Ten Words That Matter: A New Kind of Blue Laws
Dr. Tom Pace
July 2, 2017
Exodus 20:8-11; Mark 2:23-28
We’re continuing our series of sermons on the Ten Commandments. Last Week I said when we talked about taking the name of the Lord in vain, that it was the most misunderstood commandment. This is the most ignored commandment today. Sort of the most flagrantly disobeyed with pride commandment. “Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.”
So I’d like for you to listen from the Book of Exodus and then a part of what Jesus teaches as he talks to the Pharisees about the Sabbath day.
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 theLord 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.For in six days theLordmade heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore theLord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it. Exodus 20:8-11
One sabbath he 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?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.”Then he said to them, “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath;so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.” Mark 2:23-28
Let’s pray together. Gracious God, open us up. Open our eyes that we might see, open our ears that we might hear, and open our hearts that we might feel. Then O Lord, open our hands that we might serve. Amen.
You remember the Blue Laws? Back in the day, as they say, we were 19 when Dee and I moved here from Illinois and we hadn’t been here long before we jumped in the car one Sunday afternoon to go to the mall. And we discovered that here in Texas they aren’t open on Sundays, at least in those days.
I think the gods of prophet and convenience won out and those Blue Laws were repealed. I’m not sure that was a good thing.
When we were in Israel I was with Jim Fleming and he was our teacher there. He had lived in Jerusalem for thirty years before he came here to Georgia to operate a museum there. He moved his whole ministry to Georgia. We were driving through Jerusalem on a Saturday in the Jewish side of town and it was deserted. Like nobody. It was hard to find some things to do on the Sabbath in Israel in Jerusalem because everything is closed.
I was having a conversation with him and he said that one of the things he missed the most about coming to the United States was that in the U.S. – and these are his words – “there is not a day that’s not like any other day.” Each week every day’s the same. Everything is open, everybody’s at work, and it’s just straight through. I’m not sure it’s a good thing.
Maybe Blue Laws isn’t the answer but I will tell you this, it’s very clear to me that we have a problem with work - life balance. It’s funny, when you interview someone for a job, I used to ask this question: “Well, tell me what are your strengths are and tell me what your weaknesses are.” Then I realized that 90% of them said, “Well, my weakness is that I’m kind of a workaholic. I work a lot of weekends.” It’s like the only socially acceptable commandment to brag about breaking. No one says, “You know, sometimes I just have to commit adultery. It’s just kind of a little problem I have.” Or no one says, “You know, I’m trying to shake that murder habit but I just can’t seem to get over it.”
Nobody says that! But we think it’s okay, and we kind of pat ourselves on the back about our overwork. Because we’ve chosen to worship the god of productivity. We put that first.
So today I want to talk about the theological underpinnings of the Sabbath and the “why” behind the Sabbath, so maybe when you leave today you will begin to think about your lifestyle and begin to put a Sabbath in. Some way, some shape, some form. It doesn’t have to be Sunday. I’ll tell you that my Sabbath sure isn’t Sunday. But that we realize that there is a day that we set aside to stop.
I kind of wish it wasn’t on a holiday weekend that we were preaching this. I hope you’ll tell people that you know to maybe listen in because I think it might be for us – it might not be the best sermon – but it might be the most relevant for the challenges we face.
So there are really three kinds of components to the underpinnings of the Sabbath. The first is that in the Exodus narrative of the Ten Commandments it’s tied to the creation. So listen, you’ve heard how it goes through the Sabbath – what it’s like, observe the Sabbath Day, keep it holy, the Lord commanded you. In six days you do all your labor, all of your household. You won’t ask anybody else to work either, nobody works. Then it says, “For 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.”
When God’s speaking he’s tying it to creation. Now if you know someone who outlines, there are three ways it’s tied to creation. Three reasons. The first is that it’s to remind us that we are the created, and not the Creator. That we are not the sovereign - we are the creature. That God made us without our help. That God made all the earth without our help. And that it will continue without us. The idea is that we have to put God in God’s proper place in our lives. God is the Creator, we are the created.
Sometimes what we tend to believe is that we carry the whole world on our shoulders. That if we don’t do it, it’s not going to get done.
Now you might say to yourself, “But, pastor, aren’t we hands and feet of God? Aren’t we hands and feet of Christ in the earth? You know, the hungry aren’t going to be fed unless we feed them. Shouldn’t we be about the business of doing the work?”
And my answer to you is, “Yes, of course. Of course we are. For six days.” There’s a ratio there. Six days you’ll labor, one day you stop. Because there’s this tendency within us, this temptation to believe that it’s all up to us. That we’re that important.
The truth is God is God. The world went on long before us and it’ll go on long after each one of us. And we have to put life – put God and us – and the relationship between God and us – in its right place.
Now the second way it ties to creation has to do with putting our lives themselves in the right order.
I told you last week about my wife Dee and her penchant for power washing. How she loves to power wash. And I don’t know, maybe I had 15 people catch me later and say, “Hey, I love to power wash, too! It’s so great!”
