Episode 266: Big Ideas | Sabbath

What would a generative day—one that might throw off energy into the rest of your life—look like? In Episode 266, Susan and Cynthia take on the concept of Sabbath. It’s a conversation about abundance, rhythm, letting go, and what it means to rest. Also about not needing to earn or prove anything,
liberation, eradicating oppression, and some of the ways Latter-day Saints may
think too narrowly when approaching this expansive idea.

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Notes & Quotes:

4th Commandment: Remember the Sabbath, The Bible Project podcast, The 10 Commandments | Episode 7, 5/4/2026
The Gospel Economy, Center for Action and Contemplation, 11/24/2019
Our Unforming: De-Westernizing Spiritual Formation, by Cindy S. Lee
Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now, by Walter Brueggemann
How the Bible Actually Works: In Which I Explain How An Ancient, Ambiguous, and Diverse Book Leads Us to Wisdom Rather Than Answers―and Why That’s Great News, by Peter Enns
Finding Freedom Through Sabbath Resistance, by Ruth Haley Barton, Transforming Center
Liberation Keeps the Sabbath Holy (A Homily), by David Roberts, Patheos, 10/21/2016
You Need to Be Bored. Here’s Why., by Arthur C. Brooks, Harvard Business Review, 10/28/2025
A Sermon On No Time to Rest And Also No Jetpacks, by Nadia Bolz-Weber, Patheos, 10/20/2015
The Sabbath is a Delight, by Russell M. Nelson, 4/2015
The Power of Ideas: Words of Faith and Wisdom, by Jonathan Sacks
How to Be Here: A Guide to Creating a Life Worth Living, by Rob Bell
Dark Night of the Soul | St. John of the Cross, translated by Mirabai Starr

“Capitalism…is based on quid pro quo, reward and punishment thinking, and a retributive notion of justice. This much service or this much product requires this much payment or this much reward. It soon becomes the entire (and I do mean entire!) frame for all of life, our fundamental relationships (even marriage and children), basic self-image (“I deserve; you owe me; or I will be good and generous if it helps me, too”), and a faulty foundation for our relationship with God.” —Richard Rohr

“We cannot rest well unless we unform our distorted practices of work. We also cannot truly find rest as individuals until all in the community can also find rest. In the Old Testament Scriptures, the commandment to keep the Sabbath was not just an order to rest. Rather, the Sabbath establishes a liberative spiritual practice to address our unjust and unethical systems of work.” —Cindy S. Lee

“The fourth commandment is the most difficult and the most urgent of the commandments in our society . . . because it defies the most elemental requirements of a commodity-propelled society specializing in control and entertainment, bread and circuses . . . along with anxiety and violence.” —Walter Brueggeman

“Laws don’t stand still for long.” —Peter Enns

“By instituting the sabbath, God intervened in human history to make right something that had gone terribly wrong and re-established a pattern present in creation that had been tragically lost. In the Exodus narrative, the God who is free to rest on the seventh day is calling the people God loves to participate in his freedom by embedding it in their national identity.” —Ruth Haley Barton

“Jesus … defines the Sabbath through the lens of liberation, the liberating center of our lives by which we should define all our other days. In other words, he doesn’t want the Sabbath to just be part of our week. He wants it to be part of us.
Jesus isn’t afraid of work creeping into the Sabbath. He’s afraid of the Sabbath never creeping into our daily work.” —David Roberts

“A Harvard Business School survey showed that professionals spend on average almost 90 hours a week ‘on work,’ either at work, actively monitoring work out of the office or remaining accessible at a moment’s notice for work purposes.
It’s exhausting to the human spirit and makes it difficult to practice the Sabbath and without Sabbath rest, it becomes hard to see our true identity isn’t in what we do and what we produce, but in how much we are loved by God; that our worth isn’t in our successes and accomplishments but in our belovedness.” —David Roberts

“If you aren’t resting, you are a slave to something.” —Adele Calhoun

“Let’s contrast this “meritocracy,” punishment/reward economy—basic capitalism which we in the United States all drink in with our mother’s milk—with what Jesus presents, which I’m going to call a gift economy. In a gift economy, there is no equivalence between what we give and how much we get. Now I know we’re all squirming. We don’t like it, because we feel we’ve worked hard to get to our wonderful middle-class positions or wherever we are. [...] But until we begin to live in the kingdom of God instead of the kingdoms of this world, we think, as most Christians do, exactly like the world. We like the world of seemingly logical equations. Basically, to understand the Gospel in its purity and in its transformative power, we have to stop counting, measuring, and weighing. We have to stop saying “I deserve” and deciding who does not deserve. None of us “deserve”! Can we do that? It’s pretty hard . . . unless we’ve experienced infinite mercy and realize that it’s all a gift.” —Richard Rohr

