Both our scripture readings today are about the Sabbath. We know from the gospel accounts that Jesus kept the Sabbath day, that on the Sabbath day he went to the synagogue. The gospel accounts say that this was his custom. "As was his custom," he would go to the synagogue and there would sing God’s praise in the Psalms, hear the word read and proclaimed, just as it is done today. So both our scripture readings are about the Sabbath. The one that we now have in Deuteronomy 5 is explicitly about the Sabbath day, but the first reading, read just a moment or two ago from Matthew 11 is also, though implicitly, about the Sabbath day. That is, the word Sabbath is not mentioned, but the word "rest" is central to the text. Remember Jesus says, "Come to me all you who labor and who are heavy-laden and I will give you rest" – I will give you what the Sabbath commands and promises; rest, eternal rest, even heavenly rest . . . .

"Rest" is what the Sabbath day commandment is about, both literally and spiritually. We know that the Jewish people reflected on the fourth commandment, not just in its literal sense ("resting" on one day of the week) but they also thought about what it meant in its deepest level and I hope I’ll dig a little bit in both these directions this morning. Deuteronomy 5 at verse 12 (see Scripture Readings).

As many of you know, we are in our sermons looking together at the Ten Commandments just now, all ten of them, spending one week on some and a number of weeks on others of the commandments. We find the commandments spelled out in at least two passages in the books of Moses, the first five books of the Old Testament scripture, the books that we sometimes call "the Pentateuch." We find them spelled out in the twentieth chapter of Exodus and in the fifth chapter of Deuteronomy, from which I just read.

These Ten Commandments are not so much commandments which tell us exactly how to live in every circumstance of life, but rather they function just as the Constitution functions in our nation. They form the springboard from which ethical and religious discussion emerges within the Christian and Jewish traditions. And that springboard was used in ancient Israel, and in the early days of the church quite visibly, and, of course, has been used ever since.

• Back in ancient Israel when the prophets of the eighth and the seventh and the sixth century inveighed against the injustices they saw in the land of Israel, they went back to the Ten Commandments, as if to say, "You’re forgetting the foundations of our society. There they are." And they expounded them. They explained them for their present situation (e.g., Isaiah 56.2, Jeremiah 10:1, 17:21)
   
• Jesus does the same. In the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5), which many regard as the heart of his teaching, right there in the Sermon on the Mount, you find Jesus referring back to some of the commandments, saying, "This is how you’ve understood this in the past, but this is how I explain it to you right now."

Back to the foundational principles. That’s what they are. For you and me as they were for the people of ancient Israel, for people of faith who know God made known in Christ Jesus. So far we’ve looked at the first four commandments and at the sixth commandment and we come back this morning to look a second time at the fourth commandment about which I’ve just read in Deuteronomy: "Six days you shall labor, you may remember, but the seventh is a Sabbath." The seventh day is a Sabbath, the day of rest.

A few weeks ago, Darla spoke on this particular commandment and focused on the six days you shall labor part – about the importance of our work to us; what we do with our lives. Whether it’s our paid work or our unpaid work, whether we are working for a living or whether we are retired. What we do with our time on behalf of God, on behalf of others. Our work is something we do that should be an aspect of our faith. It’s not divorced from our faith, as if we have a religious life and a non-religious life. It’s all part of what we do. This is a gift of God that God gives to us and we need to think of our work in terms of God’s calling in our lives (not just to be a minister), but God’s calling in whatever we do with our lives. God is vitally interested in that. We looked at that a few weeks ago, "Six days you shall labor," but today we’re looking at the other side of the coin when it comes to this commandment. We’re looking at the seventh day: "but the seventh day is a Sabbath," a day of rest. Keeping the Sabbath day. How do we keep the Sabbath day? This day has played an important part, indeed a crucial part in the formation and the identity of the people of ancient Israel and it has also played a crucial part in our formation as Christians and in our own Presbyterian heritage.

