Parables and Procrastination

To my subscribers, contributors and faithful friends,

I am here to apologize for the dormant-like status that RE-creative is in right now.

Recently I’ve been working on my marathon training (DREAM FOR THREE with ME!- http://twv.convio.net/site/TR/TeamWorldVision/General?px=1009461&pg=personal&fr_id=1080), spending time with my wife when work permits and doing some other writing.

Over the last few weeks I led the Parables of Jesus study at Mountain View Lutheran Church. Pastor Bob Stockman and Pastor Mark Friedrich also taught some parables, while I took on the rest.

Although I am nearing the completion of Chapter 4: Striving After Wind (13 pages in) and finished the editing of Chapter 3, for now I invite you to enjoy the parable studies I wrote. I am writing two more and when I am done with them I will post them up on the site. For now, here are some links to the studies:

The Cost of Discipleship (Luke 9:57-62)

An Adventure in Missing the Point (Luke 10: 25-37)

God Isn’t Angry (Luke 18:9-14)

The Process of Writing…

…is wonderful

challenging

depressing

overwhelming

daunting

exhilirating

and of course, re-creative. *wink*

Rob Bell, in his new book/tour Drops Like Stars, discusses the endless connections between suffering and creativity. Great, for all those authors out there who thought this was going to be easy, think again! It’s interesting, but so often I don’t think of writing as a difficult process or something that necessitates suffering in order to bring about the creativity needed to craft a book, devotion or other piece.

Yet, the process that is the RE-creative project isn’t easy.

I struggle all the time with getting the right words out on paper, dealing with the overwhelming number of possible directions the book could go, organizing the different pieces that pop into my head, reading other people’s work on the topic (there is…A LOT), hitting self-imposed but promised-to-others deadlines etc.

The inspiration comes in bits and pieces and there are some wonderful moments of “a-ha!” or times when I get things done on-time and in good order.

However, there are a lot of other times where I am re-organizing, deleting, re-writing, re-reading, re-organizing and deleting and then staring at the computer screen without an ounce of creative writing within me…or if it is there I don’t have a way to bring it out.

This week I am re-organizing the book again. Now, the introduction will be Chapter 1, Chapter 1 will be Chapter 2 and Chapter 2 will be Chapter 3. Thus, the up-coming Chapter 3 will actually be Chapter 4 (out of 6 or 7). I did decide on what Chapter 4 will be about (kind of) and how Chapter 5 will flow. Furthermore, I started a rough sketch of Chapter 6. There may be a Chapter 7…we will see.

Thanks to everyone who supported me along the way so far. It’s been a great process! It is really fantastic having such a transparent process that can be shared and collaborated on by so many others in so many corners of the world. You are all great friends and the acknowledgements are going to be out of control!

Thanks, and hopefully I will be posting Chapter 4: Striving After Wind (formerly Chapter 3) in the coming weeks.

Shalom.

-Ken

P.S. Check out the Ubuntu blog http://ubuntuspirit.wordpress.com to read up about my (our) “Dream for Three” initiative. Peace.

Watch This Space

Today is Tuesday, so I should be working on the RE-creative project. However, I decided to re-arrange my week. In place of working on chapters today I did some work at Mountain View and went on an awesome trail run, grabbed some frozen yoghurt with my wife and did some other work that needed to get done (including seminary applications).

Thursday will be when I post the Chapter 2 edit and hopefully get Chapter 3’s draft up.

In the meantime, check out http://ubuntuspirit.wordpress.com for links to some PDF copies of two new Bible studies that I wrote the last fortnight on some of Jesus’ parables in Luke.

Peace.

See you Thursday.

Watch this space.

Russian Search Engines and 1,500 Page Views

Hello all!

I just wanted to say thank you for the interest that is coming in from all of you. I get e-mails, texts, comments, Facebook posts and tweets all the time about the RE-creative project.

It is very encouraging.

One of the best parts is the international following that RE-creative has.

There are people following this blog in America, Israel, South Africa, Hungary, New Zealand, Swaziland, Canada…and today someone found the site through a Russian search engine called yanzev.com or something like that.

That’s crazy.

That’s wonderful.

It was weird to see the blogsite come up as #2 on the search after entering in “recreative.”

I am here to encourage you to invite more friends to the RE-creative site and get them caught up on what’s come together so far. After I am done with Chapter Three (which I am hoping to have done within the fortnight) I am going to post the introduction with chapters 1-3 in PDF format on the internet. That means people can get connected, comment on what’s already put out and get going for the last four installments.

So, ramping up to the Chapter Three release let’s get 1,500 page views by the end of the week (Saturday January 9th by midnight).

