Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 22, 2010

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

At the lectionary study I do on Wednesdays at Merrill Gardens this week, as we read the passage from Luke we just heard, and as I read to them the passage from Isaiah that we also just heard, the women who come to that study told stories of the Sabbath practices of their youth so many years ago. They would get dressed up. One woman said her father almost never went to church, but he got dressed up for Sunday, even when he had to go out and milk the cows. The kids were not allowed to run and jump around like kids normally do when the family would gather for Sunday dinner. And they were absolutely forbidden to have a deck of cards on that day. A woman from Germany told of how quiet it was in Germany on Sunday, as all the stores were closed and the big trucks didn’t drive through the town. I shared my memory of how all the stores—or most of them in any event—in Eugene were closed on Sunday and how we always got dressed up for church. It was the only reason I had a suit and tie—a clip on tie, but still a tie—when I was a kid. Many of you, at least those of you of my generation or older, probably have your own Sabbath memories from childhood. Sabbath, which Christians have long marked on Sunday, used to be kind of a big thing even in secular America.

Sabbath observance is an ancient tradition in all three monotheistic faiths. We do it on different days, Christians on Sunday and Muslims on Friday. But the practice for both of those faiths derives from Judaism—they mark it on Saturday, or rather from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, which reflects the ancient way of counting days from sundown to sundown. Sabbath is a really big deal in Judaism. They even say “the Jews kept the Sabbath, and the Sabbath kept the Jews,” attributing to Sabbath observance the very survival of the Jewish people. In Israel today El Al, the Israeli airline, doesn’t fly on the Sabbath. The public transportation doesn’t run, the stores are closed, hospitals are understaffed, and some guest houses don’t serve meals. Strict Orthodox Jews won’t even turn on a light switch on the Sabbath. That’s work, and the Sabbath is the day when you don’t work.

Sabbath observance in Israel is very ancient. The rule is stated as part of the Ten Commandments. The Fourth Commandment reads in part:

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….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. Exodus 20:8-11

The ancient Jews took this commandment very seriously. The punishment for violating it was death, or at least being ostracized from the community. Exodus 31:14 The word Sabbath comes from a Hebrew verb that means to rest. It is the day of rest, and it has been that for Jews for well over two thousand years, perhaps for over three thousand.

Jesus, of course, was a Jew; and, of course, he knew all about the Sabbath. He knew the Fourth Commandment. He knew that the rabbis and priests of his day placed great emphasis on Sabbath observance, every bit as great an emphasis as the rabbis in Israel place on it today. Yet he was forever getting himself in trouble with those priests and rabbis because he kept breaking the rules about the Sabbath. That was probably one of the things that got him crucified, in fact.

We have one of the stories of Jesus breaking the rules about the Sabbath in our reading from Luke this morning. Jesus is in a synagogue on the Sabbath, and he heals a woman who has been bent over, unable to stand, for eighteen years. The story presents the woman’s disability as the work of Satan—more about that in a minute. Whatever the cause of her problem, Jesus has compassion on her and heals her, right there, in the synagogue, on the Sabbath. And the leader of the synagogue doesn’t like it one bit. He repeats the Commandment that no work should be done on the Sabbath. He seems to blame the woman for coming to the synagogue to get healed rather than Jesus for healing her, although it isn’t clear that she came with any expectation of healing. But never mind. The problem is that Jesus performed work on the Sabbath, violating the Fourth Commandment and angering the synagogue leader.

Jesus responds by calling those who criticize him hypocrites. Jesus loved to call people who criticized him hypocrites, and he was pretty much right that they were. He points out that they too do work on the Sabbath, doing the necessary work with their livestock even though it is the Sabbath. Then he says: “And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from bondage on the sabbath day?” If you can water your donkey on the Sabbath, he says, surely I can heal this woman of her affliction.

So we have conflicting views of the Sabbath here. The prohibition of work on the Sabbath in the Fourth Commandment seems absolute. On the seventh day “you shall do no work.” Period. And that is how the synagogue leader interpreted it, at least when he was objecting to Jesus healing the woman on the Sabbath. But here, and elsewhere in the Gospels, Jesus violates that absolute prohibition. So what are we to make of the Sabbath? What, if any, meaning can the Sabbath have for us given that the Bible seems to give us conflicting messages about it?

To get at an answer to that question let’s start by asking why Sabbath in the first place? Why is there a Sabbath commandment at all? The Fourth Commandment says it’s because God rested on the seventh day, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense. So God rested. That’s God. It’s not us. We aren’t much like God in a lot of other ways, so why should we be like God in that way? A historian would say the commandment is there because the priests were asserting their control after the return from the Babylonian exile; but I don’t know any historians here, do you? (Pause for laughter) And even if that hypothetical historian is right, so what? The question remains: Is there value in the Sabbath commandment for us?

Well, certainly there is. The Fourth Commandment says that God blessed the seventh day and consecrated it. That is, God set it aside as a holy day. God set it aside as a day when we refrain from work so that we can pay attention to higher things. So that we can worship. So that we can pray. Going to church, or synagogue, on the Sabbath isn’t considered work. It’s what the Sabbath is for. It is day that says to us: Stop. Stop with the things of the world. Rest your bodies. More than that, rest your souls. Rest them from the cares of the week Turn your thoughts to higher things. Think of God. Be with God. Listen for God. Pray. Read the scriptures. Let the Spirit of God renew your spirit, and let rest renew your body. Slow down. Stop worrying. Rest in God.

And that, my friends, is really good advice. When I was in seminary at Seattle University they pounded on us future ministers about self care. And they hit us with the importance of Sabbath time as an important part of self care again and again. They hit us with it so often I got sick of hearing it. But they were right. I’m still lousy at following their advice, but I know that they were right. Sabbath is important. Really important. Important both physically and important spiritually.

So if Sabbath is so important, why did Jesus go around violating it all the time? There’s a saying of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark that I think answers that question. At Mark 2:27 Jesus says: “The sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the sabbath.” The Sabbath is there to benefit people, not to be a burden to them. And look at what it is that Jesus did on the Sabbath in our story that got the synagogue leader so upset. He cured a woman of a debilitating physical deformity. We’d probably say she had advanced osteoporosis. Jesus said she was in bondage to Satan. He called her a daughter of Abraham. That is, he saw her as an heir to the promises God made to Abraham, and he saw Satan as preventing her from inheriting those promises. So he cured her. He overcame what was standing in the way of her receiving the promised wholeness that God wants for every person. He did God’s work, God’s work of compassion and of building the Kingdom of God, for every act of compassion helps build the Kingdom.

So what lesson do we take? Sabbath is important. If you’re as bad at keeping it as I am, that’s a lesson we really need to hear. But the Sabbath is not an arbitrary, absolute requirement. Compassion trumps the Sabbath law. With Jesus compassion always trumps every law. Sabbath rest doesn’t mean stop building the Kingdom. It doesn’t mean stop doing God’s work in the world. It means stop paying attention to your own concerns, just as it says in our passage from Isaiah, and start paying attention to God and to God’s concerns. If we can do that, the Sabbath can be a blessing for us indeed. Amen.