Genesis 2.1-4 and Matthew 11.25-30
A Sermon Preached by
Dave Shull
University
Congregational United
If you’ve lived where summers are humid,
you know what August evenings can be like.
The air is too dense for any breeze to pass through. It’s so laden with moisture you want to ring
it out. With the sun’s setting, the heat
of the day has not lessened. It’s just
made itself at home, settling in for the night.
And in our
non-air conditioned home in
Maybe it’s
because humidity was my steadfast August companion for 35 years that I remember
that particular TV commercial. It shows
someone who has the kind of job you can’t imagine doing in August –like
spreading tar or collecting garbage. You
didn’t think it was possible, but seeing them you feel even hotter than you did
before. Then someone hands them an
ice-filled glass filled with a brown liquid.
They take a sip. And then they
fall backwards into a swimming pool.
They have taken the Nestea plunge.
One sip, and they’re drawn into refreshing
coolness. Heaven in the form of a
powdered beverage.
The Nestea
plunge is a great image of what Sabbath feels like. After six days of hard work, we fall backward
into the open arms of God. There we find
refreshing rest. After six days of all
those driving, phoning, talking, diaper-changing, listening, bill-paying,
planning, cleaning, cooking, stressing, shopping, and whatever other –ing words fill your week . . . we stop. And we Sabbath, which in Hebrew means we cease.
And after we take the Nestea plunge into Sabbath, for the next 24 hours,
we are at joyous rest with the God who refreshes. The humidity still occupies my couch, my
dining room table, and my bed. But I
don’t notice it as much. Because on the
Sabbath, everything is about being refreshed.
Just like God was refreshed on that first Sabbath evening. Six days God burned the
If the
Nestea plunge as Sabbath image doesn’t speak to you, perhaps a more elegant
invitation to Sabbath will.
Come
unto him, all ye that labor,
Come
unto him, that are heavy laden,
and
he will give you rest.
In these words from this morning’s gospel lesson, set to
music by George Frederich Handel, Jesus invites us to
Sabbath. He invites us to fall into his
arms. Notice that this isn’t an
invitation for everyone. Jesus is
calling to people who have spent six days doing whatever they define as work.
“It’s time to stop,” Jesus says. “Your
Sabbath day is here. Come rest in me a
while.”
Offered refreshment in
the arms of Christ, why would any of us say ‘No’? And yet most Christians in this country say
‘No’ to the gift of weekly Sabbath.
What is Sabbath?
Many of us
have dreary memories of being stuck in our house on Sunday afternoons, the air
filled with Thou shalt not . . .
Thou
shalt not play cards.
Thou shalt not watchTV.
Thou shalt not go to the movies.
Thou shalt not get together with your friends.
Thou shalt not do anything fun. Sabbath is about opening ourselves to God’s
love. So we certainly can’t have
fun!
If God was refreshed on that first Sabbath, do
you think She spent that day all somber and grim? After working so hard to bring life out of
nothingness, I believe God was ready to enjoy the life She had created. On that first Sabbath, I imagine God climbed
a mountain to watch the sunrise. Shared
a picnic lunch with Adam and Eve. Played
fetch with a couple of golden retrievers.
Napped on
a hammock tied between his two favorite oak trees. Rode a horse on the beach in the evening, and
toasted the sunset with a glass of cabernet sauvignon.
Sabbath
isn’t about a lifeless list of thou shalt not’s. Sabbath
is about what refreshes. What restores life. What helps us
feel God’s love and presence right now, in this moment, when we’re doing
nothing but being.
That is why it’s called Holy Sabbath. The Hebrew word for Holy means filled
with the mystery and majesty of God. And
Sabbath is the very first thing in the Bible God calls holy. It’s not an altar, or a mountain, or a
job. It’s not even a person. The first thing in creation God fills with
the mystery and majesty of her presence is time (Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath, New York: Farrar, Straus, and
Giroux, 1951).
Sabbath is Holy time when we stop
what we spend most of our time doing the other six days. And we pause.
And breathe. And open ourselves
to being refreshed by whatever it is that for us is the Nestea plunge. On Sabbath, we open ourselves to receive the
life God wants to give us. What gives me
life? What do I love doing that I don’t
get to do the other six days of the week?
What helps me relax? What helps
us celebrate? What’s out of balance in
our lives? What helps us remember why we
fell in love with each other? What makes
us grateful for being a family?
