Sunday, June 2, 2024, 2nd Sunday after Pentecost
“Another Blessed Sabbath”
Psalm 111:1-10; Deuteronomy 5:12-15; 2 Corinthians 4:5-12; Mark 2:23-28
Divine Service III with Holy Communion
Hymns: #901 “Open Now Thy Gates of Beauty”; #785 “We Praise You, O God”; #733 “O God, Our Help In Ages Past”
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus.
Remember “blue laws?” Remember when all the stores used to be closed on Sundays? Remember when you couldn’t buy alcohol on a Sunday, at least until after noon? Remember when our schools didn’t schedule sports or school activities on Sundays, and when they gave us Wednesday evenings for Confirmation classes? Remember when people used to have a little more respect for what they called the Lord’s Day, or the Sabbath Day?
What does that word Sabbath mean, anyway? What is a Sabbath? Where did the idea for it come from? That’s God’s blessed Second Commandment we heard today from Deuteronomy 5. “Remember the Sabbath Day by keeping it holy.” In the Hebrew language the Sabbath is “Shabbat” or “Shabbos.” The word means “to rest” or to “cease working.” Our Father in Heaven has woven the Sabbath day into the very fabric of creation. He created the world in six days, and on the seventh day “God rested from all His labors.” It’s not that God was tired or needed a break. He’s God; He doesn’t need a vacation. (And be thankful He never takes a day off!) God created a Sabbath day, a day of rest, for our sakes.
What would we be missing if we didn’t have a Sabbath day? What would happen to us physically in our bodies, what would happen to our mental health, what would happen to our families and our relationships, if we never took a Sabbath rest? A relative of a relative of mine thought he could do that. He took all the extra days and overtime he could get at the auto plant where he worked; seven days a week, 12 or 14 hours a day, week after week, month after month. Because, he said, he was going to “take an early retirement.” You know where this is going, don’t you? He took an early retirement, all right; he had to, when he had that massive heart attack. I was at a pastor’s meeting once, and one of our brother pastors was bragging about how he hadn’t taken a vacation or a day off in over fifteen years, because “the Lord’s work is more important than a day off.” Someone looked at him and said, “Your poor wife.”
God gave us a Sabbath Day because He knows us. He knows what these people He created are like. On the one hand, we humans can be avaricious and greedy, and ambitious to a fault. If I were to give my workaholic self free reign, I’d never take a day off at all. That would be bad for me, bad for my family, bad for my Church, and bad for my poor wife. On the other hand, we humans can be forgetful and lazy and neglectful of God, and it’s easy for us to get so wrapped up in all the other things we like to do, that God and what He wants for us gets cast aside. So God gave us a Sabbath Day, a day of rest; a day to stop and worship and pray and remember Him; and also a day to rest and renew our bodies, our spirits, and our souls.
The Sabbath Day was part of a divine pattern the Lord God gave to the children of Israel, to keep them close to Him always. He gave them daily prayers and sacrifices to make, to keep them mindful of Him day by day. He gave them their weekly Sabbaths, to give them a day to remember Him and to rest their bodies and souls. And He gave them yearly feasts and festivals, the “big Sabbaths,” the “pilgrim feasts” – Passover, the Feast of Shelters, Pentecost – those special days where they could gather together as a people and remember Him year by year. God promised that those who put their hearts into keeping His divine pattern for living would be blessed.
If we’re wise enough to see it, God has given us a divine pattern to live in as well. Not the same as the ancient Hebrews had, since Jesus – Lord of the Sabbath – has declared Sabbath keeping to be not a matter of law, but a matter of grace; but still, we have a God-given pattern we’ll be blessed to live in if we’ll turn our hearts to paying attention to it.
We have daily devotions and prayers we can and should do to keep us daily close to God. A half an hour or so in God’s Word in the morning will do wonders for your soul, and brighten every day you live. Portals of Prayer, Guideposts, Our Daily Bread, are all good. I use “Martin Luther Day by Day” and a few other devotional books to get me started in the morning. Morning is the best time for devotions, by the way, because if you tell yourself you’ll wait till later, you’ll get to the end of a long day and forget to remember. Unless, of course, you do morning and evening devotions, which would be twice as good.
And we also have our weekly Sabbath Days, these blessed times together in Church, to hear God’s Word and celebrate the Sacraments. I’m so happy to be here this morning, on another blessed Sabbath Day. “I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord,’” the Psalm says. The Christian Church has worshiped on Sundays from the beginning (not on Saturdays like the Hebrews) because Jesus rose from the dead on a Sunday and made every Sunday a holy day for us. Although if your habit or tradition is to worship on Saturday, or Wednesday, or even a Monday or a Tuesday, that’s OK, too, so long as it’s a habit and a regular thing.
And we Christians also have our special days, “pilgrim feasts” of our own - Christmas Day, Easter Sunday, Ascension Day, Reformation, Pentecost - that help mark the seasons and years for us and keep us in the pattern God gave us. And again, if we put our hearts to living in that sacred pattern, we’ll be blessed for it.
Now, much as we might like to go back to the good old days of blue laws and shutting things down on Sundays, not only is that impractical, but it’s not really a thing we should do. Are any of you here this morning because you have to be? Were you pushed, shoved, or dragged here against your will? (I hope not!) Were you nagged to get up this morning to be here? (Well, a little nagging is OK, if you’re doing it out of love!) If you’re here this morning, it should be because you want to be, and because you’re happy to be, and because your soul knows it needs to be. Turning worship into a “have to” instead of a “want to”, turns it into something that isn’t worship at all.