If we can get 1,500 page views by then maybe I will be inspired to finish editing Chapter 2 and finish the draft of Chapter 3 by Tuesday.

Here’s a preview of Chapter 3 entitled, “Striving After Wind”

Re-creation is more than recreation.

Re-creation is a grand restoration of being.

It is a process of reformation.

Reformation of the chaotic mess of our existence.

It is restoration.

It is re-creating the beginning.

But…that begs some questions.

Where do we come from?

Were we created at all?

If so, why do we need re-creating?

Where is this re-creation taking us?

How do we get there?

Thanks again for all the prayer, encouragement, comments, dialogue and general support.

Shabbat shalom.

-Ken

RE-Creation Resources

After a little “holiday hiatus” I am back and at work on RE-creation.

Currently I am in the midst of Chapters 3 and 4 and am starting the editing work on Chapter 2.

Chapters 3 and 4 are going to build on the first two chapters and finally come to a distinct point on the Sabbath, the RE-creative life and way of Jesus.

Chapter 3 will do a little more leading and then in Chapter 4 the narrative of the book/the theme will build to its crescendo.

The punch line is in Chapter 4 folks and the resolution is in Chapters 5-7.

Over the past few months I’ve done a bit of reading on the Sabbath. It’s been rather enjoyable to read so many perspectives, hear so many stories and receive so much insight. Amongst all the good apples have been a few, well, not rotten ones, but nothing I’d want to put into your intellectual mouths. So, here is a list of a few RE-creative resources that you might enjoy (of course, by recommending these works it does not mean that I agree with all the points that the author states):

The Sabbath by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel – Harper Collins (1951) THE classic on Sabbath from a Jewish perspective. This guy opened people’s eyes to sacred space, a sacred calendar and having heaven on earth. He is closer to the point of Sabbath than many people realize or are willing to admit.

Keeping the Sabbath Wholly: Ceasing, Resting, Embracing, Feasting by Marva J. Dawn – Wm. B. Eerdmans (1989). This lady was writing beautifully on the practice of the Sabbath when I was but five years old. Show some respect. Marva Dawn is one of the most gifted Christian writers of our age and her words on the Sabbath are worth their weight in tithes at a mega-church. Check it out!

The Sabbath: Ancient Practices by Dan Allender – Thomas Nelson (2009). I particularly enjoy Allender’s take on menuha, the Hebrew word for rest. You will see me reference him in the book in chapters 3 and 5. Note: This book is part of a new and wonderful series put out by Thomas Nelson.

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The Sacred Way (chapter on Sabbath) by Tony Jones – Zondervan (2006). Tony is emerging as a writer with immense knowledge and understanding of practicality when it comes to spiritual issues. The Sacred Way is a great book for exploring spiritual disciplines and his chapter on the Sabbath, although simple, is a great primer.

Sabbath Keeping: Finding Freedom in the Rhythm of Rest by Lynne Baab – Intervarsity Press (2005). To be honest I’ve not read this one yet, but I saw it on the bookshelf at a local Christian book store and flipped through it. It is recommended by John Ortberg and Laura Winner (author of Mudhouse Sabbath, another recommended read that I perused one afternoon in a book store).

Yearnings (chapter on Sabbath) by Rabbi Irwin Kula – Hyperion (2006) This is Oprah’s understanding of the Sabbath (and Jewish spirituality for that matter). Taker her or leave her Oprah as left her mark on the contemporary cultural conscious and her nod to Irwin Kula and his book Yearnings is something worth noting. This is Sabbath as self-help.

Until next time. Peace in Christ. Be RE-creative.

Shalom.

-Ken

Ramblings

This Tuesday I feel like I need a Sabbath.

My eyes are red, they sting and there is that slight dull pain throbbing behind them luring me to take a nap.

Yesterday was nuts. It was full on. It was a typical day in America. Or for that matter in a lot of places across the world.

Today I am working. Studying for the GRE, finishing up some devotions for submission to Portals of Prayer, taking the dog to get her E-Collar off (finally), dropping the recycling off and changing the oil.

To say the least it isn’t a Sabbath.

Yet, I know by the end of the day I will feel good.

Why?

Because I am doing work and getting things done. Checking off stuff from the “TO DO” list and that feels good, particularly at this time of year (and by that I don’t mean ‘Advent’ I mean the ’secular Christmas season’ which are two totally juxtaposed epochs).

Now, another “why?”

Why am I posting this on the site? Do you really care about my day?

Maybe.

Maybe not.

Probably not

The reason I am letting you know is that today is not a work day for the RE-creative project. Instead, I am devoting my creativity to the Portals of Prayer submissions (which, btw, if they don’t get selected I will probably post on here or Ubuntu). Then, next week I will be cramming for the GRE and then chilling out with family and friends for Christmas. That means I won’t have a new chapter up until after Christmas and potentially until after the New Year.

