Sabbath as Sacred Wisdom

Sabbath as Sacred Wisdom

August 16, 2026

Minister: Rev. JT Smiedendorf

Text: Third of three in Sabbath series, related to Exodus 3:1-5

Download a printable PDF of this sermon here.

CENTRAL FOCUS:

Central Focus: The Sabbath soul lives most fully in the simple and kinship ways of humility, sufficiency and trust (faith).

“Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness and came to Mount Horeb,[a] the mountain of God. 2 There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. 3 Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight and see why the bush is not burned up.” 4 When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” 5 Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”

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.

 

I’ve been talking of Sabbath in recent weeks as an important spiritual principle and practice. First, we were offered the image of Sabbath as God’s exhale. Then we were invited to see Sabbath as kairos time, God’s time, a time of seasons and flow beyond the measure of money and accomplishment.

In whatever forms, Sabbath is a deepening into certain qualities that might not get enough time or attention from us or our culture. Nurturing and deepening that field of qualities or values or energies, opens us to the sacred wisdom, the sacred perspective, that enriches what the ancient rabbis called our Sabbath soul and, in so doing, enriches the blessing and re-creating rejuvenation of Sabbath.

In this morning’s story, Moses is drawn away from his work of shepherding. He encounters a mystical sight—a Divine Presence like fire that burns, yet does not consume the bush. God calls to Moses and Moses answers, “Here I am.” Then the Divine Voice says, “Come no closer and remove the sandals from your feet for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” There is a Rabbinic tradition that says this is not so much a warning to Moses about the particular ground on which he is standing, but an instruction to remove that which is blocking his direct connection to the sacred power of God in the ground. Removing his sandals and putting his bare feet on the ground opens his connection to the Divine Presence that comes through the earth.

Sabbath practice is like that, holding an intention of removing that which is in the way of us receiving the simple blessing of being, like simply being with the earth barefoot. It is interesting that the root of the word humility is related to humus, another word for soil. Humility is not putting ourselves down, it is staying Divinely grounded, close to the sacred earth. You can take your shoes off right now if you like.

Many spiritual traditions look at the ego as a central block to God.

Building the ego self is an important task of the first part of life. The ego self figures things out, makes plans and choices, helps us act in the world and work things out in the everyday. Gotta have one.

But if we are only or most often living from the ego self it can become a kind of barrier to Divine connection by keeping us too busy (or paralyzed), too anxious (or care-less), too preoccupied (or thoughtless), too self-centered (or self-forgetting), too scattered (or in tunnel vision), too much in our own story to open ourselves to God’s story and to the way in which we are held in that story.

Moses was called into the God story to liberate the people from slavery, to be an actor with God. His appropriate response was “Who, me? Are you kidding? Who am I to do such a thing? Why would an empire listen to me?” God’s next response amounts to something like, “You won’t be doing it, I will. It is the Divine Presence and your connection to it that will make this great and difficult thing happen.”

When our ego thinks we are doing it alone, we are no longer close to the sacred earth, no longer in a place of humility. We have put on our ego shoes and lost contact with the sacred ground of the GodMystery. Sabbath practice instead takes off our ego shoes, asking of us a trust and a letting go—a trust in forces greater than ourselves and a letting go of always having to act or to control or be attached to having to know the outcome of the story.

There is an ancient Taoist story of a young man whose horse ran away. People came to console him, but the father said, “What makes you so sure this is not a blessing?” Months later the horse returned bringing with her a magnificent stallion. Everyone came to congratulate the son on his good fortune. And the father said, “What makes you so sure this is not a disaster?” Things went well until one day the son fell off the stallion and broke his hip. Again, people came to console them, but the father said, “What makes you so sure this is not a blessing?” A year later the country was invaded, and all able-bodied men were called into a war in which most died. But the son could not fight and both son and father survived to care for one another.

You just never know with life.

