We Are All Wrong About Something

Our lesson this morning comes from the second chapter of Mark’s gospel. And, the reading, I’ve actually added a verse to. It’s one of those bridge verses that when you look at the headings in your Bible, the translators have it going with Jesus talking about fasting, but it’s one of those verses. Jesus could also be talking about Sabbath observance. So hear these words from the second chapter of Mark’s Gospel starting in the 22nd verse.

…and no one puts new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost and saw the skins. But one puts new wine into fresh wine skins. One Sabbath he was going through the grain fields, and as they made their way his disciples began to pluck heads of grain. The Pharisees said to him, look, why are they doing what’s not lawful on the Sabbath? And he said to them, have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food? He entered the house of God when Abiathar was the high priest, and ate the bread of the presence, which is not lawful for any but the priest to eat. And he gave some to his companions. Then he said to them, The Sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord, even of the Sabbath. Again, he entered the synagogue, and a man was there with a withered hand. And they watched him to see if he would cure him on the Sabbath, so that they might accuse him. And he said to the man who had the withered hand, come forward. And he said to them, is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save life, or to kill? But they were silent. He looked around at them with anger, and was grieved at their hardness of heart, and said to the man, stretch out your hand. He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him. How to destroy him?

Friends, this is the Word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God. Amen.

It was a different time growing up in a different place, growing up in North Alabama. And across the South, there were a series of laws known as blue laws. A blue law was pretty simple. On Sunday, nothing was open. No McDonald’s, no Burger King, no crystal burgers, no donut shop. Nothing was open. The only thing that happened on Sunday afternoon, about 4:30 or 5:00, those radicals down at the Princess Theater would open the theater up and start showing old westerns, mainly because the Princess Theater had air conditioning. You didn’t do anything on Sunday. There wasn’t anything to do. You’d go to your grandparents’ house. We would sit on the front porch, several generations of us there on the front porch, and I asked my grandfather, Papa, what are we doing? And Papa would say, we’re watching the world go by. And later in the afternoon, under those immense magnolia trees that nothing would grow, the fireflies would show up. If the grandparents were really in a good mood, they would let you on the Sabbath, chase and catch and put in your mason jar, complete with holes in the lid, the fireflies. Otherwise, you did nothing.

Now think of how we turn that on its ear. The weird people now are Hobby Lobby and Chick-Fil-A. They ought to be open as God wants them to be. We don’t understand people stepping away from that much money. They need to be open their hobbies that we need to lobby for. And there are chick fil A’s that we need to have for lunch. How dare them be closed? But they honor a culture that says the Sabbath was made for you and me, not you and me for the Sabbath. Before you can completely finish the first page of the Scroll of Genesis. And it says, And God rested from his labors, he shabbathed. And Sabbath becomes a part of the Jewish culture. It’s in the Ten Commandments, y’all. They’re going up on the walls of the schools in Louisiana. It’s in the Ten Commandments. It’s a hinge upon which the rest of the commandments rest. It connects the God part of the Ten Commandments with this is how you treat the human being, parts of the Ten Commandments. And it’s right there in the middle. Observe the Sabbath day and keep it holy, as the Lord your God has commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is the Sabbath unto the Lord your God. And you shall not do any work. You, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your ox, your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your town, so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you. Remember; You were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and with an outstretched arm. Therefore, the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day. This is what the commandment says. Don’t work.

And you know what happened? A group of Hebrew Methodists came to the rabbi and said, Rabbi, we have a question. Rabbi, what is your definition of work? And so the rabbis answered the question, because that’s what rabbis did. And the rabbis said anything that was involved in the building of the Tabernacle, anything involved in the building of the tent of meeting we’re going to declare is work. And they came up with 39 categories of work. You ready for them? See if some of these catch you: carrying, burning, extinguishing, finishing, writing, erasing, cooking, washing, sewing, tearing, knotting, untying, shaping, plowing, planting. Reaping. Harvesting. Threshing. Winnowing. Selecting. Sifting. Grinding. Kneading. Combing. Spinning. Dyeing. Chain Stitching and warping. Weaving. Unraveling. Building. Demolishing. Trapping. Shearing. Slaughtering. Skinning. Tanning. Smoothing and marking. Covered you all didn’t it. And you’re going, well there are two things I didn’t hear. I didn’t hear fishing. Fishing’s not in there. Do you know how much work fishing is? Yes. I packed for a fishing trip. You haul all this stuff, you chunk it in the boat with the cooler and all the things you need. You drive to the Marina, put the boat in the water. You go to your favorite fishing hole and you stand there. Sit there in the heat, sweating, hoping that something jumps in your boat or on the line. Whether you’re successful or you fail, you get back in your boat. You go back to the Marina, you put the boat on the trailer, and then you got to unpack that sucker. And we call that resting on the Sabbath.

