Sabbath "Rest"ling
Watch the video version of this sermon here!
Welcome back to another exciting post on Making Waves! I missed all of you this past week. My church that I am currently serving had it’s Homecoming service this past Sunday, followed by a four-night Revival. It was a wonderful time, filled with lots of inspiring and awesome speakers. Huge thanks to Sue Anne Morris, Brad Thie, Clark Chilton and Kendrick Fruits for all of their help with this undertaking. Those sermons and my concluding transcript will be posted soon, it’s just taken me longer than anticipated to get all of the video files exported.
It’s been a long week, hasn’t it? I can say that Logan and I have had an unbelievably busy week. Between doctors appointments, my school, her school, the Revival, church, friends, family, the election, raking the yard, beginning to plan Thanksgiving (way too late, might I add), beginning to plan Christmas, thinking about New Years’, and I could go on and on. Our lives are crazy right now. Logan and I went to the Southern Christmas Show in Charlotte yesterday, and we saw a sign that said that Christmas was 43 days away.
Yikes.
If I were 10 again, I’d be likely to say that that is too far away, but as a very new adult, it’s blowing my mind how quickly this Christmas has come. It also makes me panic a bit, because we only have one more Sunday before Advent season begins. It feels like I just got to Pelham a few weeks ago, and now it’s almost time for our first Christmas together. And then God, just being the typical God, throws this scripture at me as I’m writing this sermon. I want to share it with you. We’re reading this morning from the gospel of Mark, chapter 2, verses 23 through 28. Hear now this Word.
“23 One sabbath he was going through the grainfields; and as they made their way his disciples began to pluck heads of grain. 24 The Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the sabbath?” 25 And he said to them, “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food? 26 He entered the house of God, when Abiathar was high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and he gave some to his companions.” 27 Then he said to them, “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath; 28 so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.”
- Mark 2:23-28
Will you pray with me?
Dear Heavenly Father, I ask that the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts together be acceptable in Your presence, O God, for you are our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Let me just start out by being totally, completely honest with you all. I may be a pastor… but I stink at Sabbath. And I don’t mean that the Spirit of the Lord just makes me sweat so profusely that I literally smell during my Sabbath time, I mean that I am really, really bad at keeping it. And I have a feeling that I’m not the only one. If you ask my wife, she would happy to tell you the plethora of things that I like to have on my plate at one time. I’ve never been very good at “taking things slow,” and I prefer to fill every single day that I am blessed with as many possible tasks as possible.
I’m not sure if it’s because someone beat the idea of “idle hands are the devil’s workshop” into my head, or if it’s a “Cats in the Cradle” situation becuase my Dad has always been an incredibly busy person, or if it might just be the culture that we all share here. It would seem that if we look at the movies and popular media out there today, this would seem to ring true for most people.
I always watch this one movie in particular around Christmas time, some of you may have seen it. It’s called, “The Family Man,” and it stars Nicolas Cage as a young successful entrepreneurial playboy who achieved his success at the sacrifice of the love of his life when he left her for a better focus on his job. He then runs into Don Cheadle, who is an angel in disguise that transports Nicolas Cage into a different reality where he never left for New York, but instead stayed with his sweetheart, Tea Leoni, and is married with children. What always struck me about this movie is how against the transition is at first, but then eventually grows into the slowed down home life of a family man.
As we get closer to the Christmas season, we are hit with constant reminders of buying presents before it’s too late, or make sure to plan enough family get-togethers to fill out the entire final two weeks of December.
With the exception of some movies that encourage us to slow down and take things slow, our culture that we live in really gives off a single message, almost in unison: rest is a waste of time. And, odds are, most of us in here have bought into that busy lifestyle that takes over our days. So, why is this the case? What caused it to happen?
I mentioned this past Wednesday at our Revival about how natural it is that we argue and that we discuss the several important aspects of the Church. If you know much about the Methodist tradition, we are a branch of the Protestant faith, which literally begins with the root word “protest-,” due to our formation of our tradition through protest. My point here being that it is perfectly natural to protest and disagree and debate. But it is incredibly dangerous and has a sharp and dangerous slippery slope. Sometimes, you see, protest can lead to division, and division is poison within humanity. Sadly, this happens too often. We divide over baptism, communion, who sits in which pew, who vacuums which rooms, who parks where, who is loved by Jesus, who believes what and why they’re wrong, etc, etc, etc.
