Hurry the Sabbath, We Need to Sell!
I want to apologize on behalf of church leaders to parents of children who play sports on Sunday mornings. For as long as I’ve been alive, church leaders have blamed the parents of these children for their lack of religious upbringing. These parents should just pull their children out of sports or at least not let them compete or practice on Sunday mornings. This time is for God. And I’m not saying that keeping kids busy all week so no one has time for God isn’t a problem. The problem is that we are blaming the wrong people.
I understand why we do it. As churches diminish in attendance, we get scared. We look around on Sunday mornings in despair, witnessing the decline of the church before our eyes. People are on the soccer field or basketball court, but our young families are becoming less engaged across the country. Maybe we don’t actually know what to blame, so we find the easiest and most apparently responsible scapegoat. Maybe we do know what to blame, but we know there isn’t anything we can do to fix it, so we give up and demand personal responsibility from parents. Either way, it hasn’t fixed the problem. Pastors and other church leaders have been bemoaning this regrettable condition since before I was born. Complaining hasn’t helped, and placing blame on sporty families isn’t fixing it either. The real problem has been around since the time of the Old Testament. We need a better strategy for dealing with it.
Amos 8:5 speaks from the perspective of people who are anxious to get past religious holidays and the Sabbath so that they can sell. Worse than that, they know they are going to cheat and swindle, using false balances and making weights work in their favor. They are interested in making money. They don’t care about the ethics of it. They don’t care about days of rest or holidays. They only care about making money. One can imagine that if the culture didn’t hold the Sabbath in high regard, they would be doing business seven days a week from dawn until dusk. If this doesn’t sound familiar, that’s simply because we’ve grown desensitized to it.
During the pandemic, Walmart decided to change its hours from a full 24-hours to simply the vast majority of a 24-hour period, leaving only the hours of 11 to 6 to clean and restock without customers present. Of course, this still means people are constantly working in the stores. The lights are always on, and of course they don’t take Sundays off for people to be with their families. Families need to shop and Sunday might be the best day to do it, so keeping the stores open every day means more money for Walmart. In fact, there are only two days of the year, when they actually close the store: Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day. They are open for all the summer holidays. Why should workers rest on Labor Day, when you might need some last minute beer or potato chips for a Labor Day picnic? I really think we’ve missed the point of that day, along with Memorial Day and Veterans Day.
Of course, Walmart isn’t the only store that is almost always open. In fact, it would seem strange if they changed, it might even significantly interfere with their ability to be competitive in the market. In a world driven by the market and a market driven by profit, to give up good days to sell is foolishness. We can never stop. As a society, we can rest on Thanksgiving and Christmas, but that is all. Every other day, we must keep working. Individuals may rest and have days off, but we can’t all take a break together. We can’t have a day in which people can just be home with their families and play board games or go to the park. We can’t have a time when families and friends cook food together that they had purchased the day before so that neither grocery stores nor restaurants need to operate. Allowing for that would upset the market, and we can’t have that.
Our world is characterized by restlessness and competition. If a business doesn’t keep getting bigger and better, it will collapse as the market moves on without it and competitors drive it to irrelevancy. The same narrative applies to individuals. If you don’t do well in school, you won’t get a good job and you will end up working minimum wage at a job that doesn't give you Labor Day off. This is the largely uncriticized reality of the world we live in. This is the environment that parents are raising their children in. If kids want to get a sports scholarship to college, they need to be very competitive in high school. If they want to be good enough in high school, they need to be good in middle school. If they want to be good in middle school, they need to start in elementary school. Competition can be friendly. They can create a lot of meaningful connections and learn about the value of tenacity and team work. But the competition never stops. If they want to be good, they must always be getting better, better than who they were the day before and better than the people around them. There is no “good enough” in our society, there is only “better than.” It’s no wonder depression and general anxiety disorder are overwhelmingly prevalent today.
Parents of kids in sports are victims of this as much as anyone else. They are the ones who have to talk their children through the pain and disappointment of feeling not good enough, to which their sense of value is tied in the market-driven world. They are the ones who have to run around to twelve different practices and three different tournaments every week. And frankly, they are the ones who have to choose between church and sports, which may be difficult enough without the social pressures placed on them from both sides. In a world in which the global economy panics every time we take a break, where endless, restless competition is normal and shutting things down to rest is an alternate lifestyle that people write books about, what are a few parents supposed to do?
This isn’t really a problem that individuals can handle, but if the church could come together to agree on one thing and speak with prophetic voice, we could serve the world by reclaiming a theology of rest. God offers us Sabbaths not to deprive us of money making opportunities. God gives us the Sabbath because God knows we need to rest. We need to take time to simply enjoy what we have and be together and share time, love, and experience with each other. God knows that ceaseless labor, no matter how fulfilling, is soul-crushing.
Perhaps it is time for the church to stop blaming people who are unable to rest, unable to get to church on Sundays because they have to work or go to a basketball game. Instead, the church should arise to confront the injustices of our society and the forces at work that drive us to anxiety-inducing competition at all times. We can take a break, and if the market panics and collapses, then we should blame the economy, not the people resting. As much as our system has distributed resources well and raised many out of poverty, we need to acknowledge the flaws, some of which have been around in some form or another since Amos was writing, and confront them directly. There is more to life than money. There is more to us than competition. Christ offers us rest and peace for our souls. It is time to receive that gift and claim what God has given us, hoping that the whole world might have a chance to rest and be at peace.
