I'll get back to Economic Insanity with the next post, but some of the conference talks this weekend got me thinking about a different topic. Since Sabbath
Day observance has been a point of emphasis for the General Authorities lately,
I thought I’d post a rather unconventional talk I gave on that subject last year. I serve on the
high council and happened to be assigned to my home ward for this topic. I’m pretty
sure you’ll never hear a talk like this in general conference (or probably in your own sacrament meeting), but here goes.
Thanks to Craig Harline for most of the history.
The Sabbath Day Is
a Perpetual Covenant
The topic the stake presidency asked the high council
to address comes from Exodus 31:16: “Wherefore the children of Israel shall
keep the sabbath, to observe the sabbath throughout their generations, for a
perpetual covenant.”
In our instructions from the stake presidency, they
asked us specifically to extend their love “to each and every member.” They
also asked us to thank you for your “goodness and obedience in following this
prophetic priority in ‘elevating the spirit and power of the Sabbath day.’”
So, it’s my challenge to speak about the Sabbath.
I’ve got more family here than usual today. Tricia and her family are visiting
from Texas, and Matt is here from New York. Believe me, they didn’t come all
the way to Utah to hear me speak, and I’m sure they’re saying to themselves,
“He can make anything complicated. I wonder what he’s going to do to a simple
topic like this.”
Well, the truth is, it’s not me that makes things
complicated. Most things in life, when you look at them carefully, are already
complicated. I just don’t see any purpose in simplifying them unnecessarily.
So, what about the Sabbath?
As most of you are aware, when the Lord gave the
commandment to keep the Sabbath day holy, he was referring to the seventh day
of the week, which began and ended at sunset. But here we are, on Sunday, the
first day of the week, which begins and ends at midnight, attending worship
services, trying to make it a day of rest, and even calling it the Sabbath. How
did this happen?
Most Mormons, I suspect, just assume that after Jesus
was resurrected on the first day of the week, either he himself or his Apostles
determined that the Sabbath should just be shifted one day so that it would now
be celebrated on the first day of the week instead of the seventh. Well, as you
might suppose, it isn’t quite that simple.
And I knew just where to look to find out how this
shift took place. Craig Harline, a history professor at BYU, wrote a book
titled Sunday: A History of the First Day
from Babylonia to the Super Bowl. Some of you might recognize Craig as the
father of Jonny Harline, the BYU tight end who caught the pass from John Beck
in the end zone with time running out to defeat the Utes a few years ago. But Craig
is actually a very good historian and is quite entertaining.
So, let’s go back in time a few millennia. Harline
begins his book by observing that trying to find the origins of Sunday is like
trying to find the source of a great river. “The delta at the end and the long
channel flowing into the delta are easily recognizable. Yet the farther one
moves upstream toward the source of the river, the trickier the going:
tributaries multiply, lead astray, or go underground. And when finally located,
the humble source may bear so little resemblance to the massive amounts of
water downstream that one will surely wonder what the beginning can possibly
have to do with the end.”1
But this much is clear: “‘Sun Day’ emerged in the
ancient Middle East, as part of a seven-day planetary week.”2 But
this was just one of many options. Weeks in the ancient world varied anywhere
from five to sixteen days. But parts of the Middle East and then the Roman
Empire settled on a seven-day week. Each day was named for one of the known
planets. “Saturn Day was the first day (not the seventh), Sun Day was the
second day, then Moon Day, Mars Day (Tuesday), Mercury Day (Wednesday), Jupiter
Day (Thursday), and Venus Day (Friday). (Some of our English day names seem a bit
obscure because they come from the old Germanic names for the gods the planets
were named after.)3
The idea that one day of the week was superior to the
others came from a different seven-day system, that of the Jews. They also had
a seven-day week, but only two of their days had names: the Sabbath and the day
before the Sabbath, called the Day of Preparation. The other days were
numbered.4
Now, as you might suspect, these two seven-day
systems bumped into each other, and by the first century AD, the Romans started
observing a weekly day of rest. Their initial choice was apparently Saturn Day,
the first day of their week, which just happened to coincide with the Jewish
seventh day or Sabbath. This was convenient for everyone. And by at least AD
100, the Romans had started regarding Saturn Day as the seventh day, instead of
the first.5
As you are probably aware, the Jewish day began at
sunset. So did the days in the old planetary system. But the Romans began their
days at midnight. So what we now have is the result of two or three different systems
colliding.
