Picture it.
The people of God have gathered in mass assembly. The peaks of their countless tents cut like mountain ranges on the horizon. The smoke from the fires of their many encampments rises like omens against the sky. There is a drone from their workaday conversations, from the clank of metal hitting metal, from the laughter of children playing tag, from the mewling of sheep and the clatter of oxcarts, from a distance it is like the roar of an approaching storm. And so it is. The Amorites and Jebusites and Canaanites and Gibeonites are hardly able to put one foot in front of the other for fear. It’s all they think about, all they talk about, all they pray to their gods about. Why plant or harvest, why build or forge, why marry or bear children when this inescapable threat looms close, moves closer?
It’s at this moment God gives the strangest command: “At that time the LORD said to Joshua, ‘Make flint knives and circumcise the Israelites again.’ So Joshua made flint knives and circumcised the Israelites at Gibeath Haaraloth” (Josh. 5:2–3).
It is mostly the young men, the men of fighting age, who undergo circumcision. Israel’s brawny warriors are subjected to this deep wounding.
This is just the kind of opportunity Israel’s enemies were hoping against hope would come their way: to have the entire Hebrew army laid up, limping and groaning, too weak to pick up kindling wood, let alone brandish a broadsword, too damaged to fling a twig, let alone hurl a spear. Israel carried in its collective memory the story of Jacob’s sons, tricksters like their father, who duped the men of Shechem, all fierce warriors, into undergoing circumcision as a kind of bride-price for Jacob’s daughter, Dinah. These men accepted the terms and lined up for circumcision. Then, when their wounds were still raw, Jacob’s sons went into their city and cut the men down like dry grass (see Gen. 34).
Circumcision makes a man childlike. It makes him defenseless. It incapacitates him, reduces him to cowering helplessness. If Israel’s enemies find out this news, that all the soldiers are undone by intimate wounds—and this by the God of Israel’s choice—then who needs an army to turn back the threat? A gang of village boys, packing slingshots and sticks, could waltz in and finish the job.
Why didn’t God give the order for this a month or two back, on the east side of the Jordan, when the Israelites were not in such an exposed condition and before the fear and hatred of the Canaanites were aroused? If this was only about obedience, that would have been a more logical moment to issue the command. Yet God waited until this moment, when the stakes were precariously high. Why?
Because the whole enterprise was about trust. It was an exercise to teach the Israelites, not just obedience, but dependency: to rely utterly on God and not on themselves. It was the equivalent of what God later did with Gideon, stripping his army to a squad, and then stripping them of weapons, all so that none could boast on the day of victory in their own might or cleverness (see Judg. 6–7).
Circumcision is about trust.
And so is Sabbath. Sabbath is turning over to God all those things—our money, our work, our status, our reputations, our plans, our projects—that we’re otherwise tempted to hold tight in our own closed fists, hold on to for dear life. It is allowing God to wound us in an intimate and vulnerable place, to scar us and mark us and make us his own. It is camping circumcised on the plains of Jericho, in striking distance of the enemy. It is letting go, for one day out of seven, all those parts of our identities and abilities in which we are constantly tempted to find our security and discovering afresh that we are his children and that he is our Father and shield and defender.
“And after the whole nation had been circumcised, they remained where they were in camp until they were healed” (Josh. 5:8). Sabbath is camping out in one place long enough for God to wound us and heal us. It is God’s opportunity to demonstrate to us, at the very rim of havoc, on the very outskirts of destruction, his utter trustworthiness. He makes us lie down and prepares a table for us in the presence of our enemies. We learn that here, even here, especially here, his rod and his staff comfort us.
He watches over. You can rest.
G. K. Chesterton told a parable that goes something like this. A young boy was given a choice: he could be gigantic, or he could be minuscule.
He chose to be gigantic.
