Sermon on Sabbath

Below is a sermon I preached in July about the discipline of keeping Sabbath. I had recently read some writings by Mark Buchannan (who wrote and excellent book called The Rest of God), Lauren Winner, and Marva Dawn on the subject and had been attempting to keep Sabbath regularely. I altered the sermon quite a bit when I preached it and I wished I had a transcript, as the spoken word was substantially better than the manuscript but hey, there's only 24 hours in a day!

Shabbat Shalom: 11:00
Hmmm…Lord God, you, are our resting place. Amen and amen. Let us pray:
Heavenly God, Creator of the universe, of all that was and is and is to come. You have commanded that we work, that we create, as you did, for six days, and then on the seventh day, like you, we are to cease working, to rest, to be joyful, and to embrace the things that give life. We are here today, to do that. We are here today to worship you, to be renewed, reclaimed, and revitalized by you and for you so that we can do the same for your creation. Inspire us, and continue to inspire the Word, your Word, that has been sung, prayed and will now be spoken. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart, be pleasing to you, oh God. And may the Spirit run amongst us today so that we may we leave this Sanctuary, a changed people. Let all God’s children say: Amen.

It is an honor for me to be here, with you, in this Sanctuary, every Sunday. But it is a special honor and privilege for me this morning to serve as your preacher. My name is Joe Stobaugh and I am an associate pastor and the minister of music here at Travis Park. If you came expecting to hear a word from Pastors John and Karen today, I’m afraid they are not here. They are taking a well-deserved trip to Vancouver, British Columbia, for study and, hopefully, for some rest. They will be back next Sunday, however. As for this morning, you’re stuck with me!
Friends, God has placed it on my heart to talk with you about Shabbat today, to talk with you about the Sabbath. I know that language, of ‘God placing something on one’s heart’ is not language we normally use here at Travis Park but at least in this case, it’s true! I know this is true because I’m a preacher who has the opportunity to preach twice a year, I’ve got roughly six months in between sermons to think about what to preach on! Time and again, from when I found out in February that I was going to be blessed with the opportunity to preach this morning, until now, the idea of preaching on observing the Sabbath has been ever present. The idea wouldn’t leave me alone. Sabbath was like an ever-bubbling spring in my mind, it just wouldn’t stop! Up until Tuesday of this week I was still looking at alternate texts to preach on! It’s not even a topic that makes my top ten list of passions for the church. I’d rather preach about worship, or community, or about building the church, about the Kingdom of God, about the Lordship of Jesus Christ! But Sabbath…it just kept coming back, preach about the Sabbath, preach about the Sabbath… I’ve learned over the years that this is one of God’s favorite tactics with me. When God really wants to get a hold of my attention, God won’t leave me alone with that small voice of His until I’ve gotten what God is trying to do to me! A second thing I’ve learned over my relatively brief time on this earth is that God calls it’s best to answer! Thus, I shall preach about the Sabbath today!
As I was reflecting about my own Sabbath journey I was struck by my ‘Americanness.’ Growing up here in America I learned all about the Protestant work ethic: it is expected of us that we will work hard! Hard work is so much at the heart of our culture that our primary value in this society seems to stem from what we are able to produce: we are defined and valued by the market. The effects this system of value has on our culture are truly incredible. I think this is especially true among men. Gentlemen, what’s the first question you ask another male when you meet him for the first time? (“What do you do for a living?”) Isn’t that sadly fascinating? Our culture has a fetish with busyness and laziness is often regarded as the ultimate American sin. If you are not always busy, you must not be living right!
Now, don’t get me wrong: work is a good thing, a wonderful thing, a Godly thing. God calls us to a life of imitation: we are to work, to create, just as God does. Creation and work can and should be a holy endeavor. Having said that, I believe one of the biggest impediments to our spiritual growth is that many of us do not have a healthy balance between work and rest.
The primary byproduct of being out of balance in this life, is death and this death comes in both spiritual and physical forms. The ancient culture of the Chinese people learned this a great many years ago. Did you know that the symbol in the Chinese language for busyness is a combination of the symbols for ‘heart’ and ‘to kill.’ Busyness kills the heart! As American Christians, we would do well to remember this.
Growing up, I remember learning in my history classes one of the key concepts that has made this country what it is: the Protestant Work Ethic. I remember hearing the virtues of this concept being continually extolled. However, I had not, until recently, heard the well-known phrase from the Puritans (perhaps the ultimate Protestants): “Good Sabbaths make Good Christians.”
While the Puritans went about life in a much more severe manner than most of us would be comfortable with today, they were on to something here! Work and rest must go hand in hand: balance is the key! So today, we are reflecting on God’s goodness and wisdom: God has given us a command to rest and to be in community. We are to ‘set-apart’ one day in seven as a day of rest, of community, and of worship.
