Keeping the Sabbath
Keeping the Sabbath
August 21, 2022
Luke 13: 10 - 17
When we were kids, some of us had to observe the sabbath by sitting and doing nothing all Sunday afternoon. Remember? No work, but that included running around and playing. Mom had to cook the meals on Saturday; she couldn’t cook on Sunday.
My family was not that strict, but we couldn’t mow the lawn on Sunday. I still don’t mow the lawn or do other outside work on Sunday. Do you?
When the Jewish community adopted the laws on keeping the Sabbath day holy, poor people – 90 or 95 percent of the population – were expected to work 12 hours – sun up to sunset -- all seven days of the week. Getting one day to rest each week was a wonderful, phenomenal gift of life to the poor people. But then, like always, the problems come with the details. You can’t just say you don’t have to work on the sabbath; you have to define how work differs from normal (non-work) activities. [I don’t remember these details, it’s like you can walk 100 yards from your house but not 101 yards – the hundred and first yard became work. You could give your animals food and water if it were prepared the day before. Your donkey couldn’t work either so the donkey couldn’t take you to visit your parents or girlfriend.
Do you remember why the old traditional time for our Sunday worship service is eleven o’clock? It’s between milkings; all of us farmers got up around five or six o’clock this morning to feed the animals, milk the cows, eat breakfast, and clean-up a little before hitching the horse to the buggy to bring us here to church. And we should get home in time to rest a few minutes before the afternoon milking. For our grand or great grandparents that was not work; on the sabbath they could not cook big meals or plow or reap the fields because they got to (had to) rest on the sabbath.
What about you? Do you keep the sabbath? Well, do you keep Sunday as if it were the sabbath? Since Jesus was raised on Sunday, most of us Christians worship on the Lord’s Day, on Sunday, which our grandparents called the sabbath.
What do we do with the detailed laws for keeping the sabbath holy? This morning’s gospel lesson says that Jesus broke the rule in order to heal a crippled-over woman.
The leader of the synagogue was indignant because Jesus healed – that is worked – on the sabbath. 14“There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day,” he said.
Jesus replied, “You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? 16And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?”
That is what Jesus did with the sabbath laws. Using the language that I used last Sunday morning, Jesus chose to apply the second-greatest commandment of loving his neighbor over the sabbath rules that prescribed what could or could not be done on the sabbath day. He loved, cared for her instead of keeping the sabbath properly.
How about you – and me? How do we keep the sabbath laws and most of the other laws in the Pentateuch – the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament? For example, are any of us wearing forbidden clothing made of more than one kind of material – it should only cotton or wool? If we wear “blends” we are breaking the laws. Or if you are wearing beautiful jewelry, that’s another broken law.
How do we deal with all those laws or rules or principles that were written for a very different world? Keeping the sabbath, for example. We are no longer expected to work 12 hours a day, seven days a week. The forty-hour work week with two days off each week makes sabbath-keeping much less significant; those who require it are really making now-irrelevant rules seem important – which makes our churches appear to be irrelevant to our modern society.
When our churches make racism or homosexuality or economic status more important than Christianity – then loving God and loving our neighbors, our religion (our religious institution) has gotten in the way of our faith – of Christianity. We need to keep the first things first, better the first two things, first: Love God and love neighbor.
That is what Jesus taught us by his actions. Instead of focusing on the religious rules, he saw the woman who needed to be loved in real terms. He chose loving her, over obeying the rules. Especially now that many of those rules are fairly irrelevant to our modern culture, refusing to love someone because of our religious laws or rules is against everything that Jesus taught us to be important.
That is a beginning example of what “post-religious” Christianity is – that strange sounding phrase that I have used. It is trying to put the first things first: loving God and neighbor first, following the church’s rules and patterns and affirmations second – or third or fourth. It is what Jesus did; it is what we need to do in order to refocus our Church, our language, and our ministries to show our love of God – by loving “the least of these” – and our love of our neighbors. This is following Jesus’ example. It is doing Christianity rather than affirming and following the rules of the United Methodist Church or of Mt. Salem Church -- the way we used to do it.
If we focus on loving God and loving our neighbors – the first and second greatest commandments, we will rebuild our traditional congregation and create new alternative forms of teaching, supporting, and living Christianity in this community. It is that simple and that profound: love God by loving “the least of these” and love our neighbors, helping everyone gain everything that we would like to have ourselves – love and peace and joy and opportunity and success.
That is what we need to learn to do; that is who we need to become. So, let’s us do it, beginning right now. Let us begin to love our neighbors as much as we love ourselves. That is the way to the abundant life that Jesus offered us. That is the way to God’s love and peace and joy and opportunity and success.
Amen.
Sermons\Lk13_10-17.8c22