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Remember the Sabbath
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis July 24, 2005, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Exodus 31:12-17 Matthew 12:1-14
With our hearts set free to trust in God alone; with our minds set free to seek the God who has first sought us in scripture, the history of Israel and finally in Jesus Christ; with our speech set free for praise and thanksgiving, we come this morning to the fourth commandment, a commandment that sets our spirits free to rest in God's grace. Two reasons behind the fourth commandment are ventured in Scripture. The Priestly writer traces the commandment's origin and meaning to the story of creation: "For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, but rested on the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it". The Deuteronomist links the command to the story of redemption and liberation: "Remember 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." At first glance, Martin Luther would appear to have taken his theological cues concerning the fourth commandment (third by his count) from the Book of Exodus and so the Priestly tradition: You shall make a day of celebration holy, he writes. Exchanging the Hebrew word Shabat for the German word Feiertag, a word which means "to celebrate a festival or simply to take time off from work", his translation brings to mind the rest that is recreation, the renewal that is re-creation [the holiday and holy day of the English language]. We should expect no less from this bawdy theologian who taught his students about God's grace in beer halls! Yet if we read on in The Larger Catechism, we soon see that Luther has taken his cues more directly from the Deuteronomist. "We keep holy days," he explains, "not for the sake of intelligent and well informed Christians, for these have no need of them. We keep them, first, for the sake of bodily need. Nature teaches and demands that the common people-man-servants and maid-servants who have attended to their work and trades the whole week long-should retire for a day to rest and be refreshed." The same God whose mighty hand and outstretched arm once brought slaves out of Egypt now commands a limit be placed upon the labor expected from servants in any age. Though were Luther to revise The Larger Catechism in light of our age, I doubt he would so summarily exclude "intelligent and well informed Christians" from Sabbath rest. You and I know the self-imposed slavery of ego and economics which demand our souls every waking minute. Not only are long hours spent in the office but there is the email slavishly checked, the text messages pressed furiously into cell-phones on the way from here to there, memoranda revised by those plugged in on Amtrak or turned on thirty-thousand feet above the earth, the world awake and open for business 24/7. Furthermore there are the household schedules to which many otherwise "intelligent and well informed Christians" are inwardly chained: children driven hither and yon so that they may, early in their lives, get with this same enslaving program; volunteer opportunities that soon become oppressive; social obligations that rule the weekend and make Sunday morning the only morning on which to sleep in or sleep it off. More to the point of our self-chosen slavery is Abraham Heschel's admonition that on the Sabbath we "learn to understand that the world has already been created and will survive without [our] help. Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul." Otherwise we are slaves owned by something other than the One for whom we were made. The fourth commandment sets a limit to that ownership, commands on this one day out of seven that we do not belong to our work. To remember the Sabbath is to be reminded, once a week, who we are and to whom we belong: we are those who have been brought out of slavery by God's mighty hand and outstretched arm. Luther immediately adds that such remembering is not an individual matter. One day out of every seven we come together to rehearse the history of God's saving purposes in which our histories are given purpose and meaning. According to Luther, this rehearsal requires much more than the occupying of a pew for an hour…or so…on Sunday morning! "This commandment," he wrote, "is violated not only by those who grossly misuse and desecrate the holy day, like those who in their greed or frivolity neglect to hear God's Word or lie around in taverns dead drunk like swine, but also by that multitude of others who listen to God's Word as they would to any other entertainment …listening without serious concern." I take him to mean that at stake is what we do on this day more than what we refrain from doing makes all the difference in the world! "When one considers the joylessness with which blue laws and checklists of things not to be done 'on the Sabbath day,'…have infected 'the making of a day of celebration'," notes Paul Lehmann, "it is difficult not to repress at least a Te Deum sotto voce [a praise to God under the breath] for the creeping intrusion upon the