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July 30, 2006
What about the Sabbath?
Isaiah 56: 1-8 / John 5: 10-18
July 30th, 2006
It’s good to be back after two weeks away. I think nearly every pastor would agree with me that spending some extended time away is an important ingredient in keeping on in the work of the ministry. We need to get a bird’s eye view of life. Day after day, week after week, month after month in the cycle of the years, we see with an ant’s eye view of things, with nose to the ground and antennae a mere fraction of an inch higher. A bird’s eye view offers much needed perspective.
These days we need not just any ol’ bird’s eye view; we need an eagle eye’s view. Let’s keep going higher; we need God’s eye view of things. I often think, looking at the pickle the church is in, looking at the confusion haunting the nations, looking at the dilemma of the lives of so many people, I wish I could see from very high up what is the path all of life is taking. It is my duty to give some clues to how to walk this lonesome valley.
When our son was on the ice breaker “Polar Sea” with the Coast Guard he and another fellow operated a computer gizmo that saw with a satellite’s eye view of things to help navigate the ship. Thus the ship was able to nose its way through thick ice by knowing where the ice was thinnest as it went from pole to pole on our planet. Oh to be able to see this clearly.
Each time we welcome a child into our midst in baptism I ponder the way ahead of her, the pathway of her life. Today we welcome little Katrina Dubikovsky into the family of Faith. When she was born, two years ago yesterday in Russia, nobody would have guessed that the way ahead included becoming Ivan and Sasha’s sister and Sergei and Nadya’s daughter—in Indiana. God saw that she would become part of this loving family and that she would become one of us. What is the “us” to which we welcome her? Where are we headed in a path that she will join us?
I pray that in days to come she will have reason to thank God over and over again that she came not only to Nadya, Sergei, and Sasha, but also to this place where she was not only baptized into but also literally loved into the Kingdom of God.
Now I did not know when I plotted this morning’s sermon that I would be baptizing Katrina today. But God knew. And there is, I discover, a connection between baptizing Katrina and the issue that the prophet Isaiah and the Lord Jesus addressed: the Sabbath Day. How different it would seem their views were on Sabbath keeping, at least from an ant’s eye view. Isaiah was concerned that Israel keep the Sabbath. Jesus seemed to debunk Sabbath observance.
Isaiah, writing hundreds of years before the time of Christ urged God’s captive people, “Blessed is the one who . . . keeps the Sabbath, not profaning it . . . to everyone who keeps the Sabbath, and does not profane it . . . these I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer . . . for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all people.” Keeping the Sabbath day holy was not only for Jews, but also for foreigners, for deformed people who were not welcome in the Temple because of their deformity.
This was a blessing rather than a restriction. What a blessing it is to rest, to be totally free from duty. Not only not to have to remember to do this or that, but you are forbidden to do this or that so stop even worrying about it. The prophet emphasized the Sabbath Day because his fellow Jews had not been keeping it holy. They became like everyone else, without the discipline God so graciously gave them: six days of work then you must rest. It was a sacred duty to rest one day in seven. In fact, the fourth commandment spelled out this Divine command.
Devout Jews knew the Ten Commandments by heart. Somehow, when the Book of Deuteronomy was written the scribe who remembered and wrote it gave a different reason for keeping the Sabbath day than the one who transmitted the earlier Book of Exodus. In Exodus the reason for keeping the Sabbath day holy was because God rested from His work of creation on the seventh day. In the Book of Genesis we read that God blessed and hallowed the seventh day in resting from His work of creation. But when the Book of Deuteronomy was written and the Ten Commandments were re-issued, the reason for keeping the Sabbath day holy came out a bit differently. Do no work on the Sabbath because God brought you out of the land of Egypt, giving you rest from your bondage, your forced labor for the Egyptians.
Perhaps it was because Deuteronomy was written when memory of bondage in Egypt was keen that a more immediate reason was provided for Sabbath rest. But it was a struggle to keep to the discipline of the Sabbath Day. It was hard for Israel to keep the Sabbath day. Somehow over the years of decline the Sabbath Day disappeared along with keeping the rest of the Ten Commandments.
