10:30 am, Sun, June 2, 2024

(1 Sam 3:1-10; Mk 2:23 – 3:6) J G White / FBCA

The Fourth Commandment: Observe the Sabbath day and keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you. (Deut 5:12)

To prepare for this message about ‘keeping the sabbath,’ I read most of Ruth Haley Barton’s 2022 book, Embracing the Rhythms of Work and Rest. A wife, a preacher and teacher, a spiritual leader and author, she tells of being at the height of her powers and work, when she was about forty.

Then she had a bike accident. After surviving, she went right back to work. A friend laughed and said, “Ruth, when are you going to learn that when you are on a bike, you can’t take on a van?” Another friend, curious about the fact she was taking no time off to recover, said, “You know, you did just get run over by a car. You could take a day off!

The world just can’t go on without us. Some of us have days we think that way! Perhaps so many people feel trapped on that running wheel of work and family responsibility and financial demands and emotional duty. Do we see in one another what the media keeps telling us? This is a time when people have so much stress, anxiety and fear, loneliness, and struggle of every sort?

In the midst of all this, our dear Jesus would call us to a ‘Sabbath rest by Galilee.’ The ‘day of rest and gladness’ is a wonderful gift from God, but for so many an unopened gift. We think we sometimes enjoy the pretty wrapping, but never truly see what the day is or get to use it.

Even traditional Church Sundays were such a burden. They still can be! Especially for the twenty percent of any congregation who do eighty percent of the Church work. There could be refreshments to prepare, music and readings to get ready for, maybe a committee meeting after Sunday service, people to find and talk to about that decision that needs to be made, or make sure they get those papers they need for whatever ministry is about to happen.

The seventh day – or first day of the week as we Christians have it – is a gift from the Creator, who ceased from work on the seventh day in the first creation story. Even before the Ten Commandments were given, Moses and the Israelites were provided for so their seventh day could be a break.

What a break it was to be! Those ancient Hebrews were no longer slaves, slaves in Egypt. They would get a day off? Every seventh day? No work? Even your donkey got the day off? The travelers and visitors too? And food preparation was even simplified. Wow. That was good news.

That was thousands of years ago, far, far away. But in the first years of Christianity (only two thousand years ago) there was the promise of weekly rest. Hebrews chapter four declares these things: a Sabbath rest still remains for the people of God, for those who enter God’s rest also rest from their labors as God did from his. (9, 10) All such teaching is preceded by the leading of Jesus in His lifetime. More than once, Christ did things like this: He said to [the disciples], “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.” For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. (Mk 6:31)

But does it surprise us when we read that story of Jesus and his close followers getting in trouble on their Sabbath, picking grain as they wander? And then Jesus seems quite clearly to be making a point when he heals a man’s hand right there at a synagogue on Saturday. Again, we see this piece of time in our lives is a gift. The Sabbath was made for people, for us, not the other way around.

When we slow down, time can slow down. The rush ends, we share rest with others, it can be a kairos moment, a special quality of time. It can be real freedom. Think again back to those freed slaves, becoming a new people in a whole new way, journeying thru the wilderness. So too in our day and age. There are still many people who are enslaved, literally and figuratively. Resting, we remember those who get no rest.

Creator of Black Liturgies, Cole Arthur Riley, said,

When we rest, we do so in memory of rest denied. We receive what has been withheld from ourselves and our ancestors. And our present respite draws us into remembrance of those who were not permitted it… When I rest my eyes, I meet those ancestors and they meet me, as time blurs within us. They tell me to sit back. They tell me to breathe. They tell me to walk away like they couldn’t. Rest is an act of defiance…. It’s the audacity to face the demands of this world and proclaim, we will not be owned. (The Sabbath, 1951, p. 15)

Moses and those Hebrews, finding the rhythm of rest each week, with their manna in the desert, were finding their new identity, their true identity. We, today, find our identity in our quieter times with Jesus. We get in touch with ourselves, and with our Source, the Spirit of Christ in us, and among us in fellowship.

