Lenten Devotional – March 27, 2023

Monday, March 27, 2023
Receiving the Day: Christian Practices for Opening the Gift of Time
by Dorothy C. Bass 
Devotions by Pastor Travis Norton

In chapter five Bass continues her invitation to Sabbath including the practice of worship. She comments on how the practice of worship needs our help to free it from the rest of the week. She writes “Joyful worship that restores us to communion with the risen Christ and our fellow members of his body, the church, is an essential part of a Christian sabbath. Contemporary culture mitigates against this, however, both by insinuating that worship is not a very efficient use of time and by importing habits of clock bondage into a gathering where the clock has no place.”  

To combat “clock bondage,” Bass wonders if we should join observant Jews in ditching our watches when we worship. I wonder if we should include phones as well. What if you left your phone and your watch in your car or at home. How might that free you to enter fully into a time of worship?  

Sabbath is meant to free us from tyranny. Originally it was the tyranny of slavery in Egypt and the command to rest so that we would learn how to be free people. But today it is the tyranny of the clock, or efficient use of time, or productive time. How can we let worship set us free from modern enslavement?

Prayer: God you have commanded us to honor the Sabbath because you want us to know freedom. Guide us in our worship that we might leave behind anything that prevents us from living into full and unencumbered worship of you. In Jesus’ name.