WE NEED GOD to Keep Our Sanity

A Sermon based upon Exodus 20:8-11; Deuteronomy 5:12- 15; Mark 2: 23- 3: 6

By Rev. Charles J. Tomlin, D.Min.

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

Year C: Proper 17, 15^th Sunday After Pentecost, August 28^th, 2016

During my college years, one summer I worked at a Furniture Factory to make some extra money.  There was one fellow I worked with who never seemed to be putting much effort into his job.  So, one day I got on to him.

"Let's get moving, so that we can get caught up for the day," I suggested.

"I'm sorry, but today's Friday and on Friday I'm Muslim and it's a day of rest,"
        he said.

"Well, what were you last Saturday when we were all required to work over time?  You didn=t work very hard then either?"

"Last week I was a Jewish.  It was the Sabbath Day?"

"What will you be Sunday?"  I asked.

"On Sunday I'll be Methodist."

"And on Monday?"

"Then I'll be called to the Baptist ministry, Baptist preachers take that day off."

"O.K., I think I'm beginning to understand," I told him.  "But what about Monday through Thursday?  What are you then? 
He answered, "On those day's I'm so tired of being everybody else, I'm not worth much!"

That man's comical flexibility with Sabbath reminds us that the meaning of this fourth commandment can get tricky.  When I was a missionary in Germany, living in a predominately atheistic city, we only had seven active Christian groups in a city of fifty-one thousand.  We had two Lutheran churches, one Catholic, one Apostolic, one Mormon, one Baptist, and one Seventh-day Adventist.  Interestingly, the church that was geographically and practically closest to our Baptist church in worship style was the Seven-day Adventist church.  Since Adventists are historically linked to Baptists in America, their worship is more like us even the German Baptist church, whose style felt more Lutheran.  

Since we had so much in common, the Seveneth-Day Adventist’s Church often had prayer meetings together with us, and we sometimes used their baptistery, as we didn’t have one.  But in spite of our similarities, the one major visible difference between our two Christian fellowships was the day we worshiped---they worshiped on Saturday, the seventh day of the week, while we worshiped on Sunday, the first day of the week.  Although they would never have told us to our faces, their doctrine considered all who were not seventh day Baptists, being unfaithful to God's law, which says, "Remember to observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy." 

Which day are we supposed to keep holy?  Saturday, which is the Sabbath, or Sunday, which is the Lord's day?  For people who take the Bible literally, this becomes a problem.  In the secular world today,  most don't honor Sabbath at all, or at least not as we used to.  What should we do, if anything, to 'remember the Sabbath' today?

WHAT DID JESUS DO?

The gospel text from Mark reminds us of a very ‘strange thing’ that happened on the way from Moses to Jesus.  On a particular Sabbath, Jesus was walking through some grainfields with his disciples.  As was customary in those days, since there was no McDonald's, no Motel Six, nor 7-11 convenience stores, traveling people were allowed to glean grain and fruits from the edges of farmer's fields.  But when the Pharisees saw Jesus and his disciples plucking grain on the Sabbath, they found them guilty of breaking God's Sabbath law, which said: " Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God; you shall not do any work-- you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns (Exod. 20:9-10 NRS).

So, was Jesus a Sabbath breaker?  Clearly he didn’t keep the Sabbath the same way the law was interpreted in his day.  Though we don’t have Sabbath laws today,  there was a time when Sunday was considered our Christian ‘sabbath’.  As a child I was taught that Sundays was our “Sabbath” day for worship, rest, relaxation and visiting relatives.  Everything about Sunday was different.  We went to church.  We drove to see relatives.  Cousins got together to play while the adults visited.  Since no department stores were opened on Sunday, we never thought about shopping, or going to the store.  But there were exceptions, if, while on the road, we could stop and eat at one of those "Jiff Burger" spots, or if we went out for ice cream at the dairy bar after Sunday night worship, no one ever considered anyone breaking the Sabbath.  Also, we junior Sunday School boys already had our own list of jobs that were allowed on Sunday: Firemen, Policemen, Hospital and Emergency workers, Food Service, Service Stations, and of course, Preachers.  These jobs were allowed, but all others were considered to be "Sabbath breakers."