With respect to Israel’s heritage, many of you may be familiar with the Jewish festival of Hanukkah. It celebrates the restoration of the Jewish temple a hundred and sixty four years before the birth of Christ after its desecration by one of the Hellenistic kings, the descendants of Alexander the Great Antiochus Epiphanes. He had desecrated the temple and had led to rebellion among the people of Israel led by the Maccabees and in particular by Judas Maccabaeus. And his rebellion, his guerilla warfare, was successful, and after three years of warfare, the temple was back in the hands of faithful people and restored. And this great victory became the basis of this annual celebration.

You may be familiar with some of that story though perhaps you are less familiar with what went on during this guerilla warfare and the fact that right at the beginning when Judas Maccabaeus and his brothers led the revolt against the Syrians, the revolt almost came to an end right at the very beginning because of the Sabbath day. You see, Antiochus and his troops realized that no one among the faithful Jews was going to fight on the Sabbath day. And there was a particular occasion in the year 167 when there were some men, some women and some children who were seeking refuge in a cave on the Sabbath day. They had gone there for shelter and every one of them, to the last person, was annihilated by Antiochus’ troops. Word of the slaughter went out throughout the Jewish community (1 Maccabees 1,2) and the faithful Jews began to say to themselves, "This just isn’t going to work." So they wrestled deep in their hearts with what they should do on the Sabbath day to avoid destruction, to avoid annihilation, and they reached the conclusion which was for them a wrenching conclusion (it may seen obvious to us, but it was wrenching to them), that fighting self-defense on the Sabbath would be okay in the sight of God. And with that established, they went on their way and in time they won the whole battle.

That same kind of wrestling with the meaning of the commandment has gone on from generation to generation. Not perhaps with such dire consequences, but it has gone on in this country over the last ten, fifteen, twenty, fifty, hundred years or so with the systematic repealing – and many of us have observed this in our lifetime – of the blue laws, until nowadays they’re almost all gone. There may be some vestiges left, but they’re almost all gone. Things have changed within our own lifetime with regard to the keeping of the Sabbath, and in our way of understanding it, even as Christians: the Christian Sabbath, on Sunday, has changed within our lifetime. And this kind of change has happened all throughout the Western world, those parts of the world which would have seen themselves as part of Christendom.

It’s happened in my own homeland of Scotland. Growing up there in the sixties and the seventies, even professional sports were limited to Saturdays and weekdays. No games were played on a Sunday (you can imagine my horror and shock coming to this country in the seventies to find out what goes on here on a Sunday!) And that was nothing compared to how things were in the 1920's, the days in which my father was growing up as a boy, as a young man. His family would not read the newspaper on a Sunday. That seems rather obvious. But they wouldn’t read it on the Monday either – because it was prepared by somebody who had to work on a Sunday! So you didn’t do that either. If you were going to make somebody work, then you weren’t going to do it.

This was in the northwest of Scotland. Moving south to the cities in Scotland, though, William Barclay tells the story, eighty years before that (in the 1840's) about when the first train ran on a Sunday from the city of Glasgow to the city of Edinburgh, and he mentions the reaction of our Presbyterian forebears, the leaders of the Glasgow Presbytery, including the ministers and some of the lay elders. This is how he tells the story:

The first Sunday train from Glasgow to Edinburgh ran on the 13^th of March, 1842. Our contemporary journalist, (obviously writing on a Sunday) wrote that it was filled with peaceful and respectable persons, gliding quietly away on its mission. The Presbytery of Glasgow, however, denounced the running of Sunday trains as "a flagrant violation of the law of God as expressed in the fourth commandment. A grievous outrage on the religious feelings of the people of Scotland. A powerful temptation to the careless and indifferent to abandon the public ordinances of grace, and most disastrous to the quiet of the rural parishes along the line of the railways by the introduction into every Sabbath of many of the profligate and dissipated to inhabit the cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh. In Edinburgh a threatening battery of ministers, (quite an image there, a ‘threatening battery of ministers,’ picture it in your mind) lined the platforms and informed the detraining passengers that they have just bought tickets to hell, a claim which does not seemed to have deterred many of them from making their way to (downtown Edinburgh toward the main street) Princes Street."

