WEEKEND RELIGION John M. Buchanan
Deuteronomy 5:12-15 Broad St. Presbyterian Church
June 13, 1952 Columbus, Ohio

I encountered some striking information recently about time and how we use it.
In an average American lifetime:

2.3 years will be spent eating,

4.5 years will be devoted to going to school,

we will work a total of 7% years,

and five years will be consumed in miscellaneous activity, mostly traveling
between places,

sleeping will absorb 24 years out of a 70 year life,

and, on average, we have at our disposal 27 years out of 70, for leisure
time activity.

I was absolutely stunned by that. My surface impression is that leisure time
is a myth, a promotional creation perhaps of the people who make tennis rackets
and camping equipment. Most of the folks I know hardly seem to have time for life's
necessities. Twenty-seven years? Most of us can't remember 27 consecutive minutes.

The person from whom I heard the figure is the Director of Parks and Public
Recreation for the city of Detroit, a thoughtful and careful Christian who is con-
cerned about American inability to deal with the idea of leisure. My surprise, he
told me when I challenged the data, is part of the problem. "How much of the
busyness you observe is necessary?" he asked. "How much of it is vital for life,
and how much is self-imposed?" Civic duty, religious activity, attending board
meetings, quasi-professional activity - is leisure time. So is the time we chose
to invest in a profession for which there is no direct financial reward. It's not
necessarily bad, he said; in fact it's marvelous when an individual loves a job
enough to invest leisure time in it. It's helpful, however, to be self-conscious
about that, to see what one is doing and to own the responsibility for that decision.

Meanwhile, the data continue to be substantiated: 27 years: one third of life
is leisure. There is a small percentage of the population working after hours, long
into the night. Most, however, work forty hours and less. If you need to do
business on the telephone on Friday afternoon, you know about the less part.
Futurists are not absolutely sure of much, but most of them sound certain that time
saving technology, for all the headaches it creates currently, does, in fact save
time and will, in fact, continue to shorten the routine processes upon which our
civilization rests.

Forced retirement at 65 and increasing life expectancy constitute another part
of the equation. Sixty-five year olds have a very significant chunk of time with
which to deal, all of it leisure. The involuntary idleness of unemployment is
another part. The 45 year old executive, suddenly and without warning released
from a job, used to be a stereotype for sociology classes. Now it's very likely
someone you know. The 55 year old whose job was abolished and who is too experienced
and too well-paid to start again and who decides to take early retirement - thus
adding a decade at least to the leisure time column, used to be a safe abstraction.
Today he is a neighbor.

The attendant problems, of course, are immense. People who have believed
devoutly in the work ethic, dutifully predicating their sense of self-worth on their
ability to produce fall into severe emotional crisis, guilt and depression, when .

there is no work to do. Sound, healthy marriages develop stress fractures when a
man and woman who saw one another a few hours a day some days are suddenly thrown
together every day, all day.

Give or take a few years, every one of us will have more leisure time than we
will have time for anything else. It is a modern phenomenon. Fred Graham, profes-
sor of religious studies at Michigan State,wrote an essay on the sudden and dramatic
concem Americans seem to have with physical fitness. It has to do, he believes,
with our fear that we will end our lives sitting motionless, in a nursing home. He
writes, “Our ancestors scarcely knew the anxiety of terminal helplessness, at least
in its present form. When illness laid them low in their advanced years, pneumonia
quickly finished them off. Today we know we can liva for years lying in a hospital
bed." (Christian Century, August 1979, p. 822)

It is also a particularly Western problem. A young Peace Corps volunteer was
in Nigeria and decided to resume his regimen of leisure time activity, namely
jogging. One early evening he started, on the road through the village in which
he was living. He had not run very far when he was joined by two farmers on
bicycles, peddling home after a long day in thetr fields. "You got trouble?", one
asked. "Oh, no", he said. "You need help?", the other farmer inquired. "No,
thank you", he puffed. “Everything is OK." The cyclists advanced, then slowed
down and the farmer tried again. ‘You rm", one noted. "Yes...I run.” "You run",
the other persisted, "where?" "Up the road", the young man snapped. “You run up
the read." the two echoed. Again they advanced, and again drew back beside hin.
"No trouble. You run up road? Why you run up road?" Finally he stopped. Carefully
he explained, "I run up road to get exercise." “Exercise”, one responded. “What
is exercise?" The young man reflected: "For a long moment I stood there, my mouth
open, beginning to sense the scene's absurdity: Two thin, overworked farmers,
sitting astride broken down bicycles...an over~caloried white man in canvas shoes
running nowhere to get something no one here had ever heard of." (A.D. Magazine,
February 1982, p,. 28)