My ‘real-life’ education about the importance of keeping the Sabbath and the consequences that go with not observing the commandment came primarily from breaking it, frequently, and repeatedly. I learned some very hard lessons about the consequences of my disobedience in my last appointment. It was my first church out of seminary and I was so gung-ho about the kingdom of God, and so in love with Jesus, that I got into the habit of working 90 hour weeks, of being at the church every day and always available on the phone. I became an angry, resentful, mass of availability. I got caught up, unintentionally and subconsciously, in believing that the kingdom was only going to come if I helped bring it about. While there is an element of truth in that last statement, it is incredibly easy for us to elevate our work over the work that God has done and is doing. It seems I had completely lost the realization that God had already brought the kingdom here through Jesus Christ. Why? Well, let me be candid with you: because I had completely violated the first and fourth commandments! Thou shall not have any other god’s before me and thou shall observe the Sabbath and keep it holy. The violation of the first commandment came about because of the violation of the fourth commandment. I never observed a Sabbath. As some one who was raised in the church, graduated from seminary, and had served in the church for years, I should have known better. Friends, I just got out of synch: my work consumed me and it caused me to miss out on much of the wisdom of God, the rest that only God can give as well as the good things that God wanted for me.
Anybody been there?
To underscore the importance of this topic, I issue you a warning (for those of you who have been on the way a long time, you can view it as a reminder). It’s the same warning that Karen gave us last week: to ignore God’s commands is to court death. In the case of Uzzah last week, it was a physical death, in our case today it is primarily a spiritual death.
But there is good news in all of this! God gives us commandments because God loves us, and wants the absolute best for us. God knows we tend to not be able to take care of ourselves or each other, and so God gives us commandments to keep us on the right path. The commandments of God are rooted in God’s deep and abiding love for us!
Of the ten commandments God gave Moses in the Hebrew Scriptures, the fourth commandment, the one that demands us to observe the Sabbath, is the longest and most detailed of the ten. It’s the longest for a good reason. The Shabbat, the Sabbath, is for many, if not most of our Jewish brothers and sisters, the fundamental unit of time through which their lives are ordered. The Shabbat is crucial to the Jewish, and, I would submit, Christian, way of life.
It probably goes without saying but the Sabbath was very important to Jesus. While in the Gospels we mostly find accounts of Jesus getting into trouble with some of the Jewish leaders about his unorthodox observance of the Sabbath, it is very clear that the Sabbath was important to him. Jesus never tells us to do away with the Sabbath, it is a commandment, after all!
The observance of Shabbat is so central to the lives of the Jewish people that is it is recounted twice in the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Scripture.
In Exodus 20:8-11 we find “Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy. 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. For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it.” (NRSV)
The primary focus of this account is remembrance of what God has done and the command to imitate God. To strive for holiness, to strive to be like God by reorienting our weekly schedule to God. Remember God and be like God. We are to remember that God worked for six days and that on the seventh day, God rested. The seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD, our God, and so it should be for us.
The account in Deuteronomy 5 is a bit different. “Observe the Sabbath day and keep it holy, as the LORD your God commanded you. 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, or your son or your daughter, or your male or female slave, or your ox or your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the LORD your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.”
While we find a lot of similar themes from Exodus the writer of this Scripture has now added the liberation of the Jews from Egypt. In addition to remembering and imitating God by striving to become more holy, now we are to also remember our liberation. As Christians we remember Jesus’ victory over sin and death on the Sabbath, our liberation from sin and death through the work of Jesus Christ.
While this commandment is very personal in nature there is also a strong and clear sense of the social justice that God desires for God’s people. Thus, we are all called to holiness, to a life of liberation, and to the work of social justice. God gives us both accounts, because we need them both to survive.
I must tell you, I am very proud of this church and of our commitment to our vision statement: unconditional love and justice in action. Let’s be honest, however: that’s a hard way to live. The ministries that we are called to be engaged in at this church are difficult: they are hard, they require endurance, faith, and hope. Perhaps one of the biggest challenges facing progressive Christianity is that, we get so caught up in the 'nowness' of our righteous desire to work for justice and reconciliation, that we tend to forget, in our busyness, the work that God has done and we neglect to rest in God, and to realize that it is God, and not us, who makes the wheat to grow. Our ministry, friends, is too hard to do well, and joyfully, and faithfully, without an ability to rest in God and to trust God, so that we can be reclaimed and revitalized and renewed by God.