So, thank you for dedication to the project and thanks for the recent comments. I always enjoy them!

In the meantime enjoy some of the links below, check out Ubuntu and rest in peace this Advent season knowing that Immanuel, God with us, came to us and restored salvation to us. May we the redeemed rejoice in his restoration!

Peace. Paz. Ukuthula. Eirene.

-Ken

LINKS:

Drops Like Stars - the connections between suffering and creativity.

I’m going to Phoenix’s event. Will you join me?
https://www.robbell.com/dropslikestars/

WINTER IS ON MY HEAD
I’ve done work with the OC Rescue Mission before and I love the music that Tim produced and that my friends Sarah, Matt, Blake, Anthony etc. put together. Great stuff and good cause.

http://www.winterisonmyhead.com/

The Advent Conspiracy. Why the conspiracy? Check it out.

http://www.adventconspiracy.org/

Dude, this kid. Awesome.

Chapter 2: “The more he improved his surroundings…”

In ultra-draft form, here is chapter two for your reading enjoyment and to elicit your feedback. Read it, think about it, engage with it and get back to me with your thoughts, your critiques, your editing, your additions and your inspiration. Thanks for the dialogue!

Chap•ter 2:
The more he improved his surroundings…

It’s Monday.

Monday means we go to work.

Wednesday is hump day.

Thank God it’s Friday.

Everybody is waiting for the weekend.

The weekend comes and we turn on the television and turn off our brains. We spend too much money, drink too much booze and then sing the Monday morning blues.

Repeat.

For the most part we are comfortable with the way things are. We aren’t going anywhere.

Most of us do not regularly think about where we come from or where we are going or what we are doing…

…right here

…right now

…with this moment.

But we should. But we don’t. And so we are stuck right where we are.

East of Eden.

It’s Monday. It’s Tuesday. It’s Wednesday. It’s Sunday.

In all its busyness life is sometimes hard to catch up with. The hours slip past us at an almost unbearable speed. And when it gets to be too much we schedule a vacation just to stay alive.

I was getting coffee with a friend the other day. As we both opened up our planners to look to another time to meet I could not help but look at her daily diary. I mean, it was filled, to the brim. 9am, 10am, 11am, 12pm and so on, every day of every week. Jam packed with things to do, places to be and of course, people to see. Not only that, but stuffed between the pages were sheets of papers with to-do lists, business cards, scribbled notes and event flyers. She caught my glance and said the words, “organized chaos.”

How many of our lives are like that? How many of us are just on the edge of a breakdown because of all the things that we have to get done? How many of us need a vacation?

I would venture to say that most of us would agree that a little break would not only be nice, but necessary given our daily, weekly and monthly schedules.

Ever since Adam and Eve left the garden (1), humanity suffers with the effects of the fall. We yearn for what we cannot have and from the sweat of our brow we toil under the sun to provide for ourselves and the people around us.

It seems however, that humanity slowly but surely progressed in terms of work. At first we were hunter-gatherers or simple herds people and farmers. Then we moved beyond subsistence and began to store away food for the future.(2)

Yet we weren’t happy with having enough for today and tomorrow. We decided we wanted more. So we kept working. We worked to get more land, more houses for that land and more land for more houses. We figured out ways to make work more efficient.

Our history books mark these epochs in human history when work got easier.

The Stone Age.

The Bronze Age.

The Iron Age.

The Age of Exploration.

The Industrial Age.

The Automobile Age.

The Internet Age.

Human history is demarcated with eras that score inventions and developments that enable civilization to do more and more efficient work in order to have more at their fingertips for recreation, what humans do when we aren’t working.

At any given stage of human history you can bet that there is a feeling that it cannot get any better than this. That we are so far ahead of where we were 200 or 2,000 years ago.

But is that really the case?

Are we moving forward, or are we, like Adam and Eve before us, just going further and further back in time?

Are we moving forward or are we just moving further East of Eden?

There is this quirky movie that I really enjoy entitled “The Gods Must Be Crazy.” (3) The premise is that a Coke bottle is dropped from the sky over the Kalahari Desert in Southern Africa. It lands among the San people who still live separate from modern 20th century civilization. The rest of the movie follows Xi, a San person, as he interacts with modern civilization and attempts to discard this Coke bottle that has brought such confusion and chaos to his tribe. One of my favorite parts of this very insightful, if ridiculous, movie is when, after sharing the simplicity of the San people the narrator changes gears and the picture focuses on Johannesburg, South Africa where:

Only 600 miles to the south, there’s a vast city. And here you find civilized man. Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment; instead, he adapted his environment to suit him. So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery, and he put up power lines to run his labour-saving devices. But somehow he didn’t know where to stop. The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier, the more complicated he made it. So now his children are sentenced to 10-15 years of school, just to learn how to survive in this complex and hazardous habitat they were born into. And civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings, now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt every hour of the day to his self-created environment. For instance, if it’s Monday and 7:30 comes up, you have to dis-adapt from your domestic surroundings and re-adapt yourself to an entirely different environment. 8:00 means everybody has to look busy. 10:30 means you can stop looking busy for 15 minutes. And then you have to look busy again. And so your day is chopped into pieces, and in each segment of time you adapt to a new set circumstances. No wonder some people go off the rails a bit… (4)

Immediately following this apt description of “civilized” humankind, a woman takes a seat at the lunch table and asks a brunette already seated, “Is this seat taken?” The brunette responds, “Does the noise in my head bother you?” (5)

Just like Adam and Eve we think we are progressing collectively towards more knowledge and more order. Just like Adam and Eve we are sadly digressing into more and more chaos. With each and every day, with each and every year, with each and every era of humankind’s existence we are moving further and further East of Eden and more and more into the tohu va vohu.

In talking to friends and family, and reflecting on my own life, it is easy to perceive that with all the work we are doing, all the vacations we are taking and all the things we do to try and bring order to life none of us are really succeeding. No matter how hard we work, no matter how much we own and no matter how cool our vacations are or what type of entertainment we enjoy, there really isn’t anything that satiates our deep human need for rest and order.

Why is that?

Why are our lives just “organized chaos?”

To answer that we have to go back to Genesis, back to when humanity was just beginning to live East of Eden.

The Hebrew book of Genesis does not end with the story of Adam and Eve in the garden. Genesis is much more than just the story of the creation of the world. It continues past its first few chapters and tells the stories of the generations that follow Adam and Eve. For those in the Western world we are familiar enough with some of these stories. Narratives like Noah and the flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham and Isaac, Joseph and the Technicolor dream coat, the Tower of Babel and Cain and Abel riddle the pages of our classic novels and even grace the big screen. But more than clever little moral stories from ages long ago, Genesis is an unfurling narrative of people continually reverting to chaos and God restoring them through his divine intervention. And as its name points out, it’s just the beginning. (6) The whole Old Testament serves as God’s way of pointing out the chaos that has defined human existence ever since Adam and Eve shunned the Sabbath rest of the seventh day and returned to the tohu va vohu.

Truth be told, the narrative of humankind’s chaotic choices gets even grander after Genesis. While Genesis generally focuses on individual families and bloodlines, when we take a look at the book of Exodus (the second book of the Old Testament) we start to see a grander picture and a bigger narrative, one involving a whole nation – the Hebrew people.

At the end of Genesis we hear the story of Joseph and his brothers. Joseph, having been sold into slavery by his jealous siblings, is now a leader in the Egyptian royal court. When famine strikes his family’s land they come seeking solace in the land of the pyramids. What they find is their long lost brother, who has mercy on them and permits them to come into Egypt with all their families.

Slowly but surely the Hebrew people grow in number and in influence. Egyptian’s natives don’t like this and neither do the Pharaohs. In a shrewd manner the Pharaoh’s enslave the Hebrew people and set them to build the bricks upon which Egypt’s grandeur would be built.

Here in Egypt the people come to loathe the work that is set before them. Their lives become defined by the toil and struggle of labor. Their hands become hard from forming bricks from reeds and mud. Their minds become soft as they work from a young age. Their lives become bitter and their days become short. The Hebrew people lose their meaning and purpose in a cycle of unending travail at the hands of an evil oppressor.

In desperation they cry out to the God of their fathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

What they don’t know is that God is already at work. All the while they believe he abandoned them he was putting together a plan; a plan to liberate them from their oppressive work and lead them into rest. God knows the position of his people and plans to rescue them from their toil.

The book of Exodus puts it beautifully:

During those many days the king of Egypt died, and the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help. Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God. And God heard their groaning and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the people of Israel – and God knew. (7)

The next scene of the narrative introduces us to God’s plan – Moses, the once great Egyptian prince who is now…tending a flock of sheep. (8) Knowing that he will not be exactly what the Hebrew people had in mind when they pleaded to God for liberation, he complains to the LORD and asks for some divine credentials. As Moses arrives in Egypt the LORD gives him this message to deliver to the Hebrews:

I am the LORD and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will deliver you from slavery to them, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great acts of judgment. I will take you to be my people, and I will be your God, and you shall know that I am the LORD your God, who has brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians. I will bring you into the land that I swore to give to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. I will give it to you for a possession. I am the LORD. (9)

Through signs and wonders and plagues and intervention from above God sets his people free from the bonds of slavery in Egypt. (10) And from Egypt he leads them through the wilderness to the Promised Land. Over forty years he takes these people, hardened by slavery and toil, and shapes them into the nation he desires them to be.