The Pharisees had their lists of "Sabbath breaking" too.  Since the Jews had been scolded by their prophets for unfaithfulness to God's law, which they said brought God's judgment upon them, causing them to lose their land, they came to believe that by being strictly faithful to God's law again, the land would one day be restored.  The Pharisees saw it as their job to make sure everyone took the law seriously and followed it, down to the letter.    By Jesus' time, the Pharisees had come up with 1,521 things that a person could not do on the Sabbath.  The Jerusalem Talmud had 64 pages and the Babylonian Talmud 156 double pages of specific rules dealing with the Sabbath.  Some of them took on the quality of the absurd.   For instance, a person with a toothache couldn't gargle with vinegar but could use a toothbrush dipped in vinegar;  a radish could be dipped in salt, but not left too long in the salt, lest it began to pickle.  Pickling was considered work making pickles on the Sabbath.  

Since Jesus did feel the need to obey all these silly, Sabbath rules; and because he allowed his disciples to glean and pluck grain on the Sabbath, he was named a Sabbath-breaker.  But of course, Jesus did not see himself as a Sabbath Breaker because he had a very different view of what it meant to keep Sabbath.  Jesus excused himself and his disciples by making a reference to how, out of necessity, David once ate the communion bread as a meal.  That bread was considered holy just as the Sabbath day was, but David, along with his soldiers, ate the consecrated bread anyway, because they were in need of nourishment.  Making this illustration from the life of David, Jesus makes a climatic, revealing, but radical point: "The Sabbath was made to benefit people, not people to benefit the Sabbath" (Mark 2:2:27). 

           

WHAT DID JESUS MEAN?

So what is the big deal here?  What is the human benefit to keeping the Sabbath which Jesus was referring to?  To answer this, we need to understand two most important texts concerning ‘Sabbath’ found in the Old Testament. The first one we find in Exodus 20: 8-11.   

REST:  If amount of attention given to the fourth commandment among the others means anything, this is the most important commandment of all.  With the most lines given to any commandment, God instructs Moses to tell the people that they must "remember", "observe", and "keep" the Sabbath day "holy" because everything and everyone needs ‘REST’.  Even God himself, after he took six days to create the world, rested on the seventh.  If God is not a workaholic, as O.T. scholar Walter Bruggeman has suggested, then neither should we.  We must honor the Sabbath because we all need to have time to rest and re-create ourselves.

What Sabbath does, by inserting the rhythm of rest into our lives, is give us an entirely different perspective of work, life and time.  God blesses work.  We need to work.  It is a large part of our life to have meaningful, beneficial, and constructive work.  It's hard to be human, without a good job we work at.   But just as important as work itself, is to know how to stop working and have a time reflect and rest.  Rest is built into the cycle of life.  If the human body does not have a time to rebuild and refresh itself physically, socially and spiritually, we are not following the owner's manual and are putting our own lives at risk.   

In France, shortly after the French Revolution, it is said that some Frenchmen became defiant and decided to come up with their own Sabbath day rhythm.  Instead of resting every seven days, they decided to try it every ten days.  It is said that these guys became so stressed out they had to immediately revert back to the seven day cycle, as originally designed.

 

The Sabbath is a day that is FOR US, not against us.  According to economist Juliet Schor, the average worker added 164 hours, an extra month of work, to the work year between 1968 and 1988.  We spend more, we make more and we work more, but we have less time to live.  "We live in an economy and society that demands too much of people," Schor says.  We need to learn the lesson of Sabbath all over again.   We need to take time rest,  to rest from commerce,  rest from worry,  and to rest from work.  If don't we will lose our sanity.  

When we first arrived in Europe it was a shock for us to realize that at 12:00 on Saturday everything closes everything except Gas Stations and a few convenience shops.  Everyone was forced by the German government to take a rest and have nothing to do but visit and walk.  When you get used to it, it's a wonderful thing to see how everything stops this way.  It gives you time to physically recharge, recreate, and to rejuvenate.  That is what this commandment is about, making sure people who work we have time to rest to slow down and enjoy the simple things in life.  But also, there's something else to this idea of Sabbath...

