Scripture for the Week:
For six years you are to sow your fields and harvest the crops, but during the seventh year let the land lie unplowed and unused. Then the poor among your people may get food from it, and the wild animals may eat what they leave.
Do the same with your vineyard and your olive grove.
Six days do your work, but on the seventh day do not work, so that your ox and your donkey may rest and the slave born in your household, and the alien as well, may be refreshed. – Exodus 23:10-12
Reflection – Mark Lingle
Sabbath and the Land
The north forty just outside of our house in northern Minnesota teemed with crops from summer to summer. Corn, oats, barley, and alfalfa respectively filled the barbed-wire-fenced-in forty. Early in the season the rolling plot of land looked like a sea of green, blades breaking through soil seeking the sun’s light. Come September, the grains created an amber wave over the field, and come October, the field became a veritable Halloween patch of tassled and curled corn stalks.
Every year something sprouted from the rich loam soil and grew before our very eyes. Every year, that is, except for the seventh year. That year the field would lie fallow. Rest. Stop producing. The land would put its feet up, as it were, and kick back for a summer of nothing-to-do-but-just-lie-there. Nothing happened. Nothing.
But we also know that Everything happened. Everything.
Because the next year, the field would put forth a bunker crop, rested and enriched as it was.
The author of Exodus 23:10-12 was millennia ahead of her time. She understood the need for rest, and not just humans resting. All of creation was to rest at some point (in Exodus, the counsel was the Sabbath year, the seventh year). Farmers have long since taken this counsel to heart. Hard-working and hearty as they may be, they recognize the importance of rest and will gladly give it to the land before they take it for themselves. To live this close to the land, to recognize the fragility of the earth, to see the salutary salutation in slowing down—in stopping, offers a tiny window into the heart of our being.
Sabbath, you see, is not counsel for getting ahead or completing the various habits of highly effective people. Sabbath is grace. For when we stop, we recognize all that exists outside of our control, we see how vast is the universe and the inter-connections that create and sustain life, and we pause long enough to glimpse how good it feels not to have to do anything. And that is the heart of grace: everything is already done. All the lists, all the agendas, all the planning, all the mental gymnastics to make everything “fit” ultimately are second order activities. The first order activity—God engaging the world in love—is the primary order. In the grace of Sabbath, the fields of heart and our mind and our spirit are rested and enriched, and we, hopefully, develop a practice that prepares us for the fullness of grace to be expressed in life. Indeed, Sabbath is practice for the rest we will one day share with—and in—the north forty.
