P.O. Box 53055    
Los Angeles, CA 90053   

NO BREAKS FOR AL GORE

There’s a cute story that dates back to July of 1998, when a Connecticut senator named Joe Lieberman was nothing more than that: a Connecticut senator. It was Friday evening, and the Senate had worked late. Lieberman, whose orthodox beliefs about Sabbath prevent him from riding home in a car, was actually all set up to spend the night sleeping on a cot in the Senate gym. But a Senate colleague who knew him well said: “Hey, Joe, look, my folks live right near here. Please — let’s hike over and you can stay with them.” So Senator Lieberman did just that: walked the few blocks with his Tennessee friend, and spent that Sabbath night at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Al Gore, Senior. True story.

Which leads me to think aloud about a certain spiritual question that’s bound to haunt some people right up until Election Day 2004 here in the United States. Here it is: two years after that Friday night stroll, if Vice Presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman had been willing to bend a little, to campaign on his Sabbath day, and if he’d gone trolling for votes down in the Sunshine State on a few of those Sabbath days, would he have been able to come up with 538 extra ballots for the Democratic ticket? Instead of staying home with Hadassah from Friday sundown until Saturday sundown, lighting candles and praying and meditating, could he have helped Gore/Lieberman win the White House by shaking 538 extra hands, kissing 538 more Florida babies, schmoozing at a few Saturday morning coffees with 538 undecided voters?

Well, we’ll never know, will we? And you know, today I want to flip that butterfly ballot upside-down and ask the question this way instead. What if Al Gore, who admittedly worked his heart out to win the White House, who campaigned frantically a full seven days a week, week after week after mind-numbing week, from early Sunday morning until late Saturday night, who did shake the extra hands and kissed the extra babies and ate the extra rubber chicken dinners at the extra banquets . . . what if he had stopped to keep the Sabbath? Would he have lost by even more? OR . . . would a rested and renewed and spiritually centered Al Gore have found his real voice? Would he have discovered, week by week, as he turned off the TelePrompters and jet plane engines, the quiet strength that makes all other priorities fall into place, that takes away the shrillness of the race, and the sighs in the televised debate, and the verbal miscues and exaggerations that inevitably happen when you’re just too tired and spiritually drained to think straight? What if Al Gore had discovered, as his friend Joe Lieberman has, and as millions of others around the globe have, that the child of God operates best according to a divinely ordained principle of life: six days of work, and then a seventh day of rest?

We’ve spent almost four weeks here on the radio talking about things like vitamins and exercise, and you might wonder how we got over to the Florida election recount and Sabbath observance. Right here in the resource we’ve been using as a textbook, however, Live 10 Healthy Years Longer, in Chapter 19, Jan Kuzma and Cecil Murphey have this as their title: “A Whole Day to Rest”? That might have been a direct quote from Gore, Bush, Cheney, and all the reporters assigned to cover them. But these two authors go on to tell us about how in World War II, as America and England were scrambling to go head-to-head with the Axis war powers, both nations pushed their munitions factories into a frantic, nerve-shredding 74-hour work week. Can you imagine? People were putting in seven-day weeks, and just dragging themselves toward the exits when it was time to quit. Morale was terrible; the accident rate soared. And it didn’t take long for the owners to figure out that they were paying for 74 hours and getting — if they were lucky — 66 hours of real work. They soon dropped the relentless pace, and production actually improved.

Back in 1793, the French government wanted to try a calendar where they had exactly 12 months, each with 30 days. In order to make it all come out right, they tried to go with a nine-day work week, followed by one rest day. In just 13 years, that concept ground to an unhappy halt too.

The upshot of these stories is this: the human race is created — actually designed — to survive and thrive on a seven-day-week rhythm: six days of activity, one day of rest. The idea of “Sabbath” is no accident; it’s a heavenly principle, put in place by a loving God for our good. We are better men and women, better workers, better friends, better campaigners . . . if we work hard and play hard for six days, and then take the seventh day, get off Air Force Two right before sundown, and go home to rest and worship.

“If you take on this health practice,” they write — and it’s interesting that Jan and Cecil call it a health practice — “use this one-day-in-seven to contemplate God’s special blessings of health and fellowship, recharge your moral batteries, and gain spiritual insight about God’s plan for your life. After all, to rest one day in seven is one of God’s Ten Commandments.”

Have you ever really thought about that? Speaking of politicians, they clamor fiercely to post those Ten Commandments in all of our public schools, and yet it’s a rare candidate who looks hard at that Fourth Commandment and truly obeys it, truly keeps a Sabbath Day of rest.

The question for us is: can this really be done? If it perhaps “cost” Joseph Lieberman the Vice Presidency, won’t it cost us our jobs, our hobbies, our sports, our lifestyles?

I’d like to put a couple of realities in front of you. First of all, let me read the opening paragraph from Chapter Four of another great book entitled The Ten Challenges, by Dr. Leonard Felder, a brilliant clinical psychologist. What I’m going to read here, he’s shared on Oprah, CNN, NBC Nightly News, and many other news outlets, so his insights are worth listening to. Listen:

“Imagine for a moment that someone who cares about you has sent you a gift certificate for a day that is to be devoted entirely to the needs of your soul,” he writes. “On that day you don’t have to work. You can take a walk and have a relaxing conversation with friends or loved ones about the things that really matter. You can meditate, pray, and read the books that speak to your soul. You can nap and let your mind take a rest, or dance and sing to let your spirit soar. For one day, you can stop trying to prove yourself out in the world. You can look at your life as a blessing and feel at peace with where you are right now. Instead of feeling fragmented and pressured, you can spend the day in a generous, positive, and contemplative mood.”

Then Felder asks this question:

“Does this sound too good to be true? Does it sound wonderful but unattainable to have a day devoted completely to the needs of your soul?”

Maybe you’re saying yes. It just can’t be done. You’ve got too much to do, too many e-mails to answer, too many business contacts to stroke, too many babies to kiss before the Year 2004 election and the New Hampshire primaries. And yet there are multiplied people all around the world who ARE doing it, who ARE keeping a Sabbath every single week. The sun goes down, and they turn away from the world and its treadmill and its screaming headlines and its buzzing cellphones and chad-counting.

By the way, let me just make a link here between Sabbath and health. We’ve mentioned those 27,514 men and women in the decades-long focus group, the “Live-Longer Lifestyle.” Well, the research project was also called AHS, which stands for “Adventist Health Study.” And what that means is that these 27,514 people, all members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, were — all of them, every single one — a practicing Sabbathkeeper. Just like Joe Lieberman, even though they were, and are, evangelical Christians. They keep a 24-hour Sabbath; I do too, by the way, as a minister in the Adventist denomination. But my point is this: first of all, it can be done. Those 27,000 people have done it for decades. In fact, just in my denomination — and other churches are increasingly going this route as well — there are more than 11 MILLION people who are carefully and gratefully recognizing this fact of life: God made us to keep the seventh day as a complete day of holy rest and restoration and celebration. The only babies we kiss on the Sabbath day are our own babies. Instead of incessantly campaigning, we only shake hands with all our friends at church, and the lonely person at the Alzheimer’s unit in the nursing home, and we only turn on a computer if we want to share nature scenes with our friends using PowerPoint. And from both a health point of view, and a divine blueprint point of view as well, bear in mind that these are the people who live eight, ten, even 13 years longer.

So as you give God that day, it’s amazing how He turns around and gives it right back fourfold. You know — He always seems to do that.