Keeping Sabbath Holy – sermon on June 14, 2015
Deuteronomy 5: 12-15
Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy, as the Lord your God has commanded you. You have six days each week for your ordinary work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath day of rest dedicated to the Lord your God. On that day no one in your household may do any work. This includes you, your sons and daughters, your male and female servants, your oxen and donkeys and other livestock, and any foreigners living among you. All your male and female servants must rest as you do. Remember that you were once slaves in Egypt, but the Lord your God brought you out with his strong hand and powerful arm. That is why the Lord your God has commanded you to rest on the Sabbath day.
Mark 2: 23-3:6 One Sabbath day as Jesus was walking through some grain fields, his disciples began breaking off heads of grain to eat. But the Pharisees said to Jesus, “Look, why are they breaking the law by harvesting grain on the Sabbath?” Jesus said to them, “Haven’t you ever read in the Scriptures what David did when he and his companions were hungry? He went into the house of God and broke the law by eating the sacred loaves of bread that only the priests are allowed to eat. He also gave some to his companions.”
Then Jesus said to them, “The Sabbath was made to meet the needs of people, and not people to meet the requirements of the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord, even over the Sabbath!” Jesus went into the synagogue again and noticed a man with a deformed hand. Since it was the Sabbath, Jesus’ enemies watched him closely. If he healed the man’s hand, they planned to accuse him of working on the Sabbath. Jesus said to the man with the deformed hand, “Come and stand in front of everyone.” Then he turned to his critics and asked, “Does the law permit good deeds on the Sabbath, or is it a day for doing evil? Is this a day to save life or to destroy it?” But they wouldn’t answer him.
He looked around at them angrily and was deeply saddened by their hard hearts. Then he said to the man, “Hold out your hand.” So the man held out his hand, and it was restored! At once the Pharisees went away and met with the supporters of Herod to plot how to kill Jesus.
Sermon: Keeping Sabbath Holy by Rev. Doreen Oughton
Today’s sermon focus is on Sabbath. Our responsive reading is from the book of Deuteronomy, a time when Moses has gathered the people to remind them of the statutes and ordinances given directly to them by God. He lists the 10 commandments, including this one to keep the Sabbath holy. Now when Moses received the commandments however many years before this, as described in the book of Exodus, God said the Sabbath ought to be kept holy because of God’s work in creating. Here it is about God’s work in bringing the people out of Egypt with a mighty hand.
We might assume, either way, that Sabbath is for God. We must take a day each week to remember the mighty power of God, whether in creating or rescuing. God needs our remembrance and thanks. Our worship, perhaps, is so important to God, that it is commanded. And through the years, the religious leaders and biblical scholars took this very, very seriously. Perhaps they understand the human condition – and how we try to get away with things, how we push the envelope, like when the speed limit is posted at 65, we all assume that 70 is just fine. We are outraged to be pulled over when we are going 68 (or is that just me?). They feared people would keep pushing and pushing, falling down a slippery slope, displeasing God and blowing it for everyone. Perhaps they thought it would be helpful to have very clear guidelines about what activities were considered work and were therefore forbidden on the Sabbath. So they made them. This one commandment to keep the Sabbath holy included clause and subclauses, footnote and addenda – lists of things that were verboten.
And here comes Jesus with his followers, going through the grain fields on the Sabbath, and look at that! – some of them plucked some grain – which was definitely on the list of banned activities. The Pharisees see this and challenge him. He responds with a precedent established in scripture, a story in which their ancestor David – him chosen and so favored by God – ate and shared bread that was, by law, only for the high priests. And then he says something that must have been shocking to the Pharisees – Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath.
Perhaps Moses had misunderstood, or perhaps like a game of telephone, things just got distorted as they were passed on. But what I understand Jesus to say is that the Sabbath is not for God. God does not need to be worship and praised and thanked. God did not create or rescue in order to have the masses stop to praise and thank and worship God. Worship was not so important to God that God had to create people to provide it. People are not for the Sabbath. The Sabbath is for the people. God didn’t command that the Sabbath be kept holy for God’s own pleasure, but for the people’s well-being.
God knew even better than the Pharisees the human condition – how they so easily forget who they really are and what really matters. And when they forget, or lose sight, they are worse off for it. They get anxious and competitive; they operate under the delusion that they have to make it on their own in this world – survival of the fittest. Instead of seeing others as deeply connected to themselves – instead of seeing the Oneness, they see others as obstacles, problems, threats, competitors. But God is perhaps saying that if we take time to remember on a regular basis, if we stop working, remember that we were created in love, that we are children of God –the God who cares enough to intervene in our lives – to rescue God’s people, well, maybe we will find comfort and security in that. Perhaps we will see the truth about other people as well – that they also are beloved children of God.
The part of the reading from Deuteronomy that I think was passed on correctly was the emphasis that Sabbath is for everyone – the children and the servants, even the animals, even the foreigners – which I take to mean even those who don’t share our faith. Could God be trying to tell those of the tribe of Abraham that even people outside the tribe are created and loved by God and ought to have time off to remember that?
