Free Time

“I can be just as good a Christian without going to church,” said my friend Connie. “Besides, that’s the only day I get to sleep in. Isn’t it supposed to be a day of rest?” “That’s right,” said Walter. “Going to church just takes too big a bite out of my week. It’s just not realistic to expect people as busy as we are to add one more thing to their schedules.”

Scott chimed in. “My kids have soccer on Sunday mornings. Surely God wants me to spend time with my family.”

“I think the whole idea of a Sabbath is pretty out-of-date in today’s society,” said Rita. “Everything is open 24 hours a day. People can pretty much choose what times they do things, including spiritual things. I get more spiritual refreshment by spending time in my garden than going to church. I don’t think it’s very spiritual to be a slave to the calendar.”

Pretty valid points, aren’t they?

People do need to take time to rest, to spend time with their families, to escape the demands of calendar and clock. And how careful are any of us about keeping a Sabbath, anyway? I often do my laundry or my grocery shopping on Sundays. Isn’t it hypocritical of me to expect other people to work for my convenience on a Sunday and then complain because they’re not in church? What’s so special about Sunday? And why do we celebrate on Sunday which is the first day of the week instead of Saturday as the Jews do? Isn’t that a signal that things have changed?

Who wants to go back to the bad old days when you couldn’t laugh or play games or read anything but the Bible on Sunday? One character in Dickens’ novel Little Dorrit remembers Sundays as “days of unserviceable bitterness and mortification,” days when “he was marched to chapel by [his] teachers three times a day morally handcuffed to another boy...” And Robert Graves wrote, “I do not love the Sabbath, the soapsuds and the starch; the troops of solemn people, who to salvation march.” Christians actually managed to outdo the Pharisees of Jesus’ day, or the orthodox Jews in our own time. How absurd it seems to us now to have rules saying you can’t carry a package, or turn on the oven, or sew on a button.

Aren’t we free of all that? Aren’t we under grace, not under the law?

Didn’t Jesus free us from Sabbath observance in the passage we just read? Shouldn’t we be able to do just anything we want?

I don’t think there’s any question about what Jesus was getting at in the part about healing on the Sabbath. Very few people argue, any more, that one shouldn’t do good on the Sabbath. It’s the Lord’s work. That’s why pastors have always been allowed to work on the Sabbath. . . Or perhaps I should say, required. And when I worked every other Sunday as a part time hospital chaplain for a year, I noticed that priests and rabbis also showed up regularly to care for their people. That’s allowed. So, OK. Pastors can work on Sunday. And doctors. And police.

So can mothers, incidentally. Nobody ever said you weren’t allowed to feed a baby on a Sunday - or change one. As a matter of fact, I’d like to point out that no mention at all is made of mothers in the original fourth

Commandment. The exact wording is, “the 7th day is a sabbath to the LORD your God; you shall not do any work - you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns.” [Ex 20:10] See? Mothers don’t get Sundays off.

Actually, fathers aren’t mentioned either. This commandment was addressed to anyone who had the freedom and authority to set their own work schedule, or that of those who worked for them. Men and women alike. At any rate, it’s always been permitted to do the Lord’s work on the Lord’s day.

The question is, what did Jesus mean when he said, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.” [Mk 2:27-28]

Remember that Jesus and the disciples were walking through a grain field, and they were hungry, so they picked some ripe grains of wheat to eat. This was classified as “harvesting”, under the law, and was therefore prohibited. Why was it ok for the disciples to do it?

A friend of mine at the Federal Reserve Bank where I used to work had a sign over her desk which said, “Lack of preparation on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.”

Why hadn’t Jesus and the twelve packed sandwiches, for goodness’ sake? They knew they were going to get hungry, why didn’t they prepare ahead? Does lack of preparation on their part constitute grounds for ignoring the law? It sure looks as though the lesson for today is that it’s ok for me to do my grocery shopping on Sunday, doesn’t it? Anything goes, if it’s convenient for you and doesn’t hurt anyone else. Is that it?