Salvation and Godly Rule

The Sabbath

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Doctrinal Studies

Lesson: The Sabbath

Genre: Speech

Track: 13

Dictation Name: RR136G13

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

The Lord is in His holy temple. Let all the earth keep silence before Him. Exalt the Lord, our God and worship at His holy hill, for the Lord, our God is holy. Praise ye the Lord. Praise God in His sanctuary. Praise Him for His mighty acts. Praise Him according to His excellent greatness. Let everything that hath breath the Lord. Praise ye the Lord. Let us pray.

We gather together, our Father, to praise thee according to thy word, to rejoice in the certainty of thy grace, the majesty of thy government, and the ever-present help of thy Holy Spirit. We thank thee, our Father, that underneath the experiences of life are thine everlasting arms, and so our God, enjoin in thanksgiving, we gather together to praise thee, to rejoice in thy word and in one another, and to look unto thee for great things yet to come. Bless us in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Our scripture lesson is Genesis 2:1-3. The Sabbath. “Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.”

As we saw last week, when scripture tells us that God rested on the seventh day, it means not rest in the human sense, but that He disengaged himself, ceased or desisted from further creation. This does not mean that God ceased working thereafter, nor that He has done nothing since then. It does not refer to a cessation of divine activity, but of creation. Scripture emphatically tells us in Isaiah 40:28, that God is never weary, nor needs rest in any human sense. Moreover, we are told that He blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because He had rested from all His work, and thereby, He not only blessed the rest, but blessed the work; creation, so that all things were declared thereby not only very good, but holy, separate, blessed unto God.

Now the meaning of the Sabbath is eschatological. The word eschatological means a sign of the end of creation, of the end of all things. The whole meaning of the Sabbath therefore, is that it points ahead to the future. Throughout history, the Sabbath has had this meaning. The Old Testament Sabbath commemorated Passover, the deliverance of Israel from Egypt, but it also looked ahead to the fulfillment of the kingdom of God, and to this day, when any Jew celebrates the Sabbath, he not only celebrates the deliverance from Egypt, but he looks ahead to the consummation of God’s work in the new creation.

Similarly, the Christian Sabbath, the day of resurrection, the first day of the week, celebrates not only a past event but it looks forward to the general resurrection at the end of the world. So that, very clearly, it is eschatological. It is a sign of the end. The calendar, therefore, in any Christian or biblical sense, is geared to salvation. It is geared the future, to the triumph of God in time and in eternity. The sad fact is that Christians don’t realize what the calendar means. The Christian calendar, the biblical calendar, is unlike any other calendar the world has ever known. Beginning with Israel in the Old Testament and with the church in the New, man’s days were numbered in terms of a time span that was geared to rest so that he worked, looked forward to the day of rest, and that day of rest looked forward to the end of all things, to victory in time and in eternity.

The enemies of the faith have understood the meaning of the calendar and, as a result, every attempt at revolution has also been an attempt at calendar reform. The French Revolution immediately abolished the Christian calendar and began redating all days and years from the French Revolution. The same thing was done by the communists. In 1918, when the Bolsheviks took over, they immediately began to renumber the years, something they subsequently dropped, but they abolished the Christian calendar emphatically. In 1929, they instituted further calendar reform, seeking thereby to abolish Christianity and the family by abolishing the Sabbath. They created a five-day week in 1929. Every person was put on a work group. There were five color groups, and you could be a red worker or a black worker, or a blue worker, or a green worker, and I forget what else, but you had a color. It meant then that there was continuous operation in their five-day week around the clock, as well, with four of the color workers working at all times, and one resting. This meant, since it was deliberately an assignment in terms of color, not in terms of family and against family, that a husband would be working at one time, the wife at another, and their day of rest would never coincide, nor would the day of rest of any of the children who were working coincide, and of course, no day for worship.

In 1932, because this five-day week proved to be too difficult and too strenuous for people, because it meant a very radical dislocation. The color system was dropped and the work week was made into six days, with a common rest day admitted. In 1936, they instituted further changes. To quote an account of these changes, “Whereas the year of 365 days remained divided into twelve months, two parallel weeks have been introduced, one of seven and the other of six days. Labor, industry and rest are to be regulated by the shorter, government and international intercourse by the longer. The rest days of the labor week fall on the sixth, twelfth, eighteenth, twenty-fourth, and thirtieth day of each month, with March 1 taking the place of the fifth rest day of February.”