They had, for riding the train on the Sabbath day, just bought "tickets to hell." A claim, I suspect, that could be leveled at every single one of us gathered here today. We’ve all traveled on a Sunday, haven’t we? We’ve all paid money to travel somewhere on a Sunday, whether it’s gasoline or whether it’s a plane fare. We’ve all watched sports on a Sunday. We’ve all gone out for a meal on a Sunday. And some of us go to work on a Sunday. Sunday after Sunday. Sabbath after Sabbath.

So what do we do? What are we to do to keep this fourth commandment, to honor this day which is part of our heritage . . . from ancient days in Israel through the early church, through the time of Jesus on into the Presbyterian Church, and into the world in which we live today? How are we to make this commandment meaningful in an age in which everything, everywhere, in our world seems to be running seven days a week, every hour of the day? And where, at times, we find ourselves caught in a predicament, saying, "I cannot help but join in here. What’s the use? Let me join the crowd."

Well, what I want to do in the time that we have left this morning is quite simple. I want to say that while on the one hand the commandment is clearly about one day, keeping a whole day to itself, yet on the other hand, even with Jesus, as we saw earlier, some interpretation of the commandment has to go on. And that interpretation is not just a way of getting around, or avoiding the clear meaning, but it is to bring us back to the fact that the commandment was given for a reason. That is, the commandment wasn’t a commandment given to people for no reason: just do it, because God says so!!! Rather, it was given for a reason, or reasons, and I want to share some of those reasons, and then I want us to ask: Given the reasons, given the original intents, "How best can we use our time, whether it’s on one day of the week or on many days of the week to keep the commandment?"

1. To do this, I’m going to be reading four different texts of scripture in which the Sabbath is mentioned. One of which I’ve read already from Deuteronomy; I’ll read that again in a few moments, but I’m going to begin with the Exodus version, Exodus 20:8, the version there of the Sabbath day commandment:

"Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. You shall not do any work. You, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock or the alien resident in your towns. And why? The reason: Where in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, but rested on the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it. For in the six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, but rested on the seventh day."

In general terms, the reason given in Exodus for the Sabbath day was to remember who God is: who God is and was; what God did for us; and who we are in relationship to God. God is the creator. God is our creator. God is the giver and the sustainer of all of life. We are to remember that! Instead of forgetting and living as if God weren’t there, as if we by ourselves, were the sustainers of life – which is of course, not true.

Take time, the commandment says. Take time in a busy world to remember who God is. Seems rather straightforward and obvious but if we don’t do it, if we don’t make time, we forget. That’s what we’re prone to do. We forget. We think that life belongs to ourselves and not to God, that we are in a sense, our own maker, in charge of our lives. At times, we know we’re not. At times, we’re shaken up. We know that we’re not in charge of our lives, but the commandment says, "Take time regularly, week by week, to place your life back in the true perspective, where God is God and you are one of God’s creatures." God made you. Take that into account as you live your life. Simple, straightforward, but critical. Exodus 20 reminds us of that, reminds us of God the creator, reminds us to remember God.

2. Deuteronomy 5 is similar but the reason given for the commandment is different. The reason here for us to keep the commandment is not just to remember God but to remember others. Remember these words that I read a few moments ago.

"Observe the Sabbath day and keep it holy as the Lord your God commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. You shall not do any work. You or your son or your daughter or your male or female slave or your ox or your donkey or any of your livestock or the resident alien in your towns so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you." And here’s the reason. "Remember 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."

No mentioning of creation here but of redemption, but of deliverance, of freedom from slavery. Remember that you were a slave in need of God’s help and God stepped in to help you. SO, step into the lives of others and help them! If God has been so gracious to you – and, once again, how easily we forget it – so that we are not slaves, none of us here today are slaves, thank God, and slavery still exists in this world of ours. None of us are slaves. By God’s grace. But more than that, spiritually, of course, the gospel says, we are not slaves either to sin. We’re not slaves to fear. We’re not slaves to a future that is uncertain. God steps into our lives to set us free. – We are to step into the lives of others to set them free too, especially those we might not notice or those we might trample on. Take care of your slaves, male and female. And your animals as well. Your ox and your donkey, your livestock, and the resident alien who lives among you, who has no rights in your community. Remember them when you rest. Remember them, for you were a slave, God says to God’s ancient people. And God stepped in to save them. Don’t forget it. Notice your creator and notice others as God has noticed and cared for you and make time to remember these things.

