Sabbath 1 - Everybody Gets a Sabbath (8-20-2023)
August 20, 2023
Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost (Sabbath Series 1)
Deuteronomy 5:1-4, 12-15; Psalm 116:5-9, 12-14, 16-17; Matthew 11:28-30
Turn again to your rest, O my soul, for the Lord has dealt well with you. How shall I repay the Lord for all the good things God has done for me? I will take the cup of salvation, and call on the name of the Lord.
One of the great early TV shows was “The Twilight Zone.” Perhaps some of you remember it. There was a famous episode of this show that first aired in March 1962, so it’s even before my time (if you can believe that), probably one of the most famous TV episodes of all time, called “To Serve Man.” I don’t know if anyone has seen it. The Earth is visited by aliens, they’re 9 feet tall, and they say they’ve come to help us. Their technology is going to solve all of our problems; it will give food and energy to everyone, it will put an end to war. And they leave behind a mysterious book written in their language. So of course, the people in the government try to figure out what’s in the book. They’re able to translate the title of the book, which is “To Serve Man” – it’s 1962, pardon the sexist language – but they can’t figure out anything else. Still, it seems wonderful that these aliens have come to help us.
And people start getting on the spaceships to travel to the aliens’ home planet, which is said to be quite the paradise. Which brings us to one of the most famous endings of all time – I don’t like to do spoilers, if you haven’t seen it, but I’m sorry, you’ve had 60 years to watch it. So the hero is about to get on the spaceship to go to the alien planet, and at the last moment a young woman on his staff comes running up and shouts: Don’t get on board. We’ve translated the rest of the book. It’s a cookbook! “How to Serve Man” – these are recipes!
When something is too good to be true, our human experience tells us to be wary, it probably is. There’s probably a catch. That’s how we automatically react when we hear something that sounds like good news.
In the Scriptures, when the Hebrew people were delivered from their bondage in Egypt, some of them were delighted and overjoyed. And some of them were skeptical. Maybe we’ve gotten ourselves into something worse. Yes, all those plagues that struck the Egyptians and spared us were pretty dramatic. Hard to explain how we got to the safe side of the Red Sea when Pharoah’s army was chasing us – OK, maybe God is really behind this. Maybe God does want what’s good for us. But look, we’re in a desert wilderness. There’s nothing to eat. There’s no water to drink. There are these nasty snakes that keep biting us. Maybe we should go back to bondage – yes, we had to make bricks 24/7, yes the work was backbreaking and unrelenting, but at least we had food and water. I don’t know about this place. Where is God taking us? There must be a catch.
In our first reading today, 40 years have passed since Israel was delivered from Egypt. A whole new generation has been born in the wilderness. The people are now finally ready to enter into the promised land. Moses, by now is extremely old. He’s not going to live much longer. So he calls the people together to remind them of what has happened, and what happened shortly after they left Egypt. Moses reminds the people that after just a few weeks in the wilderness, they came to Mount Horeb, also known as Mount Sinai. Where God offered the people a covenant – a solemn agreement, an alliance, a treaty. In which God said: I’ve called you out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. I will give you a good land, flowing with milk and honey, and I want you to live there the way human beings are made to live. And in return, all you have to do is to be my people and you will live there the way human beings are made to live. That’s all.
This is a covenant to serve human beings – and not in the Twilight Zone way. There is no catch – other than the fact that living the way human beings are made to live turns out to be harder than it sounds. Much of the rest of the Bible story deals with that reality. But for the moment, Moses recalls God’s purpose in coming to the Hebrew people in the first place – to make a covenant where God promises to serve human beings, by giving them a land where they can live the way human beings are made to live.