Sabbath practice asks us to let go of knowing it all, to accept the amount of inevitable unknowing that goes with life and to let go of the anxiety and worry and desire to control all the outcomes. We are asked to take on what is called in some spiritual traditions, beginner’s mind, a kind of “less judgment and more curiosity” approach to each moment. There is a humility in this mindset and a necessary trusting or faith that somehow the Divine Mystery is holding it all and that this holding is sufficient and trustworthy.

Humility, sufficiency, trust.
This is Sabbath as sacred wisdom.
Our mass culture generally doesn’t support these values as much as their counterparts.

Instead of humility and nearness to earth, there is soaring individual elevation and conquering of the earth. Being famous seems to be important to many, but Zen Buddhist teacher Suzuki Roshi said that true freedom comes from becoming “nobody special” and knowing our greatness as coming from our connection to the Greater. Our Sabbath soul knows this. Jesus warning about praying in public is essentially not about the public-ness, but about the inner motivation of wanting to be seen by others in a particular way and feel puffed up about it and forgetting that praying is about connecting with God.

Instead of feeling the sufficiency of what is and what we have now, the culture tends to support dissatisfaction and the drive for more and the idealizing of our worry about tomorrow or some other place we could be. When Moses led the people out of slavery, it wasn’t directly to the Promised Land, the Land of Milk and Honey. It was a journey into the wilderness, a place of limited physical resources, ripe for dissatisfaction. Yet, even in the wilderness, God provided those on the journey with manna, a food that couldn’t be stored, but was collected each day. One could not reduce worry or create security by hoarding it for the future. Sabbath practice asks us to trust in the moment that what we have is sufficient and we can exhale for now, trusting that tomorrow will have its own sufficiency, even in challenging times.

Has anyone here experienced times of spiritual wilderness like me?

Here’s an ancient poem by the Middle Eastern poet Hafiz that reminds us we might even be blessed by those wilderness times …

Don’t surrender your loneliness so quickly.
Let it cut more deep.
Let it ferment and season you
as few human
or even divine ingredients can.
Something missing in my heart tonight
has made my eyes so soft
my voice
so tender
my need of God
Absolutely
Clear.

What if we had a Sabbath practice of naming and celebrating how we received manna each day or each week or named and celebrated how our lives as they are in the moment are sufficient?

Instead of trust and faith in something Greater than Ourselves, our culture has the security state and the fear-based seeking of a guarantee of safety through violence, money, and border walls. What if we had Sabbath practices that helped us let go of the need for this kind of security, for seeking security in anything but the Divine Mystery? Maybe one could place symbols on a home altar—symbols of enduring, healing values like nonviolence, shared resources, and love. Maybe one could take on the yoga pose of Savasana (corpse pose) where you lay as flat and still and relaxed as possible on the earth as a gesture of trusting God and God’s Creation as the only thing that really holds you, or take on Child’s Pose where one bows on both knees in surrender to the Greater Mystery.

We at Plymouth are a church with a history and concern for social ACTION and for making efforts in the world for change. Blessings to that faithfulness. And, I hope this sermon series on Sabbath as a practice of exhale, of effortless time and being, and of wisdom will find a life-giving way to integrate with and deepen our faithful acting in the world.

Perhaps this Wendell Berry poem titled simply X will help hold both work and rest, effort and non-effort together.

X
by Wendell Berry

Whatever is foreseen in joy
Must be lived out from day to day.
Vision held open in the dark
By our ten thousand days of work.
Harvest will fill the barn; for that
The hand must ache, the face must sweat. 

And yet no leaf or grain is filled
By work of ours; the field is tilled
And left to grace. That we may reap,
Great work is done while we’re asleep. 

When we work well, a Sabbath mood
Rests on our day, and finds it good. 

May we find our life-giving practice of Sabbath and allow its blessing of sacred exhale, sacred time, and sacred wisdom to wash over us, refresh us, and re-create us.

AMEN.