Now, the purpose of this Marxist calendar is very clearly revolutionary. There are new holy days in the Marxist calendar. May Day, of course, is the great one. Lenin’s Day is another. The new holy days in the Marxist calendar point to the Marxist plan of salvation. Moreover, the calendar is not geared to any Christian scheme nor to the future, but to a continuous cycle of work. Now, one scholar commenting on the Marxist calendar (and his remarks are very pointed because he’s calling attention to our approximation to the Marxist calendar): “How far is the Russian labor calendar the practice of Western man already? How far is it not? With the Russian, work is made into a public function of the people united. Leisure is a private business. Formally, this calendar contradicts our tradition in which each individual is toiling, bent on his work during the week, and comes into the common fellowship on Sundays only. However, the Russian shift in family and religious tradition is making work into a public function and rest into a private one. {?} the movement that was in progress throughout the Industrial world. For even an Anglo Saxon country, the common day of rest was slowly losing its importance for more and more millions of people. Maids, waiters, clerks in drugstores, people working in the pleasure industries, taxi drivers, telephone operators are requires to take off not Sunday, but some other day picked at random to allow production to continue more or less undiminished, and in this change in calendar, this abolition of Sunday for parts of the population is implicit in emphasis upon the community of labor. The difference between the practice, not the theory, of Western man and that of the Russian labor calendar is one of degree. Leisure is becoming more and more a private affair. Production is coming to the front as a common destiny. In America, some great manufacturing plants have rejected the twelve-month calendar and apply a thirteen-month calendar, each month containing twenty-eight days. This thirteen month calendar enables a plant to check more conveniently the amount of production per month. It glorifies production and the goods that are produced. It no longer cares for the holidays of the community. It stands half way then between a calendar which united people for worship only, and a calendar which united the people who are working in shifts together.”

Now, there is another aspect to the Soviet or Marxist calendar we should recognize. Its purpose is to abolish history. It replaces history with economics and production. Every day is the same and production continues incessantly, and the goal is to create an anthill society. An anthill society has no history. You can never write the history of an anthill, or of a beehive. It’s the same thing over and over and over. The goal, therefore, of modern calendar reform, both in the Soviet Union and in this country, as well as through the U.N., is to create beehive type of society, to abolish the calendar of progress, the calendar that looks to the future and to salvation, and it says, The beehive is salvation. The anthill is salvation. The same thing over and over again, every worker at his line in the production belt.

We cannot understand, therefore, the meaning of calendar reform unless we realize it as directed against Christianity and the Christian family. You have therefore, now a calendar of continuous work as the goal. The ancient world had such a calendar of continuous work. The Medieval church tried to war against that calendar, but their answer to it was continuous worship. The goal in the Middle Ages, and increasingly the reality was a perpetually open church, and to this day, Roman Catholic churches aim at keeping their sanctuaries open around the clock. The ideal was, yes, outside, there is a world of continuous work, a beehive, and anthill world, but here within, you have an escape from that world that goes nowhere. The Reformation reacted against it, and they said no. The answer to the world of continuous work is not one of continuous worship or escape as worship, but it is a closed church, except on the Sabbath, and so the idea that the church should be closed during the week was emphatically stressed by the Reformers, that man worked and worshiped in his work. This was the liturgy, the public work of the people of God, to exercise dominion, and the Sabbath, therefore, coming together in worship was not an escape from the world of work, but a celebration of dominion under God and of the future triumph and victory that would be the inheritance of God’s people.

As a result, very quickly with this view of the calendar, six days in which man can establish dominion, the seventh day to stop and to rest, and to rejoice in that dominion, meant very quickly that the Protestant countries were the areas where learning and science flourished. It’s not an accident of history. It’s recognized even by very thoroughly humanistic scholars that the Puritans were the fathers of modern science. It was because their conception of the calendar was such that they felt they had to exercise dominion and develop sciences during the six days, to develop everything.