3. The third text is still in the books of Moses. It’s from the book of Leviticus and it’s not a text about the Sabbath day but about the Sabbath year (which, once again, says to us that even from the earliest days, the Sabbath commandment was interpreted and reinterpreted to seek for its meaning and its understanding). Leviticus 25 and at verse two speaks of the Sabbath, or sabbatical year, like this:

"Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘When you enter the land that I am giving you, the land shall observe a Sabbath for the Lord. Six years you shall sow your field and six years you shall prune your vineyard and gather in their yield. But in the seventh year, there shall be a Sabbath of complete rest for the land. A Sabbath for the Lord. You shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard. You shall not reap the after growth of your harvest or gather the grapes of your unpruned vine. It shall be a year of complete rest for the land."

A Sabbath. A sabbatical. Merely an extension of the command to remember our creator. Remember God’s creation. Remember it is not ours. It belongs to God. Do not push it to the limit. Do not push it to the extreme as if you owned it, as if it were yours. But hand it back to God for God to replenish and for God to restore. No exploitation, no abuse. Use six years, you shall use it. But hold back, go slow, before it withers away this gift of God entrusted to our care within our hands.

A basic admonition well known to those involved in agriculture. A practice that is used to this day is to leave land fallow, to rotate crops. But obviously this is a relevant admonition too when it comes to pollution, and when it comes to callous development without forethought for the implications: Don’t push creation to the limit. Step back. Put the breaks on. Don’t press the boundaries without great care!

• Don’t forget that you were created by God. Remember God your creator.
• Remember others whom you can tread upon and abuse.
• Remember God’s creation and finally,
• take time, says Jesus himself, to remember yourselves, your own health, your own strength, your own ability to enjoy life and to serve God.

A word from Jesus in Mark’s gospel (2:23-27) by way of conclusion.

"One Sabbath, Jesus was going through the grainfields 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 is 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?’" Technically, breaking the Sabbath. "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 priest to eat. And he gave some to his companions. And Jesus said to them, ‘The Sabbath was made for humankind and not humankind for the Sabbath.’"

This is, says Jesus, a gift of God to you, for you. Don’t get lost in the minutiae so that you forget the ultimate purpose: a gift of God to you, so that you yourselves might find your lives rested and refreshed.

In our world just now, it’s true: everything is going "24/7," we say. And we get caught up in it. And it seems at times that that’s a virtue, going 24/7, that we feel compelled to follow: do everything you can at every moment that you possibly can; to the extreme, to the limit. So that it becomes a boast . . . "I’m available 24/7."

The commandment says to us that that should not be our boast, for ourselves or for those who work for us. At the most, it should be 24/6! Maybe we should call ourselves the 24/6 people or the 18/6 people or whatever it may be!! "Don’t press it," says Jesus, "I have given you your life to enjoy, to be strong enough to share with others." If we press life to the limit ourselves, we can not care for God’s creation. We can not care for others as God wants us to. And we will never find a deep and abiding love for God our creator that Jesus himself wants us to have as he himself had.

The Sabbath. It’s about time.

It’s clearly about making sure that we set aside a day for God, that is different from every other day. But it’s also about time in any day that we give, that we make, that we set aside,

• to remember God our creator.
• To remember others, created by God and redeemed by God just as we ourselves have been.
• To remember God’s creation
• and to remember our own weakness, our own fallibility, which itself needs restoration and refreshment.

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Amen.

Let us pray: Lord, all time is yours. Use this time, that we here today have set aside for you, to be a source of refreshment in our lives and through us, a source of refreshment and Sabbath in the lives of others in this world of yours which you love so much and for which you sent your only Son. Amen.