Have you ever noticed that the world seems to always be in a hurry?
If you haven’t noticed, try driving on I-5.
Sometimes a half a second pause when the light turns from red to green is too much for the driver behind you who begins honking their horn in no time. Sometimes cars will be passing other cars by weaving in and out of lanes at breakneck speed. I fear for the safety of these drivers.
Getting to your destination on time is important, but I’m not so sure that is always the case when we are in a hurry. Sometimes it is just plain road rage. I think we are impatient because we are anxious and anxiety flows from lives that are super busy and driven by a need to master time because it seems there is never enough time to do what we are supposed to do.
We are, all of us, caught up, to some degree, in this anxiety.
There’s an antidote for this and we find it in the Ten Commandments … keeping Sabbath.
Keeping Sabbath is a beautiful practice in so many ways, not the least of which is to practice a way of life that is an alternative to finding ourselves on the endless treadmill of pushing on, doing more and more, but never seeming to do enough.
“Remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy.”
Set a day apart to rest and to worship, and to acknowledge that God is God and that we are not God.
The command to keep Sabbath is in between the commandments honoring God and the commandments honoring neighbor. It is the lynchpin between the two for Sabbath enriches both our love of God and neighbor. In fact, loving neighbor flows from the love of God.
In the creation story, God took six days to do the work of creating the world and on the seventh day God rested. The commandment of Sabbath rest supports this and the commandments as they are presented in the book of Exodus put great emphasis on Sabbath rest. Here God is our role model. In other words, if God can take a day to rest, so can we.
In the commandments as they are reported from today’s first reading in the book Deuteronomy, the emphasis is placed more on liberation. Keeping Sabbath is to keep a day, set aside a day, to highlight God’s work of bringing us freedom and salvation. It is for the people of God to remember God’s acts of deliverance and to praise God the great deliverer, who delivered God’s people from slavery and oppression bringing them on a journey that would lead to crossing over into a land that God promised would be flowing with milk and honey.
As we learn from Deuteronomy, Moses was not be able to experience life in the new land, but in his final speech to God’s people, he urged them to embrace a new beginning by embracing the commandments which included Sabbath rest.
By doing so, they could remember the God of freedom who brought them to freedom.
Such remembering is more than merely recalling what God did, but remembering through ritual. Such remembering is done in the context of worship, honoring God above all else. Praising God for what he has done to bring freedom and liberation.
Sabbath is a day to be freed from the pressures and stresses laid on us or we have laid upon ourselves to always be working and producing and striving.
Note how the Sabbath command embellishes freedom by making it for more than just a few. “You shall not do any work – you, or your son or your daughter, or you’re male and female slave, or your ox or your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns …”
You see, God’s gift of freedom is for all. This sets a tone for how we are to live. Sabbath observance helps us see the world as God sees it, the creation we are called to steward instead of exploit, and regarding all people as neighbors. This empowers us to a life of advocating freedom for all who are oppressed – immigrants, those in poverty, and those who are victims of hateful violence. The promise of keeping Sabbath is that as we celebrate God’s gift of freedom we will live freely resisting the powers of greed and empire and all deathly powers that do not make us free but only entrap us in the endless cycle of anxiety fed by fear.
Each of us knows the fallout of living in a world of anxiety, fear, overproduction, and overconsumption. Each of us knows something about the fast pace. God near relines in showing us and providing for us a place that is freer.
Keeping Sabbath is admittedly very complex. Taking time to pray and worship and remember the saving acts of God and just taking a day to rest and have fun and enjoy community while ceasing from work has ironically become an ominous task. In modern life we have to navigate between our various commitments and activities that crowd in on us that make Sabbath keeping more than a little bit of a challenge.
Many people have to work on Sunday. My wife and I work on Sunday! So we take our Sabbath rest on Friday, but even keeping that day as Sabbath is something of a challenge. Gathering with the community for weekly worship is no easy deal either.
This is more than a modern challenge. I believe it has been complex for centuries.
Among Christians, there is no clear and clean tradition. First, Sabbath is for the seventh day. For our Hebrew ancestors and friends, this is the case. Our Christian ancestors met on Sunday, the first day, the day of Resurrection, which was a work day, and at least in what we find in the many of the annuls of the first few centuries, many Christians met for worship on Sunday evening.