You see, God wanted to take these work hardened people and take the burden from their shoulders. He wanted to release them from the back-breaking slavery of Egypt and lead them into the rest of the Promised Land.

When he heard the pain of his people he yearned for them to step into the future, to come back to the Garden of Eden.

God was not taking the Hebrew people out of Egypt to establish some great nation that was going to develop in the traditional sense of the word. He did not necessarily envision a development from Bronze Age to Internet Age. Instead he desired a development of a Shabbat community.

Theologian Dallas Willard says this, “The aim of God in history is the creation of an all inclusive community of loving persons, with Himself included in that community as its prime sustainer and most glorious inhabitant.” (11)

And what does that community sound like?

Like the Garden of Eden.

Like Adam. And Eve. And God. And Creation.

Living in Sabbath rest. Together. Loving. Inclusive. Community.

The LORD hungered for the Hebrew people to be free from slavery and to live in a community marked not by the toil they suffered, but by rest and worship. Just as he wanted his Creation to be realized in rest, he wanted the basis of the community to be known as Israel to be centered on Shabbat.

As God took the Israelites through the wilderness to the land of Canaan, their promised land of rest, he first had them cease their journey at Mt. Sinai. Here, God establishes a covenant with these people that revolutionizes the world. He not only sets out the moral law of one people, but vocalizes the basis of morality for all humanity. One of these commandments reads like this:

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. (12)

The word “Sabbath” (13) has been tossed around a lot in the preceding pages. But here in the Hebrew book of Exodus it gets its debut. Here, as God is forming his community through a spoken and written moral code he is sure to not only command that work not be done one day a week, but also to encourage Sabbath.

What exactly is Sabbath?

The word Sabbath comes from the Hebrew word shavvot that means “to stop, to cease, to rest.”

God says “Remember to stop.”

“Remember to cease.”

“Remember to rest.”

When I was a senior in high school my father was worried about me. I was taking five high level classes, applying to universities, president of a social club, vice president of the student body, maintaining a social life and also trying to be a leader in my church youth group. I was high strung, to say the least.

One morning after I broke down and cried myself to sleep my father came in my room and sat down on the edge of the bed. He told me how worried he was about me. For a long time I kept quiet and so did he. He told me how my high levels of stress were tearing me apart, upsetting him and my mother and also hurting the very things I was trying to do well and the people I was trying to love and serve. As I laid there knowing his words were true, he got up to leave, but before he did he turned to me and with heartfelt conviction said to me, “Son, you need to remember to rest.”

When God gives the commandment to cease one day a week he isn’t adding one more thing for us to do (14) he is encouraging his people to take a break. He is commanding us to be. In fact, he goes one step further and says that the one day of ceasing from work is to be kodesh – holy, set apart, special above all other days. And then he makes the connection back to creation. He draws the line between the Sabbath and his seventh day, the culmination of his creative endeavor.

In the commandment to remember the Sabbath the LORD is inviting his people to recapitulate creation. He is tempting his people to return to the shalom that was there before Adam and Eve set to work and brought us all back to the tohu va vohu.

And that invitation is still open.

The LORD invites us to stop.

To cease.

To rest.

And to treat that rest as not just another day but the day.

To live like that is revolutionary.

To live the Sabbath, to really and truly live in rest, changes lives.

The concept of ceasing from work is more than just positive, it is re-creative.

Thomas Cahill writes this:

No ancient society before the Jews had a day of rest. The God who made the universe and rested bids us to do the same, calling us to a weekly restoration of prayer, study and recreation (or re-creation)….The connections to both freedom and creativity lie just beneath the surface of this commandment; leisure is appropriate to a free people, and this people so recently free find themselves quickly establishing this quiet weekly celebration of their freedom; leisure is the necessary ground of creativity, and a free people are free to imitate the creativity of God. (15)

God desires for these people to be free. Free from slavery, but not free from work. He wanted to bring them into a place of rest, but not a place of laziness. He wanted them to rest, but also wanted them to continue the work that he’d begun at creation. He wanted them to be a re-established people, living in freedom and restored in their ability to work without demand and create without burden.

That’s why he invites the Hebrew people to make the Sabbath the center of their existence. He wants them to center their life around this time of rest, prayer, study, leisure, worship and recreation to spawn a new creativity in the souls of his people. This new creativity will be more than just a balm of healing for the tough week that has been, and instead become the divine spark of creativity that inspires the very re-creative process of human innovation and imagination realized in our individual callings of labor. It isn’t the end of the week it is the beginning and its center.

