Sunday, one of God’s best ideas

Nujournal Jan 3, 2019

When I was a kid on the farm, we had cows, pigs, and chickens. The animals didn’t take days off. Neither did my dad and mom, Sylvester and Alyce. A wedding dance or graduation party was the nearest thing to a vacation we had. But there were Sundays.

That meant church, but also a dialing back of work. Chores went on, but field work was to be avoided if possible. If it was summer with its long, relaxed evenings, my parents would load my brother Dean and me into the back seat of the car after late milking. We drove around to look at the crops. That would end with a trip to town and a root beer at Leo Hengel’s Drive-In or a cone at Reuben Schneider’s Dairy Queen.

The World That I Grew Up In is a distant land, living in the shadows of my memory. Some things remain. One of those is Sunday as a day set apart. Other days of the week have given attributes: Monday, back to work; Wednesday, church night; Friday, beginning of the weekend. But Sunday still stands out.

It is the Sabbath or church day. As a Catholic, it is Mass day. But Sunday has other roles: family day, visiting day, a day of rest, even perchance a nap day.

This goes back a long way, a really long way. From the Book of Genesis, “On the seventh day God had completed the work he had been doing. He rested after all the work he had done. God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on that day he rested after all his work of creating.” God deserved a break. I might be tired after a long week of farm work. That’s nothing compared to creating Earth and the firmament.

Then God instructed in the Ten Commandments, “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.” Genesis goes on to say you shall not do any work, or your son, your daughter, your male servant, your female servant, your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates.
Not a lot of us have livestock. Less of us have servants. But God’s admonition remains. It’s clear that the call to rest and worship is important.
Ancient people carved out time in ways that could be measured. The Babylonians quartered the 28-day lunar cycle into weeks. The word “shabbath” is a Hebrew word for rest, and there it is at the beginning of our Judeo-Christian tradition.
I have seen Sunday called the beginning of the week even though I more think of it as the end. The poet Henry Longfellow wrote, “Sunday is the golden clasp that binds together the volume of the week.” It seems right to begin or end my week in church. The rest of the week revolves around it. It is one hour where the busyness is set aside, I am stilled, there is time to reflect. I might or might not pray well, but at least I will shut up. There’s value in that.
Church attendance has declined. Sunday is still a day off work for most. It does not include attending services for as many. I guess I will never know what that feels like. Sunday and church can’t be separated in my 62-year old head.