once widely observed weekly calendar respite that religious pluralism and an insatiable passion for commercial advantage have irreversibly brought about." This, then, is what we do on the Sabbath: we listen for God's address in the counter-story Scripture tells us about who and whose we are, asking together after the meaning of these words in relation to our lives and the lives of our neighbors on the other six days of the week. Then who knows? Come Monday morning, perhaps when we least intend it, we may find ourselves, in spite of ourselves, speaking truth to power! "The prophetic checks upon kingship in ancient Israel are unthinkable," wrote my old Testament professor, "apart from time to reflect on the dangers of political power in the hands of one person. The development of hymns and laments that identify the actual course of life under God and are brutally frank in their portrayal of how life often gets out of control…is also hard to imagine apart from the observance of the Sabbath Day." [Walter Harrelson] In the end it is as though, within the hours of any given Sabbath, we are given a foretaste of the time to come, the time for which we long and are not ourselves without; some would say on Sundays there is a sort of eschatological whiff in the air [around the table, at the font, from the pulpit] that returns us to the week newly restless in the face of life as it is. So goes the Deuteronomist's take on the fourth commandment! But what of the Priestly writer in Exodus, the writer who hears in God's fourth command the invitation to rest in the rest God chose when God finished creating? Here our remembering the Sabbath turns us from ourselves to the God for whom we were made and so from the words of Martin Luther to those of John Calvin! "The purpose of this commandment," Calvin writes in his Institutes, "is that, being dead to our own inclinations and works, we should meditate on the Kingdom of God….Believers," he said, "ought to lay aside their own works to allow God to work in them." Sanctification this was called once upon a time by most confirmed Presbyterians. Yielding our will, resigning our heart, giving up our desires until, by God's working in us, we who are otherwise restless may find our rest in God alone. Consider, then, the repose that is God's before a finished and good creation, the repose into which we are invited by God's command, the gift of time set free when we may enter into God's delight and holy rest. Our will yielded, our heart resigned and our desires denied, we have the day to consider the God who rested on the seventh day of creation. Neither tired nor out of ideas, God was content with what God had created. So on the seventh day God set a limit on Himself and in freedom chose to "enter into this relationship with this reality…to be the Creator of this creature…." In freedom God said, "This is it and this is good!" But in so saying, God has revealed so much more. To wit, God's limit reveals God's love. The God in whom we are to rest is the God whose decision-from the beginning-to stop creating is born out of God's choice to love this particular creation. We are not dealing with some self-perpetuating process, some never ending cycle, some infinite, ongoing motion, a being never ceasing, never finding time for any creature, never satisfied, always making other beings, never loving a one of them. Rather the love of God chose its object in us! The declaration can only astound us and bow us down if we rest long enough to listen "When I look at the heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established, what are mortals…?" asked the astonished Psalmist. So the Priestly writer hears God saying to God's people: Could you not remember my beloved, one day out of seven, to quit your restlessness and rest in my steadfast love? All we have to do is remember, remember the invitation that has been issued from the beginning, remember the Sabbath. Still from the beginning we lived forgetting, turning, cutting and running. In truth, there is only One who has remembered well and in whose remembering our every moment is redeemed from insignificance. "Jesus, the Word present from the beginning at creation, is the one who fulfills the Sabbath command. Declaring with a word the finishing of his work on the cross, Jesus rests the whole Sabbath day in the tomb," according to Augustine and on the first day of the week the same God who rested on the seventh day has raised Christ on the first day of the week from the dead. In him we have become a new creation, a people who live not on the way to a Sabbath yet to be remembered, but rising on the Lord's Day with our sins forgiven, ourselves made holy. The resurrection on the first day of the week is God's earnest that "[Human] history under the command of God really begins with the Gospel and not with the law, with an accorded celebration and not with a required task, with a prepared rejoicing, and not with care and toil, with a freedom given [us] and not an imposed obligation brought to [our] notice, with a rest and not with an activity, in brief, with Sunday!" Thanks be to God! |