Acknowledging the Post-Christendom Sunday: A Saturday Afternoon Eucharist St. Margaret's Episcopal Church, Palm Desert, California Lent 4, 20 March 2004

Lord's Day legislation used to protect Sunday morning church services from competition with most other activities and attractions. In post-Christendom, Sundays are relatively open for work and play. Employees in the hospitality, transportation, and retail industries, on the assembly lines, and in emergency services may have to report to work; executives and professionals may have commitments to keep or deadlines to meet; children and young people may have athletic competitions or practices; families may decide to visit a shopping mall or eat brunch at a restaurant. Did God intend Sunday to have a special status? A familiar Christian response has been that in Genesis 2:3 God mandated a sabbath day for rest and worship, and that the Lord's resurrection sanctified Sunday as the new sabbath day. But it is not clear that early Christians thought in the same way. Paul mentions nothing of Sunday worship, perhaps because he had doubts about works of the law or because his gentile converts knew nothing of a seven-day week. A few early passages which some claim as evidence for a Sunday observance-Revelation 1:10, Ignatius to the Magnesians 9:1, the Epistle of Barnabas 15:9-can more plausibly be interpreted in a different sense. In his First Apology (67.3) Justin evidently referred to a Christian gathering in Rome on what, following the new pagan usage, he called the day of the sun, but some have found evidence of a Saturday eucharist in the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus (21-22). Origen's Contra Celsum (8.22) leaves the impression that a weekly feast day is merely a permissible practice for the spiritually less advanced. In 321, it is reported, Constantine promulgated two laws making Sunday a holiday. Pagans who worshiped the sun were pleased, but Eusebius in his Life of Constantine (4.18) explained that the emperor was promoting Christianity. For the next sixteen centuries setting aside Sunday was a hallmark of Christendom, although Christians did not agree how strictly Sunday should be observed. In 1618 James I's Book of Sports made room for dancing, ales, and other amusements on Sunday, but the reaction from Puritans was so sharp that he had to withdraw it. Charles I reinstated it in 1633, but paid dearly. Christopher Hill in Society and Puritanism (1964) famously argued that what created the modern Sunday was not Biblical theology but the rhythms of an industrializing economy. Then in the late nineteenth century, the English-speaking world began to dismantle Sunday observance. Proposals to run trains and streetcars, hold baseball games, and open restaurants on Sundays, despite heated resistance, were frequently successful. In the early 1940s some war-related employees worked Sundays. After the war, many middle-class suburban folk wanted Sundays free for shopping and outings. In the United States, Jews and other non-Christians began arguing in court that Sunday blue laws violated their First Amendment rights. Many liberal Protestants agreed with them, and in 1958 so did the Jesuit journal America. In the 1980s and 1990s, Lord's Day legislation was repealed or judicially disallowed in most of the United States, Canada, England, Scotland, Wales, northern Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. The main exception was that several American states maintained Sunday controls on alcoholic beverages. In 1983 the Roman Catholic Church promulgated a revised code of canon law which modified the pattern of Sunday worship. Canon 1248 permitted Roman Catholics to satisfy their Sunday obligation by attending mass on the previous evening. In the apostolic letter Dies domini (1998), the pope explained that, since a Christian day begins at the previous sunset, what is Saturday evening civilly is Sunday ecclesiastically. Now, an early Sunday tee-off time can pose a serious conflict with Sunday morning worship, and this is particularly true in Palm Desert, California, where half the population is over sixty-five and lives within half an hour's drive of one hundred golf courses. …

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