Keep the Sabbath

Propers: The Second Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 9), A.D. 2018 B

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The purpose of the Sabbath is liberation. It’s not a rule that we must follow. It’s a freedom we’ve been given.

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, or your son or your daughter, or your male or female servant, or your ox or your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the immigrant in your towns, so that your male and female servant may rest as well as you.

Leisure is necessary for creativity. It is the very thing that makes us most human. When we have rest from our labors, we are freed—our minds and souls are freed—to pursue imagination, education, prayer, discussion, and above all silence. It is from leisure that all poetry, all art, all science, and all political theory arise. It is leisure that allows us to transcend the level of beasts. It is leisure that frees us to contemplate the stars in their courses, the plight of our fellow man, and the intricate patterns of veins on the underside of every leaf.

Now, by leisure I don’t just mean laziness, nor simple entertainments. The purpose of leisure is not distraction or gluttony or simply to while away the hours. Leisure is time set aside to develop the mind and the spirit apart from worldly cares. And for most people throughout most of history, it has been an unobtainable luxury. Leisure, rest, was the purview of the elite, the rich—princes, priests, and potentates—who had slaves to do their dirty work, who earned their bread by the sweat of other men’s brows.

And because of this they considered themselves civilized, enlightened, standing aloft and aloof from the hoi polloi. Why, to their eyes, the illiterate commoner was subhuman, little more than a beast. The Roman aristocracy viewed people who worked for wages to be little better than prostitutes, selling their labor, selling their bodies, rather than attending symposiums or running for political office, as did their social betters.

And so the notion of a universal Sabbath—of a day off for patrician and plebian, free and slave, man and beast alike—was a shocking and perplexing notion to the ancient world; most of all because it treated peoples as having equal dignity, equal humanity, equally worthy of experiencing true and life-giving leisure. Everyone deserves the chance to rest, and pray, and think, because everyone has equal value in the eyes of God.

The God of the Old Testament hates slavery, absolutely detests it. In the great contest between Egypt and Israel, the superpower and the slaves, God unequivocally takes the side of the enslaved, and of all who chafe under Egypt’s yoke. The Book of Joel is one long screed against the evils of selling men and women into bondage. And when the Israelites established a nation of their own, buying and selling slaves of their own, God declared that every seventh year must be a Sabbath year, a mass liberation of all slaves everywhere.

If someone sold themselves to you as an indentured servant under Israelite Law, you were required by God to care for them, house them, feed them and clothe them as you would members of your own household, for that indeed is what they were. And when the Sabbath year came around—whether that be in six years or six days—those servants were given payment and freedom from every bond of servitude. If they chose to stay on as members of your household, they did so of their own free will.

Thus Israel must observe the Sabbath. Not simply as a religious requirement. Not as one more rule to follow. But as a constant reminder that once you yourselves were slaves—yes, you—and God loved and liberated and enlivened you. So then we must treat everyone made in the image of God, and indeed even the beasts of burden which God also loves, with dignity and honor and respect.

In a very real sense, then, the Sabbath was the first labor law ever put on the books. It was for everyone to have rest, to have leisure, to have the chance to feel human. Not just for the rich. Not just for the powerful. The Sabbath is for everyone, everywhere. It is about justice even before it is about worship. It is liberation from all that would enslave us.

And so, when the Sabbath is done away with, who do you suppose suffers first? Why, the poor, of course. We do away with blue laws and the like, thinking them arcane relics preventing us from purchasing a good bottle of bourbon on a Sunday. But as soon as people can work seven days a week, they do work seven days a week. They do so because they have to, taking two or three jobs at once, all to put food on the table while trying to pay down an endless mountain of debt.

We do not pay the poor a living wage. We do not establish a social safety net sufficient for the needs of our people. And so if we don’t take Sundays off, who cares? We’ll just have another day for our leisure, a different sort of weekend. But the poor will work, because they have to, so that we can enjoy our conveniences. And thus are they denied true leisure, true rest, and their shot at true humanity.

So what about us as Christians? Are we required by Israelite Law to rest from our labors on one specific day of the week? Well, of course not. The Christian is not bound by the observances of Mosaic Law. But we are still captive to the Word of God. The purpose of the Third Commandment, according to the Catechism, is that “we are to fear and love God, so that we do not despise preaching or God’s Word, but instead keep that Word holy and gladly hear and learn it.”

It’s not about a specific day, be that Saturday or Sunday or what-have-you. It’s about keeping God’s Word in mind on every day of the week. And that takes leisure; that takes rest. We need time to quiet our minds and our bodies so that our souls may reach out to God in prayer and contemplation. We need opportunity to rid ourselves of distraction so that we can read the Holy Scriptures, come to the Lord’s Table and, yes, pay attention to the sermon in the hope that the Holy Spirit will speak even if the preacher’s having an off day.

And we are required—nay, entrusted—to use this liberation, this God-given freedom, in order to liberate others: liberate them from dehumanizing conditions and toil without respite; liberate them from slavery to illness and ignorance and debt; to treat all people with honor and dignity whether they be our employers or our customers or the beggar on the street; to liberate even animals and beasts of burden from unnecessary cruelty at the hands of a broken and fallen humanity. Yes, the Sabbath is a Law, but it’s the Gospel too: the Good News of God’s care for and love of humanity not simply in the great beyond but right here and now.

Brothers and sisters, regardless of our political affiliations, we are one and all the beneficiaries of generations of our ancestors’ sacrifice and toil; of strikers and unions and the much-maligned labor movement. The 40-hour workweek, full medical and dental, even paid vacations were unthinkable barely a century ago. And for many working class Americans they remain unthinkable today. And so the Lord asks of those of us, who have the unspeakable luxury of leisure, not to waste it in gluttony or sloth, not to fritter it away on mindless entertainments.

Cherish your leisure. Nourish it. Liberate your minds and your souls with reading and prayer and silence and thought. One good book is worth a thousand TV series. One great song is better than all the radio’s filth. Treat yourself with dignity. Know you are a child of God. Feel the difference, the growth, the liberation brought to our lives by our Sabbath rest. It is nothing less than a taste of Heaven here on earth, a foretaste of the Feast to come!

And then do everything in your power to make sure that others have the same opportunity to live as human beings, today and every day of the week.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.