Sermon for August 27th, 2023

• Sabbath Day: Balance between rest, reverence, and relief.
• For Jews, traditionally the seventh day of the week.
• For Christians, traditionally the 1st day of the week.
• What’s important is one out of seven.

I’ve always been fascinated by the seven-day week. It’s something we take for granted, don’t question or even think about much, but it’s really quite strange. Here’s what I mean: A year is approximately the time it takes for the earth to complete one orbit around the sun. Ancient peoples who depended on the sun and the seasons for agriculture would have been very attuned to this. A month is approximately the time it takes for the moon to complete one orbit around the earth. Navigating by the light of the moon made observation of the lunar cycle very important to ancient peoples. A day is approximately the time it takes for the earth to complete one complete revolution as it spins on its axis. Pretty obvious why that would be important to measure. So years, months and days are all connected to movements of celestial bodies. But not weeks! There’s nothing in particular that a period of seven days measures, other than just…seven days. It seems pretty arbitrary, even though we’ve been counting that way for thousands of years.

Years, months, and days, in most modern calendars, all synchronize with each other. We start a new year on a new month and a new day. We adjust the number of days in a month in order to have exactly twelve months in a year. And yet the beginning of a year, or a month, sometimes happens on a Thursday, sometimes on a Saturday, sometimes on a Monday…because the sequence of weeks continues regardless of year, month, or day. You might think there are a nice, even 52 weeks in every year, but that’s not true. It’s actually 52.143…again, because the seven-day week is completely disconnected from any other measure of time. It’s random.

Not all ancient cultures observed a seven-day week, either For the ancient Egyptians, the week was five days long. For the Romans, it was eight. Ancient Babylonians did observe a seven-day week, although they would periodically adjust it, with some shorter or longer weeks to line up with their months and years (kind of like we do with an occasional leap year).

But several centuries before the Babylonians, the very first documented use of the unrelenting, unchanging, unwavering seven-day measure of time… goes to the people of ancient Israel, alone in all the world. Why? If you asked them, they would probably say, “Because the Lord told us to. And because he did it first.”