As a result, it’s not surprising moreover, that it was in the Puritan areas that the Industrial Revolution developed. Unfortunately, at this time, there was a dual movement that has wrought great havoc since then. On the one hand, the Enlightenment, rationalism, humanism was beginning to infiltrate all circles. On the other hand, Pietism was beginning to capture the churches, and Pietism was a product of Armenianism, which was neo-Thomism, a Protestant form of Thomism, which sought an escape from the world, and so the Sabbath, in the minds of the Pietists, was turned into a kind of a Medieval conception, of withdrawal, of retreat, of escape from the world.

As a result, whereas it was Puritan science that led to the Industrial Revolution when the Industrial Revolution began to develop, the churches were not prepared for it. They should have been prepared to work out a theology of the Sabbath in terms of the Industrial Revolution. They should have recognized that here is a great extension of man’s dominion, that this truly has been a product of everything men of faith have worked for, that now, not only is our capacity to work and our capacity to exercise our dominion greatly enlarged, but our ability to celebrate the Sabbath and to rejoice therein also proportionately increased. Lacking a theology of the Sabbath, they had nothing to offer, and the result was a progressive breakdown.

Meanwhile, the sons of the Industrial Revolution began to see the very thing that they had produced, the machine and the greater ability to work, not as a blessing but as a curse, and there was progressively and especially in the twentieth century, a revolt against technology, a revolt against the machine. The fact is the machine has decreased pollution. Pollution was greater a few centuries ago, but the ecology boys are ready to blame the machine for pollution. If anyone thinks that, say, New York City is polluted, let them read the statics on the pollution and the disease attended upon it when all traffic in New York City was horse-drawn. Every day, the deposit of manure ran not into hundreds, but tens of thousands of tons, and epidemics like cholera were routine, and the pollution of the air intense{?}. The pollution of the river, tens{?}, and of the Rhine is nothing now compared to what it was a few centuries ago. Why the revolt against the machine?

Last Sunday in Westwood, there was some kind of arts and crafts festival and fair in the streets, you may have noticed were filled with sidewalk vendors peddling a lot of {?}, artsy-craftsy junk, purely decorative, but this is typical of all romantic rebellion against technology. They assume that a lot of little knick-knacks that they make with their hands are somehow going to keep the world going and are a substitute for the machine, and some of these people establish communes where they think the answer to everything is to work with a hoe and to farm with a hoe. Not surprising, that very quickly they lose their appetite for work and head back to the city. The lives of all these communes are very, very short. It’s purely a romantic and a ridicules rebellion.

Everywhere, all over the world, however, the revolt against technology is real. Technology is seen as the enemy, and production is also declining, the ability of the average person to produce is greatly decreasing because of his unwillingness to see any point in work. Thus, when the Sabbath declines ultimately work declines. The purpose of God’s Sabbath rest was that man might see the meaning of work, and be able to work more successfully.

A few weeks ago, we hear Dr. Francis Nigel Lee. Dr. Lee, a few years ago, wrote a little pamphlet on the Sabbath, interpreting the meaning of the word “rest,” and in it he comments, “With the creation of man on the sixth day as the crown and Lord of creation, God had finished creating. Now God rests from creation. Rest in man, the masterpiece of his creation. In man, God’s Sabbath from creation in order to make it, to fashion it, and God appoints man his masterpiece to make it for him. He delegates His exclusive right to make things to man as His deputy, as His image. God shows to man the created earth as it is, as if He says, ‘Subdue it. I have created the world to make it, to make it through you. I have made it, now you must make the earth. I shall rest in this Sabbath of creation week until the end of history, and I shall watch how you develop and subdue the earth and make it for me, watch how you proceed with the development of culture, and hold you accountable on my eighth day, on the Day of the Lord at the end of history.”

When man denies God, however, he denies the ultimacy of the transcendental supernatural power of God, but he doesn’t deny an ultimate power in the universe. Every philosophy has a concept of ultimate power. So, when he denies that ultimate power is in God, because he says there is no God, he must then locate power somewhere in the world. When he says it is man, it ultimate devolves on the collective man, the state, and increasingly on the instruments of man, the machines. Very interesting how man made the machine now sees it as a threat to himself.

