2010-05-09 A Sabbath Day

A Sabbath DayScriptures: Acts 16:9-15, John 5:1-9

You don’t really like to work on a Sunday, do you?  Despite the fact that our secular society sees more and more commercial enterprises open on Sundays, and the idea of Sunday “blue laws” is almost wholly a relic of a past time, still we like to think of Sunday as “a day of rest” – worship and fellowship followed by time with family or in front of the TV.  This, despite the fact that more and more of our own members are forced by the circumstances of their jobs to work long hours on Sunday and thus miss being part of the church community on Sunday morning.  Churches used to complain a lot, as well, about school sports, like soccer, and other school activities being planned for the Sunday morning time, although perhaps you don’t hear about that so much anymore – at least in this part of the country.  There is – or should be – something special about the Sabbath.  And a day like Mother’s Day, which places such a specific emphasis on home and family and community, is a good time for this kind of a reminder.

There are a lot of different directions we could go with our gospel lectionary text for today, and the commentators I’ve been reading do take quite a few different tacks.  For instance, there’s the fact of all kinds of invalids lying in those porticos; we could talk about the church’s healing ministry and how to enhance that.  Or, there’s Jesus’ strange question to the paralyzed man at the outset:  “Do you want to be made well?”  Who wouldn’t?  What is Jesus probing for here?  Actually, a very good sermon could be made out of that one.  There’s also the datum that the man had been there for 38 years – think of what you could say about that horrific length of time just sitting there at the pool’s edge with no one to help you (think of Sisyphus pushing that rock up a hill and constantly having it roll back down).  And then there is the man’s lame (pun fully intended) excuse:  “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps in front of me.”  Ron Hansen in this week’s The Christian Century really lays into this one.  He says, “The Gospel according to John shakes a finger at such inert and excuse-making people.  John is famous for his variations on ‘See and believe.’  But he’s also insisting, ‘Decide and do.’…..We can find a hundred excuses not to do something, even if it is for our health and well-being.  And sometimes Jesus doesn’t want to ‘talk about it’; he needs to command.  Jesus is very rarely concerned with what we call ‘process’ in the Gospels; he is all about decision, yes or no.  He cuts to the chase.”

So, if you’d like to continue along the line of Jesus pushing us to be decision-makers, we could do that…but it would have to be another sermon.  Because what I really focused on when I read this passage was its last line:  “Now that day was a sabbath.”  You can almost imagine the twinkle in John’s eye and feel the anticipated glee he has in this set-up.  He is heading us for an eventual “gotcha” with these religious authorities and their arcane rules.

I suppose we should have read the next nine verses from this chapter as part of our scripture lesson (though that would have made it rather long), since that’s where the meat of this sabbath-day encounter lies.  So, as Paul Harvey was wont to say:  “and now for the rest of the story” (let’s see how many of you caught that old-time radio reference).  Jesus has healed this 38-year-long paralyzed man – simply by telling him, “Stand up, take your mat and walk.”  No more to it than that.  And he does.  And he is skipping down the road, joyful and amazed at his good fortune.  And he runs into the religious authorities.  (In John’s gospel the word that is used is “the Jews”, but it is clear from the context that he is referring to those like the Sadducees and Pharisees who were the ones in charge, running the temple and all aspects of their peoples’ lives.)  They tell him that since it’s the sabbath he can’t carry his mat.  At this point the man does not know that he has encountered Jesus, so he simply says, “The man who made me well said to me, ‘Take up your mat and walk.’”  Later, Jesus meets him in the temple and tells him, “See, you have been made well.  Do not sin any more, so that nothing worse happens to you.”  (There’s a whole other sermon in that one line about the relationship between sin and sickness, but…..)  Now the man runs to the authorities (tattle-tale) and says it was Jesus who made him well.  And all the authorities’ animosity and hatred begins to boil over onto Jesus “because”, as John says, “he was doing such things on the sabbath.”

Indeed, there were literally hundreds of regulations that governed the Sabbath day in order to help the people keep it holy.  Healing the sick, even by a word of command, was considered work by the Scribes and Pharisees, and therefore illegal.  (You know the difference between “unlawful” and “Illegal” don’t you?  Something that’s unlawful is manifestly against the law, while an “illegal” – that’s a really sick bird.  Never mind.  Thought I was back at humor Sunday.)

Now, the problem enters in when you pit legality, or legalism, against morality or a higher religious sensibility.  When does or should individual conscience come into play?  We were discussing this just last week in the Mission and Action Board in relation to our country’s immigration laws and particularly the law recently enacted in Arizona – are some of these so patently wrong-headed that it is the better part of patriotism, not to say a Christian ethic, to challenge them?  During the civil right era laws that legislatures had enacted were broken right and left in order to seek to obtain a higher justice.  Those who hid Jews during Nazi Germany were acting in defiance of the law – but in the name of a higher authority.

Here are a few laws that are currently on the books to give you an idea of what is illegal in some parts of our country:

• “In Pennsylvania, the penalty for cursing is a forty-cent fine.  However, if God is mentioned in the curse, the fine is sixty-seven cents.”
• “It is illegal to mispronounce the name of the city of Joliet, Illinois.”
• “In Utah, the law requires that daylight be seen between two dancing partners.”
• “It is unlawful for goldfish to ride on a Seattle, Washington, bus unless they lie still.”
• “In Natchez, Mississippi, it is against the law for elephants to drink beer.”
• “The California penal code prohibits the shooting of any animal, except a whale, from an automobile.”
• “In Kansas City, Missouri, children are prohibited by law from buying cap pistols.  However, the law does not restrict them from buying shotguns.”
• “A Minnesota law requires that men’s and women’s underwear not be hung on the same clothesline at the same time.”

