playing heaven

I was glancing through a back-issue of Vocatio yesterday and noticed this article about sabbath-keeping (sabbath being a day of rest, not necessarily Saturday) by R. Paul Stevens (Winter 2003 edition of Vocatio – a publication of Regent College, Vancouver). Here are some bits:

The kind of God we actually worship is revealed by whether we keep sabbath.

Being sabbath’s lord did not mean Jesus could break it at will; rather it means that the Lord fulfilled sabbath’s meaning and intent.

[...] First and foremost sabbath is the redemption of time .... time is being recovered as a gift from God rather than a resource to be managed... (quoting Rabbi Abraham Heschel) “There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord.”

[...] Sabbath is humankind playing heaven....When we “play” heaven – by co-creating with God, by delighting in creation, by making things fit a heavenly model and by worshiping – we anticipate the joys of being full “grown-up” men and women in Christ in heaven (where we truly become children again!).

[...] Some form of weekly or regular sabbath is not an optional extra for the New Testament Christian.... If we cannot put our work down and truly rest, we are probably taking ourselves too seriously. And probably we are not taking God seriously enough. Truly we do not “keep” sabbath but sabbath “keeps us,” keeps us focused on the really real, on God’s purpose, on God’s priorities for our lives and on God himself.

The article is an excerpt from a book: The Complete Book of Everyday Christianity by Robert Banks and R. Paul Stevens.

Photo: Ward's Marina at the Stewart Farmhouse - Surrey, BC.