One of the first rules for living in this promised land, one of the first rules for living the way human beings are made to live: is that everybody gets a day off work. There is still going to be work to do. Even in the promised land there will be work. But one thing is not negotiable, God says: Everybody gets a break. Everybody gets time away from work. Time to pursue your passions and do the things that make you happy, time to spend with family, time to eat meals while relaxing with friends, time to think and reflect and pray and express gratitude. Time to just rest and do nothing at all. Time to praise the God who set you free to enjoy the gift of life. You didn’t have that in Egypt, Moses reminds the people. In Egypt, the only thing that mattered to Pharoah was how many bricks you made – in the Promised Land, your life is going to matter and you’re going to get time and space to enjoy your life.
Now, like all good things, the gift of the Sabbath can get turned into a kind of work. We’re very good at that, as human beings. That clearly happened in Israel. The list of rules about exactly what could and could not be done on the Sabbath got longer. The police who handed out tickets for breaking the Sabbath got nosier. They handed out gold stars to those who worked hardest at keeping all the rules, and scarlet letters of shame on those who couldn’t always keep them. To the point that even Jesus would often get in trouble on the Sabbath and would have to remind the Sabbath police that the Sabbath is meant to serve human beings – human beings don’t serve the Sabbath. The Sabbath, Jesus insisted , is about freedom from bondage, about finding healing and new life, about living into the freedom of the children of God for which we were made. And in saying this, Jesus was not saying anything that Moses had not already said.
But as Moses explains the Sabbath, how the Sabbath is part of God’s covenant with Israel, part of God’s desire to free Israel from the bondage of Egypt and keep them free in the promised land – there is not only the promise that you are going to get to relax, that you are going to get time off, that you are going to be have the time and space to just be and to enjoy life – there is also a requirement.
In the Promised Land you might be responsible for a household, for a family, for children. And it will be your job to make sure that everyone in your family gets a Sabbath too. You might have employees in the Promised Land, you might even have slaves. We might wish Moses had thought to prohibit slavery entirely, and it might have been better if he had. But Moses says at least this – If you have people who work for you, even if you have slaves, you are not going to be like Pharoah. You’re not going to live in luxury while other people do your work for you. Your workers and even your slaves get a Sabbath too. In the promised land you might have farm animals, oxen and donkeys, and you know what? Your ox and your donkey get a Sabbath too. You may have foreigners in your midst, people who are not members of your tribe or your faith, people who aren’t part of the covenant community. Don’t get them to do your work for you so you can enjoy a break – the foreigners and the heathen who live among you, they’re going to get a Sabbath too.
This is, I think, a profound rule that goes to the heart of what the Sabbath is supposed to be. In the new world where everyone lives the way God intended human beings to live – everybody gets to rest. Everyone gets a Sabbath. And if you ever find that you’re taking a rest but denying other people that same rest, that same dignity, that same opportunity to enjoy life on their own terms – well then, Moses says, then you might as well be back in Egypt. Unless you’re giving a Sabbath to everyone for whom you have responsibility, your rest is laziness and injustice, not Sabbath. Unless you respect the freedom of everyone, you yourself will not be free. The covenant of God is a promise that God will serve human beings – and the only catch is that we actually have to live it by extending the blessing of freedom we have received to everyone that we can.
I don’t know if we really believe this. We are often aware that we have blessings, that we have freedoms, that others do not. And our temptation is to feel sorry for those people over there, who don’t have the blessings we have – but that’s the way it is, that’s too bad, but it’s not our problem. We’re just grateful that we’re one of the lucky ones. But the commandment about the Sabbath tells us the gifts of God are not just for the lucky few. I do not have more of the gifts of God when other people have less of them. I don’t have more freedom, more grace, more forgiveness, more dignity, more joy, more love, more peace, when other people have less. The gifts of God are like the five loaves and the two fish – the more they are shared, the more they grow.
As Jesus teaches us in the Lord’s Prayer, the more we forgive others, the more forgiveness we receive. As Moses taught Israel, the more we respect the freedom and the rest and the dignity of others, the more Sabbath rest we get to enjoy. This is the gentle yoke Jesus offers us: less a law and more of a promise. The blessings of God will only grow when we share them.
How shall I repay the Lord for all the good things God has done for me? By making sure others receive those good things as well. And I will take the cup of salvation, and call on the name of the Lord.