True Sabbath Keeping

Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost Year C

August 25, 2013

First Presbyterian Church, Clarksville

And

Harmony Presbyterian Church

Dr. Robert Wm Lowry

                In the 2000 presidential campaign, there was a short and now forgotten controversy surrounding the candidacy of Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut.  Al Gore chose Leiberman to be his running mate and the press began to write about him, his career and his life.

            What intrigued many writers the most was Leiberman’s religion.  He is an Orthodox Jew.  You would think he was the man from Mars the way some reporters wrote about the Sabbath practices of the Orthodox community. 

            As you may know, Orthodox Jews take a very strict approach to the Sabbath.  In addition to the religious requirements of prayer and ritual, many forego modern conveniences such as automobiles or computers while others, including Lieberman, take the command to rest from labor to the extent that they do not answer the telephone or open doors on the Sabbath.

            The controversy arose when reporters began to wonder what would happen if Liberman was to ascend to the presidency and, on the Sabbath, he was required to call the Kremlin in a crisis or enter his nuclear launch code in a computer or some other action that is strict Judaism forbade on the Sabbath day.

            Could an Orthodox Jew be President and remain faithful?

            Interestingly, that question was never asked about Baptist Al Gore, or their two Methodist opponents George Bush and Dick Cheney.  No one questioned whether or not a Christian would have trouble going to war on a Sunday- the Christian Sabbath.

            It took a while, but in the wake of the conversations about Leiberman, theologians began to ask, “have we lost a sense of Sabbath in the Christian world?”  Has Sunday become just another day?

            The short answer to the question is “yes.”

            In many ways Sunday has become just another day.

            I remember growing up and asking my mother why the beer, pantyhose and other random items were covered up and the grocery store on Sunday.  She explained “blue laws.”  Remember blue laws?

            With the exception of buying retail alcohol, there are few blue laws left in Arkansas. 

            Some other places still have them on the books, however; these laws designed to protect and defend the Sabbath; to keep it different, holy, set apart.

            You cannot buy a new car in Connecticut or a sofa in Bergen County New Jersey.

            You cannot sing vain or rowdy songs anywhere in New Jersey and in Pennsylvania you may not hunt unless you are hunting coyotes or crows.

            And good luck finding a single beer in most of the South.

            As time marches on, however, these laws are becoming more and more a thing of the past as Sunday takes its place as just another day.

            In truth, Sunday has been losing its cultural place for quite a while.  I remember as a child thinking that my great-grandmother was crazy for all of her old school Presbyterian Sabbatarian ideas about not going to the movies or mowing the grass on Sunday.  It has been a long time since Sunday was truly set aside in any significant way in our culture and certainly not during my ministry. 

            As long as I can remember in ministry, Sunday has been a challenge.

            So I have to confess some measure of sympathy for the priests in this story from Luke we have today.  When Jesus comes into the synagogue and labors, in flagrant violation of tradition, and heals the woman who has been ill for more than 18 years, he treats the Sabbath like it is any other day.  The Sabbath was supposed to be a day of rest- a day set apart from what you could do any other day of the week.  Jesus ignored that tradition.  He could have healed her on Friday or the next Monday or any of almost a week’s worth of days, but he came to the synagogue on the Sabbath and he worked.  Sure, he was working in his capacity as the one who brings miracles and healing rather than as a carpenter, but still he worked and to the priests that was a slippery slope.

            Once we start treating the Sabbath like any other day, it is going to lose all its meaning.

            One day Jesus is healing a sick woman and the next thing you know they will be selling socks and beer at Wal-Mart after church.

            It is a slippery slope when we start playing fast and loose with the Sabbath.  And the priests told Jesus that in no uncertain terms. 

            By the end of this short scene, Jesus has done what Jesus so often does.  He humiliates the priests and turns their world upside down and he does all of that by one simple action; he holds up a mirror to their lives and lets them see how foolish they have been.

            We don’t really know anything about the motives of the priests in this story.  It is easy to set them up as straw men and make them out to be the embodiment of true evil trying to stand in the way of Jesus’s ministry, but there is no evidence of that in this text.  In fact, they come across as pretty sincere.  All they want to do is protect the Sabbath from becoming just another day.

            Jesus, holding up the mirror to their lives, shows them the folly of what they are saying.  They may be trying to protect the Sabbath from becoming just another day, but in the meantime they have lost the meaning of it!  

            In the Old Testament, the command to keep the Sabbath is present in both Deuteronomy 5 and Exodus 20 accounts of the Ten Commandments.  Yet in each account, the reason for Sabbath keeping- the reason we set aside this time- is slightly different.  In Exodus, Sabbath is rooted in creation “because the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and everything that is in them in six days, but rested on the seventh day.”  Deuteronomy, on the other hand, roots Sabbath keeping in redemption. “Remember that you were a slave in Egypt, but the LORD your God brought you out of there with a strong hand and an outstretched arm.”

            Sabbath is about taking delight in both creation and redemption; in God’s bringing order to chaos and God’s redeeming that which is broken or lost.

            When Jesus goes to the synagogue and heals the woman, his act is an act of true Sabbath-keeping.  He both creates wholeness where there had been brokenness and pain and he redeems and restores the woman to health.  In this one act, Jesus embodies the truest meaning of Sabbath.

