Sabbath
From the Series: Ritual
Speaker: Heather Zempel
Date: October 4, 2009
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Transcript
NATIONAL COMMUNITY CHURCH
October 4, 2009
Rituals: Sabbath
Heather Zempel
Welcome to National Community Church. My name is Heather Zempel, I’m the Discipleship Pastor here at NCC and I want to report this weekend that I am a hypocrite. You see, for years, I taught our small group leaders the importance of establishing a sustainable rhythm to their lives and their ministries. I’ve communicated to our leaders the importance of taking a night where they do nothing except what needs to happen to make sure their relationship with God is where it needs to be. I’ve communicated to them the importance of observing Sabbath and I haven’t done it myself. See, somehow, I’ve tricked inside my head that if I worked harder and longer than everybody else, that makes me a better leader.
This series that we’re starting this weekend is: Ritual. It is about the rituals that are prescribed and described in the writings of Scripture that are given to us as an invitation into the presence of God. They are given to us to be experiences of the grace of God in our lives. Things like communion and baptism that serve as sacred markers in our lives and invite us into the story of God. Things like altars and worship and confession and Sabbath that allow us to experience God’s grace in our lives. Not the kind of grace that brings salvation to us but the kind of grace that brings us into the presence of God and helps us to live as God intended and created us to live.
So, this series is about recovering those, rediscovering them, looking through the pages of this ancient text to see how, for thousands of years, people have celebrated these rituals. The problem with us is that often times with us, these rituals become ritualistic. The routines become routine, and they lose their potency and their meaning for us. So this is about rediscovery. It is about discovering anew these practices and observances that were given to us to remember and to reflect and to remind and rejoice and celebrate God. But sometimes we’ve turned them into routines that have lost their meaning.
So I thought that a good way to start this series is to talk about the very first ritual that was implemented, and that was the Sabbath. We are going to start in Genesis 2. Turn there in your Bibles or you can follow on the screen. When I told some of my friends earlier this week that I was going to be talking about the Sabbath this weekend, they looked at me as though I had said I was going to talk about the relationship between string theory and quantum field theory, as though I had an authority or experience to talk about this. But one of my favorite movie quotes of all time is in the movie Luther when a wiser, older monk said to his young protégé, “We preach best that which we most need to learn.” So what I want to ask you to do this weekend is to come on a journey with me. A journey of discovery.
For the past ten months of my own personal life, I’ve been trying to rediscover the joy of Sabbath and there and some things I’ve learned and some things I’ve practiced that I want to share with you. So I don’t come to you as someone who has it all figured out, but as someone who is on the journey themselves and discovering and learning. So I want to invite you into that time with me. Let’s start reading Genesis 2
So the creation of the heavens and the earth and everything in them was completed. On the seventh day God had finished his work of creation, so He rested from all his work. And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, because it was the day when He rested from all his work of creation.
Now think for just a moment about the words that we’re hearing here, He finished, He completed, He rested, He declared it holy and blessed. A lot of time these are words that we don’t associate with Sabbath. They are good words, positive words. I think there are a lot of myths about Sabbath and what it is and what it isn’t. So let’s start with trying to bring it back to its original intent and purpose.
Myth number one, well this isn’t really a myth, this is just a concern that I know a lot of us have right now. This is a guilt-free zone this weekend. I know what some of you are thinking, some of you are thinking, oh, gee, here is one more thing I have to do, because if you’re like me, Sabbath becomes something that gets added to my to-do list. It is one more good spiritual practice we know we are supposed to be doing but we don’t have time to do it but we know we need to do it and we’ve already got so much on our plate so let’s just go on and let’s just heap a large-sized serving of guilt on top of that. This is not about guilt, this is about discovering a blessing; discovering something that is joyful; discovering a gift that God has given to us. So, guilt-free zone, everybody take a deep breath and let it out.
