FTER YEARS OF NEGLECT, SABBATHKEEPING is back in town. It certainly hit main street America when former U.S. vice president Al Gore selected an Orthodox Sabbathkeeping Jew as his running mate for the 2000 elections. But the current passion for keeping a sabbath isn�t only Jewish. You�ll find the sabbath-for-everyone craze anywhere�from the pages of mainstream Christian magazines to the secular shelves of Barnes and Noble.

Of course, for centuries Jews have revered the seventh-day Sabbath, and for many years after Jesus� death Christians also observed His example of keeping that day special. But most Christians eventually switched to Sunday. That practice has continued�with varying degrees of enthusiasm�through the centuries.

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Some have kept Sunday as Orthodox Jews keep their seventh-day Sabbath, prohibiting work or business of any kind. Others have kept it merely as a token, and for most today it holds few religious demands beyond taking the kids to Sunday school and attending church. It�s also a day for shopping, watching football, or taking the family to the movies. The original sense of the seventh-day Sabbath�keeping a God-ordained special day of rest�has largely been lost.

A New Wave
And yet a recent bounty of books and articles shows that Sabbath-keeping has made a comeback as an ancient antidote to modern stress. In the past two years titles have included the following: Sabbath: Restoring the Sacred Rhythm of Rest; Celebrating the Sabbath: Finding Rest in a Restless World; Catch Your Breath: God�s Invitation to Sabbath Rest; Sabbath Keeping; and A Day of Rest: Creating a Spiritual Space in Your Work.

Earlier this year Christianity Today ran an article entitled �Receiving the Day the Lord Has Made: A Day of Rest Is God�s Gift to Us.� This piece, ex-cerpted from a new book by Dorothy Bass, details her rediscovery of Sabbath-keeping. Bass tells of a Saturday even-ing when she and a few teacher friends sat around a dinner table, bemoaning the piles of papers that needed grading the following day:

�That�s when it hit me. �Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy.� This was a commandment, one of the ten laws in the basic moral code of Christianity, Judaism, and Western civilization, and here we were, hatching plans to violate it. I could not imagine this group sitting around saying, �I�m planning to take God�s name in vain�; �I�m planning to commit adultery�; �I think I�ll steal something.��¹

While Bass doesn�t specifically advocate the seventh-day Sabbath, she assumes that Christians should keep the fourth commandment. This is further than many Christians are prepared to go. Martha Hickman, for example, writes in her book A Day of Rest:� �Seventh Day Baptists and Seventh-day Adventists have considered the commandment to observe the Sabbath as the holy day binding. Most churches take this commandment to be not a moral law but as part of the ceremonial rite of the Jews.�² And yet, Hickman says, �a few moments of reflection, and most of us would readily agree that we are hungry and thirsty for the breather, the profound calm, the sense of being in touch with our deepest reality, that the Sabbath offers.�³

This new wave of sabbath literature claims that the modern world has cheated itself of a rich and important heritage. �We have not obeyed God�s commandment, we have not conformed our schedules to this fourth, most basic, rhythm of time, and the consequences have been serious,� writes Bonnie Thurston.⁴

Lauren Winner, formerly an orthodox Jew, laments losing the Sabbath when she became a Christian. She writes:

�I do not regularly feel the absence of the Jewish dietary laws, say, or the proscriptions about wearing certain kinds of fabric. But I yearn, in my Christian incarnation, for the rigor of the Jewish Sabbath, a day truly set apart from the other six days of the week. To many non-Orthodox onlookers, the Jewish Sabbath appears uninviting, merely a long list of� �thou shalt nots.� But the Sabbath for Jews is far more than a bunch of restrictions.�⁵

Is Monday Just as Good?
All these works promote keeping a sabbath, but they assume that the specific seventh-day Sabbath isn�t important. �Monday can be God�s day as well as Sunday,� writes Donna Schaper. �It is a question of perspective.�⁶ �Christians may not need to return to the observance of the seventh day of the week as the Sabbath,� adds Thurston. �But the concept of Sabbath, its origin and intention, needs to be reclaimed by all people, for our own good.�⁷

Wayne Muller goes even further in saying that not only can your sabbath be either Saturday or Sunday, it could be just an afternoon, or even an hour��anything that preserves a visceral experience of life-giving nourishment and rest.�⁸

Winner, however, cautions against a too-casual treatment of Sabbath-keeping: �It is becoming increasingly fashionable for Christians to talk about renewing their Sabbath observance, and this trend is surely for the good. However, many Christians�and some non-Christians�toss around �Sabbath� as a synonym for �time off.� So a trip to Tahiti might be a Sabbath, or a bubble bath, or a weekend when the kids are staying with the grandparents. But although the Sabbath is intended to refresh, refreshment alone does not constitute Sabbath observance.�⁹

Hickman at least raises the possibility that there may be something special about an actual Sabbath day. �Something of the specialness of the Jewish Sabbath adheres to its contiguous day, Sunday,� she writes. �Would it �work� as well if Tuesday, say, were the holy day for Christians? We are too formed by our habit of observing Sunday as �the Lord�s Day� to know, but somehow it seems unlikely.�¹⁰

Is it really so foolish to think that God meant us to keep holy a specific length of time�the seventh-day Sabbath? Is it just ritual and habit that has led Ortho-dox Jews through the centuries to tenaciously cling to the actual seventh day of the week? Or have they understood something important and specific about God�s commandment to keep the seventh day?

