Sermon from Sunday, August 4, 2013

Sermon Series:      Sabbath -- what it means for us today
Scripture:              Exodus 20:8-11; Genesis 1:26 - 2:4a
Sermon:                 Rest in Incompleteness

When God gives ten rules for good life, keeping sabbath is number 4.  Of the ten this may be the one we worry about most because it seems black-and-white and easily measurable.  

The other commandments seem open to interpretation.  Like honouring God and having no other gods or idols – we break these two fairly often, but there’s so much room for interpretation that as long as we honour God and only God more often than not, we figure we’re doing okay.  And the others – like honouring father and mother, not coveting or bearing false witness, not killing – as long as we’re not cold-blooded murderers, treat people close to us with decency, and don’t get too greedy, it’s easy to believe we’re on the right side of what God intends.

But keeping sabbath feels different, because it’s easy to tell when someone is working and not keeping the day of rest, and to count who’s in church and keeping the day holy and who’s not.  There seems a clearer line between commandment-keepers and -breakers.

Until we look more closely.  We lament Sunday shopping, for instance, but who has never shopped on Sunday?  Maybe even on the way home from worship?  And people who work in retail or in a service industry, even if they’re good church members and people of deep faith – even minister’s wives, often don’t have much choice.

I remember no Sunday sports.  In 1962 the Bombers and TiCats were in the Grey Cup at Toronto’s Exhibition Stadium.  The game, as always, was Saturday afternoon and when heavy fog rolled in from the lake and the game had to be suspended in the second half, the commissioner decided the game would be finished the next day – on a Sunday, even though people wondered if they could really do that.  Wasn’t it wrong?  An offence against God and the fourth commandment?  We still watched it, though, after getting home from church.

Years ago in Bruce County I heard about a church member’s grandparents with their own sabbath fights.  Grandma was staunch Presbyterian – no work of any kind in or outside the house on Sunday.  But grandpa was a practical, hard-working farmer, and if Sunday was the only good day for haying in the field behind the house, he’d be out there on his tractor cutting it – as well as dodging the stones his wife would be throwing at him from the back porch every time the tractor took him near enough the house.

It’s so easy to throw stones about the sabbath.  And so easy to beat ourselves up as well. 

Look at me.  I’m in church and in worship.  But it’s work – some say the only day of the week I work.  Probably I should read more of the articles in clergy journals about alternate days and alternate ways for clergy to practice real sabbath.

Which raises the question of what sabbath really means.  Muslims and Jews – close companions of ours among the world’s faith communities, keep sabbath on Friday and Saturday, and in different ways than we do.  So what is sabbath really about?  What is it we are really trying to keep?  

Over the next five weeks we’ll look at different answers, starting this week with one of the versions of the sabbath commandment – the one in Exodus 20, because this is the one we usually think of first when thinking about sabbath.  This is what we have read this morning: 

Remember the sabbath day…the seventh day is a sabbath to God;  so you

shall not do any work, either ... in six days the Lord made heaven and earth,

the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord

blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it. 

It bases the practice of sabbath on Genesis 1, where God works six days in making the world good and rests on the seventh, and where we are commanded to live in God’s image – to pattern our way of being on Earth after God’s way, which in this case means setting a limit to work and keeping a day of rest.

 

I’ve been on the look-out at different times for images of God, and this is one I encountered a few years ago on the grounds of Loyola House, a Jesuit centre in Guelph where I have sometimes been on retreat.   

 

 

 

It’s a statue of Joseph, the carpenter father of Jesus, with mallet in hand, but sitting at rest in body and in spirit.  His work, I’m sure, was never finished.  But at this moment he is at rest, and peacefully so.

 

Could this also be an image of Jesus’s heavenly Father, creator of heaven and earth, as God is on the seventh day?  If so, is this how humanity – how we, would have first experienced God, and the image of God that we’re called to practice?

 

Just think of the chronology of the seven days. 

 

For six days God works – calling things into being, setting things in order, calling life forward, making places for everything, ending with the making of humanity which makes it all very good.  Then the seventh day is a day of stepping back, stopping work, taking hands off, and affirming that what is and has been done is good, good enough, very good as it is. 

 

For humanity, though, this is the first of our days.  We are made on day six and told we’re to be God’s partners or agents in managing Earth and its life.  So imagine humanity’s – our excitement when night comes on day six and we go to sleep with dreams in our heads of all we’ll start doing the next day.

 

But when the day dawns, we’re told it’s a day not for work, but for rest – a sabbath.  All our ideas, schemes and dreams to make the world good – to take it in hand, bend it to our wishes, make it all better than it is, and make ourselves masters of all we behold are put on hold.  Before we do anything to Earth or ourselves we are called to spend time with God just sitting with what is, resting in it, learning gratitude for what’s been given, learning how the goodness of Earth as it is reflects the fullness of God.

 

And what does sitting with this image of God teach us?  Three things come to mind.

 

One is that the world is not ours, but God’s.  We are not makers of Earth; rather, we are part of the world God has made, and the well-being of life – ours and Earth’s, depends on how well or poorly we live by God’s good design.  Earth has an integrity, a meaning and a mystery beyond us and our needs or desires, and sitting at rest with God the Maker helps us become good stewards of what is given.

 

A second thing is that God loves us – Earth and us, as we are.  I was taught once that Earth on day seven must have been perfect in all its parts and this is why God rests; but is that necessarily so?  Could there maybe instead be some truth in Charles Bragg’s vision – and his picture, of “The Sixth Day”?  

 

 

Here, a craggy-faced God delights in man newly made in God’s image.  And on the workbench in front of God are other bits and pieces of the world God has made to that point – woman still in the making, a giant wisdom tooth, a mosquito, a mushroom, an apple, and some plants that look like marijuana – signs of the joys as well as the aggravations, dangers, and temptations that are all part of Earth and its life even at the end of six days.

Is Earth maybe always a work still in progress?  Is this what we agonize about every time something bad happens, whether the disaster is natural or human in origin?  Maybe also what Jesus refers to when he says his Father is still working and life is still in the making? 

This is hard for us to understand.  We’re addicted to perfection and the perfectability of all things – even of ourselves.  We’re used to making things over to suit ourselves.  We don’t always understand “good enough” or the sufficiency of the imperfect.  We wonder how God can allow imperfection and flaws.  We assume God hates them as much as we do.  And we drive ourselves to exhaustion, our kids and grand-kids sometimes to depression or despair, and Earth to the brink of tragic destruction in our relentless pursuit of “something better.”

But when we sit with God on the seventh day ...

... and just rest with what is, maybe one thing we see is that God loves us as we are, and we don't need to fuss and worry and make everything over to be something it's not, for God to approve of us.

Which leads maybe to a third thing that flows from this image of God – that the goal of it all is peace – peace in ourselves, peace within the world, peace among us, the world and God together.  

Doesn’t it seem that God’s rest is a matter of seeing that all things that are, have a place and exist together in good and right relationship?  And as we sit with God on the seventh day, put our tools and our toys away, put our hands in our lap (or maybe clasp them or raise them heavenward in prayer) we can learn to love and be at rest in this kind of peace as well.

We start life on Earth with a sacred experience of the peace of all things, and sabbath is about keeping this experience and vision alive – remembering that such peace is real, is possible, is God’s good design, and is the one thing we are called to live from and live towards.  

And maybe whatever helps us do this – whatever day and practice and time and place helps us to sit with this image of God and then live it out in the world, is sabbath – the kind of sabbath Exodus 20 commands us to keep for the good of all life – both our own and the world’s.