June 2, 2024

Mark 2:23-3:6

“The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath; so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.”

Keeping the sabbath day holy is a commandment, you might have heard. And for that reason, it is worth considering what is meant by this expectation. What is the sabbath? And what does it mean to keep it holy?

Notice that Jesus is making a distinction between the possibles purposes of the sabbath. The sabbath is for us. Human beings are to benefit from the sabbath not to be burdened by it.

Why is the sabbath on Sunday? In the Jewish tradition, it is on Saturday, or more specifically from sundown on Friday through sundown on Saturday. That day was chosen because it was said to be the seventh day, the day after God had completed creation. And as it is set forth in the Book of Genesis, on the seventh day, God rested. That is also our first clue as to the purpose of the sabbath: rest.

Christians do not follow the same rule of sabbath, meaning it being on Saturday. Instead, it is on Sunday because Sunday is said to have been the day of the week when Jesus rose from the dead. It is also thought to have been the day upon which the Holy Spirit descended upon the disciples on the Day of Pentecost. A double dose of significance for Sunday.

Sunday is, by the way, a pagan term, not Christian or Jewish. Sunday or the Day of the Sun, comes from the Latin “dies solis” and was a Roman day of observance. In the late Roman Empire the god Mithras was of great important and he was linked to the invincible sun, sol invictus. We’ve moved on from that.

In Romance languages, however, the name for Sunday is derived from a different Latin root, dominica, instead suggesting the Day of God rather than the Day of the Sun. French, Italian and Spanish use that root to get their dimanche, domenica, and domingo. German and English maintained the pagan source, with sonntag and Sunday. The term the Lord’s Day is often used instead by particularly pious English speakers who got the memo that Sunday has pagan roots.

This brings us back to the notion of Sabbath. It is the day you go to church, or the day you are supposed to go to church depending on one’s better outstanding offers. You can almost predict where this will go from here: oh, isn’t it just terrible that people are no longer going to church. These teenagers and their sports ball, these young families and their over-scheduled lives, these retirees and their Sunday Times spread across the dining room table…tsk, tsk. All these distractions, all of these preoccupations crowding out Sunday observances. What. A. Shame.

When I added “Sabbath” to my list of theological terms to explore this spring, I formed in my mind a sermon like that: an easy Sunday, a lay-up to use a basketball term. I could just remind everyone about the need not to let Sunday be taken over by worldly matters. Which means effectively wagging my finger at people who bothered to show up to church, mind you.

So, I plunked down to do a bit of research about the Sabbath. I read about people trying to do just that, trying to get other people to time travel back to those perfect years when Sunday was universally sacred. When the world was so much better than it is now. I had visions of Eisenhower being president and the world being just the right shade of beige.

And as I thought about it all, it just came to me: what a bunch of nonsense.

I do not mean that going to church is nonsense, or that taking time for God or for family is nonsense. What I mean is that trying to turn back the hands of time to a glowing era of supposed pious perfection is nostalgia at best and, well, at its worst it could be plain old idolatry – the worship of rosy memory at the expense of truth.

I think back to the Sundays of my childhood. I was not a fan. Saturday was great. I got up and watched cartoons all morning and monster movies all afternoon on the four, count them four, major television networks. Sometimes we had Chinese food from the night before and I would pour it all into one pan to warm it up into one giant mess of brown noodles and mysterious meats. Or maybe we would have sandwiches for lunch, BLTs or cold cuts fresh from the Italian deli. That was a good day.

But Sunday was awful. We could not eat anything until we went to church because you could not take communion if you had eaten anything, being observant Catholics. And you could never skip communion (the very idea). So that was the one reason we preferred to go to early Mass, because by the time noon rolled around, we were starving.

And Sunday was the worst television day of the week. If you were lucky there was an Abbott and Costello film. Otherwise, it was Hope and Crosby or Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis – the absolute worst. And then we had to travel down to the South Shore to my grandparents’ house, which was not so bad, but my grandfather pinched everyone and would not let us drink anything during dinner. To this day, I have no idea what that was about.

I am sure this biographical exposition suggests a rather shallow view of Sunday, the Lord’s Day, the holy Sabbath. Now, with years of age derived wisdom and a quality theological education under my belt, I must have a different view of it all. And I do have a different notion of the Sabbath. Slightly.

The sabbath is a day of rest in the Jewish tradition, not a day of work. There are lots of rules potentially to follow, but still you are not supposed to work. In the Christian tradition, we sort of, kind of follow that model. But in my experience growing up, the sabbath had become a day of worship rather than rest, a day of specific religious obligations.