His head brushed the clouds. He waded the Atlantic like a pond, scooped gray whales into his hand and swished them like tadpoles in the bowl of his palm. He strode in a few bounds from one edge of the continent to the other. He kicked over a range of mountains like an anthill, just because he could and he didn’t feel like stepping over it. He plucked a California redwood and whittled its tip for a toothpick. When he got tired, he stretched out across Nebraska and Ohio, flopped one arm into the Dakotas and the other into Canada, and slept in the grass.
It was magnificent. It was spellbinding. It was exhilarating.
For about a day.
And then it was boring. And the gigantic boy, in his boredom, daydreamed about having made the other choice, to be minuscule. His backyard would have become an Amazonian rain forest. His gerbil would hulk larger than a woolly mammoth, and he could ride the back of a butterfly or go spelunking down wormholes. A tub of ice cream would be a winter playground of magic proportions.
Life would have been so much more interesting had he chosen smallness.
You don’t need to be big enough to kill taskmasters or tear down enemy walls. You just need to trust in the God big enough to remove them.
SABBATH LITURGY:
Relinquishing
The Power of the Powerless is Christopher de Vinck’s story about Oliver, Christopher’s severely mentally and physically handicapped brother. Oliver never spoke a word, never walked a step, never lifted, not once, a spoon to his own lips. His family tended his stick-limbed body like a baby’s—fed and bathed and carried and diapered him—from infancy to his death at age thirty-three. Oliver was mute and helpless, but he was a good teacher. He taught the de Vincks that love is not a fluttering, dizzying emotion, gripping you one day, loosing you the next, but a rock-solid resolve to give yourself, day after day after day, to another.
A few years after Oliver died, Christopher and his son David were planting raspberries together. David saw a beetle scuttling across the earth. Christopher had stopped to talk with a neighbor, and David, five at the time, pointed at the beetle for all to see. There it was, a thing wondrous and strange: amphibian and avian, winged and armored, silently bound to some instinctual duty. Christopher had taught his sons a love of creation. He had taught them to behold God’s handiwork with reverence, to handle it with tenderness. He had taught them how to capture, with cup and paper, housebound wasps, and to release them outdoors, their bodies looping away in open air. He had taught them how, before swooping down a park slide, to gently brush the ants off the mirrored metal of its surface into the grass.
So David was captivated by what he saw.
“Look, Daddy! What’s that?” I stopped talking with my neighbor and looked down.
“A beetle,” I said.
David was impressed and pleased with the discovery of this fancy, colorful creature.
My neighbor lifted his foot and stepped on the insect, giving it an extra twist in the dirt.
“That ought to do it,” he laughed.
David looked up at me, waiting for an explanation, a reason. I did not wish to embarrass my neighbor, but then David turned, picked up the hose, and continued spraying the raspberries.
That night, just before he turned off the lights in his bedroom, David whispered, “I liked that beetle, Daddy.”
“I did too,” I whispered back.1
I used to think the spiritual life was mostly about finding and using our gifts for God’s glory—my utmost for his highest. More and more, I think it is not this, not first, not most. At root, the spiritual life consists in choosing the way of littleness. I become less so that Jesus might become greater. Its essence is No—No to ourselves, our impulses and cravings, our acts of s
elf-promotion and self-vindication, our use of power for its own sake. It calls us to deny ourselves possessions, rights, conquests that we’re tempted to claim just because we can. It is growing, day by day, into the same attitude that Christ had, and by exactly the same means: emptying ourselves, giving ourselves. It is refusing to grasp what we think is owed us and instead embracing what we think is beneath us.
Simply behold, in love and wonder, what you have strength to crush. Exercise power—power you might use otherwise—to serve, bless, protect.
Learn to give and receive.
I have a friend whose son was increasingly unruly and rude to his mother. Whenever the boy stepped over the line, she called in her husband to deal with the child. My friend’s default was to use his strength to force reform. He bellowed, threatened, invoked harsh penalties, demanded acts of restitution. It worked. Sort of. His son grudgingly apologized, sullenly conformed, listlessly obeyed. But inside he was growing hard and bitter.