Only one element of our current system was missing.
That is the prominence of the first day, Sunday. This came, apparently, from
the followers of both the Roman Sun God and the early Christians, who began
calling the first day “the Lord’s Day” because that was the day on which Jesus
was resurrected.6
Craig Harline says that “the early Christian portion
of the long-flowing Sunday river is perhaps murkier than any other.”7
Scholars have never been able to be certain about when, where, and why the
Lord’s Day emerged among early Christians. “Was it in Jerusalem or Rome or elsewhere?
Was it the work of the apostles or later church leaders? And most of all, was
it meant to replace the Jewish Sabbath, to accommodate the pagan Sun Day, or to
establish something entirely new and uniquely Christian?”8
Unfortunately, there is not enough evidence in the surviving records to say for
sure.
We do know a few things, though. First, while the
Sabbath for the Jews was a day of both rest and worship, the Lord’s Day for
early Christians was just a day of worship. In the Roman Empire, Sunday was initially
a work day, so the Christians met early and late, before and after work.9
Many of the early Christians also regarded the fourth of the Ten Commandments
as obsolete, because it was part of the Old Testament, which had been fulfilled
by Jesus. They regarded the Jews as an apostate people and sometimes criticized
them for being lazy because they rested on the seventh day.10 But for
the first three centuries, some Christians observed both the Jewish Sabbath and
the Lord’s Day. This explains why so many elements of the Jewish Sabbath found
their way into our observance of Sunday. If this is all a bit confusing,
welcome to real life.
In AD 321, the Emperor Constantine declared Sun Day
as the official holy day in the Roman week. And by the later fourth and early fifth
centuries, Christians began treating Sunday as a day of rest. After the fall of
the Roman Empire, church leaders continued supporting Sunday as a day of rest
and worship. According to Craig Harline, the Council of Rouen, in AD 650, “was
the first church council explicitly to require a twenty-four-hour Sabbath-like
Lord’s Day, to make rest and worship obligatory.”11 The council also
produced a list of penalties for violating the day of rest—but only after “first
condemning all ‘superstitious’ rules and penalties of the Jewish Sabbath.”12
In the year 755, “the Frankish king Pepin III gathered the bishops of France,
condemned Judaizing within the Church, then promptly proclaimed a long list of
prohibited Lord’s Day activities.”13
This is a tendency that has prevailed since ancient
times. We know that the Jews of the Old Testament had created numerous rules
and penalties regarding what a person could and couldn’t do on the Sabbath,
which caused them to criticize some of Jesus’s activities and caused Jesus in
return to remind them that the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the
Sabbath. This tendency is obviously hard to avoid. In our LDS efforts to make
sure people are observing the Lord’s Day appropriately, we often resort to
similar sorts of formal or informal list making. But I think this may defeat
the purpose of the day.
There are two general types of commandments we are
given. There are higher laws and lesser laws. The lesser laws are usually
rather straightforward and involve some minimum standard of acceptable
behavior. There is, for instance, only one way to keep the commandment “thou
shalt not kill.” You just don’t kill anyone. Likewise, there’s only one way to
keep the commandment “thou shalt not steal.” You don’t take something that’s
not yours. Higher laws, by contrast, are usually open-ended. An example is the
commandment to love your neighbor as yourself. There are millions of ways to
keep this commandment. So, of which type is the commandment to keep the Sabbath
day holy? For the most part, I would suggest, it is a higher law. It has a
stated objective, but it is pretty much left up to us just how we go about
keeping the commandment.