There was a prophetic novel written on that subject about 175 to 180 years ago, entitled Frankenstein, and the author saw the threat of the machines. Man without God making his own creation, the machine, and the machine proving to be greater than man. Why this threat? Some of the top men in cybernetics have actually said that machines, computerized machines may take over civilization and govern man in the future, and make man their slaves. This is not only stated by science fiction writers, but by professors at Harvard and elsewhere. It’s ridiculous but they seriously believe this. Why?

When God made His creation, He gave it a Sabbath, a rest. Man needs that rest. When man made his creation, the machine, his creation needs no rest. It can work around the clock. It is a continuous power. It works automatically, and it begins to terrify man. It is continual power, and man feels that somehow, it is a threat to him. It is power that somehow is greater than himself, because he no longer sees himself as in the image of God, as God’s lord over the earth.

A very interesting statement not too long ago in a major publication, commented on the world of machines and man’s fear of machines, and of computers, and especially of these computerized data banks. The writer, Arthur R. Miller comments, “Some people feel emasculated when private information about them is disclosed or exchanged, even though the data are accurate and they do not suffer any career or social damage, correctly or incorrectly. They think in terms of having been embarrassed or demeaned by having been denuded of something that hitherto was there’s alone. This concern for the record will be reinforced by the popular conception of the computer as the unforgetting and unforgiving watchdog of society’s information managers. As one observer has remarked, the possibility of a fresh start is becoming increasingly difficult. The Christian notion of redemption is incomprehensible to the computer.”

Very interesting point, is it not? If man has no God, there is no forgiveness of sins from God for him, and if he has created the machine and is fearful of the machine, and now the machine becomes a databank which stores all his sins, every fact about him, where is the forgiveness of sin, in some cases, known to me? Some veterans have found that everything that they ever did while in the armed forces is now part of the record, that every time they went to the doctor for any kind of shot, any kind of illness, and some things they didn’t want ever to be a part of any record are now part of the government’s databank, and there is no forgiveness of sins with the databank, and for the humanists, this is a terrifying thing, and this is why the humanists are so afraid themselves of the databanks they are creating because they want to wipe out their pasts so often and cannot do it. Having no God above to give them forgiveness of sins, they want to destroy the past, and it accumulates there constantly, unceasingly, every time there is any written record.

You will recall in Huxley’s Brave New World, he had his predestinators. Much worse now for people, the predestinators are computers. The Sabbath is gone for the humanist and he cannot find rest despite leisure. More leisure time than ever before, but because salvation, and rest, and work are inseparably intertwined, when one goes, the other goes.

It was in 1897 that the word sabotage was coined. It comes from the French word sabot, “wooden shoe.” What was sabotage? The wooden shoe workers, taking their wooden shoes and putting them in the machines to destroy them, was the first major revolt against our modern technology. The first sign of the growing move towards primitivism. In other words, humanism, having no Sabbath, is incapable of work, incapable of rest, and is committing suicide. Dr. Rotmacher{?}, in commenting on cubism in art, calls attention to this suicide. He says, “The aims of the cubists, their quest for a new expression, a new art were, in the final analysis, the making of a new worldview, one that broke away from the age old humanism of Western society. The personal was lost, for there was no longer a personal God. Man, animals, plants, things, they are all basically the same, so there should be no basic difference in the way they are depicted.”

Humanism, thus, the reigning philosophy of our time, is dying around us because it can no longer maintain a view of man. It has lost its Sabbath and is committing suicide. It is the end of man and the end of his means, but those who have a Sabbath in Christ can work, because theirs is a calendar of progress, of future-oriented, conquest-oriented calendar. All the great hymns concerning the Sabbath celebrate that fact. One of them, by Isaac Watts, written in 1719, a post-millennial hymn,

“This is the day the Lord hath made,

He calls the hours His own.

Let heaven rejoice, let earth be glad,

And praise surround the throne.

Today He rose and left the dead,

and Satan’s empire fell.

Today the saints His triumphs spread

and all His wonders tell.