One day the boy breached all boundaries. The mother called for the father, and up the stairs he took his son, to the room where consequences got doled out. He was, my friend, burning with anger, ready to trounce his son. Ready to crush him.
Halfway up the stairs, he was overcome with another idea. What would love look like now? What shape would servanthood take?He began to pray, desperately. He reached the landing, walked into the room with his son, sat beside him. The boy wore the look he had perfected for these occasions: a face both taut and slack, a mask of impassiveness to conceal a violent seething. Slowly, quietly, my friend started to tell his son about his own fears. He told him about what had paralyzed him almost lifelong, paths he never walked for fear of losing or failing. He told him about how God was working deep things in him, wrenching and healing things, things he oftentimes wanted to flee or quit except that he didn’t want to go back to what was before. He told his son all the things he loved and admired in him, all the ways he believed his son was destined for greatness. He told his son his one repeated prayer for him: that he would surpass him.
The conversation went on a long time. His son’s eyes grew big with wonder and his body limber with relief. He began to ask questions. Then my friend asked his son what he wanted to do. He wanted to apologize to his mother and finish the task over which their argument had erupted.
“Good idea,” my friend said.
And down the stairs his son went, joyful even in repentance.
Do this: think of a situation where you have been tempted toward, and maybe resorted to, the exercise of sheer power.
What would love look like?
What would servanthood?
Ask God to show you, and then do it.
SEVEN
LOSING MY RELIGION:
Stopping Legalism
Last summer I finally made the journey home, back to southern Ontario. Southern Ontario is not my home—I never lived there, and except for two early childhood visits and several recent work-related trips, I’ve spent little time there. But both of my parents grew up in southern Ontario, in a variety of little towns outside Toronto bearing names—Godrich, London, Waterloo, Breslau, Guelph, Lindsay, Lakefield—that echo cities and towns and villages in the homelands of the German, Dutch, and English immigrants who settled here centuries back, who longed to carry a piece of their own pasts with them and tuck it into the streets and buildings of this new place, hoping it would work its way through, rub its scent into this unfamiliar landscape.
Southern Ontario feels like home to me because so much of my personal history is hidden here. See, that slow brown river is where my dad fished, snagging scowling bass from its reedy shallows. And there’s the squat brick house where he grew up, and the upstairs window he crawled out at night to skulk off with his drinking pals. There’s the street on which my uncle got hit by a car and dragged thirty feet, and down which my mother ran screaming, announcing, prematurely it turned out, his death. There’s the bank where my parents met, two tellers snapping crisp bills or smoothing crumpled ones, shyly glancing at each other across the wickets, seeking opportunities to brush one another’s arms and make it seem like clumsiness.
This is home because it’s thick with aunts and uncles and cousins I’ve lived apart from most of my lifetime but whose faces are like looking into mirrors—carnival mirrors that skew you slightly, make your nose thinner or chin longer or forehead wider or ears more crumpled.
It’s odd to meet them now, all these years later. We share bloodlines, wide swaths of genetic material, deep pockets of memory. Many of us have eyes the same shade of green, with the same feline glint. Our voices rise and fall with similar pitch and cadence, and this one’s laugh—a staccato sharpness with a hint of wheeze—mimics that one’s. Our patterns of fretfulness and recklessness and obsessiveness overlap. Many of us like to read the tangled intricacy of maps. We think too much about money and food. We fret about weather, though none of our livelihoods depend on it.
These are people I’ve been missing my whole life, people who complete me and explain me in many ways. These are intimate strangers. I know them, but not by the usual means. I know them by the whisper of heredity, the thickness of tribal memory, quirks of instinct, rumors of shared wounds. There is, at the roots, a deep-down entanglement. There is a shared cache of private folklore that shapes us.
