Keeping the Sabbath
Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren
Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – September 4, 2022
Keeping the Sabbath – Luke 14
This weekend ends with a federal holiday honoring the Labor Movement of the last century. A hundred years ago, nationally and internationally, the Labor Movement advocated for limiting workdays to 8 hours and giving workers the weekly two days off we now know as the weekend. These accomplishments added to the quality of life for workers, families, and communities across the world where they were adopted.
Whether it's because of the gig economy, our cultural idolization of overwork, rampant understaffing, this recent significant inflation in the cost of living, or a number of other reasons, we may feel that some of those accomplishments of the Labor Movement are being eroded or were never fully realized in our particular industry to begin with. Many of those pressures on workers are beyond the control of any single individual. They involve a whole host of factors impacted by organization-wide, community-wide, industry-wide, and nation-wide expectations. Comprehensively lightening the load of those pressures on workers, families, and communities takes many of us working together. Yet, as individuals we can adjust our own expectations, attitudes, and approaches to work and rest that support the well-being of all and give glory to God.
Honoring the Sabbath and keeping it holy was an important aspect of the Jewish religious and cultural life into which Jesus was born. R. Alan Culpepper reminds those reading his Luke commentary that the observance of the Sabbath was meant “as a gift of rest and restoration.”[1] Even before New Testament times, it was a day of assembly for worship and a day to share a common meal with family and friends.
There were certain rules and much debate over what work could and could not be done on the Sabbath. It was generally accepted that when human life was in danger the Sabbath rules could be set aside. The ordinary practice of medicine, however, was considered a violation, and while the Pharisees allowed the rescuing of an animal, the Essenes did not.[2]
Few Christian groups today observe such strict standards about a Sabbath day. Yet, I believe we miss important aspects of holy patterns of rest and work if we pay no attention to the idea at all. I know that observing a weekly Sabbath day and taking a season of sabbatical in 2021 are and were important times for me to remember that I am not God, that I have limits, and that I am called to rest and restoration at least as much as I am called to meaningful work. But, like many, I am still growing in my understanding of Sabbath.
Perhaps that’s why I felt for a new dad who recently wrote into an advice columnist I like to read about how he feels like he is drowning every day. He wrote about the pressures of working 50 hours a week and taking several hours a day on top of that for relaxation which then leaves him no time at home with the new baby and leaves his wife, also working a full-time job, to handle all the caretaking responsibilities. He wrote to the advice columnist to ask whether he should divorce his wife or quit his job or make some other change in order to stop “white-knuckling it” through his days, “snapping” at his wife, and “hating his life.” I suspect there are a number of us here who have felt backed into that kind of corner at one-time or another or who have been the abandoned caretaker on the other side of the letter also backed into a lonely, miserable corner of our own.
Jesus was backed into an equally tight, if slightly different corner, as he sat down to dinner one Sabbath with some Pharisees. They were watching him closely because they already knew that he was a rule breaker who healed people on the Sabbath. The story doesn’t tell us if the man with the atypical and I assume uncomfortable swelling was purposely placed in front of Jesus to test him. I think though that since we are told “[The Pharisees] were watching him closely” it makes sense to understand the whole scene as a setup.
It would be easy to cast the Pharisees as the clear villains of this story. Keep in mind though that they think they’re doing the right thing. They are the devout religious types who want to honor God completely by keeping the Sabbath perfectly and teaching others how to do the same. They’re the pastors and church leaders. If you’re attending worship now, you might think of them as more or less me and you. How many of us also want to do things right? How many of us also want others around us to do things right? How many of us could use a reminder that hard and fast judgments of ourselves and others–even if we have the noblest of intentions–is missing the point entirely?
After Jesus heals the man he tells a story that both the Pharisees and we can learn from. It’s about status and honor again, an ongoing theme particularly in the Gospel of Luke. He says to the one who just invited him to a party in a room probably filled with high-powered people, if you want to throw a party you can feel good about, invite the folks no one else would. It may not make you as popular with these high status people here but it’s what will please God.