Or what about golf? If you shoot above 90, I declare golf to be work. Okay. And if you ever, ever forgive me God for this, if you ever throw a five wood into a pond on a Sunday, I declare it work in the name of Father and Son and Holy Spirit. Have you ever noticed golfers. It’s not you, it’s always the club.

So, what happened was the Jewish rabbis because they kept going to Sunday school class and the Methodist kept asking questions. Rabbi, what do you mean by carrying. What are we carrying. And the rabbis actually said to own property was carrying a weight and carrying a burden. Work on that one. They said that if you carried yourself and you went beyond a Sabbath day’s journey, a sabotage journey basically was 2000 steps. So, what you needed to do is you needed to make a mark during the week that you were going to go half of a Sabbath day’s journey, minus one step. You needed 999 steps outbound. So, you’d have enough steps left over so you can get in your house. Is this becoming ridiculous to you because it became ridiculous to them? They said that carrying a burden, and they defined a burden as the amount of ink necessary to make a jot and a tittle, the amount of ink necessary to make the dot over the i and the cross over t. If you’re carrying that much of a burden you’re working. And if you’re working on the Sabbath, you have violated the Sabbath. And I threw burning in there. It’s number two. And the thing I’ve got about burning is if you throw a toothpick in an already burning fire, you violated the Sabbath.

Every one of us in here have violated the Jewish Sabbath. And if we were good Jews in the time of Jesus, do you know what that means? Okay, you violated the Sabbath. You committed a sin. Who said you have sinned? The rabbi sinned. How did the rabbi say you’ve sinned? Because you worked. The rabbis have made the rules. The Bible says, Observe the Sabbath. The rabbis made the rules, and so they caught everybody in the snare. Everybody was guilty. Nobody kept the Sabbath. So, what do you do about that? Yeah, I got to go make a sacrifice for your sin. And so, you go to Temple and you’re bringing your sheep. It’s a pure sheep. You check Baba, and Baba has no blemishes. Baba is a pure sheep. And you present the sheep to the rabbi. And the rabbi goes, yeah, sorry, sheep’s got a flaw. But over here for just $19.95, we’ve got some of our temple sheep and you can buy a sheep to atone for your sin of violating the Sabbath. And that’s why that weird last verse was in there, that I read that the Pharisees who hated the Herodians, conspired with the Herodians to kill Jesus because Jesus is now messing with their economic system by saying, you’re missing the point of Sabbath. It’s not created to bind you. It’s created to set you free. And they couldn’t have that.

This morning, after I preached it the first time, one of our sainted church members came up to me and said, I’m going on vacation. Tuesday. Congratulations. I’ve got all this work to do before I go on vacation. You picked a lousy time to talk to me about the Sabbath, so I’m about to start meddling with you. I want to talk to you about properly observing the Sabbath. And the first thing you need to do is just get rid of all the legalism around the Sabbath. Because I know everybody says, well, I’m not going to work on the Sabbath, but the ox is in the ditch, wink, wink. And I’ve never understood that. How many of you got oxen, and what are they doing in the ditch? Just say, I’m going to work. But Jesus said, it’s a day holy unto God.

One of the saddest things I’ve started hearing from church people is I don’t have time for God. I’m too busy. For God. Four things I want to say about Sabbath to you. And it comes from an image that we think is a foreign concept. up in the, plains and the northern part of the United States. Up in the Dakotas and Iowa and Montana, Idaho, blizzards will come through, and we can’t imagine a blizzard. But the snow is falling, and the snow is blowing. And there’s a condition known as whiteout where it is so blinding you can’t see. And when they issue blizzard warnings up in the northern Plains, they will very often tell the people, look, tie a rope onto your house. If you got to go to your barn, or if you’ve got to go to a field and the blizzard is going on, tie a rope onto your house so that you can find your way back. Because all kinds of people in the Upper Midwest or the Upper Plains have died literally feet from their front door because they couldn’t see it. And what I want to say to you is the Sabbath is sort of like that rope tied to your house. It allows you to get home. It allows you to have space. It allows you to communicate and commune with God in ways that are life giving, not life robbing.