REMEMBER: In another moment of Israel's history, in Deuteronomy, this fourth commandment is referred to again, but now there another emphasis.  All the same reasons are there as before, "the Sabbath is to be keep holy" and it is a "day of rest".   But there is also an additional reason for keeping Sabbath given.  It occurs in verse 15, where Moses says: "Remember that you were once slaves in Egypt and that the LORD your God brought you out with amazing power and mighty deeds.  That is why the LORD has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day."   The point is made here, that you need more than rest to get through the life you've been given, but you also need time to reflect and to remember how God has given you the chance to have a life with both hope and meaning.

Have you ever stopped to give very much thought to what it would be like to have been like to have grown up on a plantation in the old south?  When you and I go back to visit some of those historical places in America, we ‘white folks’ might fantasize about how it must have been to have lived in such Romantic, slow going times.  Our African-American friends have a whole different experience.  When they visit old southern plantations, they don’t fantasize, but they have ‘panic attacks’, anxiety, and nightmares because their ancestors where once slaves in those places.  As slaves, their ancestors lived at the mercy of their ‘masters’ and ‘owners’.  There were no options, no choices, no freedom and no self-determination. 

That's how it once was for Israel  when they were in Egypt.   They were slaves with no freedom to rest or worship as they needed.  They had to do what they were told.  But now, God gives them a day to remember and reflect upon their new freedom.  This God who granted their freedom to become their own people and to determine their own destiny does not want them to forget what they now have and who has given it to them.  The Sabbath is the day to rest, to remember and to reflect upon everything that matters most.  It was a time to come away from the daily tasks of life that might re-enslave us, unless we remain determined to remember who we are to whom we belong. We belong to this gracious God who has made us free.   

Early Christians decided to let Sunday morning become their Sabbath, since this is the day that Christ arose from the grave to free them from their slavery to sin and selfishness. They got up ‘early’ because they were still working on first day of the week, and most of them were living subservient lives under the Romans.  Many of them were still Jews worshiping in Synagogues on the Sabbath as well, but Sunday morning had become another worship time that was even more special to them.  They saw themselves as part of a new Exodus, because another one even greater than Moses (Hebrews 3:2) had come to open a whole new world of hope for them.  Because Christians had experienced God=s love and healing power in Jesus Christ, they worshiped on the "Lord's Day” to ‘remember’ and follow their ‘living’ Lord. 

This is why we still gather on Sunday.  We are not Jews, but Gentiles, but we gather to enjoy the same blessing which Israel received, and even more:  By receiving, celebrating, and observing Sunday as our Sabbath, we are ‘grafted into’ the holy vine of God’s people, as his chosen, peculiar people who remember and rest in this God who still strong and mighty enough to save us from the chaos, confusion, and insanity of the world.

WHY ‘SABBATH’ STILL MATTERS

That is what Sabbath means.  It does not matter whether it's a Saturday or Sunday, but what matters is who you are, what you still need to be fully human, and what God has done to enable you reach your full potential. 

We stop and keep Sabbath because to be who we have been created to be, we have to rest, we have to remember, and we have to reflect upon what and who matters most.  If we don’t we get lost and we become enslaved all over again.  If we keep our nose to the grindstone too long, our lives become worthless like animals, without meaning or purpose.  If we don't ‘stop to smell the roses’ and reflect about what our short lives mean, we soon come to the end without anything to show except a final suffering and death.  But if we remember that there is a liberator, a deliverer, who stands with us against the empty, final, nothingness of our lives, then everything looks different.  Life matters, you matter, and so do the choices that you and I make.  Most of all, the God you trust in matters.  Without him you are dust, you are nothing, and there is no hope at all.  You better eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you die, and there is nothing else.  But those who ‘live and trust Him,” “will not perish, but will have everlasting life.”  This is the Word we come to remember and realize as our reality, as we “keep Sabbath” in the Spirit of Jesus.