One myth is that we think Sabbath equals Sunday. For those of us who grew up in the church, we get confused about this because we know that Sabbath is the day that is supposed to be holy and we trick our brains into thinking that that’s when we do our religious duty and activities so that must be Sunday because that’s when our parents drag us to church. In the original text, Sabbath was not Sunday, it was Saturday, it was the seventh day of the week. In Jewish culture, Sabbath was celebrated from sundown Friday night to sundown Saturday night. In the New Testament, the idea of Sabbath began shifting to Sunday. Are you interested in learning why? A few, ok. Jesus was resurrected on a Sunday, He appeared to his disciples on four different occasions on the first day of the week, which was Sunday. He ascended into heaven on the first day of the week, Sunday. So this pattern was established and Sunday became a day of celebration, a day where the church came together in community and celebrated their relationships with one another, and they celebrated the rest of God on that particular day. But I don’t know that Sabbath is really about a specific day of the week. I think it is about an attitude and a heart that desires to enter into the rest of God. Do we have a day set aside somewhere in our lives that is given to celebrating the gifts of God in our lives.
Myth number two, we have thought that Sabbath means the day of religious duty and obligation. See, we read that the Sabbath is set aside to be holy and in our minds, we think holy means religious work, so we pile up a day full of meetings and activities and religious duties and obligations and we call that the Sabbath when really holy has nothing to do with our activities and everything to do with being set apart. It has to do with setting aside a day in which we live differently and we experience life differently. It means being set apart as people and setting apart time in a way that makes it different.
Another thing I think we do is we think Sabbath is the day of rest, so that means we don’t do anything. We lounge on the couch and eat popcorn and watch television all day. Or we just do nothing.
At the beginning of this year, some of my accountability partners came to me and said, “Heather, you’ve got to cut something out of your life, you have to cut something out. The next time we talk to you, we want you to have a list of the things you are cutting out of your life. You are doing too much and this isn’t a sustainable pace for you.” The first thing I wanted to say was, ‘I’m cutting YOU out.’ But I came back to them and one of the things I told them I was going to cut out, which they thought was very funny was that I would not check email or work on my day off. That sounds like a good place to start. So the first day off came and I did not know what to do with myself. I was anxious, I was nervous, I was so afraid that if I didn’t check email, the world was going to blow up. What I realized is that the reason I was having trouble with this whole idea of Sabbath is because Sabbath isn’t just about emptying our time, it is about emptying of the things we have to do; it is about emptying our lives of the must do, of the to-do list, but not leaving it there, filling it with joy and celebration and feasting and fellowship. You don’t just do nothing, you fill it with things that turn your affections to God, things that cause you to stop and love life and love the people that God has given you to do life with.
The last myth that sometimes we perpetuate as a church is that Sabbath helps us establish balance in our lives. I might submit that we just we throw the word ‘balance’ out of our dictionaries. When we look at the pages of Scripture, I do not read about Jesus Christ and think, ‘wow He was really a balanced man.’ What Sabbath does is not so much bring a balance to our lives as it brings a rhythm to our lives. Now, maybe it’s just a semantic thing but for me that was a big difference. It was a change of thinking about it, that’s it’s a rhythm of life that we can lead.
Here’s what I’m going to do this weekend, and this is a little bit different. I usually take one passage of Scripture and I walk through that passage to bring out the topics and the themes that we see play out in that passage. But what I want to do this weekend is a little bit different. Instead of taking one passage and working through what topics and themes are there, I want to take this one topic of Sabbath and work through the entirety of Scripture to see what the Scriptures have to say about it. So I’m going to be going fast. Exodus 16 is where I’m going next, verse 22
On the sixth day, they gathered twice as much as usual—four quarts for each person instead of two. Then all the leaders of the community came and asked Moses for an explanation. He told them, “This is what the Lord commanded: Tomorrow will be a day of complete rest, a holy Sabbath day set apart for the Lord. So bake or boil as much as you want today, and set aside what is left for tomorrow.” So they put some aside until morning, just as Moses had commanded. And in the morning the leftover food was wholesome and good, without maggots or odor. Moses said, “Eat this food today, for today is a Sabbath day dedicated to the Lord. There will be no food on the ground today. You may gather the food for six days, but the seventh day is the Sabbath. There will be no food on the ground that day.” Some of the people went out anyway on the seventh day, but they found no food. The Lord asked Moses, “How long will these people refuse to obey my commands and instructions? They must realize that the Sabbath is the Lord’s gift to you. That is why he gives you a two-day supply on the sixth day, so there will be enough for two days. On the Sabbath day you must each stay in your place. Do not go out to pick up food on the seventh day.” So the people did not gather any food on the seventh day.