I believe that it was one of these church-based divisions that led to the eventual rise of the “busy” mentality. Many years ago, Sabbath went under attack because of a rising debate on which day was appropriate for the day to be honored. There was also a discussion of what was and wasn’t acceptable. It got so specific that you couldn’t walk further than ⅔ of a mile on Saturdays, nor could you shower or do essentially anything. It got so silly that you had to ensure that your hens didn’t lay any eggs on Saturdays. Somewhere during this debate, while everyone was fussing and yelling and missing the point, the true purpose of Sabbath slipped out of the room and we lost it completely.
Since then, any time the idea gets mentioned, it is shut down quickly and we are pushed further from really understanding the purpose of this incredible extension of God’s grace onto us here on Earth. Well, I think that today is the time to re-claim this celebration. But first we need to know what we are dealing with here. So, what does it really mean?
Well, it’s easy, all you have to do is R.E.S.T. Whenever it comes time for you to remember the Sabbath day and to keep it holy, keep this acronym in mind and let it help you realize what Sabbath should truly be.
Logan and I recently had my sister and brother-in-law over for a visit, and they brought us their firepit to babysit while they are transitioning from one house to another. So, being the man that I am, I have gotten wayyyyy too in to this whole fire pit thing. I went to the Lowe’s Hardware and saw how expensive lumber was and thought that it was such a silly price and that I have plenty of dead lumber in my backyard over at the parsonage. So, instead of buying lumber, as I was supposed to, I decided instead to buy a chopping ax. I took the axe out to the back of the house and start to chop into a dead log on the ground. And I chopped. And I chopped. It was then that I realized just how difficult it was to chop up lumber and the reason for the convenience of pre-cut. My ribs have finally stopped aching and think I’m ready for round two trying to get through that silly again this afternoon.
I tell this silly story because it made me think of this other story that I’ve heard before. There were once these two men who were both incredibly adept wood choppers. Out of pure rivalry, one of the men issued the other a challenge of an all-day wood chopping contest. The other man accepted. The man who issued the challenge worked incredibly hard. He started at sun-up, as was agreed upon, and worked until sun-down, only stopping briefly for a lunch break in the middle of the challenge. The other man had taken a long leisurely lunch and even had the audacity to take several breaks during the day. The challenger, expecting a landslide victory, was intensely annoyed to learn that the other man had chopped considerably more wood than he had.
Frustrated, the challenger asked the other man how he did it. He didn’t understand how the other man could have possibly done more than him, since every time he had checked, the other man seemed to be resting or taking a break.
The other man explained to the challenger, “I did take several breaks. But what you didn’t notice was that I was sharpening my ax when I sat down to rest.”
This is one of the first and most important things that we remember about the Sabbath: it has to be Restorative. Notice here that I didn’t say “Recliner.” There is a difference between restoring and being lazy. I think we have this misconception that Sabbath is a day that we turn our brains off entirely and drag our feet through the day. But, if this is the attitude that we take, then we miss half of the purpose of Sabbath.
There are two major things that happen during Sabbath: first, we take our minds off of the world; second, we set our sights on God and the work that He is doing in our lives. Eugene Peterson says that Sabbath is “that uncluttered time and space in which we can distance ourselves from our own activities enough to see what God is doing.”
So, just like the man who sharpened his ax during the challenge, our Sabbath time should rest our bodies, while sharpening and focusing our tool. It not only rests us, but also restores us.
This goes well into the next point, Sabbath should be an Extension of God’s grace into our lives. It isn’t just about us and our own personal day-vay-cay, it’s about an oppotunity to rest in God’s presence. As Martin Luther states, “The spiritual rest which God especially intends in this commandment is that we not only cease from our labor and trade but much more-that we let God alone work in us and that in all our powers do we do nothing of our own.”
This relates a lot to the Restorative part of R.E.S.T. It has be more than just us lounging around doing nothing and thinking about nothing. Sabbath is a lot like communion and baptism in the sense that it allows God to work in us in some kind of real, meditative way.
