Well, there's just one football game left between now and way next August—the Pro Bowl game tonight! But there's still time for one last, rousing football-style cheer, and I'm sure you'll all have no trouble following me as the cheerleader. Right? So (ready?)—
Give me an "S"! ["S"]
Give me an "A"! ["A"]
And give me a "BBATH"! ["BBATH"]
What does it spell? ["SABBATH"!]
What do you want? ["SABBATH"!]
What do you need? ["SABBATH"!]
What've you got? ["SABBATH"!]
What'll you keep? ["SABBATH"!]
Ah, ah, ah! Not so fast! What'll you keep? The Sabbath? Are you really, really sure about that?
For among all the Ten Commandments, neither the one about "not taking God's name in vain," nor the one about "not committing adultery," nor even the one about "not bearing false witness" is more widely broken by Christians today than is this one about "keeping the Sabbath."
You see, this Fourth Commandment is the one that most threatens to overturn our ordinary ways of looking at the world and living in it.
For in the first place, our beloved New York City has one of the most secular and least "God-oriented" cultures in the history of the world. And in the second place, ours is, arguably, the most work-oriented culture in the history of the world. Indeed, work has become "the drug of choice" for many of us, an addiction that works well to numb our feelings and take the place of deep interpersonal relationships, albeit at a considerable cost to our health. (Judith Hoch Wray, in The Living Pulpit, April-June, 1998, p. 10)
Now relative to this second point, I have to confess that I'm preaching this morning's sermon as much to myself as to anyone else. For "Hi! I'm Byron, and I'm a workaholic and a Sabbath-breaker. The term '24/7,' was doubtless created with me in mind."
Of course, I haven't always been that way. When I was growing up, my parents firmly taught me that Sunday was the Christian Sabbath, and they strictly enforced Sunday as my day of rest, my day for Sunday School, Church, and Family. Some of our Sabbath observance felt really good to me: a wonderful family dinner, no school work, no chores. But some of our Sabbath observance felt pretty bad: no movies, no parties, no hanging out with friends.
And I've always suspected that it was to reinforce my Sabbath-keeping that when I was in confirmation class, my father—who was also my pastor, whoa!—assigned me the task of memorizing the particular question and answer from the Shorter Catechism that he did: "Q. 60. How is the Sabbath to be sanctified? A. The Sabbath is to be sanctified by a holy resting all that day, even from such worldly employments and recreations as are lawful on other days; and spending the whole time in the public and private exercises of God's worship, except so much as is to be taken up in the works of necessity and mercy."
Yes, I dutifully memorized that catechism passage and recited it in front of the whole congregation when I and the other youths in the class became members of our church, but when I went away to college I quickly left much of that Sabbath observance behind.
Oh, I wasn't all that bad, mind you! I still went to church on Sunday mornings, and that was pretty good for a college student, even back then. But I certainly spent the rest of the day in "worldly employments and recreations," like homework and movies and hanging out with friends, especially Margaret! The Fourth Commandment had definitely slipped into the far recesses of my mind where, amidst the ongoing busyness of my life, it continued to lie ignored, indeed forgotten.
Then came my renewed reflections on this Fourth Commandment and on the meaning and purpose of the Sabbath, which took on a more serious dimension during my study leave last May at a conference for Presbyterian ministers called "A Pastor's Sabbath." And I've concluded that my old-fashioned parents really were on to something way back then when they sought to fulfill this commandment seriously! And so I've also concluded that Rabbi Michael Lerner really has it right when he tells all of us today, "We must choose to be commanded again."
Yes, I am now convinced that Sabbath-keeping needs to become again a visible, intentional, and regular part of the Christian life—first because, in this secular culture of ours, God is simply getting lost in the Sunday shuffle of our "worldly employments and recreations." Why even our kids are too busy to come to church—because of soccer and football and birthday parties and who knows what else! Yet, as the Shorter Catechism says ever so truly, our chief purpose in life is not to work or to play sports but is instead to glorify God and enjoy God forever. Yes, we really must re-order our Sunday-priorities and -lives so that the worship of God again becomes primary.