So here is what’s going on. The children of Israel have, just a couple chapters over, escaped from slavery in Egypt. They are now in the desert heading toward the Promised Land and they start to complain and they say to Moses, ‘We wish we had stayed in Egypt, if only the Lord had killed us there, at least there we would have had enough to eat.’ I’m not kidding, check it out. So God begins to rain down manna and quail on the children on Israel, but He says, ‘These are the rules, on days one through five, you will collect what you need for that day, don’t collect any more because it will go bad the next day. You’ve got to trust me for your daily provision.’ But then, He says on day six, ‘You’re going to have to gather twice as much so that you’ll have it for two days, for Friday and for Saturday.’ So here, Sabbath is about celebrating the provision of God. It’s about trusting God to bring what we need to us when we need it, just in time when we need it.
For me, it’s a lot easier for me to trust God with my checkbook than with my calendar. I am totally ok with believing that if I give God the first 10% of my income that He can do more with my 90% than I can do with 100%. I have no problem trusting God with that dimension of my life. But when it comes to trusting God with six days, I have a little bit harder time with that. I grow afraid that somehow something is not going to work out correctly because I need to do doing something. It is a lack of trust and it is a lack of celebrating the provision of God. I think the key for me as I’ve explored this for the past year is trying to understand this idea of sanctifying time. Time is not just a commodity that we buy and trade and sell, but it is a resource that God has given to us to steward. Time is something that He asks us to manage well in our lives, and part of what He asks is that we set aside one day to celebrate his provision; that on that day, we are not asking what time is it, we are asking what it’s time for, and realizing that that time is for celebrating the provision of God in our lives. It is about recognizing the goodness of God and the sovereignty of God and rejoicing in that. To me, gratitude plays a huge role in this. I don’t think that I’ve celebrated a Sabbath that I haven’t found myself extremely thankful and grateful for the provision of God in my life because I slow down and stop long enough to see things. I see people and I see events and I see stuff that God has blessed me with that I missed before because I’ve been running through time so quickly that I just missed it. The Sabbath is about celebrating the provision of God.
In Exodus 20, we see the giving of the Ten Commandments. Verse 8
Remember to observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days a week are set apart for your daily duties and regular work, but the seventh day is a day of rest dedicated to the Lord your God. On that day, no one in your household may do any kind of work, which includes you, your sons and daughters, your male and female servants, your livestock and any foreigners living among you, for in six days, the Lord made the heavens, the earth, the sea and everything in them, then He rested on the seventh day. That is why the Lord blessed the seventh day and set it apart as holy.
So, let me make a couple of observations about this. First, the Sabbath commandment, if you look at all the commandments listed in Exodus 20, this one is the longest. The commandment about not worshipping idols comes in a close second, but at 115 words, this is the longest one in order to clarify what God means by this ritual. The second thing that is interesting about it is that this commandment is not given just to the Israelites, it is given to anyone who interacts with the lives of the Israelites. They can’t just enjoy a day of rest at the expense of their servants, their servants get the rest as well. I really with I knew about this when I was six years old and my mom wanted me to clean my room, on any day of the week, I would have declared that my Sabbath right then and there. Sabbath was designed to be a gift for God’s people. A rhythm of time, a rhythm of celebration that we can live in.
