Sermon: "Freedom of the Day"

4th in the "Stone Tablets in a Wireless World" series.
Delivered June 28, 2009 by Bart Houseman.
Sermon Text: Exodus 20:8-11 and Deuteronomy 5:5-15

Click to download & listen to the sermon MP3

So when they said to me, "Bart Houseman, we think you ought to do the bringing of the Word on the 28th of June." I said, "Great." And then they said, "You're going to do the fourth commandment on the Sabbath Day." And I said, "Okay." And I mentioned it to a few people. And I said, "I'm going to do one on the Sabbath Day." And they all reacted the same way. They all said, "Couldn't you turn that one in for an easier one?" They said, "Oh, you got the short end of the stick. Couldn't you ask for "do not kill" or something like that?" And it turned out they all had a story. They all had a story of some kind or other that came out wrong about the Sabbath Day.

When I told a friend who is a member here, he said, "Oh, that whole Sabbath Day thing is so unhappy." He said, "Almost the last conversation that I had with my now dead mother was one in which she bawled me out for pulling out a weed on Sunday, and she said, 'That's work. You shouldn't do that.'" Somebody else said, "Oh, there's an argument that goes on in our house all the time about whether it's okay to buy gas on Sunday." Even though it's self-serve, doesn't make anybody else work, but you worked. And then it turned out, I think they settled it saying, "Well, if you need the gas on the way to church, it must be all right."

My sister-in-law, living out in Iowa, said, "Oh, do I have an unhappy story about that. When my son was little, he took on a paper route which turned out to be a seven-day route, so on Sunday too he got up at 6:00 in the morning and took papers around to the neighborhood as needed.

Then a member of our church came to me and said, 'Do I understand that your son is working on the Sabbath Day?' And I said, 'Well, no he's putting out papers for people to read.' 'But he's working, is that right? He's getting paid.' 'Yeah.' 'Well I'm sorry I have to tell you that my family will no longer be a friend to your family because you are disobeying the Word of God.'"

And that was the end of that friendship. These two boys were, until that day, closest friends, and they were no longer allowed to have anything to do with each other.

There are more stories like this. I could go on. There's a story in the town in which my son now lives that was able, because of the nature of the population, to make sure that the grocery stores were closed on Sunday. Then a smart merchant came by, bought a piece of property one-and-a-half feet outside the town line, set up a grocery store and caused chaos in that town, splitting the town right down the middle, causing all kinds of anguish between people who felt it was the right of that store to do that and others who felt it was not. And so the amount of anguish that came up in that town over that issue continues even to this day.

I grew up in a home that was interesting in this way because when I was about 10 or 12 years old, I said to my mother, speaking seriously, "Mom, what's the mark of a Christian?" And her answer was immediate when I said, "What's our mark as a Christian?" And she said, "We keep the Sabbath." That was it. I was old enough to wonder about that. It's not that we loved Jesus. It's not that we depend on his work of salvation for ours. It's not that we belong to God because of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. No, it was... we keep the Sabbath.

And boy did we keep the Sabbath. The rule was you don't go out of the house on Sunday. If you do, it's okay to go out for a walk, but not a hike. It's okay when you're small enough to ride a tricycle to ride it on Sunday, but if you're old enough to ride a bike, no. You can throw a ball, but you can't go out and bat a ball. You could throw a basketball, but you can't go in the backyard and shoot baskets. You could play a board game, but it can't be Monopoly.

And of course the adults had complicated rules like that too. You could put money in the collection plate, but nowhere else. You couldn't pay off a debt to a friend on Sunday. You had to go back to them on Monday and take care of that. And I'm just giving you the top of the rules. The rules as we grew up were really very subtle as you can see.

I went to college with a friend who said, "Bart, you got off easy. In my house, we drew the shades on Sunday and everybody stayed inside." Now you might have your own story. I can see from some of your grins, yes, you have a story too, and that's what I want to address.

