24/7

 This week's verses are Jeremiah 17:19-22:

 The Lord told me, “Go and stand in the People’s Gate through which the kings of Judah enter and leave the city. Then go and stand in all the other gates of the city of Jerusalem. And then announce to them, ‘Listen to the Lord’s message, you kings of Judah, and everyone from Judah, and all you citizens of Jerusalem, those who pass through these gates. The Lord says, Be very careful if you value your lives! Do not carry any loads in through the gates of Jerusalem on the Sabbath day. Do not carry any loads out of your houses or do any work on the Sabbath day. But observe the Sabbath day as a day set apart to the Lord, as I commanded your ancestors.

 These verses come after Jeremiah pleaded with God to defend him and vindicate him. He asks God for relief from persecution and suffering and for the people to be afflicted finally for all the things God said he would punish them with. And God's response is to tell him to go do some street preaching about the Sabbath.

It's almost surreal. He asks for freedom from persecution but he is sent out to provoke even the king. And the thing he is sent out to preach isn't the usual street preacher tirade on sexual immorality and drunkenness but the Sabbath.

Who preaches fire and brimstone about the Sabbath?? It's probably the most harmless of the ten commandments. Breaking it doesn't even hurt anyone but ourselves. Even Jesus weighs in later and says the Sabbath was made for mankind. But here Jeremiah is sent out to confront passers-by like some teenager riled up about climate change.

But what Jeremiah preaches is the truth. God did command us to set aside one day a week for rest and simplicity. And not doing so will destroy us.

The same way we need sleep at night for the body to repair itself and for the brain to organize the random bag of experiences it dragged home the day before, we need the Sabbath day to reflect on the goodness of God and organize and repair ourselves spiritually.

If we go 7/7 we will burn ourselves out. If we simply repurpose the day to go shopping and watch movies, we will miss the centrality of God in creation and try and fail to be that center ourselves. Maybe the reason the condemned people of Judah had fallen into sin was that they no longer had that weekly reset and reality check.

So it deserves some thinking. Do we ourselves take the Sabbath as seriously as God would have had Jeremiah tell the people of Jerusalem to take it? Do we see it as a "do this if you want to live" kind of thing?

And what does it say about a God who, when asked to finally pull the trigger on the punishment his people so richly deserved, instead was like "Let's give them one more chance to get back to basics and return to me. Let's pick the easiest, most straightforward  thing, the clear thing that unambiguously benefits them and them alone."  It's a ridiculous amount of love and patience.

So reflect on it from the perspective of these condemned people. Imagine you were headed to the mall on a Sunday to pick up a few things, or cracked open the laptop to finish up a bit of work before the new week began, and a street preacher was preaching what Jeremiah was preaching in these verses. Would you take it in love, realizing that God was calling you to glorify him in self-care? Would you start to take a Sabbath? Or would you brush by and dismiss it as irrelevant craziness?

 If you value your life, you will give God the space to speak and accept that you need rest.