Hosanna to the anointed king,

to David’s holy son.

Help us, O Lord, descend and bring

salvation from the throne.”

But without such a faith there is no Sabbath, no victory, and rest becomes boredom. Man either revolts against the machine or becomes a slave to it, and even prides himself on becoming like a machine and like a computer. In commenting on the modern calendar and its orientation to the world of the machine, Dr. Eugene Rosenstock Hussey, who lectured here at UCLA about ten years ago, had this to say, “The new solar calendar trains man to think of the future not as something new but as something that can be calculated in advance. Future, in this world of economy and technique, is the prolongation of the past. If former civilizations had dared to think of the future as an annex to what we know about the past, a special grammatical form for the future would probably never have been invented. Real future, in its proper meaning, implies a change in quality, of surprise, and of promise. To live in the future means to be indifferent to present hardships. In America, the future was such {?} because it meant an unknown life, but the solar calendar commerce is pedantic. A witty banker in Berlin effectively made fun of it in the following story. He had a conference with the president of the largest German electric company, and after two hours they saw that they would have to meet again. The industrialist was rather self-important and explained how terribly busy he was. Every day was completely booked up. Practically every hour was taken by meetings, consultations, committees, and business trips. It was now January and not before April 16 could he find a free day in his appointment book. Yes, the 16th of April would suit him. Would it suit the banker, too? Bored by this pompousness, the banker said calmly, ‘I’m sorry, but on the 16th of April I have a funeral.’ The abolition of the real future is the price we pay for overloading our calendar, as though the days to come were as much our own as those of the past. He who treats the future as his private property never gets the full benefit of his character of regeneration.”

The Sabbath tells us that the future is not our private property, and it’s not the past endlessly repeated. The Sabbath, because it speaks of God’s regeneration, tells us that the future comes not from man, not from his computers, not from his beehive, anthill planning, but from the sovereign God. The Sabbath says that we have a future, a victory, a resurrection from the dead. When we have no Sabbath, we have a world without a future. When we have a Sabbath, we have work, victory, and dominion. This is why the Sabbath is so important to the calendar. Apart from a Christian calendar, the world will sink back into a deadly routine of work that gets nowhere and satisfies no one. Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, who of thy grace and mercy hast given unto us a Sabbath rest. Teach us therein to take hands off our lives and into thy keeping, to know, our Father, that thou are He who dost crown our days with thy loving-kindness, that our labor is not in vain in thee, but all things have their glorious purpose in terms of thy kingdom. So teach us to rest and so teach us to work, that we may in all things be more than conquerors and ever joyful in thy service and of the rewards thereof. In Jesus’ name. Amen. Are there any questions now, first of all, with regard to our lesson? Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] I did know, but I couldn’t tell you now, because when I read the book on cybernetics by Norbert Wiener, I was so amused that I promptly forgot within a month or two after I read it. Does anyone know?

[Audience] He subtitled the book, The Human Use of Human Beings.

[Rushdoony] Yes. The Human Use of Human Beings, but that isn’t the meaning of the word. However, I don’t think it’s a very human use he has in mind.

[Audience] {?} language between {?} and the language of the computer?

[Rushdoony] As I told you, I read it and I didn’t like it, and I thought it was rather absurd. Well, it came out about ten, fifteen years ago, and I read it then and, was it that long ago? Yes, I’ve forgotten what he had to say. Yes?

[Audience] {?} long word, he named it after {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, he coined the word. His father was quite an interesting scholar, a zoologist, so he came by the business of coining words naturally. His father did some very interesting work on the origins of the American Indians. Yes?

[Audience] Yes, a few years ago, {?} have a world calendar {?} what it was {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. First of all, the UN does have in mind a calendar not unlike the Soviet calendar, a world calendar, which will combine the various holy days so that there will be a Spring day to replace Easter, which will combine ancient fertility celebrations in primitive countries, and a Buddhist day, and so on. Then second, with regard to the purpose of changing the holidays has been first of all, to gear the calendar more and more to leisure, more and more to purely national holidays. Historically, the big days in the calendar in this country were Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, and the only national holiday that was anywhere near these was the fourth of July. Now, by this new kind of calendar dating, the emphasis is going to be given increasingly on national holiday. It is going to be an attempt to gear the calendar also to leisure, because the net effect of putting them there is to enable people to get away, you see, on the weekends, to have a long weekend, and it doesn’t have any real function in terms of any historic calendar consideration. It is anti-work.