Making Sunday Sabbath came much later and how Christians have observed Sabbath has not been monolithic. For many the emphasis is on Sabbath as worship, for others it is Sabbath as rest, and for others it is both.
For Luther, Sabbath rest was critical and he laid the emphasis on hearing God’s word. Sabbath day, was primarily for listening to the preaching of the Gospel. Luther’s protégé, Philip Melanchthon, described Sabbath as the day for public worship and warned against casting ancient rituals into stone. John Calvin understood Sabbath rest as a kind of spiritual rest allowing God to work his saving grace within us.
Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Workers movement, described something of a Sabbath practice when she said: “My strength returns to me with my cup of coffee and the reading of the psalms.” Lest you think it was merely a private deal between her and God, she also attended Mass every day.
And in recent years, a movement is afoot to reclaim Sabbath as essential for the people of God and to practice as a means of resistance.
One of the spokespersons for this is the Old Testament scholar Walter Breuggemann who says that Sabbath keeping is a means of resisting the powers that lead to oppression and anxiety. He cites the ideology of the market place and describes it as the “liturgy of consumerism.” We consume more hours, so we can produce more and we produce more so we can be more powerful and richer than we are. It’s a vicious cycle.
Sabbath rest is a way to yield to God, and resist the powers that seek to entrap us.
Rest and worship on Sabbath, remembering God’s acts of freedom, shapes us to be free and to live freely and to resist the idolatry needing more stuff or needing more attention or needing more status. What looks like freedom is no freedom at all. So, set apart a day for Sabbath.
In a culture addicted to work where we base people’s worth on what they produce and achieve, God can pry us from such an addiction and help us see that others are not people to compete with or demean. They are neighbors sharing God’s good gift of creation, stewarding it instead of exploiting it.
So, if Sabbath is such a holy practice then why did Jesus and his disciples have little regard for the Sabbath? Or, so it seems.
While passing through a wheat field on Sabbath they began to pluck grains of wheat. The reaction of the guardians of religion was pretty fierce: “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?”
Jesus reminds them that David and his friends were hungry and raided the place where the bread was kept to feed only the priests.
Sabbath was made for humans, not humans for the Sabbath.
Sabbath is for us and if a neighbor is hungry or suffering, such a neighbor deserved to be fed or relived.
Jesus reminds them here an in many, many other places that the spirit of God’s law was replaced by the letter of the law. THE gift of Sabbath became legalistic and it lost its original purpose.
Isn’t that what we tend to do when we are entrusted with God’s gift? Instead of stewarding them we ignore them or we use them in ways that are not life-giving. We make them into rules to enforce and the intent of the gift disappears form our radar screen.
Where is the place between ignoring Sabbath all together and making it a legalistic?
How do we live freely?
First, we acknowledge that we are, as Paul writes, clay jars or “cracked pots” meaning that the greater glory belongs to God. That’s a fact and it is good to know as it may keep us humble. Secondly, I wonder how we might practice the commandments like Sabbath keeping as gifts to be received.
Maybe that’s where the emphasis lies.
To receive God’s gifts. To receive the gift, instead of trying to control it or master it is to yield to God and to enjoy what God gifts. We are on the receiving end of God’s good gifts both in the days of work and on the day of worship and rest.
To receive Sabbath da or any day is to resist the temptation to master the day, or control it. TO receive is to live in freedom.
At the investiture on Thursday evening when we celebrated this new ministry, this new beginning, I made promises and so did you. I promised to be faithful to the scriptures and to the means of grace and to care for you, shepherd you, proclaim the good news to you, and to pray for you. And you promised to pray for me, support me and work with me in the ministry and mission of God in and through this congregation.
And do you remember how I responded and you responded. I will. We will. Then, comes the saving grace: “I will and I ask God to help and guide me.” “We will and we ask God to help and guide us.”
On our own we are fickle, even irresponsible, and unfaithful, but with the help of God, we participate in God’s work of healing the world.
Yes, with God’s help.
Friends in Christ, do not shun asking for God’s help. Ask and ask and ask and receive God’s good gifts like keeping the Sabbath and making it holy. Amen.