Of course, there’s also the question of why, exactly,
we think that Sunday is the Sabbath. It’s not really, of course. Sunday is the
Lord’s Day. But over the centuries, Christians have largely transferred both
the intent and the injunction given in the fourth commandment from the seventh
day of the week to the first day. As Craig Harline concludes, “It would remain
this way for so long that countless generations in the Western world would
consider the day’s very existence, name, and status as obvious, unquestioned
facts of life, as if things had always been this way.”14
He spends chapters discussing how Sunday was observed
over the centuries in various countries. He explains, for instance, how America
inherited (through the Puritans) a very strict version of Sunday, while in continental
Europe a very different and more pleasant sort of Sunday prevailed. One aspect
of Sunday was rather common, though. In the agrarian economies that existed
until the Industrial Revolution, Sunday, of necessity, was for most people a
day of work, to one degree or another. In spite of all the lists of rules. And
after the Industrial Revolution, the capitalist owners of businesses made sure
that it was a day of labor for the working class, until the labor unions and
churches gained enough influence to convince business owners to give their
workers one day off each week.
If you look at all the tributaries that flow into the
river of modern LDS Sunday observance, they would include the ancient Jews, the
Romans, the early Christians, the Catholic Church, the Reformers, labor unions,
a particularly strict Puritan writer named Nicholas Bownd, the Methodists of
the 1820s and 1830s, latter-day scripture, and, dare I say it, the modern
corporation, which is at least partially responsible for the extreme level of
organization we now have and all the planning meetings Mormons like to hold on
Sunday.
So, what instructions does the Lord actually give us
in modern revelation about what we should do on his day? The only information
we get is in D&C section 59. In verses 9 through 14, we read:
And that thou mayest more fully keep
thyself unspotted from the world, thou shalt go to the house of prayer and
offer up thy sacraments upon my holy day;
For verily this is a day appointed
unto you to rest from your labors, and to pay thy devotions unto the Most High;
But remember that on this, the Lord’s
day, thou shalt offer thine oblations and thy sacraments unto the Most High,
confessing thy sins unto thy brethren, and before the Lord.
And on this day thou shalt do none
other thing, only let thy food be prepared with singleness of heart that thy
fasting may be perfect, or, in other words, that thy joy may be full.
The phrase that jumped out for me in these verses was
“And on this day thou shalt do none other thing.” I wonder how all of our
meetings and other Sunday duties fit in with this commandment. I know, for some
of us, Sunday is actually the busiest day of the week. Hardly a day of rest,
and often not a day of rejoicing and prayer either. Perhaps we should strive to
view the Lord’s day as the early Christians did—as a day of joy.
I can’t help thinking of Sunday evening two weeks
ago. Sheri and I, somewhat like peasants in the Middle Ages, were out in the
garden picking raspberries because they were ripe and we weren’t going to have
time to pick them Monday morning. I couldn’t help hearing what was happening in
our next-door neighbors’ backyard. Their kids and grandkids were there, and I
could hear some of them playing some sort of a game. It may have been kickball.
If you know the Nelsons, it had to involve a ball. But they were having a great
time. Now, some people might look down on this sort of activity on Sunday, but I
knew at the time that I would be speaking on this topic, and I couldn’t help
thinking that there was a lot of joy going on in the Nelson’s backyard. And joy
is what the Lord’s Day meant to early Christians.
One other thing we ought to remember is that we shouldn’t
judge each other on how we decide to keep this higher law.
My hope is that you will focus more on the purpose of
the Lord’s Day, which is to remember him and worship him, and not get bogged
down by lists of rules or questions about what is and isn’t appropriate. If you
get the purpose right, chances are you’ll also get the behavior right.
________________
1. Craig Harline, Sunday:
A History of the First Day from Babylonia to the Super Bowl (New York:
Doubleday, 2007), 1.
2. Harline, Sunday,
2.
3. Harline, Sunday,
2–3.
4. Harline, Sunday,
3–5.
5. Harline, Sunday,
5–6.
6. Harline, Sunday,
7.
7. Harline, Sunday,
6.
8. Harline, Sunday,
7.
9. Harline, Sunday,
16.
10. Harline, Sunday,
12, 19–20.
11. Harline, Sunday,
22.
12. Harline, Sunday,
22.
13. Harline, Sunday,
22.
14. Harline, Sunday,
25.
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