Sabbath-Keeping: Preaching the Gospel to our Bodies
Raising four kids in a 950 square foot apartment in Manhattan mean I have built more than my fair share of Ikea furniture over the years. With three active boys and no outdoor space of our own, we were constantly stress-testing the durability of Scandinavian plywood. For a stretch of about a decade when they were younger, it felt like a new furniture build was a weekly Saturday ritual.
The moment I sat down on the floor and tore open that thin cardboard box, all four of my kids would come running over to me in a caravan of laughter, saying, “Daddy, daddy, we want to help you!”
Don’t tell my kids this, but on the inside, deep in my heart of darkness, I always thought, “Oh, Lord, please no.”
Of course, I never had the heart to tell them no. As every parent knows, these days weren’t going to last forever. And what a fun way to spend an entire morning, working on something together with my kids! So, I waved them in and said in my most convincing dad voice, “Oh good, there’s no way I’m going to figure this out without some professional help!”
And so we would jump in together, optimistic and bright-eyed. But it would only be a matter of time—minutes, mere minutes—before I caught them happily attaching shelves upside-down or gleefully dumping bags of carefully-sorted hardware into a heaping pile like Halloween candy. For the next few hours, I would have to devise encouraging ways to say things like, “Wow, that’s really good work, but what if we tried putting it in the other way instead?” or, “That’s amazing, you’re already on that step? But maybe we should try doing it in the same order as these drawings,” or, “Hey, you know what, let’s not use that like a lightsaber.” And inevitably my patience would start to wear thin and I soon became incredibly grateful that moments like these weren’t going to last forever. And I would say something along the lines of, “You know what, kids? You guys have been so helpful today. You must be tired. Why don’t you go play and Daddy will finish this up.”
On the day I keep Sabbath, after a long week of pastoral ministry, I imagine the Father saying those same words to me. “You know what, Abe? You have been so helpful this week. You must be tired. Why don’t you go play and Daddy will finish this up.” It makes me smile every time I think about that. And it makes it so much easier for me to set down the work that I all too often carry on my shoulders like the weight of the entire world. “Let Phillip cease to rule the world,” Martin Luther used to say to his more anxious protege, Phillip Melanchthon. I suspect that for many of us, one of the reasons we struggle to keep a Sabbath is because we take ourselves far too seriously. As my friend Rich Villodas often says “We don’t have to keep a Sabbath. We get to keep a Sabbath.”
Keeping a Sabbath reminds us that God hasn’t invited us into his work of redeeming and restoring the world because he needs our labor any more than I needed the labor of my children. He doesn’t need our genius or our compassion or our courage or our sacrifice. He certainly doesn’t need our seriousness. He invites us into his work not because he can’t get it done without us, but simply because he loves being with us.
When we keep the Sabbath, the day on which we produce nothing for God becomes the day on which we experience his love and delight most tangibly. It is the gospel preached not just with words to our minds. It is the gospel enacted in our entire body. We don’t keep the Sabbath—as the saying goes, the Sabbath keeps us. It is the day on which the unconditional love of God in Jesus Christ becomes the most real and vivid thing to all of our embodied senses. And when we keep the Sabbath every time it comes around, we not only routinely reorder the loves of our hearts and renew the habits of our minds. We also gently rewire the anxious nerves in our bodies. And every seventh day, our limbic systems get the chance to join our minds and our emotions, to taste the delight of God for itself and declare in its own way, “Yes, it is very good.” It is the gospel inscribed in time which our entire selves must pass through weekly, like the parted waters of the Red Sea.
And so as I go off and play during my Sabbath, I like to imagine God the Father quietly going back and fixing all the serious work I did for his kingdom throughout the week, not having the heart to show me all he had to redo. And I see him smiling at every backward shelf and every upside-down door, shaking his head, saying to himself, “Love that guy.”
About the Author
Abraham Cho is City to City’s Vice President for Thought Leadership. With 15 years of experience in urban ministry, history with Redeemer Presbyterian Church in NYC, and leadership within the Asian American community, Abe seeks to advance the church's mission in North America.
He and his wife, Jordyn, have four children—Lydia, Ezra, Micah, and Judah.