Another thing that is interesting about this specific command is that it comes in spot number four in the list. The first three are about our vertical relationship with God. The last are about our horizontal relationship with one another. This one comes right in the middle of those to show where the intersection of those two things happen; that as we live rightly with God, it affects the way we live rightly with other people.
What I really I want you to see in this passage is the reason why it was given. The reason that the Sabbath was given is in verse 11:
for in six days, the Lord made the heavens, the earth, the sea and everything in them, then He rested on the seventh day. That is why the Lord blessed the seventh day and set it apart as holy.
So Sabbath here is grounded in the creation event. It is grounded in that moment of creation, so it reflects our creation and it reflects our identity in God. It says that God created in six days and set aside the seventh to be holy and that’s why we observe it; because we are imitating God. It is about celebrating the creation and celebrating our identity in God; it is about knowing Whose we are and how to live because of that. For me, one way that Sabbath has worked well is when I get out into creation. When I’m on the side of a mountain somewhere or I'm paddling on a river somewhere, when I am enjoying the creativity and celebrating the creativity of God, I find Sabbath, I find rest, I find my heart turn toward God. I know for some of you those things I just mentioned sound like the worst things you’ve ever heard. It’s not about necessarily that. I think Sabbath looks different for different people. For you, it might be being in an art gallery, or it might mean feasting on a great meal. It is celebrating the creation and celebrating our imitation of God. It is observing Sabbath because that’s what God did and He created us in his image and wants us to live like He lives.
The Jewish Rabbis actually taught that an extra soul was granted to the Jewish people on the eve of Sabbath and then was removed at the end of Sabbath. It was this idea that they were granted a more dynamic life for that moment, for that day, for that experience. It is celebrating creation and celebrating who we are as God’s creation.
It is interesting that after these commandments are given in Exodus, there are other instructions that are given and we see the Sabbath coming up over and over again. In fact, right at the very end when God is finished creating the tablets and is handing them to Moses, He reminds Moses that the primary thing to remember is the Sabbath and to keep it holy, and when God gives Moses instructions on how to build the tabernacle in Exodus 35, He says to do the work for the six days but not to work on the tabernacle on the seventh. He is continually giving instructions about how to observe the Sabbath. It keeps coming up over and over again. So as the Israelites wander in the desert for 40 years, God gives them this gift of rest. In the midst of hardship and uncertainty, God grants them a day to rest and to celebrate, to celebrate their identity in God.
The Ten Commandments are given in other places in the Old Testament. In Deuteronomy 5, here’s what’s going on. Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers chronicle the story of the children of Israel during their first 40 years after their escape from Egypt as they move to the Promised Land. It chronicles the story and the events and the major places and it talks about the law that is given. The book of Deuteronomy was written 40 years later. What happened is that all of the adults that had left Egypt died in the wilderness, so this new generation of young Israelites had grown up knowing nothing about Egypt, only knowing the time in the wilderness. So Moses wrote the book of Deuteronomy, which is basically a retelling of Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers, to instruct this new generation of Israelites on who they are, who created them, where they were going, why they were going there and how to live once they got there. The tone of Deuteronomy is very different, it is very hopeful and encouraging and inspirational. So the Ten Commandments are given again the book of Deuteronomy. Here’s what we read in verse 12
Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy as the Lord your God has commanded you. Six days a week are set apart for your daily routines and regular work but the seventh day is a day of rest dedicated to the Lord your God. On that day, no one in your household may do any kind of work. This includes you, your sons and daughters, your male and female servants, your oxen and donkeys and other livestock and any foreigners living among you. All your male and female servants must rest as you do.
That’s all the same stuff that was given in the book of Exodus, but listen now to the reason it is given.
Remember that you were once slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out with amazing power and mighty deeds. That is why the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.
In Exodus, it says because God created six days and rested the seventh, that’s why He set it aside and pronounced it holy. In Deuteronomy, the reason has shifted, it is because you were once enslaved in Egypt and God has delivered you out by mighty power and deeds.