Thus, after returning to the Promised Land after years of exile, pious Jews remembered God’s command. The Pharisees of Jesus’ day descended from pious Jews from the days of Ezra when the Second Temple was built. These devout Jews asked specifically, “What does it mean to keep the Sabbath day holy?” They thought about this and thought some more. When we look at the Mishna that records all the hard thinking these devout Jews did, we find a whole section devoted to the Sabbath Day. The Mishna was not written down till the end of the second century AD, but its contents came together gradually much earlier, beginning in the days of Ezra.
I found such careful thinking about Sabbath keeping in the Mishna. How do I keep from working on the Sabbath? What is work? The section of the Mishna called “Shabbath” brings together some of the answers to these questions. For example, “He is culpable of breaking the Sabbath that takes out wine enough to mix the cup, or milk enough for a gulp, or honey enough to put on a sore, or oil enough to anoint the smallest member, or water enough to rub off eye-plaster.”
I don’t mean to ridicule these seemingly picayune details. Jesus chided the Pharisees for straining at a gnat; for taking an ant’s eye view while missing God’s eagle eye view of the purpose of the law of the Sabbath. Jesus kept the Sabbath according to the intentions God had in giving this command to Moses. We err on the opposite side. We do not honor the Sabbath Day.
In John’s Gospel this morning we read how some pious Jews took issue with Jesus for healing a man on the Sabbath and then drawing this fellow into sin by having him pick up his bed on the Sabbath. They were so angry at Jesus that they wanted to kill Him. Why such vehement anger? John tells us that it was because Jesus not only broke the Sabbath but called God His Father, making Himself equal with God (5: 18).
Now we should be careful not to throw stones at the Pharisees because we live in a glass house. How have you strained at a gnat to make the Bible say what you want it to say? What kinds of things make you come to a boil? What desecration of something you hold sacred so enrages you that you could see yourself supporting the death penalty for it? In a way we know what is really important to us when we take inventory of what really makes us get upset. What can get you so upset that you could chew nails?
How many of these things are really sacred, that is, having to do with honoring God? In our pluralistic day I am suspicious that there are not very many issues having to do with God that are really sacred. For sure not many Christians would get angry enough to kill for desecrating Sunday, which is the Christian Sabbath. For that matter, think of the Ten Commandments; how many of these are commonly violated—having been explained away by this or that consideration. And no outrage follows. We accommodate the violations of God’s laws that develop.
Well, Jesus did not violate the fourth commandment when He healed the man and told him to take up his bed and walk. He violated the unfolding tradition that defined work to include acts of healing and a simple effort like picking up a straw mat. But He didn’t violate the Sabbath. These interpretations, though made out of the desire to honor God became oppressive, violating the intention of the command to rest on the Sabbath day. Jesus’ eagle eye view of the purpose of the Sabbath Day collided with the ant’s eye view of the rabbis.
It is a constant danger for those who once ignored God completely, that when they start to become serious in their religion they go overboard. But this is not a problem many Christians face today. I believe if Jesus were to come to us American Christians He would ask us, “Why have you completely ignored the fourth commandment, to keep one day in seven holy? I think we do wrong to cite the Apostle Paul who wrote to the Christians at Colossae, “Let no one pass judgment on you . . . with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are only a shadow of what is to come.”
The Apostle Paul kept the Sabbath Day. Whenever he was in a city on the Sabbath he would seek out a synagogue. And we can be sure he set aside his labors as a tent maker on the Sabbath. He rested on that day. When he wrote to the Colossians he warned them against a super-legalism that had crept into the Church, mixing this and that of Jewish law with this and that of the popular Gnosticism infiltrating the Church. Let us not throw out the baby with the bath water. The freedom we have in Christ does not take from us the benefit of God’s kindly discipline that we so desperately need to live out our lives in peace and joy.
If we take an eagle’s eye view of life do we not see that we talk about “obeying Christ” with no sense of what that means. We talk about ”the Christian life,” with little sense of how this might be unique, different from an ordinary life with no consideration of what Christ commands His followers.