And there's also a second reason why I believe that Sabbath-keeping needs to become again a visible, intentional, and regular part of the Christian life—and that's in order to stave off the vision of the world being offered to us in this modern age by that old slave-master Pharaoh. We need to tell old Pharaoh, "Let my people go!" For our work has become for many of us a captivity—a captivity that numbs our feelings, inhibits our development of deep interpersonal relationships, endangers our health, and cripples our spirituality. Workers in every segment of our economy seem to be putting in many more hours than they did a decade ago when I first became your pastor. And it seems high time for us to rediscover the biblical view that our failure to set appropriate limits on work is a form of captivity.
As we learned in this morning's First Lesson, the book of Exodus tells us that every seventh day we need to desist from our work and rest—because even God, the Creator of the universe, needed to rest on the Seventh Day. And if God needed to rest, how much more we! Then, too, the book of Deuteronomy tells us that we are to observe a Sabbath rest so that we can regularly remember that God created the Sabbath in order to extend the grace and kindness of rest to everyone living in any form of captivity.
And by reading Exodus and Deuteronomy together we learn: that Sabbath-keeping is a way to make a public, disciplined proclamation that our lives belong to God, not to the rat-race of consumption; that Sabbath-keeping is a sign for all to see that it's God who's telling us who we are and what we're to do, not the world; that Sabbath is a time for focusing on the holy purposes of God, not on the secular purposes of the world; and that Sabbath rest has the power to energize us for our holy work of helping to establish right here on earth God's reign of justice!
And if you don't believe the Bible, then maybe you'll listen to the wisdom of physical trainers, who tell us that it's after our physical workouts, during the rest we take, that our muscles grow. Or maybe you'll listen to the wisdom of musicians, who tell us that rests are indispensable to the rhythm of music, and integral to the ebb and flow that establishes mood and meaning.
Anyway, today, after nearly 50 years of having tried it "my way," starting with my teen-age rebellion against my parent's views of Sabbath observance—today I am at last prepared to begin to take the Fourth Commandment seriously and to allow myself to experience the joy of regular rest and the joy of the quiet, sustained praise of God.
I am at last prepared to agree that: "When work and the countless demands of daily life fill all our hours; when our minds are preoccupied by relentless [secular] demands and distractions, it is not surprising that we fail to apprehend the holy [that is] in our midst." (Martha J. Horne, in ibid., p. 22)
I am at last prepared to step off that old treadmill and to begin developing for myself a theology of God-given rest.
I am at last prepared to acknowledge that when the Creator has offered us the freedom to rest, we refuse that gift at the risk of our own physical and spiritual health.
I am at last prepared to acknowledge that the Sabbath is the day that God has designed for replenishing the human body and soul.
And so we heard in our Second Lesson, that on one Sabbath day, while Jesus was teaching in a synagogue, he spied a crippled woman, a woman whose body had been bent double for nearly 18 years. Like her ancestors who had been slaves in Egypt in Moses's time, she was unable to walk straight and tall. But that Sabbath day became for her a day of deliverance from all that was afflicting her. The woman made no approach to Jesus; she made no request of him; she revealed no faith in him. Yet Jesus, in a spontaneous act of compassion, fulfilled the purpose of the Sabbath day that God had proclaimed in the book of Deuteronomy. Jesus liberated her from her physical captivity and replenished her in both body and soul. (Luke 13:10-17)
So here's the truth of the matter! God created the Sabbath so that all of us can be replenished in body and soul.
Amidst the rat-race of life, the fact is that, all by ourselves, we are not able to hold ourselves up. So the Sabbath is a day for letting God hold us up. The Sabbath is a day for taking our hands off thecontrols of our lives and losing ourselves just long enough for God to find us. The Sabbath is a day for relaxing into the embrace of God's love. The Sabbath is a day for leaning back onto the Everlasting Arms and finding rest and refreshment for our bodies and souls. So—
Give me an "S"! ["S"]
Give me an "A"! ["A"]
Give me a "BBATH"! ["BBATH"]
What does it spell? ["SABBATH"!]
What do you want? ["SABBATH"!]
What do you need? ["SABBATH"!]
What've you got? ["SABBATH"!]
What'll you keep? ["SABBATH"!]
Amen!
Let us pray:
O God, You have offered us the gift of Sabbath rest so that in You we may find refreshment and rest for our bodies and souls. Help us so to change our values and priorities that we may come at last to accept Your gift of Sabbath. In Jesus's name, we pray. Amen.