It is a modern problem and it is a western problem and we deal with it in
varied and exotic ways. We play tennis, racket bail, and finaily we run. We have
and will have a lot of time on our hands. We do not need another activity. What
we do need is better understanding and one of the resources we can employ to help
us understand our situation and deal creatively with it is the ancient Helbaic
concept of Sabbath, a special, holy time, away from all the other time.

The Babylonians devised the seven day week: the Romans named each of the days
for a deity. The current names of the week days derive from Scandanavian Gods:
Wednesday from Woden, Thursday from Thor.

But the idea of one out of every seven set apart for rest and recreation;
the idea that the pattern is part of the fabric of creation; the notion that obser~
ving a Sabbath is vital to health and happiness - is pure Judaism and pure genius.
Tt has been confirmed over and over again, there is fundamental truth in the ancient
word. Healthy, happy, vital life depends on a rhythmic motion between hard work
and leisure, stress and relaxation, effort and no effort.

The idea has been yulnerable to distortion, however, One ef the earliest con-
flicts in his ministry occurred when Jesus’ disciples picked a few grains of wheat
on the Sabbath. Technically they had broken the Sabbath law prohibiting harvesting.
When he was challenged he responded, "The Sabbath was made for the good of man:

Man was not made for the Sabbath."

Human beings are notorious for establishing institutions, customs, laws around
an idea which is important. And before the ink is dry the customs and laws and the
institutions are assuming more importance than the original idea itself. Thus the
relentless distortion of the idea of the Sabbath. By Jesus" time the original
Sabbath idea had become a labyrinth of taboos and restrictions. For instance, work
was prohibited: burdens could not be borne on the Sabbath. It was legal to carry
a child, but not if the child was holding a stone.

The earliest Christians did not observe Sabbath at all. Their Lord's Day was
the first day of the week, a work day like all the rest, different only in that
they met for worship early in the morning to remember and celebrate the Lord's
resurrection. But gradually, over the centuries, the idea of a Sabbath reemerged
and was combined with the Lord's Day and the rest is history. Distortions have
characterized the custom rather than creativity. Scots Presbyterians condemned the
first trains which operated on Sunday. In order to prevent frivolity on the
Sabbath it was impossible and illegal util recently, to buy a drink in Scotland on
Sunday in one's own town. Travelers, however, were exempt from the restriction.
Inns could serve whiskey, but only to travelers. The result was that thirsty Scots
Presbyterians traditionaly drove to the next town for lunch after church. A
Scottish woman we knew told us about sitting in church, totally preoccupied with
the beautiful salmon reposing in the pool in the stream on her property, and
deciding to cast caution and propriety and plety to the winds, to break the law
and pull him out after church. The Reformers tried to abolish the idea of a
Sabbath because of its excesses and distortions. As if to prove them correct,
the Puritans, when they gained control of Britain under Cromvell in the next
century "enacted a series of severe Sunday laws including some which outlawed ‘vain

_and profane walking’ on the Sabbath. For good measure they turned Christmas into a
penitential fast and ordered every Maypole in the realm cut down." (see William
Barclay, The Ten Commandments for Today, p. 36)

More important, however, is the philosophic distortion which accompanied
Sabbath silliness; namely that work is the only source of meaning, that financial
reward is the only purpose of work, that being unrewarded and/or unoccupied is
somehow the equivalent of meaninglessness or immorality. That Puritan legacy is
with us still and combined with the simple fact of the leisure each of us will
have can result in disaster.

The recovery I propose begins with a faithful reaffirmation of the Sabbath,
the special time whose observance is not only the means to make the rest of time
more valuable, but an end in itself. And it ought to proceed with the recovery of
a theology of leisure, a theology of play, if you will.

The church, in recent years, has worked very hard at the illusive goal of
relevance: relevance to the market place, the real world of commerce, politics,
education. It has been an exciting and necessary venture. But, in terms of the |
time you and I have on this earth, reality is at least partly leisure. My sugges-
tion is that nothing could be more relevant than a religion that knows what the
weekend means as well as the market place.