In one of his sermons, George MacDonald, the great Scottish story-teller and pastor said, “Instead of asking yourself whether you believe or not, ask yourself whether you have this day done one thing because [Jesus] said, Do it, or once abstained because he said, Do not do it. It is simply absurd to say you believe or even want to believe in him, if you do not anything he tells you.”
We need to put into balance Jesus’ challenge to the Pharisees who had gone overboard in spelling out what Sabbath keeping meant and how Jesus kept to God’s intentions for the Sabbath day. Jesus did not lead us to think the fourth commandment is obsolete. Neither did the Apostle Paul teach Christians to scrap the fourth commandment. “Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy,” echoes down through the centuries as a gracious discipline God gives to us, to provide structure and meaning and rest in the oft chaos of life.
Once the Jews were ridiculed by the Romans as lazy for not working one day in seven. In fact, there was a time when they wouldn’t even defend themselves when they were attacked on the Sabbath day. They soon thought better of this realizing that God did not command them to keep the Sabbath in order to be sitting ducks for their enemies on the Sabbath.
I wish I might persuade you all that from an eagle’s eye perspective, from God’s perspective, you and I need to keep one day in seven as a day holy to God. We need the discipline of this day to remember we belong to God; we need the discipline of the Sabbath day to help us remember that belonging to God means living a special kind of life; we need the discipline of the Sabbath day to help us remember that worshipping God together is essential to being a Christian. If one day in seven you specifically do this because God commanded it, it will help to instruct your heart to obey other commands Jesus gave.
In the past two weeks I have thought of what is distracting us as Presbyterians these days, and what distracts some of us at Faith Church. There are some things that bother some of us that we should simply let go; they’re not worth it. They produce needless discord. They have nothing to do with anything that is important. Let them go because Jesus tells you, “Forgive those who bother you so that I forgive you when you bother Me.”
But there are not only these tiny, unimportant matters that are hurting us. There are the positive things we should be doing out of obedience to Jesus that we do not do. Having begun to accept the principle that being a Christian means obeying Jesus, and obeying Jesus means something specific let’s go on to see what Jesus would tell us to do if He were visibly here with us. Let us go on for example from the discipline of keeping Sunday holy to doing for the people who live in the trailer court on Klondike Road what we can. How can we help them? How can we help those children we see there, and the many families there that are struggling to keep afloat? How can we show them that Jesus loves them by loving them?
As Katya Dubikovsky grows up in this congregation what will she learn that following Jesus means? Will she notice that people here come to church each Sunday because they think this is an important part of following Jesus? Will she see that we obviously love each other because little things don’t get under our skin, causing strife within the church? Will she notice that we see beyond ourselves because we have embraced the needy people who live near the church? Will she observe that we give generously because we have been given much, and that these resources go to care for people far and near whom we care for because Jesus loves them?
If Katya sees all of this we will be glad. And it is in your hands and mine whether she will see this. It is in your hands and mine whether Katya will think “believing in Jesus” is just a head thing or a whole life thing. I think I know what we would like Katya to see, and our little ones too, and not only our little ones. We help each other to see from a higher perspective when we choose to live according to this higher perspective.
In many ways this begins with accepting the Sabbath Day, Sunday for us. Keeping it holy. Always be here to worship unless ill or away and not because you had other things more pressing. Be here not for “a satisfying worship experience,” an outlook that asks, “Do I like the way they do things?” but be here to worship God. Be a part of those who worship here, demonstrating that being a member is more than a word. Love one another; serve one another; forgive one another as God has for Christ’s sake forgiven you.
Let Katya see this, and others will see it too. And perhaps God will find at Faith Church an outpost of the Kingdom of God that has ripple effects of great blessing. I pray it may be so.
Let us pray: O God, we bless you for the gift of the Sabbath day, for rest, for refreshment of heart and mind found in worshipping you. Give us grace to trust your word, that it is good to do. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47905
Posted by faithpres at July 30, 2006 09:30 AM