Of course, this was the reality at the beginning. Adam, Eve, God and all creation enjoying Sabbath rest and yet continuing creation. In Genesis God blesses the newly created progenitors of humanity and says, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion…” (16) Here the Creator of the Universe invites Adam and Eve to take part in his continuing creation. He bids them to be fruitful, to literally bear fruit from their recreation together. He invites them to fill the land with more people who can enjoy and know the Sabbath rest he gives them. He commands them to watch over his creation and to keep working at it. This work was fruitful work. Fulfilling work. This was work in Sabbath perspective.

And God wanted this for the Hebrew nation of Israel as well. He wanted the nation of Israel to be an example to the nations of the world. He wanted their way of life, centered on Shabbat, to be the mold for the world. He wanted the Israelite people to follow this way of life and live in such a way that this way of life spread to the people that interacted with them.

Why?

Because God hears the cry of all people.

He knew, as Thomas Cahill writes that those people who live without the Sabbath “are emptier” (17) and lack the proper foundation for creativity and a truly abundant life.

God gave the Sabbath command (18) so that people would be transformed. That work would be restored. That life would be transfigured and transported, back to the beauty of the beginning.

God made the Sabbath holy so that the Hebrew people would observe it and be re-creative; so that they could help spread the hope, the love, the life of the way of the LORD.

But the Hebrews just didn’t get it. Slowly but surely they lost their way, forsook the Sabbath and wound up right where Adam and Eve found themselves thousands of years ago.

In their book Jesus Wants to Save Christians pastors Rob Bell and Don Golden outline a progression of the Old Testament narrative that shines light on the exact way that the Hebrews made the same mistake that Adam and Eve made. Here’s an excerpt from their church’s website outlining the progression:

God heard the cry of the Israelites and liberated them from their oppressor. He took them out of Egypt and into the desert. This liberation from oppression under Egypt is a central, defining moment in history where God inaugurated his plan for restoring the world….God brought the Israelites to Mt. Sinai out in the wilderness, where he spoke to them and came to dwell among them…God chose this group of people to become his flesh and blood, calling them to become a kingdom of priest and a holy nation where they would use their blessings to bless others. He did this so the whole world might come to know the one true living God.

And he didn’t want even that work to be a burden to them. He never wanted them to enslave themselves again.

As Moses gives his final words of instruction to the people of Israel before they enter the land of Canaan, the land of promise, the land of rest; he repeats the Ten Commandments. Whereas the majority of the commandments are repeated verbatim, the Sabbath command is different.

Moses says,

Observe the Sabbath, to keep it holy, as the LORD your God commanded you….You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the LORD your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day. (19)

The tone of this command is different. Instead of calling to remembrance the creation of the world and God’s Sabbath rest the people are called to remember their slavery and God’s redemption. Instead of remembering the Sabbath, they are called to observe it.

In the same book, the book of Deuteronomy, there are hundreds of words dedicated to the regular observation of the Sabbath, even to the point where it is blown out to not only be one day a week but one year in seven. (20) This would come to be called the sabbatical year.

It seems that the Hebrew people are already losing something in regards to the Sabbath. Before they even get to the promised land of rest they seem to be losing perspective and returning, again, to the tohu va vohu. The closer they got to improving their surroundings and to making their lives easier, the more complicated their lives became and the more difficult it was to “keep the Sabbath holy.”

And it didn’t get any better when they entered the land of promised rest. Indeed, it only got worse. As the Hebrew people settled in the land of Canaan they set to work, expanding their kingdom, expanding their land, expanding their bureaucracy, expanding their nation. (21)

Unfortunately, somewhere along the line they lost sight of the Sabbath. Somewhere along the line they didn’t remember their slavery and their redemption at the hands of God. At some point they just forgot…

To stop. To cease. To rest.

And it slowly, but surely killed them and their kingdom. (22)

The Hebrews mistakenly thought that God established them in Canaan to build a society of order and power, of expansive borders, large buildings and powerful kings. They forgot that the land of promise was meant to be a kingdom revolving around rest, worship and re-creation. And in the process of forgetting to stop and to rest in Sabbath re-creation the Hebrew people lost everything and wound up back in slavery, back in the tohu va vohu. Given the invitation to rest, to Sabbath with the LORD and Creator of the universe, the Hebrews instead made a choice that actively brought them back to the tohu va vohu – this existential condition of chaos and confusion.

Rob Bell says that God brought the people out of Egypt and into their new land of promise. After they forsake the promise God then goes about taking the Egypt out of the people (23) because what they did, making life about work and expanding kingdoms, was inviting Egypt back in. Inviting the tohu va vohu back into every day life. God took them out of Egypt only for them to put themselves right back in it. Sound familiar. It should. It is the story of Adam and Eve all over again.