Now, my favorite part, and one of the two most argument-inducing parts of Sabbath, is that Sabbath can be, is allowed to be, and most often should be Special. Sabbath doesn’t need to be some kind of list of ten things that are allowed on a certain day. It’s so much more than that. It’s so much more personal than that.
Let me tell you something that you may not have heard before: God desperately wants a relationship with you. Have you ever had a relationship with anyone before? Each relationship is just a little different, right? Your relationship with your mom is a little different from your relationship with your dad? Your relationship with your brother or sister might be slightly different? Maybe your wife or husband is different than those? (I sure hope so.) Then add friends into the equation, and I doubt that you have a single identical friendship in the mix. In the same way, God’s relationship with each and every one of us may differ slightly, and that’s okay. Sabbath and that Extension of God’s relationship in and through us will likely be unique and special to our own personality.
I’ll give you an example. I’ve recently been pursuing a deeper relationship with God through my spiritual disciplines, so I tried everything in the book. Or the Book, I suppose you should say. I went through every spiritual discipline I could find. I tried repetition of Bible verses, I tried prayer and meditation, I tried eating foods that supposedly get you more centered, and you know what? I got zilch out of it. I feel guilty saying that, but I just wasn’t being fed by the traditional means. But I tell you what I love: art therapy coloring books. Anytime I had free time, I would sit down with a book, I’d begin to color in the intricate design and I caught myself thinking about God. Then I caught myself praying. Then I caught myself openly talking to God. Through coloring! It may sound unconventional, but the focus forced upon me by coloring and getting my mind off of the world became my Sabbath time. Since then, I’ve found God in a variety of different means. I was raking leaves the other day and found myself in restful conversation with God.
But here’s an important thing that I want you to hear: just because it’s restful for me doesn’t mean that it is for you, necessarily. Coloring may work for me, but it may completely stress you out. It may not give you any kind of rest. Seek and pursue things that give you rest. If you find that your mind is just in complete bliss, try talking to God, and praying. You may find that this is your Sabbath even in this busy world.
Finally, let’s talk about the other controversial topic: Timing. I’m going to make it incredibly controversial from the get-go. Timing is, in all honesty, irrelevant. Before you launch your fist through the computer screen, let me explain.
I’m not going to try and reason using the traditional means of explaining how the calendar has changed or how we can’t possibly know which day was which, because honestly, that’s not important either. Instead, I just want to bring it home.
More specifically, to a home with a mother and a child. The child, a young tot, approaches the mother seeking out a drawing request. Any of you that have ever been around children likely know this game, the child asks, you suggest. So, the mother requests that the child draw a picture of the mother with the blue crayon. For some reason or another, the child gets distracted (as children often do) and draws several other things: an otter, three giraffes, maybe a tree, or a house, who knows? Finally, the child gets around to drawing the mother and draws her in red crayon. Now, imagine the mother’s reaction. How does she react? Is she incredibly disappointed at this child for drawing this beautiful creation in a different color than the mother requested? Is she angry and abusive over the time it took for the child to draw the request? How does she react? I imagine that she reacts with love and grace. She accepts the drawing as it is, and in the time that it took, because the mother truly loves this child.
Friends, if this is true in this scenario, then replace the mother with God. God’s love for us is so much deeper than a mother’s love (and a mother’s love is pretty insanely, incredibly deep sometimes).
Timing is only important in one sense, that you eventually turn to God in some way. Like I said earlier, He desperately wants a relationship with you. I’ve mentioned this poem before, but there is this powerful poem about a man being 10,000 steps from God, and he can’t imagine ever being able to cross this great divide. But God calls out to him and says that if the man will just take one tiny, itty-bitty step towards God, then God will take the other 9,999. The key to our timing is that it be our goal and passion to pursue this relationship.
I believe that we can reclaim Sabbath if we can only recall these four major components of Sabbath: that we treat it as something Restorative, allow it to be an Extension of God’s grace, give it the power to be Special and unique to us, and then remember that the Timing of God is in
infinite and that He is waiting for us to rest in Him with open arms.
Comments
Post a Comment