I think this is something that’s going to help a lot of us get this. Sabbath is about celebrating our freedom in God. God said to this new generation of Israelites, ‘You need to celebrate this day because you were once enslaved in Egypt and I brought you out by mighty power and deeds and you are no longer enslaved by anything. You are no longer hell bound, ruled by, driven by anything else and I want you to set aside a day to celebrate that. Exodus was rooted in creation, Deuteronomy is rooted in liberation. Exodus remembers life in Eden and the original creation; in Deuteronomy it remembers life in Egypt. In Exodus, it is a celebration of the creation, it is a celebration of the life, an imitation of the life that God wants us to live; in Deuteronomy it is a warning about what happens when we step away from the life that God has designed us to live. It is about freedom. Some of us are slaves to our work. Some of us are slaves to addiction. Some of us are slaves to stuff we can’t shake off of our lives and Sabbath brings freedom.
It is hard for me to remember a time when I haven’t felt an urge to be enslaved to my work, whether it was engineering, whether it was life on Capitol Hill, whether it was doing ministry in a church. Not forced slavery, I love what I do, but when good things begin to rule us and drive us, we become slaves to them, and Sabbath is a way that we can celebrate, that we can declare, that we can decide again and rejoice in the fact that we are not slaves to anything except Jesus Christ. Sabbath is about celebrating the provision of God. It is about celebrating the creation and our freedom. It was a gift to be given, to be enjoyed. And over time, because we love to define things and put it into a box so we know how we’re doing and sometimes, worse, to know how we are doing compared to other people. So over the centuries, all these rules got heaped on about what you could and couldn’t do on the Sabbath, until Jesus showed up in human form. In Mark Chapter 2, He has an encounter with the Pharisees. I love Jesus. Jesus is so good. Jesus is constantly redefining things, and apparently, in Pharisee world, being nice to people on the Sabbath was not an acceptable activity. So, Jesus’ disciples are walking through a grain field and some of them are picking off the heads of the wheat to eat and the Pharisees call foul and say, ‘You can’t harvest on the Sabbath, so your disciples are out of line.’ That’s when Jesus said, ‘The Sabbath was made to benefit the people and not the people to benefit the Sabbath and I, the Son of Man, am Lord of the Sabbath, I am Master even of the Sabbath.’ See, the Pharisees had forgotten that the Sabbath was something to be enjoyed. Then He goes on and after this, we read in Chapter 3 verse 1
Jesus went to the synagogue again and noticed a man with a deformed hand. Since it was the Sabbath, Jesus’ enemies watched Him closely. Would He heal the man’s hand on the Sabbath? If He did, they planned to condemn Him. Jesus said to the man, “Come and stand in front of everyone.” Then He turned to the critics and asked, “Is it legal to do good deeds on the Sabbath or is it a day for doing harm? Is this a day to save life or to destroy it?” But they wouldn’t answer Him. He looked around at them angrily because He was deeply disturbed by their hard hearts. Then He said to the man, “Reach out your hand.” The man reached out his hand and it became normal again. At once, the Pharisees went away and met with the supporters of Herod to discuss plans for killing Jesus.
Is this a day to save life or to destroy it? Jesus saved this man’s life. Jesus was constantly healing on the Sabbath, whether it was a crippled paralyzed man on a mat or a blind man or a crippled woman, He was constantly healing people on the Sabbath because the Sabbath was about giving life to people. The Sabbath is when we celebrate salvation. It is when we celebrate creation and our freedom and ultimately it is a celebration of the salvation that Jesus Christ has brought to us.
In a very physical sense for these people, He healed on the Sabbath, for us in a very spiritual sense that He has redeemed us once and for all on the cross. Ultimately, our salvation, our relationship with Jesus Christ, that is the ultimate Sabbath. If we think about Sabbath as being the provision of God, Jesus Christ provided the sacrifice on the cross so that we could enter into the rest of God. If we talk about the Sabbath as being about discovering and celebrating our identity in God, Jesus Christ turned us from people who were sinners and turned us into adopted children of the King. If we talk about Sabbath being a place and a time where we celebrate creation, then Jesus Christ’s work on the cross restored the rest of Eden and it anticipates the future where we entered the creation of the new heaven and the new earth. If we talk about Sabbath being a time when we celebrate our freedom, Jesus Christ paid for the sin, for the burden that was on us and nailed it to the cross and freed us from sin.