While keeping the Sabbath is not the answer to all our problems, it is one of the ways in which we can be reclaimed from this world by God. The theologian Marva Dawn has said it well: through Sabbath, God’s kingdom reclaims us, revitalizes us, and renews us so that we in turn can renew others. It is through keeping the Sabbath that our lives are changed, because we live in God’s rhythm of time. The pattern of creation, liberation and resurrection becomes the pattern of our lives as well. Through this reclamation, this revitalization, this renewal, we are given a new sense of community, humility, and gratitude. Through Sabbath we gain an added sense of perspective about life. We learn what is important and what isn’t.
So in order for us to do the good work that God has called us to, we must rest in God every week, and renew our relationship with God, each other, and the universe so that we may not only be strengthened for the work but so that we might allow time for that still, small voice of God’s to penetrate the layers of junk that society places on us. Sabbath life is part of life in the kingdom of God: worship, community, rest, and play (in that order) are an important part of God’s creation and of God’s dreams for us. Sabbath is not supposed to be terribly dull but to have a feast like quality through which we joyfully and restfully reorient our lives to God.
So, how do we observe Sabbath. Pastor Mark Buchanan has put it simply: to properly observe Sabbath we must “cease work and embrace the things that give life.”
What does it mean to cease work? For a great many rabbi’s, to cease work meant to not alter the natural world, to leave the world as God created it for a day, so that we can remember that it was God who made the world, that it is God who makes the wind blow and the wheat grow. For some of us, our work doesn’t involve altering the natural world, for others of us, it does. Whatever it is that you do for work, if you are so blessed as to have work to do, try to cease it one day of the week and rest. For most of us, Sunday is the ideal day to observe and keep the Sabbath.
In addition to stopping the work we do six days of the week, we are to embrace the things that make for life. The first of these things, and the most important, is the worship of God. For Christians, we are to worship together every Sunday, at a minimum. Worship gives us life and allows us to focus our love, adoration, and attention on that which truly deserves it: the Triune God!
We are also to be in community with other Christians, with our friends and with our families if we are so blessed to be near them. We are to be in community. We are not to be alone. One of the best ways to do that is to get in community at the church. (And I’m not talking about getting on a committee, but getting in a community.) Attend or start a Bible study. If you’re a youth, go to choir and youth group. If you are a child or that parent of a child, talk with Laura Solarzano about the many ministries for children here. Join a Sunday School class. Join us in taking the Living the Questions classes starting in August. There will be classes offered on Sunday nights and Wednesday nights. There will even be a class offered for those of you north of 1604. What we do in church on Sunday’s is not work but community building and worship. Take a walk, enjoy God’s creation. Take a nap, get some rest! Make that phone call to a family member or friend that you know you need to make. After church, get some recreation time! In every book I read about the subject before beginning to write this sermon I encountered an interesting rabbinical suggestion that is quite beautiful.: married couples are encouraged to have sex on the Sabbath. (Please note the word ‘married’ in the last sentence.!) The point of all this is, make time for the things that bring life!
Now some of you might be saying to yourselves, “Joe, you don’t know what my life is like, I don’t have time to do this.” All I can tell you is that, frankly, you need to make the time. Let’s call the roots of this issue what they are, at least for most of us that make this excuse: idolatry, pride and arrogance. Do you really believe the world will fall apart if you don’t work for a day? To put yourself in that frame of mind is disrespectful and disobedient to God. God was clearly aware that this cessation of work would be a problem for many of us, and thus God made it a commandment. It is my hope and prayer that, if you haven’t, you will find the time in your life, including but beyond Sunday morning worship, to orient your life to God and what God has done and is doing for you and the world through observing Sabbath.
As far as myself and my Sabbath journey, I now only occasionally work 90 hour weeks. By continuing to learn to keep the Sabbath, my life continues to be ever more oriented toward God. My wife will tell you, I am a better person to be around and I mostly enjoy the yoke that God has placed on me. My prayer life has deepened considerably and, honestly, I have become physically healthier and more efficient in my ministry here at the church. My understanding of work and my ‘theology’ of it has improved dramatically. More importantly, I have learned that the weight of the world does not solely hang on my shoulders but on God’s, and that is one of the most freeing epiphanies I have ever experienced.
The Hebrew word for holy is best translated as being ‘set apart.’ I pray that you will be able to set apart a day, preferably Sunday, where you can strive for holiness by observing the Sabbath. I know that God will be continue to be faithful to the promises God has made by reclaiming you, revitalizing you, and renewing you through the practice of the Sabbath so that you can renew others and help to bring about God’s reign on earth! I pray that your soul would say yes to the Spirit of the Lord, that you would say Yes, Lord, Have Thine Own Way, yes, Lord, your will be done in me. Won’t you say Yes to God’s love and to God’s life affirming practice of Sabbath?