INTRO
Over the years, our faith family has used this time after Easter to help one another reenter the whole and holy rhythm of Sabbathing into work and working into Sabbath, which life resurrected makes both possible and compelling. At the heart of the matter, we believe we are made, remade, to participate in the fullness of our days on earth by resting with God in His finished work and by joining with God in His continued work. Sabbath and Work, rest and responsibility in relationship, are what make life. That indeed is how our story begins and is being reimaged in Jesus.
The story of our beginning is one in which God speaks all that is into existence, proclaiming its essential goodness. For six days, His Word brought forth very good life, and then our origin story says this,
And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation. (Genesis 2:2-3)
This special seventh day became known as Shabbat, meaning “to stop, to cease, to rest,” and was later translated as Sabbath.
Sabbath has been “called the historical anchor of a fundamental rhythm of time for the Christian life.” Sabbath was spoken, practiced, and set apart by the one who established our circadian rhythms. It was a day gifted to us, though it soon became one forgotten or mastered, clumped into and manipulated along with all the other perpetual dawns and dusks. And so, when God intervened to pull his chosen people, those blessed to be a blessing (Gen. 12:3), out of the oppression of squandered and abused time, he reset creation’s clock for them and for you and me, saying,
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 servant, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. (Exodus 20:8-11)
And so, God’s people throughout the generations and in a variety of expressions have sought to keep the Sabbath holy, not so that God might do something, but because God has and is continuing to do something.
It is that finished work, God’s work complete in the eternal now, as Saint Augustine describes it, and which we, on days like today, experience rest in memories of God’s work finished in the past, in expectation of His work’s fullness in the future, by our attentiveness to His sufficient work in the present.
Will you pray with me, as we enter the Sabbath rest, praying that indeed, the Sabbath rest may enter us.
Song #1 - Come and Rest by Mission House
Song #2 - Son of God by Nathan Partain
SERMONNETTE | Submitting To Freedom
No working on the Sabbath; keep it holy just as God, your God, commanded you. Work six days, doing everything you have to do, but the seventh day is a Sabbath, a Rest Day—no work: not you, your son, your daughter, your servant, your maid, your ox, your donkey (or any of your animals), and not even the foreigner visiting your town. That way your servants and maids will get the same rest as you. Don’t ever forget that you were slaves in Egypt and God, your God, got you out of there in a powerful show of strength. That’s why God, your God, commands you to observe the day of Sabbath rest. (Deuteronomy 5:12-15, MSG)
As simple as the rhythm of Sabbath into work and work into Sabbath may be, we have had to acknowledge our struggles in keeping step. Restless hearts are, after all, notoriously elusive, evading capture and quieting. And so, Sabbath remains foreign or feigned to many of us. Rest, after all, is subjective, dependent upon the person’s preference. Besides, we are not bound by the law but by grace, so why keep an old statute? Well, like work, such perceptions of Sabbath are just wrong. They fail to see in the story that our resting with God in His finished work is the good, not merely a means to it. And so, Sabbathing is actually a defiant act of freedom.
“Don’t ever forget that you were slaves in Egypt and God, your God, got you out of there in a powerful show of strength. That’s why God, your God, commands you to observe the day of Sabbath rest.” That’s how The Message translates Deuteronomy 5:15.
Don’t forget that life, having forgotten God with you and God for you, was a life of confinement, restricted by the demands of the authorities, oppressed by the economy of producing for others’ prosperity, and trapped by the demands of the culture. And don’t forget that God got you out of that life! He got you out in a powerful show of strength, his strength over the most powerful force known to humanity, a force that we have yet, in all of our histories, been able to conquer: death. But God conquered death and got you out of death’s sting, the confinement, oppression, and trappings of enslavement to sin.
Remember, that is why you keep the Sabbath, because you are free by God’s power and by his compassion. Remember, that is why he commands you to rest…not labor…for your God is not like the ones who enslaved you in Egypt…who continue to enslave us today.
The text we just read was addressed to the generation of Israelites who had wandered through the wilderness with their parents and grandparents for some 40 years. The command to Sabbath rest was both a memory and an expectation that was becoming their present reality.
The generation before them had walked out of Egypt, leaving behind slavery and oppression under the systems and rulers of the age. That generation had never known a day without work, with no weekends off and no liberty from the demands of the culture. And yet, as they marched across the dry bottoms of a parted sea, they found themselves wedded to God, who commanded not their labor but their rest. And here, their daughters and sons stood on the footsteps of the land of promise, the land of abundance, a place of rest.
Our God speaks creation into existence, gives it purpose and peace, and rescues his creation from self-destruction. That’s how the story of our faith begins. Sabbath, then, is a submission to the power and compassion of God, to his unceasing good purposes and his unabating restorative presence. Sabbath was not a routine or ritual done to appease a demanding deity, but rather a rhythm established to ensure our freedom, as the very expression of our freedom. This is why Jesus said, “The Sabbath was made for humanity, not humanity for the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:27). Or to put it another way,
“The Sabbath was established in service to humanity, to ensure humanity's flourishing. The Sabbath was not established to entrap humanity, but to keep it from slavery.”
To Sabbath is to be free, is indeed the free choice of grace. For Sabbath is, “the time set aside to do nothing so that we can receive everything.”[1]
Song #3 - Slow Me Down by Porters Gate
CORPORATE CONFESSION & COMMUNION
Keeping a rhythm of Sabbath is about submitting to freedom under the authority and kindness of our Creator. It’s a reminder that we are created with a purpose, to live and work in ways that bring goodness into the world. Not on our own, but with others in the grace and power of our heavenly Father, through our resurrected life in Christ Jesus.
This is the confession we make when we receive the broken body and shed blood of Jesus on our behalf this morning around the table. In Jesus, his life, death, resurrection, and ascension, we have all that we need to live a full and abundant life now and forever. Will you freely choose to receive what he offers?
Because of Jesus, we choose:
To set aside our anxious attempts to make ourselves useful
To set aside our tense restlessness
To set aside our media-saturated boredom
Because of Jesus, we choose:
To receive silence and let it deepen into gratitude,
To receive quiet into which forgotten faces and voices unobtrusively make themselves present
To receive days of the just-completed week
absorbing the wonder and miracle still reverberating from each
To receive our LORD’s amazing grace.[2]
In Jesus name…and through His life in us, we rest.
BRUNCH
We take a month or so every year to consider, together, the rhythm of creation according to God's design: Sabbath & Work This sermonette was a recorded during one of our regular Sabbath meals, where we gather together, around a table, to rest in Jesus,