For six days we are
part of this world of endless production and consumption. On the seventh day, we stop. Which means there are three thou shalt not’s on the
Sabbath. To proclaim that we are God’s
children, and not the children of the god of production and consumption, on the
Sabbath we shalt not work, worry, or buy or sell
things (Dorothy Bass, “Keeping Sabbath,” in Dorothy Bass, editor, Practicing
Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997, p. 86).
This may seem like an arbitrary
list. But think about these powerful
gods our culture worships, and the power this god has in your life.
The god of work. This god never lets us settle for simply
enjoying our work and doing it well.
This god demands we keep working harder.
It tells us we shouldn’t use our vacation days because the boss will
think we’re not dedicated. After all,
work is about producing and promotions.
If you’re not moving up, you’ll have to move out.
The god of worry. The god of worry keeps telling us we don’t
have enough, don’t do enough, and aren’t good enough.
The god of
consumption. “People who have already
run out of closet space work overtime to pay the interest on their average
$9000 credit card debts, while economic predators are sending teenagers
applications for their own pre-approved cards in the mail. An entire pine forest comes down to produce
the paper for this week’s Eddie Bauer catalogue (Barbara Brown Taylor, “Sabbath
Resistance,” The Christian Century,
As
children of the Sabbath God, we do not see people first and foremost as a means
to an end. We don’t think first about
what they can produce. We do not see a
cornfield and first think , shopping mall. God’s creation is an end in itself. It is very good by itself. And for at least one day a week, can’t we
just let creation be?
A Bible scholar has
said, “Sabbath is the most radical action a church can take.” And he’s absolutely right. Imagine if all of us observed a 24-hour
weekly Sabbath. We’d give this fragile
planet a day to rest. We’d have time to
get together with family or friends to share love. For one day a week, we’d know there’s more
than enough time. Slowed down, attentive
to the present, rooted in the here-and-now, we make room for God to break
through into our awareness. Having fallen backwards into the arms of God, we find
rest. After observing the Sabbath day,
we in this community return to our work refreshed. Having spent 24 hours in God’s arms, enjoying
this precious gift of holy time, we can re-enter our 6-day world to help mend
whatever torn piece of creation God calls us to mend. We can’t feel the world’s pain and help heal
it for very long without keeping Sabbath.
We will burn out.
Most of us find it
impossible to imagine keeping Sabbath.
So, as one writer says, plenty of us take an hour off here and there and
call it Sabbath. But that’s like driving
five miles to town and calling it
How
might you imagine keeping Sabbath? Here
are two examples to show it’s possible for people with children and busy lives
to imagine keeping Sabbath.
First example: For
most of her life, a college professor I know believed she had to earn God’s
love. And she earned God’s love by
doing. She didn’t believe God could love
her just for who she is. As an adult,
she felt God’s love by impressing her colleagues at work. If she kept producing, she could feel like
she’d earned her right to occupy space on this planet. She and her husband told each other that
family was their top priority. But they were
not living like that. For the last nine
months, she has practiced an office Sabbath.
Now she does not go to her office on weekends. It’s been an adjustment. And it is opening new possibilities for her,
her husband, and their two children to be together. And to discover the love of God is a gift
freely given that cannot be earned by doing.
Second example: A family where the parents are both 42, and
children are 9,
11, and 14. Several years ago the
parents realized their lives were going too fast in opposite directions. So they decided to try to keep Sabbath. They sat down together, and talked about
Sabbath as God’s gift to their family.
They shared things they’d like to do individually and as a family during
that 24-hour period of time. When they
talked about Sabbath as a day not to do homework, the 14-year-old
protested. His parents listened to his
concerns, and then asked him, “What if you thought about it this way: here’s a
period of time when you don’t have to study.
You can ride your bike, relax, shoot baskets, or play with friends
without the pressure of studying hanging over you.” Describing that conversation, his parents
said, “It was like a light bulb going on.
We could see the moment when he understood this might be a gift. Sabbath-keeping is a way we can do more than
talk about the priorities and values we want our kids to learn. Sabbath-keeping lets us put our words into
practice (Lynne Babb, A Renewed Spirituality: Finding Fresh Paths at
Midlife, Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity
Press, 2002, pp. 114-118).
Sabbath-keeping lets us put our words and
out faith into practice. We can give no
greater gift to the world than that.
Amen.