There are four ways that we hold on to this rope. First of all, when it comes to the Sabbath, stop. Just stop. Oh, preacher, I can’t stop. I’m too busy. Preacher, you don’t know if I stop right now, all of creation would come grinding to a halt. I am so important in what I do that the world cannot get along without me. The first thing about stopping with Sabbath is you trust you. Trust God. You trust that God is still on his throne, and God is God, and you are not. And God has taken care of creation, and God is watching over you, and God is watching over your neighbors, and God is caring for those he calls children. We can’t stop. If we stop, we would worry that we had stopped. Jesus said this therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life. Do not worry about your life. What you will eat, what you will drink about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food in the body? More than clothing? Look at the birds of the air. They neither sow know, reap nor gather into barns, yet your heavenly father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you, by worrying. Add a single span to the hour of your life. Stop. One of the ways to translate the Hebrew verb Shabbat. Sabbath is just that. Stop.

Second. Rest. Rest. Rest. Jesus said, what? Come unto me. All you who, all you who labor and are heavy laden. And what I will give you, what? Rest. Here and say, come to me. I’ll give you something else to do. He didn’t say, come to me. I’ll give you a service ministry. He didn’t say, come to me. I’ll send you to the mission field. He said, come unto me and I’ll give you rest. We need to rest from work, from physical exhaustion, from hurried ness, from multi-tasking, from competitiveness, from worry, from decision making, from catching up, from talking, from technology. We just need to put it all in and rest. Oh, you understand? If I put it all down? Something’s going to happen. Right. You might feel better. There was a group headed from Saint Louis to Oregon. They were traveling one of the trails that took the wagons out west. In the summer had faded and the fall was in full force. And they knew that winter was coming. And they feared getting in the, the mountains in the winter. And so, they were in a hurry. But this group was religious in nature, and they’d always practiced the Sabbath. They had traveled six days and stopped the seven, six days, stopped the seven six days, and stopped. And a fight broke out between the group. One group said, we need to keep the Sabbath, and the other group said the Sabbath is a waste of time. We’ve got one day we’re not traveling. Think of all the distance we could travel if we would just run our wagons for seven days. And so, this feud kind of happened and the group split. And guess who got to Oregon first? The group that took the Sabbath days, the group that rested themselves, the group that rested their horses, the group that rested.

There’s something holy about a nap. There’s got to be something holy about getting in your recliner with the remote control and checking your eyelids for holes. There’s just got to be something holy about doing nothing. There is. Stop rest and delight. In the first chapter of Genesis, God creates something. He looks out on it and he said it was good, it was good, it was good. And he gets to the last of the creation. He said, it’s very good. Do you delight in what God’s given you? Do you delight in the beauty that surrounds your life? Do you delight in the the small blessings of creation? Do you delight? Do you stop and smell the rose and then delight in it? And then Sabbath gives us an opportunity to contemplate, to think about what our lives are like, because Christ died for us. To contemplate the fact that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. It gives us a time to contemplate being human and to act humane. Jesus said it wasn’t given to you for you to keep the rules. It was given to you as a gift. A gift that brings life and love and hope. It’s hard. Every Type-A individual in this room is twitching right now. Because you don’t want to rest. So, if you need a little extra help after church today, go park and Hobby Lobby’s parking lot. Or go park and chick fil A’s parking lot and ask the question, what do they know that I don’t? And oh God, show me how to practice a holy Sabbath day. Amen.

Christ our Lord invites to his table all who love him. That’s all of us. And he invites us to share his body and his blood as a way of refreshing our souls, as a way of bringing us life. And it is to that sacrament that I invite you now. And if you’re helping us serve, would you come up and let us get that started? And as we’re doing that, I remind you that this is God’s table, that you are all welcome here. You’re all invited here. we serve communion by intention, by receiving a piece of the bread and dipping it in the chalice. There are no ushers to help you. We’re going to be free range Methodist this morning. So, once I get everybody served over here, you’re going to come in an orderly fashion and the altar is open if you’d like to spend some time praying.