Ayoung, music student recalls: “Miss Belknap was my music teacher, and in me she had a pupil with neither eye nor ear for music. I’ll not forget the day she tried to explain to me what a musical rest was.
“This long dash,” she said, indicates a full measure of silence, and this shorter one is a half-measure. Do you understand all this?”
“Yes,” I replied, “a rest is anything from a sixty-fourth to a full measure of nothing.”
“Well, not exactly,” she said, “A rest is not nothing. I mean, it is something, just as silence is not nothing. Right?”
I looked as Miss Belknap blankly as she launched into a long lecture about how the rest was a rhythmic silence that the composer in his genius had placed there as part of the grand design of his work, and though the rest might seem like repose, it was really very busily working both for the composition and for the musician playing it.
I never learned to read music; but Miss Belknap was right. A rest is not nothing. It is part of God’s grand design both for himself and for us. He gave us a full measure of it called the Sabbath.
Dr. Marva Dawn, a teacher of Spiritual Theology at Regent College, Vancouver, tells us: “ Especially worship sets us apart from the surrounding culture as a people who rest in the fullness of God’s grace.”
She goes on to explain that one of the highlights of the Sabbath for the Jews is feasting. She says “feasting auditorily” is a compelling part of worship and the “rest” of our Sabbath days. In worship we feast on a diversity of music; we feast on contemplative silence, as during the prelude and silent prayer; we feast on the spoken word of God—Scripture. We feast on its interpretation and application— the sermon. We feast on the hymns with which we praise God. This feasting is the space between our busy days. This space is one of the ways we most experience God.
Elizabeth Sherrill shares an old family story as she remembered as she was driving to the supermarket one Sunday. Grandfather was a teacher in a small, west Texas town. Grandmother had been one of his students: All their married life she continued to call him “Mr. Sherrill.”
One June morning Grandfather rose early to work in the vegetable garden that helped feed their five children. He’d weeded a row of beans and was working in the lettuce bed when the bedroom shutters flew open.
“Mr. Sherrill!” came his wife’s reproachful voice. “It is the Sabbath!”
Horror-struck, Grandfather straightened up. In his haste to get started before the Texas sun rose high, he’d forgotten the day of the week. He let the hoe drop from his hand. And there it lay, all that summer, as the weeds grew up around it and the lettuce wilted and the beans shriveled and died. Family meals were skimpier that Fall without the garden produce, but Grandfather would take no benefit that he had gained, however momentarily, in violation of the Lord’s commandments.
Rigid? Legalistic? Maybe. But his five children grew up with reverence for the Sabbath. Elizabeth concludes: “I stopped the car and ran my eyes down the grocery list. Nothing on it we couldn’t get along without…until Monday.”
Are persons free to establish their own approach to the Sabbath? Yes: God has given everyone perfect freedom. But those who give God and Christ only slight acknowledgment on the day of holiness should reconsider whether Jesus is Lord for them.
- Log in or Subscribe to post comments.