In my research for this sermon, I came across a book from a group known as the Lord’s Day Alliance. The text was published in 1986 and it has a decidedly Cold War flavor. Here is an excerpt: We love our country, its flag – the old red, white and blue. We love its people, its freedom, the Declaration of Independence…”

And that list goes on for a bit. It picks up, “To preserve our liberty and these valuable documents we must be God-loving, God-fearing, God-honoring people. To secure constitutional government we need that pause with our week’s occupation in the quiet peaceful hours of the Lord’s Day. One days rest in seven makes us better citizens.”

How? How does one day’s rest in seven make us better citizens? The stated goal of this group is to maintain Sunday, the Lord’s Day, as a day of Christian renewal and worship and to spread this blessing of the Lord’s Day to all people. But what does that do?

There is another more recent effort along similar lines. It is known as Project 2025. And it is a bit more sinister, at least from my perspective. It is a plan by a conservative think tank to reclaim the United States as a good and pious place, adhering to Christian moral principles, and placing the government itself squarely into that religious mindset.

And if that plan sounds great to anyone, please know that when I try to explain moral principles from the pulpit, it is an invitation. This is different. This would be a plan to make our nation follow along with one group’s very specific and nonnegotiable understanding of Christian principles. This would be a command performance. You might need to clear up your Sundays for the foreseeable future and stop your subscription to the Sunday Times.

The Sabbath was by no means a simple day off from work in Biblical terms. Work was not allowed – any work. You could not prepare food or kindle a fire. No business could be conducted of any kind. And travel was quite limited.

From the Book of Exodus: The Lord has given you the sabbath, therefore on the sixth day he gives you food for two days; each of you stay where you are; do not leave your place on the seventh day. That rule was later relaxed to allow a Sabbath day’s journey, which is a ranging notion up to 8,000 cubits, or about two and a quarter miles. No long walks on Sunday.

The requirements of the Sabbath are different across denominational lines, both within Christianity and Judaism. The most stringent branch of Christianity came from the Calvinist strain, also known as the Reformed. And the most stringent branch of the Reformed was arguably the Puritans, our Unitarian ancestors. Things change.

Those previously austere Christians considered the Lord’s Day to be solely for worship and related religious matters. No leisure activities of any kind were permitted, particularly cards, dancing or similarly frivolous pursuits. I assure you golf would have been on that forbidden list.

Thinking back to my memories of Sundays, we had to contend with the Blue Laws, which also prohibited most commercial activity. Here is the Massachusetts law in question: Whoever on Sunday keeps open his shop, warehouse, factory or other place of business, or sells foodstuffs, goods, wares, merchandise or real estate, or does any manner of labor, business or work, except works of necessity and charity shall be fined…

Necessity and charity: depending on one’s opinion, necessity could imply a lot or a little. For example, one legal exception to that rule was the showing of noncommercial real estate property for sale or rental – a boon for brokers. Another was the sale of gasoline, making Sunday drives to church possible. Over time those exceptions accumulated, swallowing the rule. We now have almost no laws about Sunday, barring a few quirks as to liquor sales. Even the Post Office will deliver your Amazon packages on Sundays.  Necessity depends on what you say you truly need.

What about charity? Yes, hospitals were and are open along with churches. Police and fire stations stand ready to help those in need. But what about anything else? And by this, I do not mean the Walk for Hunger or the other numerous races and fundraisers that crop up in the spring. Is there anything about gathering on the Lord’s Day that leads us to thoughts of charity particularly now that next to nothing is prohibited?

The description from the Lord’s Day Alliance from the 1980s implied that Sunday was a bulwark of God-fearing Americans standing against God-hating communists. It is rather unfair of me to tarnish the good work of a group based upon that dated text. I did look at more recent publications and that degree of muscular Bible-thumping is no longer present.

However, the brand-new Project 2025 says pretty much the same thing. It is a retread of the 1950s, both the anti-Socialist rhetoric and the thinly veiled Christian nationalism. Again, if that sounds good to anyone, please know that Unitarians are not allowed to be members of the Lord’s Day Alliance. I imagine they would be even less welcome in the planning meetings for Project 2025.

Fortunately, I came across several discussions of the Sabbath in more approachable terms. One referred to the Sabbath as a sanctuary in time, a place of refuge from the feverish pace of the rest of the week. Another discussed having a common Sabbath day as a common good, a way of giving the world a reprieve from non-stop commercialism, to act as a bulwark against Godless capitalism rather than Godless communism.