The fourth commandment came to a motley bunch of slaves who had no idea of the love of God. In fact, those slaves who had managed to get their freedom as a result of the courageous work of a leader called Moses, numbering somewhere, we really don't know, and the numbers go all the way from 10,000 to two million. The best guess is probably somewhere between 20,000 and 70,000, of these former slaves who had lived in a culture in which the only thing that related you to any god (of which there were many) was that you feared him.

That was the question that you would ask somebody if you wanted to find out what was their supposed... what did I say... favorite god. The question was... whom do you fear? Not... whom do you love? Not... whom do you obey? Whom do you fear? So you also heard in Old Testament times, "Fear the Lord God Yahweh," because that made sense to those people.

It's also true that when God gave, through Moses, the Ten Commandments, it was probably the only way that God could, at the beginning of that time, these were former slaves who had grown up in Egypt, who had just been out of Egypt for perhaps three months, they still had only the foggiest notion of that very important preliminary sentence that precedes the Ten Commandments, "I am the Lord your God that has brought you out of the house of Egypt, out of the house of bondage," and then the first commandment. "Have no other gods before me."

The people heard that and knew little more than that about this God who brought them out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. So God related to the Israelites at that time by giving them 3,300 or so years ago, the set of commandments which we still look at today with awe and reverence. And as I speak with you today about the fourth commandment, it's perhaps one of the most interesting ones and one of the most subtle of the commandments.

Let me throw up on the board the passage from... .first from Exodus. As we look at Exodus 20, verse 8, which says, "Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work... " I'm giving you the King James because it's the one I know.

"But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle [as the King James says, thine ox nor thine ass], nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day."

I know that by memory because I went to a church, the only requirement of which in a church service was that the Ten Commandments be read every Sunday without fail. Did you know that it was this commandment that led essentially to the seven-day week which is everywhere in the world today? There were weeks before that time. The Egyptians had a 10-day week, and other societies in that area had 20-day weeks. But it was Moses, God through Moses, who introduced the seven-day week. It certainly has seemed to work. It is the clock by which we live our lives. Whether we're Christians, whether we're Jews, or whether we are none of the above.

Can I show you another passage which will help you and me to understand the Sabbath Day better? It's a passage from Deuteronomy, which is sometimes regarded as the second giving of the law, but it turns out that if you look at Deuteronomy, chapter 5, you will find a second rendition, in my opinion, to tell you the truth, I'm quite convinced that it was the earliest one. When we look at the one that's in Deuteronomy 5, we're probably looking at the first version of the Ten Commandments. They turn out to be the same, word for word, in every commandment from beginning to end, except for the fourth commandment. Let me show you what's there and it will help me in helping you to understand that fourth commandment.

"Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy, as the Lord your God has commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God." All the same so far. "On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your ox, your donkey or any of your animals, nor the alien within your gates, so that your manservant and maidservant may rest, as you do."

The rationale for it in terms of creation is gone. The rational for it in terms of that last verse has changed. I think this was the first one. The next verse which I don't... oh we do have. Good.

"Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day."

Now when you understand this you have to also understand that the characteristic of the lives of those Jews from which they had come was nonstop work... work, work, work, work, work. Work until you drop. In fact, the Egyptians were so furious at the Jews because they had developed in number and power that they, as you know, were killing the baby boys, hence Moses. And you know also that they made life as hard as they could by making them build buildings without the straw to go in the clay that holds the clay together. Make it as tough as you can for those rotten Israelites.

And so when the Israelites wanted finally to leave, they wouldn't let them go, but because of all of those plagues as you well know, they finally said, "Go, go, go, get out of here. We can stand no more. Go!" And out they went. But did they go to an easy life? No, they went to a harder life. From the minute they got up, what is the first thing they had to do? They had to go out and somehow scratch that white stuff off the ground called manna.

Can you imagine how long they had to stand in line, if in fact there was something like 40,000 people all waiting to get water from the same well? Can you imagine...can you imagine the amount of work they had to do when in that condition, they didn't have the things that we absolutely have to have to make our lives possible? They were working from the minute they got up until the minute they fell down onto that hard ground and fell asleep.