Incidentally, the Nick Finnegan Counseling Center is starting a support group for power washers if you would like to join you may do so.
This is another similar story. Now Dee is really good at organizing stuff. And just before vacation she got on kind of – she’s still on it by the way –on sort of an organizational binge. We began in the garage. She said, “Now we’re going to go clean out the garage and organize it.” I said, “The garage is fine.” It’s my domain in my view. So I said, “I think it’s fine the way it is. We’ve been able to get two cars in. It’s a little messy, a little disorganized. Stuff is just on shelves.” But she says, “No, we’ve got to organize it.”
So we went in and got little plastic bins at the store and put electrical stuff in one, and the plumbing stuff in one and we put the outdoor toys for the grandkids on one shelf. And we’d put the gardening stuff together, and hang stuff on the walls and all that sort of thing.
It looks better. Then we go on vacation and we come back. Now we’re going to do this downstairs closet with the file cabinet in it. That means we’re going to have to clean out the files and then we have to get another file cabinet. We clean out all the files and throw away all the junk in those. Now each file has a little place with its file name on the file slot, not just the file itself, but the file slot. Everything goes in its right place there.
Then this weekend it was the upstairs closet where you’re putting – it’s kind of been this way all along – but the white socks go in the white socks drawer and the colored socks go in the colored socks drawer. You don’t put the colored socks in the white socks drawer and you don’t put the white socks in the colored socks drawer. I don’t understand why because I can tell by looking which ones are white and which ones are blue. I’m able to do that! I can tell which ones go where.
Now why am I telling you this silly story? Because when you look at the creation story it’s all about organizing. As God creates, God divides. Separates. Puts one thing here, and one thing here. Begins by creating light and then separating the night from the day. Then the next day separates the waters above the earth, the sky, from the waters below the earth. And then the next day separates the waters from the dry land. And at the end of each day, “And there was morning and then there was evening, a second day… a third day…” Then when it reaches the end of creation God separates work from rest. “Six days you shall do your work, one day you shall rest.”
You see that? There’s a template for life. For the way, the rhythm, the organization of our lives. And when we get those all out of whack, when that organization seems to fall apart then life gets out of order. See here’s the thing – we no longer do that. We no longer organize work and rest that way.
Do you know when the most active time on social media is? Between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. Work time. Because there are lots of people at work who get bored. Think I’m going to put my Facebook in my Instagram… yeah, I know you use some of those for work, right.
Then what happens is that you get home and you’re not really done working, you’re not going to set it aside so you answer e-mails at home, and it’s kind of like it was in the garage before my wife put it together. Everything just goes in one big bin called “Stuff.” And you just put it all in there. We put our lives all in together.
A number of years ago when my daughter lived in Boston she was in the advertising business working for one of these big advertising firms. Had bunches of floors in the Pru Tower there. She asked if we wanted to go to see her office, and we went and it was 9 o’clock at night. It was full of people, packed at 9 o’clock at night. I wondered, “Why are all these people working at 9 o’clock?” Then I looked around and I saw a beer tap in there, there’s ping pong tables, and pool tables. There’s no distinctions between work and rest. Between work and leisure – it’s all in there together. It’s all mixed in.
So the template, the rhythm, that God has established for life is all a mess. The Sabbath is to remind us that there is a rhythm, a template that was given to us to make life fulfilling, to put God in God’s place and us in our place. To put work in its place and rest in its place. And leisure in its place.
Now there’s one other part. One of the reasons it’s important it be tied to creation is because the Sabbath reminds us that our work, our worth, is not established by our productivity. We like to think that we only really matter if we’re producing something.
I’ve always found it interesting that there are wrongful death lawsuits. Now I’m not saying we shouldn’t have wrongful death lawsuits, but I just think it’s interesting. How do you establish the worth of a human life? What’s it worth? A million dollars? Five million dollars? Ten million dollars? How do you know?
Here’s how – it has to do with how much money you make. That’s the sad truth. If you really look at it, if you’ve made a lot of money and you lose fifteen years’ worth of work, then you multiply what you make every year by fifteen years and that’s the award. But if you don’t make any money at all and you were old so there weren’t many years of productivity left then your life isn’t as worth as much.
See, that’s how it is in our culture. We establish our worth based on our productivity.
But if you really look at human life it’s just not that way. Think about it. In a significant portion of our lives we are unable to produce. An infant, a child is born and produces … well, it produces something, but it’s not really worth much. The crying and other byproducts. And when you reach the end of your life you are mostly a care receiver and not a caregiver.
So if you’re an infant or in hospice care your life just isn’t worth as much? Come on – we know better than that.
No, we take a day off to remind ourselves that I am worth something. My worth was established in creation, even if I’m producing nothing today. Nothing. I’m not getting anything done. Nothing checked off my task list. And I am still of intrinsic and ultimate worth unto God.