You may be thinking, perhaps I misread that – how could capitalism be Godless? Just a few decades ago capitalism was the only thing standing between the Red Menace and global domination. Now, wouldn’t you know it, a few Socialist leaning religious types have taken it upon themselves to impugn all that Godly work intended to benefit shareholders and portfolios.

Why ruin a good time, hippy Christians? Take the win over the Soviet Union and move on. Have a nice cappuccino – they sell them on Sundays now.

And yet there is one pesky problem with that victorious assessment of capitalism: the Bible. Here is one from Isaiah: Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day, and oppress all your workers. Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high. Is such the fast that I choose, a day to humble oneself? Indeed, there are a few references in the Bible with similarly Marxist sounding sentiments, one or two. Well, one or two or three dozen really.

But isn’t all that in the Old Testament? Maybe we can work around that. Many modern Christian leaders only pay attention to the Old Testament when they want to find someone to stone. Now, the New Testament, that is the good stuff. Jesus of Nazareth, John Locke, and Adam Smith all locking arms together in economic harmony. Oh, the blessed profits.

Strangely enough, however, that is not the case. It was never truly the case. Jesus said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.”

There goes that theory.

Jesus strenuously and repeatedly pointed out the requirements of caring for those in need. Of turning our lives toward charity rather than simple self-enrichment. Of rejecting a belief in our economic good fortune as God-given without God-given expectations about how to use it. That reading from Isaiah could have come directly from Jesus, for worship without a sense of God’s purpose is like a meaningless fast. Because fasting is a luxury for many people, choosing not to eat from our abundance while others had nothing to eat in the first place.

There are different ways to understand the Sabbath. One comes from the book of Genesis: And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation. God rested and made that day holy.

Did God need to rest?

Think for a moment about what that would mean. Was there a day God needed to rest? Maybe. Or perhaps instead we need to focus not on God resting, but the fact that God intended to make the day holy and therefore refrained from work. That is by no means the same. When we refrain from work, we might rest or we might turn our minds toward other things. Rest or reflection versus rest and reflection: these are the choices we have on the Sabbath.

Sabbath can be seen as how we choose to end the week. In many Christian traditions, however, Sunday is the first day of the week, not the last. Instead of capping a week’s work, the Lord’s Day turns our minds toward the coming week. It anticipates the expectations and challenges and does so by reminding those gathered in worship that there are expectations upon us from God and there are challenges that may best be met by remembering the lessons from Sunday morning.

There is a hymn we often sing called Though I May Speak with Bravest Fire. The hymn is a setting of Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians, specifically chapter 13. Here’s a little bit of it, though I will spare you from my singing.

Though I may speak with bravest fire,
And have the gift to all inspire,
And have not love, my words are vain,
As sounding brass, and hopeless gain.

The empty words of empty prayers. The endless pursuit of wealth that gives no hope to those who accumulate it and no comfort to those who lack the means to live. We focus on the wrong things.

Though I may give all I possess,
And striving so my love profess,
But not be given by love within,
The profit soon turns strangely thin.

It is easy to say pretty words, well-formed and well-scripted, even from the Bible itself. But if the mouth says something that the mind does not mean and the body does not follow, the soul will eventually be troubled and certainly God will not be fooled.

Come, Spirit, come, our hearts control,
Our spirits long to be made whole.
Let inward love guide every deed;
By this we worship, and are freed.

The Spirit of God, like the fire of Pentecost, is thought to be the Love of God in the world. Let inward love guide us and let that same love find its way outward into the world. By this love, this care, this sense of goodness born within us, by these we may worship and by these we may be free. Freed from all the distractions and all the burdens. The Spirit of God is now within us, teaching and guiding, not passively carrying us along but actively leading us forward.

How should we honor the Sabbath? It should be a respite from work if possible, but that is not always possible in this modern world. It should be a time for worship and family if possible, but again that is not always possible, because of the way our lives are organized or the way we have chosen to organize our lives. One is a burden while the other is a choice.

And the sabbath should be a time to reflect upon the Spirit of God in our hearts and minds, in the actions of our lives throughout the week. That is always possible, always possible regardless of the length of our days or the weight upon our shoulders.

The Sabbath can offer us the rest we need to embrace what is holy and to do the holy work of God in so many ways. And to make our lives holy, we must take the time to remember what that all means, even when we do not think we have the time to do anything. The hard work of following God’s light does not end at sunset on the sabbath. The sabbath is however an invitation to follow that light and God’s love for the rest of the week.

Amen.