This story reminds me of how Jesus is nothing if not cheeky with those in power in basically any situation. I don’t think he had the same people-pleasing tendencies some of us struggle with. Maybe that’s what makes him so good at reminding the Pharisees and us today that all too often it’s our striving for status that keeps us from what we really seek. It’s our trying our best to hold up the weight of the world’s expectations that keeps us from experiencing real health, wholeness, and security.
Advice Columnist Carolyn Hax responded to the drowning dad’s question as to what he needed to change with two words: “your worldview.”[3] “You are your circumstances,” she wrote. “They’re not some oppressive outside force. And with that mental change, you can also change your priorities to fit how you see yourself in that world.”
For me, her tough words shared a kinship with the disruptively convicting and ultimately compassionate, if cheeky, advice of Jesus. She encouraged the drowning dad to seek support in a therapist who could help him with aspects of his life that could be symptoms of anxiety and depression. She encouraged him to readjust his priorities keeping in mind the negative impact his current priorities were having on his family and himself. Finally, and perhaps most germane to today’s examination on work and rest, Hax invited the dad to adjust his workload and, importantly, his expectations. “What can you spare?” she asked. “Money? Rest time? Ambition? Either downsize strategically” she warned. “Or lose it all.”
She could be right. I’m not usually sold on either ors though. So, I might add that I suspect there’s a whole lot of uncomfortable adjusting while downsizing, in order not to lose it all. In my experience, finding a pattern of work and rest that serves the well-being of everyone in my life is an ongoing, messy work made more manageable by the company of those who love me, and who are trying their best too to let go of unhealthy pressures and expectations that have so much more to do with status than they do our neighbors’ good or the glory of God.
In today’s story Jesus healed the swollen man and asked the Pharisees, ‘Is it lawful to cure people on the Sabbath, or not?’ … ‘If one of you has a child or an ox that has fallen into a well, will you not immediately pull it out on a Sabbath day?’ And they could not reply to this.”
I don’t think it’s that Jesus doesn’t care about the Sabbath or that we should work all the time or continuously overspend ourselves in the service of others. No, I think the point he’s making with the Pharisees, is that our rules, goals, and expectations–even really noble ones–matter a lot less than the human needs before us.
Kids get sick. Parents and partners fall ill. Our own bodies have limitations. So do our bank accounts and our hearts. If we ever feel we are speeding through life at a breakneck pace, I believe Jesus tells us in this story and others that it’s okay to let up on the gas pedal of life and respond to the needs around us. That’s what he did in today’s story despite the expectations laid upon him.
Lutheran church planter and writer Nadia Bolz-Weber shares in a widely-watched video interview that she doesn’t hear the message “You can have it all” as a liberation. Rather, she hears it as an accusation.
She shares that years ago she was trying to prove that she could “have it all.” She even included self-care in her “have it all” plan with a strict 8:30pm bedtime and six days a week of an intense fitness program. These habits assured her over-functioning, until one day when she seriously disappointed someone she loved. That person responded with forgiveness that allowed her to realize that she didn’t need to have it all. She needed to be set free. She needed to be set free from the torturous fear that one of the many plates she was spinning would drop. In the end, letting the plates simply drop was much healthier for everyone in her life than serving that fear.
“Faith” she shared, “tells us [we are] already enough. [We are] loved quite apart from anything [we] do or don’t do. “Faith,” Bolz-Weber proclaimed, “tells us our worthiness is not in our busy-ness.”[4]
Maybe that’s what it means to keep the Sabbath holy and honor God.
Maybe it means leaning enough on our faith that we are loved to be present to the real and human needs before us.
May God grant rest and restoration to us all. Amen.
[1] R. Alan Culpepper. “The Gospel of Luke: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections. New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary. (Abingdon Press: Nashville, 1995), 285.
[2] Everett Ferguson. “Sabbath.” Backgrounds of Early Christianity, Third Edition. (Eerdman’s Publishing: Grand Rapids, MI, 2003), 557.
[3] The whole column can be found here if they Washington Post hasn’t raised a paywall on it yet: https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/28/carolyn-hax-dad-work-family-impossible/
[4]https://www.facebook.com/MAKERShavealittlefaith/videos/no-one-has-it-all-have-a-little-faith/185413442126189/
