Be careful, then, how you live, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of the time, because the days are evil. Ephesians 5:15-16
“Now as then, keeping Sabbath is refusal to have one’s life defined by the production and consumption demands of a commoditized economy. In the keeping of Sabbath we, like ancient Israel, attest that our lives are not defined by or answerable to the insatiability of commodity.
In that ancient world, Sabbath broke the spell of production. In our world, Sabbath invites living in the new rule of God that contradicts the fatiguing world of things. Sabbath keeping is indeed acting as though Jesus is Lord of our time and
has decisively trumped the rigors of our schedule!
From that discernment of Sabbath, mature materiality has radically resituated all of our times with reference to the new rule of God. Thus the psalmist can aver: “My times are in your hands.” All my times! All our times! Not just Sabbath time but all our days.
Mature materiality consists in a willing readiness to recognize that every time is a gift from God; every time is an occasion for response to the holy time-giver; every time is an opportunity to act out our glad creatureliness in ways that befit the time-giving God.”
Walter Brueggemann in Materiality As Resistance: Five Elements for Moral Action in the Real World (Louisville: WJKP, 2020), 54.
What a word picture: Sabbath breaks the spell of production. “Mature materiality has radically resituated all of our times with reference to the new rule of God.” We find freedom from domination and the necessity to produce!
In God’s economy and within the construct of sabbath, we receive time as a gift. Our response shows our love of the holy time-giver. And every time God grants use comes into view as an opportunity to glorify our time-giving God.
Interestingly, we cannot steward time. We can only make the most of it. Why? No one possesses time. We can only choose how to use the time given us. Generous people give God one day a week.
In so doing, they do not lose time but gain it. The reset makes everything better, richer, and fuller. By including sabbath – on Saturday, Sunday, or some other day – we follow God’s design for making the most of time.