“When we add ‘get more rest and take Sabbath seriously’ to our to-do list, we might be tempted to think of it as nothing more than a scheme to fuel us back up just so we can do more work; after all, it is our work that is so very important since that’s the thing that justifies our existence. And the world really needs us. But the wise Rabbi Abraham Heschel reminds us that Sabbath rest is actually about stopping long enough to see that God’s redeeming work in the world goes on with or without us.” —Nadia Bolz-Weber

“In letting go, we acknowledge what we can't do—and what we need God to do. Rabbi Abraham Heschel writes, ‘Rest on the Sabbath as if all your work were done.' Rest is knowing we've done what we could do this week, and now we need to receive grace. Rest is the center and heart of our work because it acknowledges that in the end, no matter how hard we work, we continue to be dependent on the grace of God.” —Cindy S. Lee

“Not pursuing your ‘own pleasure’ on the Sabbath requires self-discipline. You may have to deny yourself of something you might like. If you choose to delight yourself in the Lord, you will not permit yourself to treat it as any other day. Routine and recreational activities can be done some other time.” —Russell M Nelson

“The issue is not that people aren't taking their faith seriously; they're just exhausted. An event-based church, dependent on attending programs and volunteering, becomes just another job to juggle with our work lives and family responsibilities. The rhythms of the church don't match the rhythms of people's lives. Churches aren't known as places of rest; instead, we are just as busy in the church as we are at work. People burning out from never-ending church events indicates there is something seriously wrong with our understanding of Sabbath.” —Cindy S. Lee

“In Judaism we have the Sabbath, a dedicated day of stillness each week, where we make space for all the things that are important but not urgent. Not every culture has a Sabbath, but life without dedicated time for renewal, like a life without exercise or music or a sense of humour, is a lesser life.” —Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, (pp. 122-3)

“In the Scriptures, work and rest are not opposites. Together, they create a cyclical rhythm, a continual embodied movement of unforming and re-forming. As we enter into rest, we unform through practices of letting go. We then experience a holy rest through the practice of stopping. When it is time to work again, we carry our holy rest into our work. Rest is the center of this rhythm, and work flows in and out of our rest.” —Cindy S. Lee

“I myself have only 2 speeds: go and stop. But when I stop it’s not like I’m resting, I’m just collapsing because I can’t go anymore. And I don’t think that’s what sacred rest means. I think that maybe we’ve made an idol of multi-tasking and hyper-activity.” —Nadia Bolz-Weber

“Sabbath forces you to listen to your life. Sabbath is a day when you are fully present to your pain, your stress, your worry, your fear. Sabbath is when you let whatever you’ve pushed down rise to the surface. Sabbath is a day when things that are broken get fixed, when things within you that have torn are mended.” —Rob Bell, (p. 172)

“It is an initially reluctant dropping down into the emptiness and an ultimate experience of peace when we stop doing and rediscover simple being. It is the Sabbath of the soul when we heed the call to cease creating and remember that we are Created.” —Mirabai Starr, (Intro)

“When we spend a day being fully present, we quickly discover how much of the rest of our lives we aren’t fully present.” —Rob Bell (p. 169)

“The rest of the Shepherd who makes you lay down in green pastures is not about time off from work, it’s about time off from all forms of worthiness. … Sacred rest is a break from the am-I-productive-enough, lovable enough, safe enough, thin enough, rich enough, strong enough-worthiness system we live under. The sacred rest that is yours never comes from being worthy. It never comes through adopting the right kind and the right amount and the right quality of spiritual practices (although if those bring you a sense of well-being then by all means don’t set them aside) the rest that is yours and mine comes from the promise of the Gospel: that Jesus came to save sinners, that Jesus came to heal and love and save the sin-sick and the over-functioning, that Jesus came to give rest to the weary, and the restless, to give rest to harried housewives and overworked social workers and mildly depressed executives. So rest. Resting knowing that you are justified, not by your busyness, but by grace through faith. Rest in the knowledge of how madly God loves you. Not because of who you are, but because of who God is. Rest in that. Not because you should. But because you can.” —Nadia Bolz-Weber

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