Tim Hansel wrote a book a number of years ago called When I Relax I Feel Guilty. Any of you feel that way? I think it’s still as relevant today as it was then. And this isn’t just about people who get paid for their work. If you’re a homemaker, or if you are a volunteer you still churn in your mind, “If I’m not doing something, if I’m not accomplishing something, I’m just not really worth something.”
No, the Sabbath is to force us into the discipline of remembering that our worth was given to us at our creation.
So that’s all about the creation narrative. It’s interesting when you get to Deuteronomy - Actually the Ten Commandments are listed twice in Scripture, once in Exodus and once in Deuteronomy. In Deuteronomy the commandment is almost exactly the same except when they get to the rationale for it, to the end of the commandment. Instead of pointing at creation it refers to something else. Listen to what it says: “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt and the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.”
So it doesn’t tie it to our creation but to our liberation. “You were once a slave, I set you free, now don’t go back there! Don’t you go back to slavery.” Friends, I think sometimes we become slaves to the lifestyle we’ve chosen and created. We don’t own our stuff – our stuff owns us. The life that we’ve made owns us, and we have to keep on feeding that monster.
Now I want to take a brief aside and say just one word and that’s that I do think it’s true that some people don’t work hard enough. I want you to note the ratio. Six days you shall work, you shall put your shoulder to the plow, you shall work at life. But one day you stop and rest.
Every year the Gallop organization does an update to a report that’s called “The State of the American Worker” (SOAW). They list a number of statistics – how many people are looking for work, how many people feel underemployed and a whole bunch of stuff. But one of the items has to do with employee engagement. Thirty-three percent of American workers in 2016 said they were fully engaged in their work. That meant they were working hard.
The Scripture tells to “Work as for the Lord.” It’s as if to say, “I’m working for God as I’m working here. I’m putting my shoulder to the plow and I’m working hard.”
Fifty-one percent of the American workers say they are not engaged. Sixteen per cent say they are actively disengaged. Wow – I wonder what that means.
I heard this term this week. It’s an old military term I’d never heard before called “road warriors.” Have you heard what a “road warrior” is? Road warriors are R-O-A-D – “Retired On Active Duty.” In other words they’ve just checked out, collecting their paycheck and moving on.
I think sometimes we ignore the six days where we should do all our work, working as for the Lord. And we can blame management, but the truth is that we are responsible for our own attitudes. And one of the reasons that we get in that mental place is that we’ve lost the rhythm of life. That it just seems like it never ends. That we never have the discipline to step back and stop.
You know what? I’m a slave and this is my shackles. This phone – it has Outlook on it, my task list, it has my calendar of events I have to go to. It has the e-mails I have to return. And I can’t seem to get free.
What the Scripture is saying is, “You need to take a Sabbath because I set you free from slavery. Don’t go back there?” Don’t let your attitude get where you can’t let go.
The last reference is about Jesus and how he doesn’t talk about our liberation or our creation, but it’s really simple. Jesus talks about our redemption. Jesus says, “The Sabbath is for you, it’s because God loves you. It’s a gift to you.” Over and over in Scripture in the New Testament, well a few times in the Gospels, Jesus has interchanges with the Pharisees about the Sabbath Day. He says, “The Sabbath was made for you, for us, not us for the Sabbath. It’s not a burden. It’s a gift to us. Take it – enjoy it.”
There’s the story in one place about when he heals a man with a withered hand. He tells the critics, “Well, if a sheep falls into a pit on the Sabbath then aren’t you going to rescue it? Well, aren’t you much more valuable to God than a sheep?” God loves you so much. God wants you to enjoy life that it would be fulfilling for you.
So God’s given us this template, this rhythm of work and rest for us to take hold of and to live. And to live fully.
When I first came into the ministry I would go to these pastors’ meetings and there I would look around at some of the older pastors and I’d look into their eyes. Some of them had this sort of blank look. Kind of like, “I’m just going through the motions here.” And I thought to myself, “I’m never going to get like that! I’m going to keep that passion – I’m going to keep that fire! Not letting that go out!” But as time goes on I kind of get how they got that way. Because they decided that, “Man, it was all about productivity.” And they decided to maybe not just enjoy the gift of rest that God has given us, a rest.
I’m going to tell you the truth about something and I’m almost scared to admit it because my wife’s here. After we put the garage together she said, “Now, isn’t that better?” And I said, “Well, maybe for you.” Here’s my admission – she was right. It’s way better. It’s way better and it is way better when we choose to take hold of the template for the organization of life that God has given us.
It works like this: here’s God, here’s us. We are not responsible for everything. We’re going to trust God. We’re going to do our part – six days we’re going to work hard. But we’re going to trust God. We’re going to have our relationship with God in the right order. God is God and we’re the creature. Work and rest and leisure and play are going to go in their proper places. And we’re going to live a life that is full of joy and fulfilment because that’s what God wants for us.
Let’s pray together. Lord God, we confess to you that sometimes we just get it all messed up. We throw everything in the big tub called life and we don’t understand this separation, this division that you have made for us. Creator and creature of rest and work. God, maybe we take hold of the freedom you’ve given us. In the name of Christ we pray, Amen.