SECOND SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
Prayer of the Day: Almighty and ever-living God, throughout time you free the oppressed, heal the sick, and make whole all that you have made. Look with compassion on the world wounded by sin, and by your power restore us to wholeness of life, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.
“The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath…” Mark 2:27.
The same is true for the other nine commandments. They were made for the benefit of humankind. The Commandments are our servants, not our masters. In our gospel lesson, Jesus’ opponents stand the law on its head by making it the master of humankind rather than its servant. There is plenty of religion around taking that approach. There is plenty of religion, much of it purporting to be Christian, that preaches a god obsessed with his rules. This is the god who allows school shootings to punish the Supreme Court for its decisions on the legality of school sponsored prayer in our public education. This is the god who sent AIDS to punish gay men simply for being who that same god supposedly created them. This is a god incapable of forgiveness, who must have a blood sacrifice to punish every infraction of his rules. This is the god who is obsessed with each particular of a teenager’s sexual conduct but doesn’t give a flying fruitcake when legislators attempt to deprive millions of people of health care insurance in the name of balancing the budget. This spiteful, narcissistic, egotistical and mean-spirited little god does not exist. He is only the imaginary product of spiteful, narcissistic, egotistical mean-spirited little people. This pathetic little deity is not the God who gave us the sabbath.
Note well that the sabbath is not about going to church. It is all about rest, rejuvenation and re-creation. It is more a labor law than a religious ordinance. Jesus does not abrogate the sabbath or suggest that it is not important. To the contrary, the sabbath is the oldest commandment in the Bible, being grounded in the Genesis account of creation. There we read that after six days of creative work, God rested and sanctified the seventh day as one of rest. Being the generous God that God is, God makes provision to share the divine joy of rest with creation. Hence, the sabbath. God is serious about ensuring that we-and all creation-get our rest. Jesus knew that it is hard to rest when your stomach is empty or your hand is crippled and painful. He was therefore affirming the importance of the sabbath by ensuring that his hungry disciples and the fellow with the crippled hand could share fully in the rest it affords.
“Remember,” says Moses to the people of Israel, “that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day.” Deuteronomy 5:15.
Israel had had firsthand experience of life without rest. They were slaves, after all. The Egyptian empire regarded the Hebrews as units of labor. They could be worked to death without consequence. Their numbers could be regulated by genocidal laws mandating infanticide. For four hundred long years they knew nothing but unrewarded toil under ruthless exploitation with no hope for anything better. The God who liberated the people of Israel from that bleak condition was determined not to allow them to sink back into the same kind of existence in the land of promise. To that end, sabbath law mandated rest not merely for the people, but also for their oxen, donkeys and livestock. Deuteronomy 5:14. As observed by the author of the Letter to the Hebrews, the sabbath has an eschatological dimension. “So then,” says the anonymous writer, “a sabbath rest still remains for the people of God; for those who enter God’s rest also cease from their labors as God did from his.” Hebrews 4:9-10. It is God’s desire that all creation enter into God’s rest, a state of justice, reconciliation and peace.
The Israelites are commanded to include also their male and female slaves in their sabbath observance. Clearly, slavery existed in Israel with no indication of divine disapproval. While I do not wish to be understood as justifying or rationalizing slavery in any way, shape or form, it is worth noting that the wellbeing God desires for Israel extends to slaves as well as non-Israelite resident aliens. Before being too critical of Israelite culture in the bronze age, we progressive white and ever polite American Christians should reflect on how the working poor in our own land are often holding down multiple jobs without adequate health insurance or any vacation, maternity or sick leave, yet still find it difficult to shelter and feed themselves and their families. There is little if any sabbath rest for them or for our resident aliens living daily with the threat of deportation. American capitalism is in most ways as ruthless a slave driver as any Egyptian overseer. So, let us be mindful of the proverbial glass house before casting stones in the direction of ancient Israel.
We are a people who make a god of work. The highest compliment you can pay a person in our culture is to say “she’s a hard worker,” “he’s a real go-getter,” “that family has a strong work ethic.” Conversely, the worst thing you can say of people is that they are “lazy,” “unproductive,” “slackers.” As I look back on my years of pastoral ministry, I often muse on the habits and practices I developed unconsciously. For example, when a colleague asked how I was doing, my reflexive response was, “busy.” I generally received the same response form such quarries directed to them. Truth be told, I was often not particularly busy. To be sure, there were always things I could be doing. There were always calls to be made, worship planning to be done, meetings for which I needed to prepare. But these matters were seldom urgent, requiring my immediate attention. I had the time, or with a modicum of planning, could have made the time for leisure, rest and recreation. But something deep inside made me ashamed to admit that and I always felt twinges of guilt when, for example, I slipped away from the office to enjoy an ice cream sundae at the nearby Dairy Queen on a sunny afternoon. At times like these, as I sat in the shade with my ice cream, I could never quite silence the voice in my head reminding me of all that I could (and therefore should) be getting done. As the full weight of cultural guilt for wasting a valuable work hour overshadowed me, it never occurred to me that, in all my frantic devotion to getting more work done, I was actually wasting precious sabbath time.
My advanced Hebrew language professor in college, who was a reformed Rabbi, used to say that God commanded us to rest on the seventh day because God knew, if we were not so commanded, we would never rest. God knew we needed a day to stop all the work we imagine to be so important. Only so will we ever learn that, lo and behold, the sun still rises and sets and the earth keeps rotating even though we have not completed the last item on our to do list. We need the sabbath to remind us that there is more to our existence than work, that we are more than the dollar value of our labor, that just sitting in the shade with an ice cream sundae, being alive and breathing the good clean air and drinking in the beauty of God’s good world is time well spent without need for justification or apology. This sabbath joy is God’s gift to the human race and to all of creation. What a shame it would be for us to miss out on it because we were just too damned busy!
Here is a poem by Nikita Gill describing beautifully what a sabbath day might look like.
The Present
As I was sad today, I went out walking again.
And some people will say that isn’t poem-worthy.
But poetry lives in everything ordinary
even walks where you pretend the trees are your family.
And though it was cold,
I bought some strawberry ice cream.
I also sang back at a blackbird’s scream
while an old man laughed delightedly and called me crazy.
I stopped at the corner park
to watch autumn’s first call,
as a show of ochre and amber
and flame leaves danced and fell.
On the way back home,
I thought of all these little happenings
and how well they helped me survive.
Despite anguish-ridden bones, I returned home feeling most
alive.
Source: Where Hope Comes From, Nikita Gill (c. 2021 by Nikita Gill; pub. by Hachette Books) p. 48. Nikita Gill is a British/Indian poet and playwright who lives in southern England. She is editor of SLAM!, a poetry anthology, and has produced several collections of her own poetry. You can learn more about Nikita Gill and sample more of her poetry at her Instagram site.
Peter's Outer Cape Portico 