Sabbath Time is Healing Time

14 Pentecost, Cp16,August 25, 2013   

Jer. 1:4-10   Psalm 71:1-6

Hebrews 12:18-19,22-29  Luke 13:10-17

Lectionary Link

  What is the first commandment?  Thou shalt have no other gods.  How does one make the practice of not having other gods?  To use the human love analogy, one gets married and makes an exclusive commitment to one's spouse and forsakes all others in order to be devoted to one.

  A restatement of the first commandment in both the Hebrew Scriptures and in the words of Jesus was to love God with all one's heart, mind, soul and strength.  And how does one do this?

  The answer is given in the fourth commandment of the Big Ten.  The fourth command is: Remember the Sabbath to keep it holy.  And what is the essence of the meaning of the Sabbath?  It means putting in deliberate and designated time with God.  It means that one spends time with the one whom one loves.  And if one does not put in the time, one may question the love.  People spend time with the ones whom they love.

  When it comes to worship time, probably most clergy of all ages agree with the words of Woody Allen:  "80% of life is showing up."  Meaning that clergy have spent lots of their lives counting worship attendance.  (Let's see, one, two, three, ......fifty...that's how popular God is today???!  Really?)  The Hebrew Scripture could be said to have been written by various members of the clergy and so there is writing about the importance of honoring the Sabbath.

 We know that honoring the Sabbath is not about worship attendance so that clergy can keep their jobs.  Sabbath worship is about not forgetting God. 

  It is easy to forget God because God in God's invisibility does not demand or force worship upon us.  Since God is invisible, God has to compete with what is visible for attention.   God can be like the forgotten spouse who is forgotten when his lover goes after many other lovers.

  The invisible God has many competitors in the visible world.  We have many other things to do with our time.  We have many other people to honor.  We have many other things to attend to and take care of.  We have ball games to attend on the day of worship.  We have the beach to go to on the day of worship.

  So those pestering clergy forever have been hassling us about keeping the Sabbath and making time for God.

  What can happen when clergy pester about religious rules is that the rules can become dislodged from practical significance.

  Rules can rise to their level of incompetent absurdity if the rules lose their connection with what is healthy, good and just for the people who are supposed to keep the rules.

  We had a baby child in Texas and so for some reason in the 1980's we had to go to the grocery store to buy a baby bottle.  We went to find that during that time there were Sunday Blue laws to protect the holiness of the Christian Sabbath.  And so we could buy beer under the Sunday Blue laws but we could not buy the baby bottle that we needed.

  How's that for a Sabbath law that had arisen to its absurd incompetence?

  So, the Gospel issue raised by the story of Jesus is this?  How do we maintain the integrity of the meaning of the Sabbath without losing the meaning in legalistic absurd incompetence in its actual application?

  This is illustrated in the words of Jesus:  "Listen, you clergy, are you telling me it is okay for a farmer to feed his animals on the Sabbath, but I cannot heal this woman of her illness on the Sabbath because healing is unlawful work on the Sabbath?  Get real, you have lost the connection of the Sabbath with the salvation of the lives of people for whom the Sabbath is supposed to serve in making their relationship with God the most important of human experience."  This is like saying let the houses burn down on Sunday because fire fighters cannot work on Sunday.

  In another Gospel Jesus is quoted as saying, "Sabbath is made for the benefit of humanity; humanity was not made for the benefit of some weekly calendar designation of Sabbath time."

  If the Sabbath is disassociated from the purpose of loving God and one's neighbor with all of one's heart and soul and mind, then it has lost its purpose.

  What else was happening when the Gospel of Luke was written?  The followers of Jesus were being removed from the synagogues.  The Christian movement was becoming more Gentile in membership than Jewish.  The Gentile followers of Jesus were not required to follow the ritual purity rules of Judaism.  Keeping the Sabbath for Jews was very important, it was not just a "Fourth Suggestion" for them; it was one of the Big Ten, non-negotiable.

  Roman Society of the time did not have a weekly holy day, even though there were many non-business days that happened during the Roman year, some of which were religious festivals.  If Sabbath was welcomed on Friday nights by the Jews, how is it that the followers of Jesus could refuse to honor the prescribed Friday to Saturday time for the Sabbath?  What gave the followers of Jesus the right to forget this specific weekly time or change it to the first day of the week?  What is it that gave Christians the right to be more flexible with "Sabbath" time?

  The witness of the Risen Christ within the early church was not to dishonor Sabbath time but to free it from being regarded as only a 24 hour chronological time of prescribed behaviors.

  The witness of Risen Christ gives us permission to elevate the Sabbath to its intended purpose, namely, the celebration of spending quality time with God in the times of one's life.

  The day of rest in the Sabbath tradition means that essentially we should give one seventh of our time to God.  And if we do this, we can know the blessing of God in the other six days of our time.  The purpose of the Sabbath is to take a portion of our human time and designate it as a gift to God and when we do this, we can find a significance qualitative improvement in the rest of the time of our lives and this improvement includes more enjoyment for ourselves and other people in our lives.

  Now any fidgety child will tell us that 24 hours of meditation can be really "boring."  They will also tell us that sitting in church for more than an hour is also, "boring."  They will also tell us that listening to long wordy sermons is "boring."  (You can yawn now).

  The lesson from the Risen Christ tells us that Sabbath time need not be limited to a 24 hour prescribed weekly time.  Sabbath time should also be about "healing" time?   How much time can you and I spend this week in healing our world?  Healing time is the active Sabbath time of taking care of each other and our world.  Healing time is not limited to the 24 hours on Sunday.  Healing time is anytime that we put in the effort to love our neighbors because we deliberately are engaged in the lifetime Sabbath work of loving God, with all of hearts and souls, strength and minds.

  Sabbath is learning to love God and our neighbors in all of the times of our lives.  Sabbath time is salvation time.  Salvation means healing time.   Sabbath time also means the time that we spend in healing each other and our world.

  Let us not be legalistic about the Sabbath today.   Let us learn from Jesus Christ to celebrate the Sabbath each day in our lives as we receive God's grace to heal each other and our world.  Amen.