Today, I come with Sabbath ideas for your celebration of life (or the 24-hour period you will take it this week). The following are some Sabbath ideas from deep historical thinkers and practitioners on the topic (Abraham Joshua Heschel, Marva Dawn, Wayne Muller, Ruth Haley Barton, and many others), to enhance it and make it more what it was designed to be—transformative—in your life.
First, a few principles to contextualize the Sabbath ideas I suggest:
The practice of Sabbath is a weekly invitation to more, not less. It is an invitation to more of the essential, more of the eternal, more of the glory threading through it all.
Sabbath is a day of feasting, and is considered a feast—on faith, on hope, on joy—to enter into the sacred creational delights for which we were designed. The only acts we are to cease from are those which perpetuate our self-sufficiency, self-dependence, self-absorption, and self-deification.
In honoring a weekly Sabbath, we restore our awareness of what must be true in our lives in order for joy to abound. In a constant mode of acquisition and achievement, creation and compensation, we dull our sense of time—its passing, its sanctity, its gifts.
The Sabbath is the ritual culmination of each week in celebration of God’s Love, enduring purposes, and sovereignty over our time. It is a day to feast in recognition of eternity-in-time (Heschel), and to celebrate the New Creation Christ brings and is bringing.