When we slow down, and cease a lot of usual actions, lots of things can surface. Thoughts, feelings, memories, problems, questions. So sabbath keeping has its harder moments. Christ uses Sunday to help us feel all the feels, as people say today. 14th century Persian poet, Hafez, wrote

Absolutely Clear

Don't surrender your loneliness

So quickly.

Let it cut more deep.

Let it ferment and season you

As few human

Or even divine ingredients can.

Something missing in my heart tonight

Has made my eyes so soft,

My voice

So tender,

My need of God

Absolutely

Clear.

As we build – or rebuild – sabbath days into our weeks, or sabbath moments into every day, we touch the deeper parts of ourselves, and are touched by others. Even by God. I know how some of you do this. 😊

We believers have, for the most part, taken the tradition of the seventh day, and moved it to the first day of the week, the day of the resurrection of Christ. Sunday becomes our tithe of time – the first and best of the week is given to God; we get to enjoy it fully with our God.

In theory. As I pointed out, Christian Sabbath has gotten lost in all the dos and don’ts, and the busyness and business of congregational activities. As well as our feelings that we are competing with the other activities of our community.

It is time to recreate and reclaim for ourselves what our day of rest can be. We have fully entered this age of shopping on all seven days, and work of all sorts too, and sports and so on that can be demanding and controlling of our time. I don’t think we fight against these trends; I think we get creative and live better, in spite of. Some people need to take their spiritual Sabbath on a day other than Sunday, for example.

The gift of this sacred day of rest is a shared thing. And it needs leaders to lead us into it. Starting with Jesus, yes, but we need people among us, such as pastors, to lead the way. Teaching, and example. I have read a quotation somewhere that claims, ‘A minister should be a kind of human Sunday.’

I find it striking that Eugene Peterson has a chapter in his book, The Contemplative Pastor, that is all about ‘The Unbusy Pastor.’

How can I persuade a person to live by faith and not by works if I have to juggle my schedule constantly to make everything fit into place? (p. 25) Peterson goes on to suggest an unbusy ministry leader is able to do three things. I can be a pastor who prays. I can be a pastor who preaches. I can be a pastor who listens.

Presbyterian minster and author/editor, John Buchanan, says he learned sabbath keeping this way:

My instructor in Sabbath-keeping was not a professor or spiritual director, but a foreman at the East Chicago Inland Steel plant named Make Paddock. His wife was the treasurer of the tiny congregation I served as a student pastor, and she wrote my salary check twice a month. Mike would deliver it along with two dozen eggs and a shopping bag full of tomatoes, cucumbers and honey dew melons. Mike’s seminar on Sabbath-keeping occurred on a summer Saturday morning when he saw my car at the church.

“What the hell are you doing here on a Saturday morning?” he asked me.

“Well,” I stammered, “I’m here being available to the congregation. I’m pretty much gone all week, at school, so Saturday I’m here in case anybody needs me.”

“Let me tell you something,” Mike said. “Nobody needs you today. If they do, they’ll call you. Nobody wants to see you today. They’re busy. They’ll see plenty of you tomorrow. So go home. Cut your grass, wash your car, sit in your yard, play with you kids. Get outa’ here.”

I did what he said and have tried to abide by it ever since.

Our First Testament story today – centred around the boy Samuel – is one about the failure of spiritual leaders: Eli and his wicked sons. Young Samuel hears the call of God to rise up and renew the path.

We all need renewal. I do, with your help. And you do, with my help, and the help of one another. Help to find Sabbath, a spiritual practice that is a gift to us, to our world, to all of creation, actually. Help to share it, to let others know this gift that is waiting for them!

Sabbath was made for humankind and not humankind for the Sabbath. Jesus, the Son of Humankind, is Master even of the Sabbath. It is lawful to do good on the Sabbath, to save life.

Jesus found out that keeping the Sabbath would get him into trouble. But it was so needed. It even saves life.