Epiphany 5
February 12, 2022
If you refrain from trampling the sabbath, from pursuing your own interests on my holy day; if you call the sabbath a delight and the holy day of the Lord honorable; if you honor it, not going your own ways, serving your own interests, or pursuing your own affairs; then you shall take delight in the Lord, and I will make you ride upon the heights of the earth; I will feed you with the heritage of your ancestor Jacob, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.
Shortly after I began my work as a pastor, I had a curious invitation from a church member. I’ve had lots of curious invitations, but this one was particularly curious. He said, “I have an extra ticket to an Eagles game in Philadelphia. Want to go?”
· When is it? “Next Sunday.”
·
When would we have to leave? “About ten in the morning. It’s a one
o’clock game, and there will be traffic.”
· Do you have any idea what I do on Sunday mornings? “Oh yeah. Right. But do you want to go?”
With some regret, I took a raincheck, knowing that while I was employed as a pastor, I would probably never cash in that raincheck. Yet if today’s sermon is about keeping the sabbath, that story bubbles up in my memory.
For a lot of people, Sunday is a special day of the week. Few people call it a holy Sabbath or have any idea what that means. Rather, they claim it as a day of pleasure, a chance to break up the routine and do something fun. These days, affluent Americans have countless options for Sundays: go out to brunch, shop at the outlet mall, head out for a festival or a footrace, book the weekend getaway on VRBO, or in the case today, eat a lot of chicken wings and cheer on the Eagles.
A hundred years ago, no church member would have invited the preacher to skip church and head off to the stadium. Times have changed. The world around us has loosened up. Religious rules sound like restrictions at worst, or suggestions at best. For an increasing number of people around us, church is optional or unnecessary. And the whole notion of doing nothing for twenty-four hours strikes most folk as impossible.
That’s what the Sabbath commandment teaches: “For 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 town.”
God says this twice. In Exodus, chapter twenty, God says, “Remember how I created a world in six days and rested on the seventh. You should imitate me and stop hovering. Let the world run without you.” In Deuteronomy, chapter five, God says, “Remember how you were slaves in Egypt, working your fingers to the bone, and I set you free. Claim your freedom by taking a full day’s break.”
The Ten Commandments are given to us as a gift. They structure our lives by providing necessary restraints so that we can flourish. Don’t go worshiping other gods; they can’t feed you and they can’t save you. Don’t reduce the invisible God of Israel to something small you could hold in your hand; they can’t deliver any of their promises. Honor your folks, keep your promises to your partners. Don’t lie, don’t steal, don’t murder – isn’t it interesting how not breaking the Sabbath is held with same authority as ‘don’t murder’? They have equal weight, equivalent importance. And all the commandments are given because they are good for us.
So Isaiah says to the people returning from the Babylonian exile, stop trampling the Sabbath. Apparently, they were. Apparently, they had compromised with the surrounding culture, giving in, making allowances, or exceptions, or excuses.
Years ago, my father and I spent a few nights in the Jerusalem Hilton. Jerusalem is a complicated place, full of inconsistencies. But one thing we discovered: the elevator buttons don’t work on Friday night. They are wired that way. I had heard that, my dad had not, so here’s this retired IBM engineer poking the little circle with the number eight. Nothing happens, so he pokes it again and again. Still nothing. “Must be broken,” he mutters. “No, Dad,” I replied, “it’s the Sabbath.”
“What do you mean?”
“No work on the Sabbath. Traditional Jews regard the poking of an elevator button as work.” He tilted his head to look at me, as if to say, “Do they teach you this at Preacher School?” The door closed automatically. On the way up, we stopped at every floor. One at a time. Then another. It took a while. The elevator was programed to keep us from breaking the Sabbath. The restraint was imposed on us.
Some of us can remember a day when the shops were closed on Sunday, which has become the Christian Sabbath. The banks, the restaurants, the grocery stores – seems so long ago, and to hear how Hobby Lobby and Chick-fil-a still give their employees Sundays off sounds quaint. Charming, even admirable, but bucking the tide.
During a trip to the Outer Hebrides, the islands off the west coast of Scotland, my wife and I discovered the same restraint. The city of Stornoway is run by old fashioned Presbyterians, well starched and very conservative. On Sunday, everything shuts down except the churches. We stayed in a B and B some distance from the center of town.
The proprietor told us how, one Sunday morning, she hung up some wet laundry on the line behind the house. When she returned from attending church, a neighbor had taken all of it down, folded it still wet, and put all the laundry back in the basket. “Just a bit obsessive,” she remarked, “but well intentioned.”
It’s worth reflecting on what lessons can be learned this restraint. What do you think? We don’t have to get it all done today. We could manage our time differently, especially with some advance planning. Perhaps the to-do list might be overrated. And maybe, just maybe, we could learn how to rest, and breathe, and receive rather than produce.
