Prayer:
May only truth be spoken, O God, and your truth be heard. AMEN

Last week we began a series of sermons on the Decalogue - the ten commandments. In the Dutch churches of my childhood, we heard the ten commandments read most Sundays.
The theory I guess, was that if you heard them often enough you would remember. And indeed there is deep within me a memory of those words of God, that begin:

I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery: you shall have no other gods before me, and so on.
Read them at your leisure in either of the Bible books: Exodus 20 or Deuteronomy 5.

As we reflect on the Ten Commandments, I want to emphasize what I said two weeks ago: all the commandments of the Old Testament need to be tested against the law of love which Christ revealed. Legalism is not what Christian faith is about. Christian faith is about loving God above all, and loving our neighbour as ourselves.

Last Sunday we had before us the 6th Commandment - you shall not murder or kill. And because of the 75th Anniversary Series with Peter Burns of the UN Committee against Torture, our conversation on torture helped us realize that killing, in Jesus' understanding, doesn't start and stop with ending life.
Rather it has to do with diminishing life - whenever we make the lot of another person substantially worse, we are breaking the sixth commandment - we are killing people
And thereby inviting God's judgement and wrath.

Today then we move to the Sabbath law. Six days you shall labour and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to God - cease from your labours. Just as in the creation story God worked for six days and ceased working - rested - on the seventh

But our Gospel reading shows Jesus appearing to water down the absolute law by remembering the heart of the matter.

I want to approach this little story by focusing on the three players in the reading: there are the Pharisees, there are the disciples who are accused of breaking the sabbath law by picking grain to chew, and there is Jesus.

Let's be the Disciples
We were hungry. Why wouldn't we pick some grain and chew on the kernels? We can't imagine that God really would want us to starve! And Jesus didn't tell us we couldn't, so we figured it was okay to pick some for our immediate need.
It wasn't like we were harvesting for the farmer.
Besides, we get sick and tired of these detailed rules.
There are just too many for us to keep track of.
We also heard Jesus say at times that he came to fulfill the law, and
then he also said that the whole law could be summed up with "love God" and "love your neighbour as yourself" -
what we did transgressed neither of those commandments.
So what's the fuss with those narrow religious people?

(any other perspectives, disciples?)

Now let's be the Pharisees:
We believe that the 10 Commandments are God's Law and deserve absolute obedience because they are given by God to Moses.
We worry about how people are always trying to get around the Law,
so we have "built a fence" around it - over the generations we developed detailed rules about what could and could not be done on the Sabbath. And one of those is picking grain on the Sabbath.
Inspite of all we've done to help people keep the Law of God, we still see God dishonoured as individuals take it upon themselves to disobey the law. We call it the way we see it.
Look at those disciples of Jesus. They know that harvesting grain is forbidden on the Sabbath and still they do it.
And Jesus himself, he goes out of his way to heal people - and that clearly is work according to the tradition.
If we don't obey God's laws in the little things, there is every reason to believe that we won't observe the law in big things.
We're here to honour God and stop others from dishonouring God.

(any other perspectives from the Pharisees?)

Now let's be Jesus
The religious leaders of our day have so burdened the people with laws, that the people have lost the point of it all. The people keep imagining God as some big ogre, who will get them if they don't observe all the laws perfectly.
So keeping the Sabbath has degenerated into what you may not do - don't do this, don't do that - and by the end of the day, people just throw up their hands and say, "who cares, we'll never get it right."

I want people to understand the Sabbath as a gift from God - an opportunity to rest and refresh, to relax and enjoy the work of the week past. Our Sabbath day off (whether Sunday or Saturday or Friday) is a gift, but I know how reluctant people are to accept the gift. So God had to make it into a command. (source: Barbara Brown Taylor)
Well I want the Pharisees to realize that God is driven more by caring and love than by command and anger.
That's why I mentioned about King David and his soldiers - they ate holy bread reserved for the priests. But they were hungry and God responds to the hungry, by providing food.
What else would we possibly expect of God for the human family.
God gave us the Law to make our lives better, more livable.
The glory of God is human fully alive. So when laws harm or burden people, they need to be re-thought.

(any further thoughts, Jesus people?)

When I was growing up, Sundays were enforced quiet days: stores closed, no swimming, a walk was okay, Sunday clothes, reading, and not much else. That was the way we were required to observe the Sabbath - Sunday.

That has changed. In our time we might well re-think the Sabbath observance, but from the other side. Today we have largely forgotten what God intends with Sabbath time. I don't just mean how in this society we observe Sunday - though that is troublesome enough with many of the wheels of industry and business just grinding on.

It is estimated that between 1968 and 1988, the average worker in the USA added 164 hours per year (equivalent of one month of 8 hour days) to their workload. I doubt that it is any better in Canada.
And since that time e-mail and other technologies have hiked the pace and the length of work even more.
When we watch people walking on nature trails with their cellular phone at their ear or at weddings, when people just can't stop shopping for even a twenty-four hour period, when we don't know what to do with free time - then we know that we have lost the gift God intended for us.

Sabbath is holy time - time for us to be renewed and healed from the burden of the day and week.
Sabbath is that time when we cease our work so that God may do God's work within us. (John Calvin)
We may not be able to reserve all day Sunday for that. But it would do us well to identify some parts of our week where we stop the merry-go-round and intentionally seek rest, relaxation, quiet and renewal. Otherwise "Days pass, years vanish, and we will walk sightless among miracles." (Rabbi Chester Diamond, Louisville, Kentucky reciting a Jewish penitential prayer)

My Sabbath tends to come on Fridays - the Muslim holy day.
I try as much as possible to withdraw, to be quieter, to walk and meditate, to deepen my closest relationships, to read, to leave behind various demands of the week, to simply be.
I don't fully succeed, but I know I need to. Not because it is a command that comes from God, but because God gives me Sabbath time so that I may be renewed, refreshed, and resurrected to fuller life.

Receive the gift of Sabbath from God. Make the most of it. Let it renew and heal your soul. Let it help you become humans fully alive, thereby reflecting the glory of God.

I invite you to take a mini-sabbath right now. As the Choir sings "Attend to My Prayers" close your eyes, let yourself be immersed in the peace of God.

(choir)

Shabbat shalom. The peace and the glory of God's Sabbath gift be yours!

Hymn 352 vss. 1 & 3 only