WORSHIP NOTES: Over the next 6 weeks I will be using Walter Brueggemann's new book, Sabbath as Resistance: saying NO to the culture of NOW - as the foundation for my worship reflections. We'll also have conversation about the text after each Sunday celebration. I am looking forward to being with the community again after two weeks apart. It was a joy to celebrate midday Eucharist today.
Introduction
I LOVE vacations: I love every PART of vacations – from the
planning and anticipation to the actual experiences and surprises – and this
year at the Montreal Jazz Festival we encountered some wonderful musical
experiences and met some truly remarkable people along the way. We had the
chance to bask in our birthday celebrations with our children and grandson and
take in a few soul-satisfying walks around an incredible city. For me it was a
time for rest and play, love and music, conversation and silence.
+ And as we were
driving home I began to realize that over time I have even come to love the ending
of our vacations: we return to our own homes and beds, reclaim the rhythms of
our ordinary lives, unpack our luggage, listen to the new music we have
collected and try to carry forward a gentle sense of refreshment into the work
of each new day.
+ As the Scriptures
tell us, to everything there is a season, yes? A time to be born, and a time to die; a time
to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to
heal; a time to break down, and a time to
build up; a time to weep,
and a time to laugh; a time to
mourn, and a time to dance; a
time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from
embracing; a time to seek, and a
time to lose; a time to keep, and a time
to throw away; a time
to tear, and a time to sew; a time to
keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.
Our spiritual cousins in
Judaism are better at doing this than most
Throughout
the summer I will be using brother Brueggemann’s new book, Sabbath as
Resistance: Saying NO to the Culture of NOW as a guide – and I invite you to
get it and read along with me. Each week I will lift up some of his biblical
insights, share them with you and then invite you to share your reactions and
questions with me. We’ll even regroup for more conversation after worship, too,
for those who would like to go deeper.
And
here’s why I think this is so important:
we no longer understand or practice Sabbath keeping in its deepest and
most liberating sense. We have forgotten why God ordained this way of life as
essential for faithful living four thousand years ago. We no longer grasp what
a bold alternative the Sabbath is to the busyness that infects and addicts us
all. And as independent as we like to think we are, we don’t really know how to
unplug ourselves from “the demanding, chattering and all pervasive presence of
advertising” that saturations our contemporary culture and clutters our soul.
· This morning’s
gospel reading finds Jesus telling his disciples a story about the way God has
written grace into the very rhythms of creation: the seed of God’s love, he tells us, will grow
and bear fruit wherever there is rich, deep and uncluttered soil. It will try
to bring blessings amidst the rocks and sand and thorn, but it needs
uncluttered soil to prosper.
· And in the
tradition of Moses and the prophets this uncluttered soil comes into being
through Sabbath keeping. Honoring the Sabbath and keeping it holy, you see, not
only unclutters our lives, it brings us clarity about the very nature of the
God we love – and how we can go deeper into God’s love.
· How does the
Psalmist put it: happy – or more
precisely blessed – are those who are undefiled as they walk in the way of the
Lord?
Insights
To
walk in the way of the Lord is to move and live according to the Holy One’s
commandments – God’s decrees as the Psalm says – to embody and embrace the 10
Commandments. That’s what Jesus did during his ministry and that’s what we are
called to do in our generation: live and move and have our being in the ways of
the Lord.
So
let’s look at the opening of these commandments in Exodus 20 because they offer
us invaluable insights – and what is the first commandment? Thou
shall have NO other gods before me, right? Now think about this with me for
just a moment:
· The first four
commandments concern God and the remaining six speak to us about living as God’s
people. Scholars have suggested that the
fourth commandment – remember the
Sabbath and keep it holy – is the hinge between the sacred and the secular
precepts of the Lord. Brueggemann puts
it like this: the fourth commandment looks back
to the first three and the God who rests, and, looks forward to the
commandments that concern a way to live at rest with our neighbors.
· The Sabbath is
not only at the heart of these commandments, you see, but for Israel the
Sabbath is also a short hand summary of God’s story. How do the
commandments start out in Exodus 20? Would someone read that text out loud,
please?