Along with these Israelites, the Ancient Greeks, to whom the Western world owes a lot of its philosophy, thought that the more they could understand and order the world according to rational means the more they could understand their complexity and bring calm out of the chaos. We in the Western world inherited this philosophy that work and order brings sense into our chaotic existence. The problem is, we’ve been doing it for thousands of years now…

…and nothing is getting better.

Sure, we have computers and systems and a better understanding of the universe at our doorsteps but isn’t life just as chaotic as it was in Plato’s time?

Isn’t it even more so?

Of course there are going to be differing answers to the question above, but what I am getting at is – what is the big difference between then and now? What has all the effort in ordering our world brought us? To true happiness? To human fulfillment?

The story of the modern/post-modern man and woman is that we have all the technological advances that the world has to offer us and yet we are still searching for something more. Amidst the chaos of life we try to make ourselves happy with work. When that doesn’t work we try vacations. When that doesn’t work we try other things. We have more access to more opportunities for work and more options for distraction and yet we are still perplexed as how to find happiness in the world today.

Even recreative activities have become a form of slavery. Activities that are supposed to set us free actually enslave us.

Take for example the modern academic practice of giving a professor a sabbatical, which has its origins in the book of Deuteronomy. In Deuteronomy it is a described as a “release” literally the Hebrew word shemitta means “to drop” and there in Deuteronomy God is inviting us to take one year to drop everything. Today a sabbatical is anything but that. Most of the time, a sabbatical is an opportunity for a professor to get work done that she cannot get done during the normal course of a semester. The sabbatical is an occasion to get work done that you couldn’t get done usually because you have too much work to get done normally. My father-in-law is a professor at Arizona State University and in his department he reviews sabbatical applications. Before someone can even get a sabbatical their work has to be approved as worthwhile for such a break. I asked him what would happen if someone submitted a proposal where the professor just asked for some time off to re-group, re-focus and re-create. His response was, “It would never be approved.”

And are our vacations any better? Vacations are meant to be a time of restoration, relaxation and rejuvenation. A lot of times they are. I mean, for me my times of vacation are the most re-creative times of my life and some of my fondest family memories. But sometimes for me, and I know for others, vacations mutate into just another form of slavery.

There is this comic online entitled “Vacation Relaxation?” Whoever the artist is, they get it. They show stress levels as they progress before, during and after vacation. Stress hits its highest point right before the vacation and descends for a while, but ever too soon the stress levels are back up and after the vacation are right back at pre-vacation levels. Why is that?

Often times vacations are just as, if not even more, stressful than work. If you Google “vacation stress” 70% of the thousands of websites that pop up are doctors’, psychologists’ and bloggers’ suggestions for reducing vacation stress.

Wait a second. Did I miss something? Vacation stress? Aren’t vacations supposed to be a time to de-stress?

A lot of people spend so much time stressing about the vacation, the details, the money, the location, the timing etc. Once they are on it the spend half the time thinking about work, about checking e-mails about all the things they will have to get done when they return. I know because I too am guilty of this.

What about you? When’s the last time you really took a break? When’s the last time you went on a vacation and were able to let everything go?

What does that tell us when even on vacation we can’t let go? We can’t release? We can’t stop?

What does it mean when even recreation becomes another list of things to get, things to plan, things to do, things to toil over?

Just like the Ancient Hebrews we have twisted and transformed things meant to give us rest into things that cause us more effort and exertion and because of that they cause us more trouble and pain.

We keep reverting to the tohu va vohu. We keep reverting to the slavery. We keep forsaking rest for the sake of perceived order and end up with chaos instead.

Constantly, whether at work or at play we make a conscious choice to return to the tohu va vohu of our pre-existence.

Maybe we are missing the point entirely.

Because just like the narrator in “The Gods Must Be Crazy” said…

…the more we improve our surroundings to make life easier, the more complicated we make it.

Instead of living our lives comfortably in contentment we live life on the brink of sudden disaster. If any one of the cogs in the machine of our modern existence goes missing or stops working we lose control and chaos ensues. We are holding off a chaotic catastrophe with a thin wall of order brought about by our own efforts. The worst part is that we choose to do that. We make a conscious choice to live life just on the other side of chaos instead of adjacent to peace.

We don’t have to let the world get us to that point, we decide to. That is so ‘Adam and Eve’-like of us.
You see, when God observed that with toil and sweat we would work the ground in our lives East of Eden he understood that we would know deep inside that we are missing something. He knew that we would try and do as much as we could to try and bring order out of the chaos of existence. He knew that from our toil would come beautiful and worthwhile human achievements. He knew that we would work hard to feel accomplished. Yet, he also knew that our deepest desires would never be fulfilled. We could never work, yearn or desire hard enough for true order to be brought out of the chaos of our existence.