Now, one of the interesting things today is how people feel the need of getting away. This is a new thing in history. I mentioned some time ago when we were studying the law, that historically, men not only did not want to get away, but they liked to have their tools where they could see them all the time. They took pride in their craft, and so they kept their tools, the tools of their craft or trade, close at hand, and I mentioned at the time that you find a touch of that in doctors to this day. A doctor, when he travels, likes to take his bag along with him. He doesn’t feel happy unless he can do it, and his vacation is really made if he has a chance to use that black bag somewhere on the trip, because previously, men did not rest by getting away. They rested on the Sabbath, and now, rest is escape from work, because the whole conception of work and of life has changed, and so to meet this demand for escape from work and the place of work, and escape from the home, whereas at one time, people liked nothing better than a chance to go into the house, their home, and shut the door from the outside world. That was freedom and peace. Now, it’s to get away from work, to get away from the home, to get away from the kids, and even to get away from your husband and to get away from your wife. That’s rest, increasingly, to the modern person, and you’re not really traveling unless you leave the country, too. Yes?

[Audience] So {?} calendar easier {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, and they are, of course, working very seriously on major calendar reforms, and they do want to abolish the Christian calendar definitely. Yes?

[Audience] Does the Jewish calendar have {?}

[Rushdoony] No, three. It has two days at the end of six months and three at the end of the year. Now, this is no longer true. The Jewish calendar is the same as ours today, but originally, it was 360 days with twelve months of regular days and then extra Sabbaths sandwiched in between the six months and at the end of six months, make it an even 365.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, it had the advantage of giving regular, twelve regular months. It meant that the Sabbath was on the day of the month rather than the day of the week. It was a good calendar. It wouldn’t be adverse to it being reestablished. It did have a great deal of merit, and a calendar like that would meet the demands of industry to have regular months of equal numbers of days, but they’ve never proposed a return to that. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. The Book of Common Prayer calls for morning and evening prayer, but it did not call for perpetually open church.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, they are. That’s been a kind of compromise in many areas between the old Medieval and the modern notion.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, very true, but you see, most of the Reformation churches did have morning and evening prayer for some time. This does not mean that they were all open all day. In some of the cities, they were, that’s very true, but in no period in England could you have gone to any country church and necessarily find it open around the clock.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Perpetually unlocked.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, right. But this has been not a constant practice in the Anglican churches. They have varied greatly. They’ve swung back and forth on that. In other words, they have, at times, been locked where there is no services. At times, they’ve been open around the clock. It’s just depended upon which influence has been strongest in Anglican circles. So, they have been in both camps, as it were, a good deal of the time. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] I don’t see anything wrong with it. In fact, I rather like it. Yes?

[Audience] {?} calendar {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] We are told that after so many days after the resurrection, forty days, I believe, our Lord ascended, and these were all parts of the Christian calendar and have progressively been dropped, which is tragic. Now, a Christian calendar will restore the significance of those days, but today, of course, progressively, the Christian calendar is deteriorating. There is an all-out hint to really do away with it, and in educational circles, it’s no longer Easter vacation, it’s spring vacation, which is very significant. In other words, it ceased to be a religious holiday.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. It’s either at the beginning of Acts or the latter part of one of the gospels. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, that’s interesting that the word Christmas has dropped out now. Well, it is an all-out deChristianization of the calendar, and the churches have not been aware of the issues so they have not really done anything about it. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Sometimes the children of this world are, as our Lord said, wiser than the children of {?}, unfortunately. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] No, there have been a great many calendars devised in various cultures. Some of them are fairly accurate, very accurate calendars, but they are purely solar calendars. They have no reference to any religious purpose.

Well, our time is up now. Let’s bow our heads for the benediction.

And now go in peace. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost bless you and keep you, guide and protect you this day and always. Amen.

End of tape