Now, a lot of these and similar such laws stem from a certain level of prudery in our society that we’ve never quite been able to get away from.  And it is important to note that there was undoubtedly a context at the time each law was enacted that made it seem significant at the time (though I’d love to know the context for only being able to shoot a whale from an automobile in California).  Yet, you have to wonder sometimes about the utter wrong-headedness of those who have such a felt need for following the letter of the law.  It’s not terribly different in our day.  The Rev. Jack Cherry, writing in the new Reformed Church in America magazine, rcatoday, gives us a very clear-headed understanding of how this dynamic works and how we can change it when he says in response to the question, “what does it mean to ‘Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy?’”:

“The people of God have always wanted to put a precise definition on the sabbath:  don’t dance, don’t go to movies, don’t work, don’t play sports, don’t mow the lawn, and on and on.  But these have always deteriorated into ways for us to stand in judgment of one another, and there is rarely anything holy about that…..

“Sabbath is the rest that comes when we spend a day living differently.  When we alter our daily patterns of prayer, work, exercise, meals, and sleep, we are – for that one day – sensitive to God’s presence, remembering the sabbath and keeping it holy.”

Lydia was certainly doing something different on a sabbath day in the passage we read from the book of Acts.  She was outside the gate of the city by the river – presumably doing something like the wash along with her female companions (in other words, working on the sabbath) – when Paul and Timothy and Silas came out looking for a place to pray.  The significant point to this story is that Lydia was open to a new experience; she was ready to do something different – to “alter [her] daily patterns”, as Jack Cherry puts it – and in doing so becomes a whole new person and, along with her household, is baptized into a completely refreshed way of life.  (I am fascinated that Luke, the author of Acts, throws in the little, seemingly irrelevant, datum that she was “a dealer in purple cloth.”  Maybe it’s from such a detail as this that we get our Easter liturgical color.  Or maybe I’m just fascinated by it because purple is Ann’s favorite color.)  But again the key point is her openness, her readiness to grasp this new thing – and to be ready to act upon it even though (or perhaps especially because) it was the sabbath.

Back to the religious authorities and their problems with Jesus.  What’s really going on here?  Somehow their reaction seems all out of proportion to the offense against this religious law about not working on the sabbath.  As Wil Pounds, a missionary in Ecuador and Honduras, puts it:  “The religious leaders were incensed. It aroused a murderous hatred in their hearts for Him….  Jesus was in the habit of doing these things on the Sabbath.  He persisted in doing these things on the wrong day.  They pursued Jesus with hostile intent to molest, harass, to chase Him like a wild animal, to track it down and kill it.  It was a steady, continuing persecution of Jesus.  This was no isolated incident.  They would pursue Him until they killed Him at Calvary.”

Again, why?  What was their problem?  Their problem was what Jesus now claimed himself to be.  By his actions and by his words he was proclaiming himself to be the Lord of the Sabbath.  And more:  he was identifying himself with his parent God.  As John puts it in verse 18:  “For this reason the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him. because he was not only breaking the sabbath, but was also calling God his own Father, thereby making himself equal to God.”

Again, Wil Pounds:  “The powerful message Jesus was driving home was that He alone displays the unique characteristics of God.  This aroused a murderous hatred on the part of His enemies.  It still does even in our day.  You can say that Jesus is one of many saviors, or a good moral teacher, or one of many ways to get to heaven, and no one will be displeased, but that is not the option He gives us.  From this point on in the life of Jesus they were determined to put Him to death….. Chapter 5 [in John’s Gospel] marks the beginning of a hatred for Jesus that will only increase in intensity until he is dead.  The central issue in this passage will be the central issue in the controversy surrounding Jesus.  That issue, which is the central issue of the Gospel, is Jesus’ identity as the Son of God, the Messiah.”

So, disobeying something so seemingly insignificant as a sabbath day law turns out to have very far-reaching consequences – at least for Jesus.  And perhaps for us, too, as his followers.  We who accept Jesus as the Son of God, the Messiah, are called upon to do something – to act upon our relationship with our Creator/Redeemer.  We have circled around back to the beginning of this Gospel passage; we have come back to Jesus’ command to the invalid:  “Stand up, take your mat and walk.”  Recall what Ron Hanson said about this command:  “We can find a hundred excuses not to do something, even if it is for our health and well-being.  And sometimes Jesus doesn’t want to ‘talk about it’; he needs to command.  Jesus is very rarely concerned with what we call ‘process’ in the Gospels; he is all about decision, yes or no.  He cuts to the chase.”

What is a sabbath day for?

• it is for healing, not for hurting
• it is for working when we are called upon to do God’s work
• it is for standing up when an unjust law needs to be fought
• it is for offering care and compassion, not rigidity and legalism
• it is for praising the Son of God, the redeemer, and proclaiming his oneness with the creator
• it is for being God’s people

Dave Pomeroy

First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ
Las Vegas, NV
May 9, 2010