Sabbath is the stranger you’ve always known. It’s the place of homecoming you’ve rarely or never visited, but which you’ve been missing forever. You recognize it the moment you set eyes on it. It’s the gift that surprises you, not by its novelty, but by its familiarity. It’s the song you never sang but, hearing it now, know inside out, its words and melody, its harmonies, its rhythm, the way the tune quickens just before the chorus bursts. It’s been asleep in you all this time, waiting for the right kiss to wake it.
Life is meant to be much different—fuller, richer, deeper, slower—from what it is.
You know this. You’ve always known it.
You’ve just been missing it your whole life.
But Sabbath is elusive. It is hard to grasp, like the shadow of the wind. Pressures in and around us conspire to muddy our remembrance of it, dry up our keeping of it.
It’s like Molvania, that tiny, mountainous, landlocked eastern European country just now emerging from the shadow of Communism. Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner, and Rob Sitch have written the definitive travel guide to this old-world nation of shoe cobblers and goat herders. In fact, they’ve written the only travel guide. An old fur-capped man, scruffy-browed and bleary-eyed, grins gap-toothed from the book’s cover, holding up a glass of garlic brandy, a traditional Molvanian breakfast drink. Behind him stretches a blighted landscape of stony earth and barren trees. Above him looms a wintry sky.
Everything you ever wanted to know about Molvania—its history and geography, its legends and lore, its ethnic groups and dialects, its quirks and taboos—it’s all here. The authors have assiduously researched and compiled, along with maps and charts and photos of historic sites and not-to-be-missed attractions, a wealth of information. Each page has a patchwork of sidebars and insets that are crammed with travel tips and tourist warnings. For instance, on page 85, under the section “Where to Eat?” there’s a photo of several shirtless men, their meaty backs lacquered with sweat, bent over plates of food, gobbling like dogs. The caption: “When dining in certain parts of southern Molvania, it is considered rude to ask for cutlery.” Or flip back to page 78, under the accommodation section, and find this warning: “Due to erratic water pressure, guests at Vajana’s top hotels are advised against using bidets (frekljsqirts). As one recent visitor pointed out, ‘There’s a fine line between personal hygiene and colonic irrigation.’” Every few pages, Philippe, the travel guide’s world-weary explorer, weighs in with a bit of hard-won travel wisdom. A sample:
I was traveling through Svetranj some years ago with a group of friends who suddenly had to leave me. Tired of the usual tourist traps and tacky souvenir shops, I hailed a cab and asked
the driver (in my best Molvanian!) to take me somewhere I could get a real sense of the country’s heart and soul, somewhere I belonged. Two and a half hours up the road he dropped me off in a vast wilderness that I later recognized as the Great Plain. A few days later, when I collapsed from hunger and hypothermia, I realized it was one of the most authentic travel experiences I ever had. Unforgettable!1
Quaint. Charming. Exotic.
The whole thing’s a spoof.
Molvania—“a land untouched by modern dentistry”—doesn’t exist. The authors have gone to elaborate lengths to parody, down to appendices with conversion tables for currency and distances, a serious travel guide. Their mimicry is so note-perfect it takes reading many pages, with increasing double takes, to catch on to the joke.
Everything about Molvania is a hoax.
That’s my fear, writing about Sabbath. The thing has proved so elusive, so mirage-like, we’re beginning to wonder if it really exists, or whether all books about it are works of clever invention, mythologies disguised as histories, travel guides concocted as parodies of the real thing.
There are two main things that do this, make Sabbath an invented country, a place we read about but never get to.
One is busyness. The other is legalism.
Busyness is more our problem now, and I talked about it earlier. But for a long while, legalism was the hound that chased Sabbath, kept it gaunt and haunted. That certainly was the situation Jesus met up with in Galilee and thereabouts: the towns jostled with sticklers for the rules, men who studied every nuance of Sabbath rigmarole, who watched every move Jesus made, who whipped themselves into every shade of purple over his infractions. They made a kind of sport of it, devising sting operations to see if they could get Jesus to do something outlandish and, in their eyes, illicit on the Sabbath. He typically obliged, knowing full well what they were doing.
The Rest of God Page 11