God sees the people of the world – and God knows.

He sees our toil, our sweat, our desire and our yearning.

He sees our work and our recreation killing us instead of setting us free.

And he knows.

And he hears the pain.

And he has this plan.

But it isn’t what we’d expect.

Because what we need isn’t more opportunities for work, or for that matter recreation,

…instead what we need is re-creation.

FOOTNOTES (still need work):

1) Where they were with God and God was with them and they were resting in his creation.
2) At that moment humanity discovered “the vacation.”
3) The movie was shot in the 90’s. Yes, there are some rocking perms on the ladies.
4) Uys, Jamie. The Gods Must Be Crazy. (INSERT OTHER REFERENCE INFO HERE).
5) Jamie Uys is a genius.
6) The Hebrew title for Genesis is ‘Bereshit’ literally, ‘In the beginning.’ The Greek word for beginnings is genesis.
7) Exodus 2:23-25
8 ) As everyone else says to themselves, “Brilliant!” in their best Monty Python voice.
9) Exodus 6:6-8
10) I don’t mean to brush over one of the most powerful narratives in all of literature, let alone Scripture, but space does not permit. Read Exodus 7-12 on your own and feel the movement of the LORD for his people’s peace.
11) As quoted in Foster, Richard. The Celebration of Discipline. San Francisco, CA: Harper Publishers, 1998 (p. 189).
12) Exodus 20: 8-11
13) Or it’s Hebrew transliteration, “Shabbat.”
14) Remember that later when we come to Jesus’ words and actions in regards to the Sabbath.
15) Cahill, Thomas. The Gifts of the Jews. Lion Hudson Publishers, London, England: 1998 (p. 144).
16) Genesis 1: 28
17) Cahill, Ibid.
18) There is so much baggage with this word “command.” Most Westerners hear this word and think of hard, burdensome Puritanical legalism. The Hebrew word, mitzvoth, is defined as a word of instruction given from one in authority or one “in the know.” Just as God told Adam and Eve how it was going to be, in the Ten Commandments the LORD is letting us know how it could be. He is inviting us to follow his loving instruction and in so doing help restore the world. Unfortunately, we not only misread his intentions, but also don’t follow his instructions.
19) Deuteronomy 5: 12, 15
20) Deuteronomy 15
21) Read the chronicles of Israel’s developing and growing years in the land of Canaan in the Hebrew book of Joshua, Judges, I and II Samuel and I Kings.
22) Read I Kings and II Kings.
23) Bell, Ibid.

Recreative Google

Greetings!

Let me tell you, I am so filled from the last couple of days and not just in terms of food (although turkey, stuffing, corn, green beans, rolls and pumpkin cheesecake are currently pumping through my veins), but also stuffed to the brim with family and fellowship. What a truly great time for some family sabbath-ing.

Now, onto business.

Today I created a Google account for the Recreative blog (actually, I didn’t because the nifty little verification code that Google sent me didn’t work…we are ironing that one out at the moment).

Over the past few months I’ve been receiving a few e-mails about the project and plenty of Facebook messages. I appreciate them, but I would like to get it all centralized so that I can organize the comments better.

So, here’s where you can send me private messages, e-mails or long comments you don’t want to post on the blog:

recreativeblog@gmail.com

There’s also some other motivation for creating this Google account – Google Wave.

This is Google's cute little Wave logo. It's, well, cute.

In the future I want to get together several people who’ve been very interactive with this process with me and some other invitees to Wave on the topic of sabbath and re-creation. Sound cool?

To me it sounds re-creative.

Peace.

-Ken

P.S. I am one page from finishing chapter 2. Chapter 3 is four pages in. I…am…making…progress…

1,000 – Thank You

Just yesterday (18 November) the site hit 1,000 page views.

Thank you.

Thanks for the interest.

Thanks for the views.

Thanks for the feedback.

Thanks for the contributions.

Thanks for the encouragement.

Thank you for all of it.

I still am so excited and committed to this project and knowing that the site has had 1,000 page views in just under three months encourages me to keep the conversation going about “re-creation”, the Sabbath, rest in Jesus Christ and the opportunity we have to be re-creative.

Peace and blessings.

Keep up the good work!

-Ken

Working Title for a Work in Progress

The working title of Chapter 2 is

“The more he improved his surroundings…”

I only have about a page or two left to finish this chapter. I hope to have it up next week. Check back then to add to the conversation. I need help with this chapter, it’s been one of the most difficult to write so far.

Thanks for the continual input.

Shalom.

Ken.