What did those people need the most? They needed the fourth commandment. The fourth commandment was a gift wrapped inside the wrapping of the only thing they understood... a command. It was a beneficial present to them when God said, "The seventh day, take a day off. Do what you would like to do, just don't work. And I'll set it up in such a way that you will still be able to eat. I will send enough manna on Friday," I don't know what they called it back in those days, "that you can get twice as much, you can put some away, and you have some for the next day." This is the fourth commandment: Take a day off.

Now, I have to tell you the truth. There is a subtlety here that is also just as important. If you read beyond the Ten Commandments, inside the book of Leviticus there is set up other Sabbaths in what is a larger Sabbath system. You have the Sabbath Day every week, but then there was a command to put the land into a Sabbath system in which every seven years you let the land lay fallow. Under which circumstances you were also supposed to allow the poor, the widows, the aliens in your land, the desperate people... they were supposed to have the opportunity to glean from the unused acres every seven years.

And if it was set up properly then you see it would rotate through. Every year one-seventh of the property would be free for nothing. And so as long as you could figure out which property wasn't being farmed, if you were poor you could go and glean the food that you needed from one-seventh, 14 percent of the property was always available for the poor people.

Then every seven times seven years, every 50th year, there was a Year of Jubilee, at which time all of the indentured servants that had become so poor that they then essentially had to sell themselves to the wealthier Israelites as indentured servants, the indentured servants were set free and they got to go back to their own land and start over.

You see that from this Sabbath system, Sabbath system, Sabbath system, that this was an organized way for a very, very early people to show that they cared about the poor. So it's just marvelously pertinent that the deacons who also care about the poor among us and the unfortunate people whose lives have gone wrong demonstrate the care that Central shows, but it also behooves us to recognize the Sabbath Day as a signature on the fact that we individually must always be watching out for and caring for the poor people and the unfortunate people among us.

Fortunately we have a government that cares as well for all of the inefficiencies of government systems to do it. It takes care of the worst problems, but you and I both know that there are problems that fall between the cracks that we have to be alert for. And the fourth commandment is just as much a commandment to be alert for those people who fall between the cracks as it is to take a day off and enjoy the rest.

But there's one more that I have to point out to you, and that is in the subtlety and in the complexity of the first statement, "Remember the Sabbath Day, to keep it holy." To keep it separate. I'll come back to that, but that's also important.

If I were to give you the history of the Sabbath Day, it would be a sad, sad story. The people of Israel when the command was given knew only that the Sabbath was the day on which they got food for nothing. As the days went on, they realized that the Sabbath Day might mean something else. Did you notice the words "thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter nor thy manservant, nor thy maidservant... " I can just imagine Aaron saying to his friend Joseph, "Manservant, maidservant... I got no manservant. You got a manservant?" Jacob says, "No, I got no manservant, no maidservant." Then it says, "And the alien who was within your gates." Aaron says to Jacob, "You got some gates?" He says, "I got no gates. I'm sitting here; most I got is a piece of a tent in the desert."

What wonderful hope God was giving to the people when he says, "Not your manservant or your maidservant or anybody who was within your gates. The day is going to come, you Israelites. We're on our way to the Promised Land. The day is coming that you will have menservants and maidservants, and you will have gates." I think... I think how wonderful it must have been for these former slaves to imagine, to just think ahead and say, "God's going to give us the land where we have all of these wonderful things." So God was doing another thing as well. He was giving hope.

Well, the history of it isn't so good. In fact, as soon as Joshua was dead, the society in the land of Promise was so disorganized that as far as anybody can tell, nobody began to worship on the Lord's Day. They did not respect the Lord's Day at all. A couple of other things happened, they began to fight each other and all kinds of things went wrong. And we're not even positive that as time went by when Saul and David and Solomon became kings that they really had brought back the Sabbath Day yet.