The Hebrews, and other religious groups and denominations down through the years, made Sabbath keeping a mandatory thing. Keeping the Sabbath was a matter of civil law, and there were fines and penalties, stocks and pillories, waiting for those who failed to comply. For heaven’s sake, we don’t want that. The pilgrims who first came to America, came here to escape state churches and mandated religion and religious persecution, and to be free to worship as they wished.
In our Gospel reading in Mark, the Pharisees, the law-keepers, were watching everyone, keeping track, taking names, taking note of everyone who wasn’t keeping the Sabbath rules like they were supposed to. They were watching Jesus and His disciples, keeping an eye on them, especially on a Sabbath day. They were “looking for something with which to accuse Him.” (That they were spending their Sabbath day looking for things to accuse people of, instead of joyfully remembering the goodness of God, tells us a lot about them).
How many Hebrew blue laws were Jesus and His companions breaking? For one, they were taking a walk though the grainfields. The Sabbath rules said taking a walk wasn’t allowed on the Sabbath. It was permissible to walk as far as you needed to get to the Temple or the Synagogue; but a longer walk than that meant you were breaking the law by working on the Sabbath.
And then the disciples – horrors! – began to break the rule about fasting on the Sabbath day. The grain was probably wheat; or it could have been rye or barley; and if you’ve ever done this with raw grain, rolling the grains in the palms of their hands to open the husk, and puck out the grain to eat it. Why were they doing that? Because they were hungry! I heard a caller on a religious radio program, who was terrified that he’s broken his denomination’s rule about fasting before receiving the Sacrament, because he’d absent-mindedly removed a piece of meat from between his teeth with his tongue and swallowed it while waiting in line for Communion. (The host of the program absolved him, thankfully!)
The Pharisees, no doubt thrilled to catch them in the act, said to Jesus, “Aha! Aha! Look! Look! Why are Your disciples breaking the Law on the Shabbos?” Jesus answered their accusations by taking them to a passage from 1 Samuel 22, one these “teachers of Israel” should have known well. In that story, David and his companions are being pursued by King Saul and his whole army, and they find themselves desperately hungry and in need of provisions. They go to a priest named Abimelech, at God’s house in a place called Nob, and ask him for help. Abimelech tells David that the only bread he has on hand in the Bread of the Presence, the sacred loaves that are laid out before God each morning, and that only priests are allowed to eat. David was no priest, but the need was great, so they ate the holy bread. And the Lord was OK with it, because mercy and human need have always been more important to Him than rules to follow. “I desire mercy, not sacrifice,” God says. Jesus once healed a crippled man, in a synagogue, on a Sabbath day, and the Pharisees condemned Him for that. And He told them a story about a sheep in a well. “If your sheep, or your son, fell in a well on the Sabbath day, wouldn’t you break the rules about working on the Sabbath, in order to pull him out?”
And Jesus tells them, “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.” Jesus, God bless Him, is taking their whole system of Sabbath laws, rules, and regulations – a system they used to control people, and not to bless them – and setting it on its ear; turning it over, just like He overturned the moneychanger’s tables.
The Sabbath is a blessing for you. It was never supposed to be a burden, or an obligation, or a rule. If you’re here because you have to be, you’re doing it wrong. This is joy! This is a place to rest! This is a place to feed your soul and renew your spirit. Is there work to be done in God’s Church? Sure there is, and lots of it. We have work to do out there in the world, people to reach, souls that need saving, needs to be met; and that work never, ever stops. But that work isn’t what this morning is for. Evangelism is a good and necessary thing, but here on Sunday morning isn’t the time or place for it. This hour, this Sabbath day, is for us, to bless us, renew us, and keep us strong. Evangelism, outreach, and witness is for the other six days of the week, until God in His mercy brings us back here again.
This morning (and stop me if you’ve heard this before) I’m preaching to you, as St. Paul did, that Jesus Christ is Lord, and that we’re all God’s servants for Jesus sake. The same thing you’ll hear me preach every blessed Sabbath day, the same thing I’ll preach until I die. We’re here in God’s house to get a little bit of God’s heavenly light shined into us, so we can shine it out into a world that’s dark and getting darker, when we leave this place. God has given us this Sabbath day to put a little of His heavenly treasure into these jars of clay, so we can have the grace to go out and share it, and invite others to come and see.
What would we do without a Sabbath Day? This world can have us all feeling hard pressed and perplexed, persecuted and abandoned. Death is always with us, surrounding us and threatening to swallow us whole. But you and I won’t ever be crushed or despairing or destroyed, so long as we live in that divine and holy pattern God gave us, and so long as we keep coming back here. Here’s where we’re reminded that Jesus died for us on a cross, and that Jesus has indeed been raised from the dead, so we can have life. And that gives us hope, and hope is what makes life good.
Lord Jesus, You are Lord of the Sabbath, Lord of our Sabbath, and the God of love and mercy and grace. Your Spirit has called us here, Your love has brought us here, and the Word and Sacrament we receive here upholds and sustains our lives. Lord, keep us faithful in worship and faithful to Your Word, whatever life in the world out there may bring. It’s good, Lord, to be here. We pray in Jesus’ name; Amen.