDP, those things that put us in touch with the eternal now where we are held by the Mystery we name God.
AMEN.