Snow Days & Sabbaths

by the Rev. Scott Walters

 

Snow days, at least the first one or two, are when my mind gets closest to the sabbath mind. It’s the imposed and instant removal of options … or maybe the shared permission not to do most of the things that fill most of our days that brings a different way of being. On my way home from Calvary, as the snow was beginning on Friday, I bought a record at Shangri-La on Madison, because I thought there might be more record-playing time in the days to come. There was indeed.

 

Snow day sabbaths are simple. Snow day sabbaths are also complicated. I serve on the board of the Hospitality HUB, so later that evening last Friday, Ardelle and I took some cookies over to First Baptist Church, where the warming center was opening. This wasn’t a heroic act. We slipped in, handed a couple of tubs of Ardelle’s perfect molasses cookies to a couple of the HUB staff members who were staying the night, said thanks for their service, and went back to our snug little house to hibernate. On the way out, I said hi and be safe to Gloria, who was waiting in line to get in.

 

Sunday morning was consumed with the question of whether I could get from here to there. Here being our house. There being Calvary Church, with stops to pick up Robyn and Wesley so she could run the livestream and he could preach. Katherine and Richard also made it downtown, so we opened the doors and live-streamed the service to our mostly shut-in congregation. Room in the Inn was housing women next door at our Welcome Inn. Betty Jo brought several of the guests over for church. They, plus a couple of men waiting for rides to the warming center, and Stephen, who had driven Katherine, and William, who lives downtown and walked over, made up our grateful little congregation.

 

On Monday, I got a text from Jarad saying the HUB’s stockpile of blankets was depleted. Nathan said Calvary had some we could share, so I dropped those off at the HUB on Washington Street, where they were now sheltering women. I said hi to Lily as I walked in, someone I hadn’t seen in a while and had hoped was housed. I saw her again on Wednesday at the Greenlaw Community Center, where yet another warming center had opened. They were badly in need of men’s pants, borrowed again from the supply that Nathan’s team sorts and stocks each week in the Calvary Clothes Closet.

 

A warm, quiet house. Cookies. Church. Books. Blankets. Pants. People who need them. People whose names we know. But mostly quiet. Mostly coffee and calm and records and safety in our living room. Such were the simple elements of my snow day sabbaths.

 

In the midst of it all, the news came from Minneapolis that someone else had been killed by agents of my government. An ICU nurse named Alex, who was filming an interaction between border patrol officers and two women, was shot. This was only days after my childhood friend Steve, who lives in that city, told me one of the five children of his Laotian neighbor had just texted. Masked ICE agents were pounding at their door. The kid was terrified, even though her father is fully documented and works in manufacturing for Boston Scientific. By the time Steve got to the house, the agents had gone. The child’s terror had not.

 

Why pile these instances together in a snow sabbath blog? A blog post is a bit of a “Here’s some stuff that’s been percolating” thing for me. But I also think part of sabbath’s wisdom is to shut down all the lesser urgencies that fill our weekday attention so that we might see the world more clearly. Or maybe see a few things more clearly. People whose names we know might die in the cold if not for other people whose names we know. Music and warmth and food are good things worthy of our enjoyment. We should want them for everyone. All people deserve to be treated with decency and respect, even if you think they’ve done something wrong, and especially if you are in a position of power.

 

As a child, I knew police officers wore uniforms, had their names printed on their badges, and “To protect and to serve” was painted on the side of their squad cars. Not all of them always lived up to a child’s image. Not all parents or school teachers or priests do either. But that image was and is a call to clarity. It’s important to have a clear image of what we should be. There was and is something true in the simple, childlike belief that everyone deserves to be treated fairly and with respect. Intimidation and threats are wrong on the playground. They are wrong in the warming center. They are wrong in the church. They are wrong when enforcing immigration laws or policing protesters. They’re just wrong. We knew this once, didn’t we?

 

Maybe, as I bring these rambling reflections to a close, the thread through it all is that there was a simple clarity to the Kingdom of Heaven that Jesus taught about and pointed us to. He gave us images of the world as it ought to be, “on Earth as it is in heaven” was one way he put it.

 

And maybe sabbath has always been, at least in part, about stepping out of the churning complexity of life long enough, not to form a firm position on an abstract issue, but to see people you know by name for who they are, hear their stories, and want that kingdom to spring into being in their life, like a warm house with plenty of coffee and a brand new record on a snow day.

 

“He has told you, O mortal, what is good,” wrote Micah in an oft-quoted verse. “And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” We knew this as children. We still do when we’re not caught up in the false urgencies that fill up too much of too many of my days. On this snow day sabbath, could we just stop for a moment … Stop and remember what we’ve always known … Could we just stop, and before we decide what the next right thing to do is, remember in a few clear images, what kind of world we want this one to be? Clear images of what kind of people we know God wants each of us to become. Clear images of a kingdom in which such a becoming is possible for every last one of us. Everywhere. Could we stop and remember clearly the world we were created to want?