In the name of God ☩ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Deuteronomy 5:12-14 says “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.” Other than the command to love God, our neighbors, and ourselves, the Sabbath commandment is the most important. Rightly observed, the ordinance to keep the Sabbath orients our lives to God and sets on the path of living a sanctified life. But the Sabbath commandment is also the most difficult to keep.
This is because the Sabbath goes against nearly everything that we’ve been taught. The Sabbath tells us that we are to have a day on which we do not work. But we’ve been trained that time is money, and time not spent earning money is money not earned. We worry what might happen if we take a day off – what will we miss, who might get ahead of us, what might we be out of the loop on?
We are squeezed for time – between hobbies, work, volunteer activities, raising children, caring for aging parents, doctors’ appointments, and housework, it seems as if there just aren’t enough hours in the week. And what ends up happening is that very few things are scheduled for Sunday morning. You might say that Sunday morning is the most valuable time of the week because you can pretty much do whatever you want with it. And because we’re so short on time elsewhere, we borrow that time to get things done. Now, often these are good things, things like catching up on sleep, or spending time with family, or catching up on neglected chores that have been causing you stress. These are not bad things to do.
But I wonder why it is that the time we always seem to borrow from is God’s time? Why is it that we don’t push back against all of the other demands on our time? What prevents us from telling our employers that they can’t have more than 50 hours of our week? In 2016, the New York Times reported that the average American watches 5 hours and 4 minutes of television each day. Maybe you’re below that average, but even an hour a day adds up to a lot of “found time.” Or how about our phones? We spend nearly 3 hours a day on those devices that are supposed to serve us; when in reality, we serve them with our attention to every ding and beep. Again, it’s not that work or leisure activities are bad, but when Sunday morning rolls around and we just can’t find the time to worship, well, then maybe it’s time to think about how we spend time.
As God gives the Sabbath commandment to us, we are told “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.” That is the root of the Sabbath – remembering that our salvation is not something we obtain by hard work, rather it is something given to us by God. The Sabbath reminds us that we are free, we do not need to be slaves to work, or expectations, or money. Because we are pulled in so many directions, we need to be reminded that we are actually free because of God’s grace.
Another reason why the Sabbath is so difficult for us to keep is that it is incredibly disruptive. Most of us are people of means – we can afford to take a day off with little to no economic impact. Sadly, this isn’t true for a lot of people. For people just scraping by at nearly minimum wage at two jobs, the prospect of taking a day off is a hardship. Practicing Sabbath means that we would have to have more justice in our economy. It would mean that we have to ensure that everyone is paid a living wage so that they could afford to take a day off. In our society, the wealthiest 1% holds 38% of all wealth, while the bottom 90% holds 73% of all debt, and those gaps are only getting wider. This is the opposite of justice.
The Sabbath isn’t just about having a time to relax because, at its core, the Sabbath is about orienting ourselves and our society to God. Including within this Sabbath commandment is this clarification: “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.” The Sabbath can only be practiced in community. But this is hard work. It means that our habits as consumers, employers, and employees would have to change, and not just in small ways. And so, if we keep the Sabbath, we often reduce the Sabbath to being about going to church and maybe doing some leisure activities. Again, I’m not against coming to church or having leisure – I’m actually quite in favor of doing both of those things on the Sabbath, but the Sabbath is about the entire community being able to do the same. But restructuring our lives and economy is prohibitively disruptive to most of us.
For us as Christians, the Sabbath takes on another layer of meaning because of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, which was the dawning of the New Creation. By keeping Sabbath, we are entering into the New Creation. What we do on the Sabbath should point towards the Resurrection. The Sabbath is a glimpse of what heaven is like – where we experience the fullness of finding our rest and peace in God.
Perhaps you have some objections or questions about keeping the Sabbath. What about people like doctors, should the hospital close on Sundays? Or firefighters, are you just out of luck if your house catches fire on a Sunday? Of course not. This is where Jesus’ teaching about the Sabbath is instructive. He makes it clear, the Sabbath is not about legalism, it is about compassion and justice. “The Sabbath was made for humanity, not humanity for the Sabbath,” Jesus says.
In the episode where Jesus heals a man on the Sabbath – Jesus is clearly showing us that the Sabbath isn’t about keeping rules or defining what counts as “work,” rather the Sabbath is about remembering that God is our salvation, not our bank account balance. The Sabbath isn’t about having a list of things that you’re not allowed to do one day a week, rather it’s about having one day each week where we do our best to live in the grace of Resurrection, where we remember that we are a liberated people, not slaves to jobs, to productivity, to having a clean house or a mowed yard, to technology. The Sabbath is not about checking off the box of coming to church, but rather is that sanctuary in time in which we encounter the grace of God towards all of us. How we keep the Sabbath is our testimony to the saving grace of the Resurrection in our lives.
As I said earlier, this, I acknowledge, is hard. Sabbath living is living differently. After Jesus had taught about the Sabbath, Mark records that “The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against Jesus on how to destroy him.” Hopefully, you aren’t quite feeling that way about me after this sermon. The Sabbath is God’s gift to us – the gift of reminding us that we can rest because God has liberated us, the gift of showing us that justice is when all can afford to not work for one day, the gift of catching a glimpse of our final rest and peace in God. How will you enter into God’s gift of the Sabbath?
