You are not God: The reason for Sabbath

Text: Luke 6:1-16

            A few weeks ago I had what I thought were some good thoughts on the Sabbath… and then somebody went and read them Sunday morning at Grace when I was off in Moorhead—so much for recycling those thoughts! Nonetheless, since we do a particularly poor job of taking Sabbath rest, I’m not just going to skip over it. You lucky folks just get a second sermon on the same subject!

Today, I'm going to start in a different place, namely with the question of what Biblical laws are supposed to do. In order understand why Jesus is willing to violate the Sabbath we first need to understand what the law is. If I were to guess, I bet most people who don’t take the Sabbath seriously do so because the idea of Sabbath seems like general guidelines for a good life. The law, however, is much more than guidelines, and, anyway, the “good” life that scripture would have you live is the one where you take up the cross and follow Jesus to the crucifixion. I’m guessing that’s not the good life for which you were hoping: it’s counter-cultural and downright scary. It's scary also because the law always convicts you. You can never be good enough according to the law. That is, after all, why Jesus came. Only when you understand that you are not going to live up to God’s standards can you begin to understand the importance of Sabbath.

            To many people, the Sabbath is the kind of thing that sounds nice in principle but doesn’t really work in the real world. It’s even tempting to use Jesus’ treatment of the Sabbath as an example, since he seems to consider it flexible in certain situations, but notice that Jesus doesn’t justify breaking the Sabbath because the law is not a good one. Rather, he is willing to break the law because he is “lord of the sabbath.” Are you? If you’re the son of God you can treat the Sabbath—and really, any law—however you want, but if you’re not then the Sabbath isn’t just a nice guideline.

            Some of you may be familiar with A.J. Jacobs’ book The Year of Living Biblically. In the book, Jacobs spends a year trying to follow all 700-some laws that you can find in the Bible—every single one of them, followed as closely as he can manage—and the conclusion that Jacobs draws, which should be evident from the beginning, is that following all the laws is really an impossible task. I mean, some are relatively easy: Do not murder? Check. But others are just a pain: no wearing clothes with mixed fibers. Weird. And others are incredibly tough to follow in our world today: the law that tells us to stone adulterers, for example.

            But here’s the thing: Jacobs could have really stopped at the very beginning; that first law that Moses brings down the mountain at Sinai with the Ten Commandments: You shall have no other Gods before me. None of us get past that one; it convicts all of us and it convicts us often. Most of our lives are spent making little gods of our time and our money and other people and our favorite sports teams and TV characters and celebrities; in fact, we are experts in the field of god-making. Michel de Montaigne once said, “Oh these foolish men! They could not create so much as a worm, but they create gods by the dozens.” Jacobs doesn’t even take up the question of god-making, but, then again, that would make for a less entertaining book.

            So, assuming none of us are righteous even according to the first commandment, it might stand to reason that the rest aren’t very important. That’s another justification for not taking the Sabbath seriously. But, remember, the law is not just guidelines, and, more to the point, it’s not just there to make you feel guilty. The law tells you something about who you are at your core; it shows you who you were created to be; and so the Sabbath law tells us that we were created for rest. There is a very good reason for the Sabbath, and it isn’t just so you can sit on a couch watching football. Rest-taking is at the heart of the creation story. When God created the world he spent six days doing things and one day resting. In fact, I think that’s the reason why we have a seven day creation story at all, because the author of Genesis 1 is telling us a story about how best to spend our lives—work for six days and then rest. Genesis 1 is more than a tale about the creation of the world; it is a prescription for living life.

            None of this changes the fact that we all have a thousand different things telling us that rest isn’t all that important. We live busy little lives doing busy little things, and in our busy little lives we are told in countless ways that we are really important people. That’s what advertising does: it tells you that you are the most important person in the world and you deserve a Big Mac or a vacuum cleaner or a magical pen that removes marks from your car; you deserve it because you work so hard. And the worst part is that we believe it. Very quickly, we start to believe that we are really important, Without me the world would stop spinning, the horsemen of the apocalypse would come, and all of you—you would be so screwed. It’s so easy to start thinking that I am the lynchpin keeping the world from spinning wildly out of control. And that’s the reason, more than anything else, why we need Sabbath. You see, Sabbath exists for practical reasons: it keeps you from burning out and it recharges your batteries, but it also has a good theological reason: it reminds you that the world does not revolve around you. Sabbath reminds you that you are not God, no matter how much you try to be the other six days of the week.

            Many of you who are parents to young kids, or are a young person yourself, often feel like the reason you don’t take a rest is because you have so many important things to do. In some sense that’s kind of true. You don’t rest because you have to do this and you have to do that; nobody else is going to bring the kids to hockey practice or do the laundry—there is some truth in that—but the danger is that you elevate yourself to a place of importance that can easily overwhelm you. The culture that does not understand the value of Sabbath drifts casually away from God. Tell me that isn’t what’s happening in this country. Tell me that isn’t the justification for not going to church. I just need to sleep in, just need that little break. I’ll be with God… in my bed.

            Well, the truth is you do need a break, but it needs to be bigger than not getting up on a Sunday morning. It needs to be a day set aside—that you know will be there—because otherwise the temptation is too great to make ourselves into the god we would otherwise worship. Maybe the most Christian thing you can do in this day and age is to actually say, “I’m taking a break” and mean it. No TV, no internet, no distraction, no work, just rest. That is the most counter-cultural thing to do, because it spits in the face of the industry out there telling you that you are a god, and counter-cultural is usually where Jesus would start.

Thanks be to God for that.

Amen.