            But the priests cannot see it.

            They have become so wedded to the words- the letter of the law- that they have been blinded to the true meaning of Sabbath.  They work so hard to preserve it in name that they have lost track of why it is here in the first place.

            They were like modern day politicians who get worked up into a lather about whether a local celebration is called a Christmas Parade or a Holiday Parade.  Some get so worked up into a name calling frenzy about the word Christmas, they often lose the meaning of the whole season.  It is kind of hard to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace while calling your political opponent a worthless, godless, hedonistic, atheistic, Communist!

            The same was true for the priests in the synagogue that day. 

            They had lost the meaning of Sabbath. 

            And when they admonish Jesus, he responds saying, “Hypocrites! Don’t each of you on the Sabbath untie your ox or donkey from its stall and lead it out to get a drink?”  In other words, “are you really going to stand there and tell me that this woman’ suffering is less important on the Sabbath than your donkey’s thirst?!”

            It is difficult to take delight in creation and redemption while actively ignoring the needs of a child of God.

            In recent years, the church has taken more and more notice of how Sunday has culturally become just another day.  There is a movement within the church to resist those things that conflict with Sunday and especially with Sunday morning and the community’s time of worship.

            In some quarters of the church, there is active resistance to what is perceived as the war on Sunday which is an extension of the perceived war on Christmas.  There are fingers pointed and accusations hurled at soccer practice, homework, television and just about every other boogey-man around.  Every potential culprit is named.

            Except one.

            Not many of those fingers point back at the church.

            If we are really going to get a handle of why Sunday has become just another day, our time would be much better spent not looking for how the world is at fault, but by holding up a mirror to ourselves and our own habits of Sabbath keeping. 

            Put another way, we need to ask the question, why do we want people here on Sunday morning rather than reading the paper or playing golf or fishing or whatever else they might be doing?

            If the reason is that we would prefer to see more seats filled, or because we remember when there were lots more people here or because we want to be sure the church is still around in another generation or because more people means a better chance of making the budget, we’d better be prepared for that mirror that Jesus holds up because the picture looking back isn’t going to be pretty.

            If our whole reason for Sabbath keeping and Sabbath advocacy is the building up and preserving of what we have or value, we miss the point of Sabbath.

            If Sunday is important only because it is not Monday through Saturday, we miss the point of Sabbath.

            If we set this day aside out of a sense of obligation or even duty, we miss the point of Sabbath.

            Sabbath is not about fulfilling a requirement or preserving a church, Sabbath is about delighting and sharing delight in creation and redemption in God.  And when our Sabbath is about that- when our Sabbath is about delighting in God rather than rooted in anxiety about how many people come to church, Sunday takes on a whole different meaning.  Our preservation of this time set apart stops being about holding on to something we cherish and instead becomes a celebration of being held onto by the God who cherishes us!

            In the Jewish community, the traditional Sabbath greeting is “Shabbat shalom.”

            Literally translated, it means “peaceful Sabbath.”  However like so much of Hebrew idiom, there is much deeper meaning beneath the words.  Sabbath-shabbat- is not just a day it is an orientation of life toward delight in creation and redemption.  It is the orienting of our lives toward God.

            Shalom, though it does indeed mean peace, means peace that is found only in wholeness-completeness in God.

            Shabbat shalom translates as “peaceful Sabbath” but it means far more; “may you know wholeness in your delight in God.”

            “May you know wholeness in your delight in God.”

            The woman in the synagogue that day with Jesus certainly knew wholeness and the text tells us that the first thing she did when she straightened up was praise God- delight in God.

            She knew Shabbat shalom and all through Jesus’s touch.

            What made that day truly a Sabbath day was not the blind observance of rules by the priests and congregation, but Jesus reaching out to another and sharing the wholeness of God.

            The labor from which we rest on the Sabbath is our labor for a wage in the world.  On the Sabbath, we rest from that labor so we might focus on our work in the kingdom of God and there is no more pure way to live into the promise of the day of delight than by reaching out and sharing the wholeness and delight of God with another.  That is the purest way of honoring the Sabbath and the truest way of honoring God in this day.  When we gather on Sunday to worship God together we do not gather just to perpetuate an institution or to live up to an obligation.  We gather because we seek to share in the wholeness of delight that comes in Shabbat Shalom.

            John Winthrop’s sermon “A Model for Christian Charity” is famous mostly for his use of the image from Matthew’s gospel of a city upon a hill.  Far from describing the power of a nation as it has come to mean, Winthrop’s image of a society that shines like a city upon a hill is built on an ideal of sharing the promise of wholeness in God and delighting in God through our love for our neighbors.  Speaking to the community, he said:

We must delight in each other; make others' conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body.

The Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us, as his own people.

For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.

What Winthrop described as the model for Christian Charity, might also be called the model for Sabbath living because when we delight in each other; when we make others’ conditions our own; when we live as members of the same body, we cannot help but delight in the LORD and our very living becomes true Sabbath keeping.

            Shabbat Shalom Chevarim!

            May you know wholeness in your delight in God, my friends!  Amen.