Salvation is the ultimate Sabbath. Sabbath is a celebration of our salvation and salvation allows us to enter into the Sabbath of God.
It is a gift. It is not something we add to our to do list.
Some of us this weekend can’t even imagine Sabbath rest because we’ve never established a relationship with Jesus Christ. I would invite you now to the cross where you find the rest of God. Sabbath is about celebrating provision and creation and identity and freedom and salvation. It is about us trusting Him. It is about us imitating Him. It is about us identifying with Him. It is about us living in the way He created us to live.
How do we do this thing? How do we put some practical skin on it? Here’s my issue with this – rules, we like to box things in, we like to establish rules so we know how we are doing. I really think Sabbath is about throwing the rulebook out. I’m going to give you four things that have helped me as I’ve celebrated Sabbath over the past year.
One is to plan for it. If we go back to Exodus 16, they had to gather more on the sixth day so they would have enough on the seventh. They had to plan for it. If Sabbath for you is Sunday and you have a big important meeting at 7:00 a.m. on Monday morning, then you better make sure you are fully prepared for that on Saturday. You have to intentionally, strategically plan for it. There have been moments where I’ve found myself in a flurried mess on my Sabbath because I forgot to plan for it.
Secondly, play with it. There are three questions I keep in the back of my brain when I think about Sabbath. What turns my affection toward Jesus? What gets my heart excited about my relationship with Jesus? What brings glory to God? What do I enjoy? Isaiah 58:13 says that Sabbath was meant to be enjoyed. So, what do I enjoy? I usually find Sabbath at the intersection of those three things. What turns my heart to God? What brings God glory? What I enjoy doing. Play with it.
Number three, involve friends. Ryan and I were part of a Shabbat meal with a Jewish family not too long ago and what really struck me was the community and the celebration of relationships that were involved in that. Invite a bunch of friends over, have dinner, play games, share with one another what God is doing in your lives. Celebrate the work of God in each other.
Number four, make sure to incorporate gratitude. Sabbath should help us slow down and appreciate the things of God, the ways of God, the blessings of God. And as we practice gratefulness, we enjoy Sabbath.
Some of the things I’ve done on my Sabbaths, I’ve hung out at a monastery, I’ve gone prayer walking around the mall, I’ve hung out at on art gallery with my journal, I have gone to New York city to see a Broadway show. I have gone down ridiculously high slides at Cox Farms with my two-year old niece. By the way, my family is in town this weekend, some of you know them from sermon illustrations. Sabbath for me was hanging out with them and my two-year old niece at a farm the other day.
It is about celebrating. It is about enjoying a gift, about entering into the blessing of the rest of God.
One of my heroes from church history was a guy named Philip [?]. You may not have heard of him but he was a good friend of Martin Luther’s and was one of the chief theologians of the Protestant Reformer. He was the heady dude, and he came to Luther one day and he said we shall discuss the governance of the universe. And Luther looked at him and said, “No, today, we will go fishing, and we will leave the governance of the universe to God.” Luther, who was in the midst of reformation, who was in the middle of receiving communication and attending inquisitions and translating the Bible into German chose to go fishing, to enjoy the rest of God, to celebrate the provision of God and creation and his freedom and his salvation. We would do well to do the same.
Father thank You so much that You have given us this gift of Sabbath. Forgive us for missing the opportunity. We know this is not about rules or something we have to do, it is about something we get to do. You have commanded us to give us permission to take a day and enjoy it. Help us to enter into your rest, help us to celebrate your provision and your creation. Help us experience your joy and your rest. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.
Ministry Transcription
Margaret Salyers
606-706-5006
margaretsalyers@gmail.com