I recently read the story about an old man, up in years who was downsized from his job and went looking for work.  When he finally found a good paying job, they told him to come in the next day, which was Sunday, his Sabbath day.  The man was not particularly a religious man, but he was always in church on Sundays and he believed that the Sabbath day, was holy, a day of rest and of remembering.  He turned down the job and ended up taking a lesser job and having to live on much less as well.  When the man finally died, his family, who loved and appreciated his very simple life, wrote on his tombstone,"Our dad was a simple man, who taught us how to live."

Joan Chittister wrote that going to her grandmother’s home on Sundays was like nothing else in her childhood.  In her good Protestant Grandmother’s house, “absolutely nothing happened on Sunday except church, Sunday school, and the family meal.  She did not play the radio.  She did not sew.  She did not work around the house.”  Joan continued: “You didn't have to be a philosopher in that house to figure out that Sunday was a different kind of day.  Grandma sang hymns to herself as she went from room to room throughout the day.  She frowned if Grandpa hammered boards in the garage.  She frowned at loud laughing.  She frowned at anything “frivolous.”  She frowned at the very thought of doing anything secular like going to a movie, playing games in the yard, having a party — shopping! — all these were entirely out of the question.”  She concludes: “I didn't much like to be in Grandma Chittister's house on Sundays. It was so different from the rest of the week. It was so compelling.
 

But, from her, I got a message about life that stayed with me forever. Life, I learned young, is about more than noise.  Life is about listening to the music of the soul. Work is important but it can be a distraction from meaning. Reflection is of the essence of being human…Sabbath says everything all the grandmothers of an earlier age were trying to teach us: be still, be thoughtful, be contented, be gentle with the world and you will become everything you were ever meant to be.” (From Chittister, Joan (2012-08-01). The Ten Commandments:  Laws of the Heart (pp. 37-38, 43). Orbis Books. Kindle Edition).   

More than a having a Sabbath law that makes us frown, Sabbath should be, however, about having a “Sabbath-Heart”.  Isn’t this what Jesus was trying to teach us?  Sabbath is not about what you do or don’t do, but Sabbath is about who you are.  Sabbath is not about getting some ‘rest’ because you are tired, but Sabbath is about finding ‘rest’ and ‘peace’ in being human.  Sabbath is about resting, remembering, and reflecting, but it is also about resisting the powers that can enslave us again, making us forget who we, whose we are, and what matters most.

When we keep Sabbath, we find ‘time’ to rest and reflect because we 'tell' time differently.  When we see time differently, spend time differently, we will also learn to live and work differently.  Everything about our lives changes when we take time to stop, rest, remember, and reflect—both talking to God, and, as John Denver once sang, “listening for the causal reply” --- which can come through nature, through Scripture, through family, through friends, and through the time we put back into our hands because we keep God in our lives.  When we do this, we can rescue time and "redeem the time", so we never fully lose it.  Sabbath is about the ‘heart’ that takes time because it has time, as God has now put eternity into our own hands.  There is a great song in German that goes:

“Meine Zeit steht in deinen Händen.
Nun kann ich ruhig sein, ruhig sein in dir.

Du gibst Geborgenheit, du kannst alles wenden.
Gib mir ein festes Herz, mach es fest in dir.

Translated it goes something like:

My time is in your hands, O Lord.  

Now I can be at peace and fully rest in you.  

You give me confidence.  Your loves changes everything. 

Give me a steadfast hope and make me strong in you.

Keeping the Sabbath is day and time we remind ourselves that our time all is finally in God's hands.  It is not finally your life in your own hands.  Time belongs to God,  just like your life belongs to God.  And if you take time to listen and learn, you will hear that times is talking.  Are you listening?  How do you find rest in your soul when your life is a race against time?  You won’t.  Only when you put your time into God’s hands will you find rest that keeps you from losing your sanity in a world that keeps on ticking, ticking, and ticking, and going nowhere fast.  Time will finally turn against you, and against me, unless we find ‘rest’ in this God who has ‘time’ and will keep ‘us’ in his hands.  When you realize, remember, reflect and rest in this, you are keeping ‘Sabbath’.  Amen.