Just the other day, a fellow pastor told me about Southminster Presbyterian Church in Boise, Idaho. They normally worship at 9:30 a.m. on Sunday mornings. But on the second weekend of the month, they worship on Saturday at 5:00 in the afternoon. According to the church’s website, “One weekend a month, we take Sunday as a day of intentional Sabbath rest.”[1] There’s nothing scheduled in the building on that weekend, no meetings on the calendar. The church has decided to break the prevailing obsession with activity, and announce to the city, “We do not live by work alone.”
If we
read through the Jewish scriptures, we find how Sabbath keeping shaped Israel’s
life as a community. The scriptures taught restraint on obsessive work. It
carried over to restraint on harvesting the fields. “Don’t pick all the grapes
in your vineyard,” teaches Leviticus. “Leave some grapes for the poor and the
immigrants to pick.”[2]
“When you knock the olives out of the olive trees,” says Deuteronomy, do not
strip the trees of what’s left; it shall be for the immigrants, the orphans,
and the widows.”[3]
The principle here is the same as our use of time: create a margin. Don’t plunder your vineyards and olive trees when others are hungry. Don’t fill every hour of the week with activity. Break the habit of having to control everything. Chill out, to the glory of God.
Now, there’s no evidence that anybody has ever done this consistently or well. A Sabbath can get trampled rather easily. Just remember the last time you decided to relax for a while – and the phone rang, or the neighbor bugged you, or you checked your email “just for a minute” – and two hours later, you’re still on the computer. It happens. Even the best of intentions goes awry.
One of the young adults in our family worked for a while in a large hotel. One Friday, a large contingent of Orthodox Jews checked in for a weekend conference. They filled the place. They brought in experts to scrub down the kitchen. They hired their own chefs to prepare kosher food. They prepared a ballroom as a worship sanctuary. It was a cultural revelation for her, which she viewed from the front desk.
But then the moment came when a bunch of the group arrived from New Jersey. It was shortly before sundown, and they had been stuck in traffic. The people in the group were three deep at the front desk, hollering and pushing, all of them waving their credit cards, demanding to prepay their hotel bills. What was the commotion about? Well, if you keep Sabbath, you refrain from commerce. No buying or selling! And here were the hotel guests, fearful of trampling the Sabbath. Instead they were trampling one another.
And that seems to be a good part of Isaiah’s concern. “On the seventh day, you shall not do any work – you, your son or your daughter, your male or female servant, your livestock, or the alien resident in your town.” For Sabbath is more than an individual discipline. It is providing rest for others, too. For all the others. And it’s a choice that God invites us to make.
One of the Hebrew scholars did a deep dive on that phrase, “trampling on the Sabbath.” It turns out to be an idiomatic phrase, literally, “turning away the foot.” It means to stop whatever you’re doing and return to where you came from. It sounds like “returning,” or hitting the reset button (as long as the button’s still working, I guess). There’s a sense of repentance. And an invitation to begin again.[4]
And this becomes the invitation for all of us. Wean away from the obsession. Breathe deeply. Lean back into God’s arms and float. Perhaps most of all, to slow down and pay attention to the glory of God all around us.
You’ve heard me quote Barbara Brown Taylor from time to time. She’s a great preacher and a wonderful writer. For a while she served as the pastor of an Episcopalian church in a small town in north Georgia. She and her husband Ed bought a farmhouse outside of town. One Sunday morning, she left home late for church. She was focused on tearing up the country roads to get to the church and lead Sabbath worship for others. Here’s what she says:
With
nine miles to go and fifteen minutes to travel them in, I hardly noticed the
dew-soaked cobwebs in the tall grass by the side of the road, which the morning
sun had turned into pockets of light. I barely glanced at the herd of deer
grazing in the meadow and had less than my usual appreciation for the
red-tailed hawk that lifted off a fence post as I ruined his morning watch.
For seven miles I had the road to myself. Then I roared up behind a red sports utility vehicle that was traveling significantly below the speed limit. The driver, who was all alone, was sipping a cup of something hot enough to steam in the cool morning air. As I rode his bumper, he admired the mountain view with one elbow propped on his open window. All I could see was the solid yellow line that forbade me to pass him. He slowed down a little when he saw the Holstein cows circling the old Indian mound. As he turned his face toward them, I could see his face smiling in his side rear-view mirror. Finally he pulled over to read a historical marker and I zoomed past him, wondering who was doing a better job of observing the sabbath.[5]
Oh, yes, it’s so easy to trample a perfectly good Sabbath. Fortunately, the opportunity keeps coming around every seven days to “turn away the foot.” God wants us to stay grounded, to take notice, and to enjoy this world and one another. It’s one of the primary ways we can enjoy God.
So I
bring all of this up in the grand hope that maybe we can learn to breathe a
good bit more. Busyness is overrated, but resting and delighting in the Lord –
why, that’s a rehearsal for eternity!
(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.
[2] Leviticus 19:10
[3] Deuteronomy 24:20
[4] Ed Christian, “Sabbath Is a Happy
Day! What Does Isaiah 58:13–14 Mean?” Journal of the Adventist Theological
Society, 13/1 (Spring 2002): 81–90. Online at https://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1268&context=jats
[5]Barbara Brown Taylor, "Remember
the sabbath," Christian Century (May 5, 1999): 510.
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