Then God spoke all these
words: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the
land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
Our
God – the God of Israel and Jesus Christ – is the God who brought us out
of the land of bondage and slavery in Egypt.
In this sense, Sabbath is a short hand way of talking about the Exodus –
the experience of God hearing the cries of those in pain, inspiring Moses to
lead the Hebrew slaves AWAY from the never-ending work of Pharaoh’s slavery and
the children of God finding a land of grace and hope in the Promised Land. “The Sabbath commandment” Brueggemann writes,
“is drawn into the Exodus narrative for the God who rests is the same God who
emancipates from slavery… those who had been bound by the work system of Egypt
and its gods.”
· Are you still
with me? Because here’s the kicker: the REASON why we are told – and prohibited
– from worshipping other gods – in this case the gods of Egypt, Syria, Babylon
and Persia – is because these gods are insatiable. They demand work,
work and more work. All they want is
MORE – more products, more gold, and more grains to store in more pyramids – and
to get more, they required slaves.
· Part of what the
Ten Commandments teaches us is that Pharaoh served gods whose demands were
relentless, whose economy required slavery and oppression, who organized life
in such a way that there could be no rest for all but the elite. Just do a quick survey of chapter five of
Exodus and you will be dumb-founded for “Pharaoh comes across as a hard-nosed
production manager for whom production schedules are inexhaustible.”
Read
selections from Brueggemann re: working for Pharaoh pp. 3-4
Now
contrast “this hopeless weariness with the God who erupts into the story
· And just so that
there can be no confusion between THIS god and those who relentless crave more
and more, THIS god is revealed as “the God of mercy, steadfast love and
faithfulness.”
· That’s one of the
crucial truths about Sabbath keeping: it reveals God’s deepest nature. It tells
us that the LORD GOD is NOT “a workaholic, that the Lord our God is NOT anxious
about the way creation works and that the well-being of all creation does not
depend on endless work.”
Ours
is a God who RESTS – who seeks refreshment and renewal – who enjoys a vacation. Ours is a God who is not restless, but
restful. And we grow closer to God’s
nature – learn more about God’s will – and unclutter our lives when we, too
practice resting: “Sabbath becomes a
decisive, concrete and visible way of opting for and aligning ourselves with
the God of rest.”
· The other three
opening commandments – NO other gods before me, no idols and no trivializing God’s name – reinforce that walking in the way of THIS God is different from
serving the gods of oppression and obsession.
· In fact, I would
go so far as to say that the reason the Bible tells us that ours is a jealous
God is because God’s love for us is so fierce. We often think of jealousy in a
negative way, but this word – qanna in Hebrew – is only ever used for God. It
is as if the Lord’s heart were breaking with extreme grief and anger whenever
we choose to walk in the way of other gods.
· Does that make
sense? Please, God weeps and shouts, do NOT return to the ways of bondage that
exhaust and destroy: walk in my ways –
follow my path – that you might no longer be weary and heavy laden but know…
rest.
Conversation
Ok,
that’s my reflection – born of the study and hard work of both Walter
Brueggemann and others – about Sabbath and its importance. Brueggemann likes to
say that Sabbath is not only a way to resist the culture of over-work,
stress and anxiety, but Sabbath offers an alternative, too. So, what are you thinking?
· Did I clearly
state why Sabbath is so important to our way of being faithful?
· Do you have any
questions you want me to unpack or go deeper with?
· What gets in our
way of honoring the Sabbath and keeping it holy?
· What clutters our hearts and minds and live?
What stresses us out?
This challenge is obviously ancient
– not something we’ve just encountered – but something God’s people have been wrestling
with since the start of time. The way we experience the relentlessness and
inadequacy, however, IS different .
+ Can you name aloud
some of the other gods that consume us – and wear us out – and render us anxious
and exhausted?
+ God’s word in Scripture
suggests that honestly keeping and practice Sabbath unplugs us from the madness:
it is one of the ways we move from death into life.
+ So what’s it going
to take for us to start making Sabbath keeping an essential for us at First Church:
what would that look like?
Blessed are those who practice
God’s decrees – who honor and keep the Sabbath – for they seek the Lord in all things
with their whole hearts.
credits
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