There�s plenty of biblical support for the concept of seventh-day-Sabbathkeeping, and that the particular day is important�specifically chosen by God for us to keep, and not just one day in seven. Is it possible that when the Bible says God made the seventh day special and blessed it, He actually did make the seventh day special, and bless it?

It Does Matter
In our postmodern world it�s increasingly acceptable to �construct your own truth� on any number of issues. If something works for you, then that�s fine (just don�t prescribe it for everyone else). The tenor of most of these new writings leans in the direction of Sabbathkeeping by convenience�design a form of Sabbath-keeping around your own schedule into something that works for you.

But the historical, biblical, seventh-day Sabbath has always been a specific practice, on a specific day, for a specific purpose. The Bible claims that the seventh day is something God has ordained Himself, and that it does matter when and how we keep it.

Chris Blake�s book Searching for a God to Love, published this year by mainstream Christian publisher Word and distributed to Christian and secular bookstores throughout North America, recommends seventh-day-Sabbath keeping. �To commemorate His creation, God hallows�sets aside for a particular purpose�the seventh day,� writes Blake. �Followers of Judaism still honor the Sabbath as Joseph, Jesus, and Paul of Tarsus kept it. Why don�t most Christians keep this Sabbath?�¹¹ Blake, a Seventh-day Adventist, points out that the change to Sunday worship came about gradually in the second-century Roman church. �In recent years millions of people have discovered the beauty of the Sabbath,� he adds. �In place of nonstop sprinting, Sabbath provides a calm place, a warm place, a wise place. A time for all time, just in time.�¹²

Writing recently in the Los Altos, California, Town Crier, Joan Passarelli shares a variation on Blake�s call for seventh-day Sabbath keeping.¹³ Although she and her family continue to attend church on Sunday, they have discovered the benefit of keeping the seventh day as their Sabbath. �Sunday is not the Sabbath,� she says. �As the Jews and the Seventh-day Adventists remember, it�s Saturday that is the seventh day of the week, the day God rested, and the day we should, too. I propose that we reclaim Saturday as the Sabbath, and give ourselves the gift of freedom on that day.�

In the West we live at a time when people are hungrily chasing �spirituality��generic, nonstructured religion. New Age books sell in the millions, self-help gurus pack convention halls, and people search for more than just a nicer house and a bigger bank account.

The recent rallying call to look again at Sabbathkeeping is an exciting first step in rediscovering the seventh-day Sabbath, which is an essential and practical part of God�s original plan for our spiritual health. But that first step is not quite enough. It�s a bit like holding Thanksgiving in January, all by yourself. The food might be nice, but it just wouldn�t be the same.

Even people who never go to church or a synagogue are discovering the benefits of a sabbath rest each week, because Sabbathkeeping makes a lot of sense even at just the physical and emotional levels. But like a January-bound, lonely Thanksgiving, it can, and should, mean a whole lot more.

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¹ Dorothy Bass, �Receiving the Day the Lord Has Made: A Day of Rest Is God�s Gift to Us,� Christianity Today, Mar. 6, 2000, p. 63.
² Martha Hickman, A Day of Rest: Creating a Spiritual Space in Your Week (New York: Avon Books, 1999), p. 14.
³ Ibid., p. 37.
⁴ Bonnie Thurston, To Everything a Season: A Spirituality of Time (New York: Crossroad Pub. Co., 1999), p. 69.
⁵ Lauren F. Winner, �Sabbath and Strangers: Restoring Christian Practices,� Books & Culture, a Christian Review, March/April 2000, p. 17.
⁶ Donna Schaper, Sabbath Keeping (Boston: Cowley Publications, 1999), p. 7.
⁷ Thurston, p. 73.
⁸ Ibid., p. 8.
⁹ Winner, p. 17.
¹⁰ Hickman, p. 14.
¹¹ Chris Blake, Searching for a God to Love (Nashville: Word Publishing, 2000), p. 199.
¹² Ibid., p. 195.
¹³ Joan Passarelli, �Give Yourselves a Holy Rest and Reclaim Saturday as the Sabbath,� in Los Altos, California, Town Crier, Nov. 1, 2000.

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Gary Krause is the communication director for Global Mission at the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists in Silver Spring, Maryland.