Did you ever wonder why in all of the book of Psalms the word Sabbath appears only once? And it appears in Psalms 92 only in the little preface, "A Psalm for Sabbath." So it must have been recognized, but it wasn't a very big thing in their lives. Did you know that in all of Proverbs there's not a single Proverb, anything about the Sabbath? You just... can you imagine all the Proverbs that they wrote, "Blessed is the man that does this and not this. Blessed is the person who avoids doing this." Can you imagine all the opportunities to say something about what you should and shouldn't do on the Sabbath, but there's not a word.

I think the Sabbath began to be important after the return from Babylon when Ezra and Nehemiah lead the people once again into a theocracy underneath the umbrella of the Persian rule. And Nehemiah and Ezra saw that the only way to bring the people back together was around the Temple and around worship on the Sabbath particularly. And that's what held the Jews, as they were then called, finally after the time in Babylon, that's what held the Jews together for 400 years.

But during those 400 years, the laws became more and more complicated. And as those laws became more and more complicated, they became more and more trivial, and so instead of appreciating the joy of the Sabbath Day, you find that 400 years later as we're approaching the arrival of Jesus, it was a burdensome thing what you had to do and not do on the Sabbath Day.

And Jesus, when he came, you can tell from the things that he did and didn't do and said and didn't say that he was shaking his head and saying, "How can these people be missing the point?" You know Jesus didn't start any arguments about the Sabbath Day, he just ignored it as far as the detailed rules were concerned. If you think about what he did, he healed people. You weren't supposed to heal people on the Sabbath Day. He just did it. He healed people on the Sabbath Day.

And then I think of the one time when he and his disciples were going through the grain field. They plucked the grain and they rubbed it in their hands and they got the good part and they ate it like candy, and the people said, "What are you doing? You can't do that on the Sabbath Day." And Jesus said, "The Son of Man is the Lord of the Sabbath." Now what he was saying when he said Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath, I think he was really saying, "Look, I'm in charge. I'm in charge of the way I spend my Sabbath Day."

Another time when the people bawled him out for what he did on the Sabbath, he said the very important statement, "Man is not made for the Sabbath. The Sabbath is made for man." And in so saying, he was going back to that original purpose of the Sabbath Day. Take a day off.

Now, as we Christians developed our history, we have to ask the question, "What did the earliest church do?" I'll tell you what the earliest church did. The Jews continued to worship on Saturday, their Sabbath. But did Paul make the Greeks worship on Saturday? No, at the time that worship developed, it apparently worshipped... they worshipped on Sunday, partly because it was convenient. We know only from the book of Revelation that John talks about being in the spirit on the Lord's Day, as Anna mentioned actually as she read Scripture. But the Lord's Day is arbitrarily chosen. It's arbitrarily chosen because that's the day Jesus rose from the dead. It's a day that was special to Christians.

Do we see any instructions about what to do or not do on Sunday? No, we look all through the instructions that Paul gave to Timothy on how to run a church. Is there a word about telling them anything about Sunday and Sunday rules? No, we go to Titus where he taught Titus how to run a church. Any rules? No. Paul did give some advice, however.

I'll read to you what he said on the... in the fourteenth chapter of Romans when he says:

"One man considers one day more sacred than another. Another man considers every day alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. He who regards one day as special does so to the Lord. He who eats meat eats to the Lord and gives thanks to the Lord."

And then he talks about dietary rules and says, "No dietary rules, no Sabbath Day rules, except this, do it as you do it unto the Lord."

And so as we think about that Sabbath Day rule, remember the simple rule, "Enjoy it. Let it not ever be a burden to you." And enjoy also the opportunity that it gives you to be open on the god-ward side. That's what it means to keep the day holy.

Now I won't give you any advice on what you ought to do, how to keep yourself holy, how to keep yourself open on the god-ward side. That's for you to do. That's for me to do. But what joy we have to enjoy that freedom.

Let us pray: Oh God, most high, how good you are and how good you were to those Israelites. How we thank you for what you're teaching us today in the words of 3,300 years ago! Amen.

© 2009, Bart Houseman
Central Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD 21204 410/823-6145
www.centralpc.org