Sam.Keen, in a superb little book, To a Dancing God, suggested that our pro-
blem is time keeping. We have sold out to mechanical chronology. Keen wrote, "We
march to the beat of an alien pacemaker, eating when the clock strikes 8, 12 and 6,
working five times eight hours per week.....Who can deny that it is well for the
trains to run on time.....By ordering time in abstract modules we have been
rewarded with what we consider a "higher standard of living'. But what have we
lost in the transition?" (p. 53)

ah

What we have lost, obviously, is the ability to play; the gracious, graceful
ability to accept the moment for what it is, to live it fully, to respond to it
naturally, to "consider the lilies", in Jesus' words.

Political philosopher Michael Novaks wrote a very good book several years ago
called the Joy of Sports. Novak is hardly indolent and unmotivated. In fact, he
was born and grew up in the coal and steel regions of Western Pennsylvania. He
speaks a language I well recall. Yet he writes, "Flay, not work, is the end of life
«oeeeThe modern age.....nourishes illusions. In Protestant cultures as in Marxist
cultures, work is serious, important, adult. Its essential insignificance is over~-
looked. Work, of course, must be done. But we should be wise enough to distin-
guish necessity from reality. Play is reality." (p. 40)

Playfully, he suggests "Sports pages printed the critical dispatches. They
celebrate the essential human qualities. They tell the truth about human life.
They carry minimal illusions. It is the good sense of most humans that leads them
to look first at the sports pages, second at the news of the world." (p. 42)

Only partially with tongue in cheek the political philosopher proposes American
baseball as the perfect human activity. Baseball is theologically appropriate
because its context is infinity...the absence of time. He writes, "Baseball pays
no attention to the clock. However long an inning takes, it takes; games may last
two hours or five.....In baseball clock time does not exist. Time is measured by
outs - three outs per inning.....nine innings per game.....162 games constitute a
year." (p. 126)

Or in the words of Bill Lee, recently released from the Montreal Expos, for
his persistent playfulness when a reporter asked where he planned to work next,
"Why, I haven't worked a day since I was eight years old."

Thanks to psychology and Transactional Analysis we have learned that there is
a child in each of us: a child who is essential, joyful, affirming, playful; a
child God created and loves; a child whose playfulness is part of who we are. TA
taught us to value play as well as work and it came right out and suggested that
we have a demonic way of turning all of life into work - even our sexuality, the
very essence of the child in us. One of the first major fights I experienced in
the Presbyterian Church was over our General Assembly's report on Human Sexuality.
I will never forget the vigorous debate on the floor of Presbytery. A minister
was attacking the report,not only its position, but the simple fact that the church
should have something to say about the subject. After a time, one of the elder
statesmen rose, suggested quietly that in four decades of ministry he couldn't
recall too many people seeking counseling because they didn't know how to work,
pray, sing hymns or read the Bible. But he couldn't remember a week that someone
had not presented a great deal of pain related to human sexuality.

There is a child in each of us. Our wholeness depends on its health.

Our needs, it seems to me, are urgent.....and they are two in number. We need,
first, a recovered, revitalized idea of the Sabbath; time spent in rest, recreation,
leisure, for its own sake. We need to take time to play, learn how to play.

Second, we need to prepare for, appreciate, and meaningfully use the leisure
time which we find at our disposal. We need to be honest about the commitments we
have already made for our leisure time. We need, rather critically, I would submit,
to acknowledge that ahead of all of us is a time when the hours and the days will
be ours to use as we wish.

hes

tt le not simple. Tt id not easy. Calling attention to it. does not mdke it
a reality, Paul Tillich taught us that "the demons take our anxteties ahd magnify
them into raging psychic needs whose feeding threatens our sanity." (Graham, op,
cit.) We live in a time which exaggerates normal anxieties about meaningless and
we have seen those anxieties become obsession so that work is all that matters in
life. The Gospel of Jesus Christ addresses this. It addresses us in our wholeness.
In Jesus Christ God has affirmed our humanity. And in his ministry our life has
been confirmed.

The Sabbath was made for us, he said one time, a gift for our health and sanity,
and peace,

Salvation means knowing God's love for us and our freedom in his love, to live
dife in all its fullness -~ work and play, Monday - Friday and Sabbath; weekdays —-
weekends -~ in the gracious freedom of God's love. Amen.