Sabbath, Sunday and Discovering the Weekend

By Rodney L. Petersen

Executive Director, Boston Theological Institute

A poll conducted several years ago by the Gallup Organization showed that seventy-nine percent of Americans preferred Sunday to all other days of the week.  It is true; this had little to do with Puritan conceptions of Sabbath practice. Many liked Sunday because it is a day to hibernate, become absorbed in a favorite pastime, do a crossword puzzle, watch a football game – or take that additional job to help pay the bills. 

Many different groups, including the Massachusetts Council of Churches, might wish it were otherwise.  In the face of an individualized and commercialized Sunday, observing diminishing Sunday church attendance seems like watching pools of water evaporate on a hot summer day. Nevertheless, consider some of the things that are enhanced and strengthened by regular public corporate worship on a conventional Sunday.

An understanding of individual and social health, which Christians refer to in its deepest sense as salvation, is strengthened. A recent issue of The Atlantic (July/August 2009) featured articles on “How to Fix the World” – and we must, whether we take our cue from the Hebrew prophets, the Eightfold path of Buddhism or some other more secular source. Jesus talked about the in-breaking of the Kingdom of God – and early churches began the practice of meeting regularly on the day of Jesus’ resurrection to celebrate this. An advantage to this continuing practice is that it gives strength to change ourselves and the world, but acknowledges a greater vision and grace toward its accomplishment – something affirmed by mystics, theologians and politicians through the ages. An added value of the visible and physical practice of Sunday worship as families is that we pass along the vision of faith and hope to the next generation. 

Corporate public worship is a way of affirming the structural reality of the church. Churches are made up of people like you and me. Regular corporate worship acknowledges the existence of the church as a public institution with its own internal logic, organizational structure and practices. The pastoral function of a church includes consolation and support of persons and the community; it is also to acknowledge its own faults through confession toward restoration. For example, in a society prone to conflict the liturgy might be seen as an antidote to violence. Consider the exchange of peace practiced in most churches, to paraphrase from Matthew 5:23-24: be reconciled to your neighbor before legitimate worship can happen. Christians worship one they call the “prince of peace,” still a figure worth emulating when considering the options. Church norms are taken from the lessons of reconciliation found in the Old Testament and letters and writings that became the New Testament. And the point of the service is the repair the world (Matthew 25:34-46).

The existence of a public and corporate entity in society that draws together in regular public worship reminds us that persons and societies are held to values greater than themselves. This point recognizes the integrity of a prophetic role in society. This is not to say that churches or other religious bodies have always been on the cutting edge of social truth or have the corner on the market of social criticism. It does say that in ministerial preparation and practice these are norms to be emulated and fostered. It acknowledges the importance of such a prophetic voice in the dialectic of debate and controversy. This separate and prophetic role has often been taken up by colleges and universities, but we cannot forget its origin in the vision and practice of religious communities.

To go back to that Gallup poll: My hunch is that if we lose the religious basis for the weekend, long grounded in Jewish and Christian Sabbath practices, we will soon lose the weekend (and the favorite pastimes, crossword puzzles, football games, etc.), something intimated by Karl Barth in the Church Dogmatics (III, pt 4, 53) – and something that is clearly happening under the social and economic pressures of the times. To cite historian Alexis McCrossen, “It may be that the solution lays not simply in refashioning Sunday.  Nor does it lay in refashioning Americans…. Rather, it lays in remaking the United States of America so that both its citizens and its Sundays can escape the limitations of selfish individualism and market capitalism.” (See “‘That Sunday Feeling’:  Sundays in the United States,” in Sunday, Sabbath and the Weekend; Managing Time in a Global Culture, edited by Edward O’Flaherty, S. J. and Rodney L. Petersen with Timothy Norton [2009]). It lays also in a theological recovery of vision that sees the church as central to and supportive of an innate human impulse to heal and to restore, something Elizabeth Spelman refers to as homo reparans.