It is important to our true humanity to take time off work, to rest in the assurance that we are loved and cared for by our Creator. It is important to make sure that others get the same opportunity for rest and remembrance. In the days of Moses, and even in the time that Jesus walked the earth, shutting everything down for a day probably made a lot of sense. Because again, our tendency to forget could cause us to want to keep Sabbath for ourselves, but make it easier by having others do the work that we are missing. The command is so clear though that no one should work, that the best way was to pick a day that everyone would stop everything that was deemed work. But I don’t know that that was meant to be a permanent, unchanging model. I know it is tempting to shake our heads and rue the day the blue laws were repealed, wreaking all kinds of havoc on society, what with families hitting the basketball courts and baseball diamonds and soccer fields instead of church, with teens going to the mall instead of spending time with family. But really, doesn’t that make us like… the Pharisees?
Its outrageous, isn’t it – what the Pharisees did to the law. They took this life-giving guidance offered by God and twisted it. In the Gospel reading Jesus calls them out, asks them what is it that is really lawful – an obedience to the clauses and subclauses that ends up doing harm, or a veering away from the minutia in a way that brings life. Jesus answers his own question by healing a man with a withered hand, and is overcome by grief and anger at the hardness of the Pharisees, at their determination to misuse the principles and turn them into a mechanism for harm or punishment.
We would never distort things this way, would we? We would never take a divine teaching and turn it into a rigid law with clauses and subclauses and footnotes and addenda – laws that would see people punished for not adhering to every little subclause. Oh, wait… there’s that teaching on feeding the poor, providing for the orphan and widow. That wouldn’t be codified into tax laws, would it? And wait, if you don’t pay your taxes – those monies that will help the widow and orphan and also the manipulative addict or the scheming and lazy welfare queen – you could end up in jail, right? And there’s that whole business of blue laws. I’m not sure how often people were punished for breaking them, but still, there was a rigidity about what were allowable activities.
Things get a little fuzzy when you think about it, don’t they? One of the things we talked about in bible study was whether it was important or not that everyone/ most people take Sabbath at the same time. Maybe that is not so important in 21st century society. If each person or family works out some down time – time to be together and remember who and whose they are – take a break from what they consider work, why is there any need for stores to close? Is it because we can’t count on ourselves to take this time and so we have to have external enforcement? Can’t we just make our own decision to avoid shopping for a day, to turn off the computer, leave the phone at home when we go for a walk? My struggle with Sabbath-keeping is the issue God is so pointed about in giving this commandment – that everyone should keep Sabbath – the servants and the animals and the foreigners. We live in a time when there are so many jobs that don’t pay a living wage. People need to work 7 days just to get by. And I think we should be concerned about that.
It is this kind of thing, this and the tax laws that redistribute wealth to help the poor – that is fuzzy for me. I guess I, like the Pharisees, don’t trust people to do the right thing unless they are under some kind of threat, and I care about the poor. I care about those hard-working minimum wage laborers. It’s not right that they have no safety net. It’s not right that they don’t get sick time or get minimal (if any) vacation, that they have to have part-time and full-time work. I think there is something to be said for legislating a minimum wage – a decent, living wage. And I think there is something to be said for requiring people to pay taxes – to have some system for redistributing wealth for the common good, and a system that has teeth.
And yet I am becoming increasingly clear that my thinking on this is not God’s thinking, not Christ’s mandate. I am increasingly convinced that our God is a God of freedom, and that the work of Christ was about liberation. We are freed to live by our own conscience, and free to live with the consequences of our choices. But God and Jesus try to help us see what the consequences are.
I’ve read that the commandments were misnamed – that they are not commandments, not even suggestions for good living. They are commitments, they are signs that we are living in the kindom. When we remember who and whose we truly are, when we recognize the divine spark in everyone, when we remember that every other person is our brother, our sister, God’s beloved child, then this is what it will look like. You will love your God and not worship idols, such as money or power or security; you will not swear to things by God’s name that you don’t even mean; you will regularly set apart some time to connect with God’s holiness and with your own; you won’t lie or cheat or steal or kill; you will not covet – not resent others for having something lovely, nor pity yourself for not having it nor concoct ways to take it for yourself. Jesus struggles all through his earthly ministry to convince people that the kindom had come and is coming. He tried to lead them to it, but he knew he could not force them to enter, could not command it. We have to follow willingly. We have to trust what he says and take a leap of faith. Or we don’t HAVE to. God won’t punish us if we don’t – maybe the government will, but God won’t, I believe. But we will suffer for our hard hearts, for our mistrust and disbelief, and we might not even know we are suffering. But we will be living much smaller lives than we could live.
And I don’t know how to break this crazy system we have – how to stop letting laws be the answer and replacing heart and conscience. Maybe a way to start is to go above and beyond the law. If the law taxes us at 25%, maybe we could pay it cheerfully and then give away another 5% to a cause we care about – some relief or justice work being done. Do work of heart – accord worth to all, no matter their circumstance. Maybe if the company gives us two weeks of vacation, we take a third without pay just to show who is really in charge of our Sabbath time. Or maybe we advocate and lobby a company to voluntarily increase the pay or vacation time for their workers – at a company that we don’t work for so it is clearly not about self-interest. What if all Christians started doing stuff like that – voluntarily sharing and encouraging others to share also? Could it begin to change the world? I am so ambivalent saying these things – it seems beyond my imagination that it could be so, that we could do it, and yet we are here, on this Sabbath day, being reminded of God’s mighty hand, of Christ’s life-giving salvation, and perhaps I can at least give thanks that such grace is far deeper than my tiny imagination. May it be so.
