Pentecost 2B. Deuteronomy 5:12-15 “O Day of Rest & Gladness” 6/18/2006
Beaver Creek Lutheran Church, Forest City, Iowa (ELCM)
Source Material: Concordia Pulpit Resources, Vol. 13, No.3
Sermon Outline
Introduction: Every day seems to have its own personality. Fats Domino sang a song called “Blue Monday.” Monday is back-to-work or back-to-school day—back to the grind. Wednesday is called “hump day,” getting over the hump moving towards the weekend. We all know the phrase “Thank goodness it’s Friday!”
What about this day—Sunday, the day of worship, the day we gather together as God’s people? What kind of day is this? What personality, what purpose, does our Sunday observance have? Our readings center on the Sabbath, that time God commanded be kept as special day of worship. What is the Sabbath now? Why and how do we keep the Sabbath? What Kind of a Day Is the Sabbath?
I. Is the Sabbath a workday?
Seems like a silly question to ask in light of our sermon text from our Old Testament reading for today, doesn’t it? Who in their right mind would think after reading this text that the third commandment was about turning the Sabbath into a work day?
A. The Pharisees thought so in today’s Gospel.
Well, the Pharisees in our Gospel reading from Mark chapter 2 didn’t get it right. In fact, although they thought they were resting, they had turned the Sabbath from a day of rest into a day of work, perhaps even more work than the other 6 days of the week! You see, the Pharisees were the group of people who turned the 10 commandments into hundreds of different laws, many of which had to do with the Sabbath. They saw the Sabbath as a day of work, of keeping a whole host of rules and observances. To the Pharisees, by keeping these various rules about the Sabbath, by doing these works, then God would accept these works as Holy and fulfillment of the Sabbath.
With this in mind, it’s easy for us to look at what happened in our Gospel reading for this morning and understand what’s going on. It’s the Sabbath day, and Jesus and his disciples are traveling through some grain fields. As they were traveling, the disciples were starting to get hungry, so they did what you’d expect someone in their situation to do, they started to pluck some heads of grain so they could eat. Now remember, the Pharisees have all these rules and regulations about how to keep a proper Sabbath observance. According to their “rule book” they’ve come up with, plucking grain counts as “work”, thus, in their eyes, the disciples and Jesus are violating the Sabbath! In fact, they went right up to Jesus, and said “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?” (v. 24) They were outright offended when Jesus’ disciples didn’t seem to follow the rules of the Sabbath, of doing the proper work of the Sabbath.
When we look at this particular account from the Gospel reading, it’s easy for us modern day Christians to look at the Pharisee’s and really crack down hard on them. Let’s look at what they’ve done. They turned a simple commandment from God, “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy” and went so far as to decide they could take on the role of “Sabbath Police” by telling folks what they could and could not “lawfully” do on the Sabbath. They decided they knew what was and was not considered “work”. They even had laws about how many steps a person could take on the Sabbath day before it was considered “work”! We easily point out their sins of pride, arrogance, and even putting themselves and their piety and works above God by completely distorting the Word of God, clearly violating the 1st Commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me!”. Often when this Gospel text is preached on or looked at in a Bible class in the church, we hear a lot about “legalism” and how Christians are never guilty of such things. Why we’d never add on works, or rules to our Sabbath observance! We’re not Pharisees!
With that in mind, this is the part of the sermon where some very stern application of law needs to be preached, lest I fail in my duty in proclaiming the truth of God’s Word to you all this morning. Do you want to know the truth? We very easily slip into this same exact attitude that the Pharisees displayed in our Gospel reading for today when it comes to the Sabbath. There are people in church pews in our community, throughout Northern Iowa, throughout the world this morning, perhaps even the person sitting next to you, or even you yourself, who are taking the same, self-righteous, sinful attitude toward Sunday morning as the Pharisees displayed toward the Sabbath day in the Gospel reading.
It leads to having to ask the question, why did you come to church this morning? There are many, many people, even who claim or honestly believe they are “devout Christians”, who look at how many or “sincere” prayers they pray in the service as proof that they’re better Christians or have achieved a better status than others. Others distort the Word of God and buy into the worldly notion that “If I give a large amount of money this week to the church, or make the biggest contribution to the building fund, or to missions, then that makes me important and God will bless me more than someone else who can’t give as much as I can!” Others have what one of my former pastors refers to as the “Country Club Mentality” toward church. They look at the church the same way one would the local country club. They come to their fancy building, complete with the newest, state of the art video screens, sound systems, and all sorts of bells and whistles that go into it, dress up in their newest designer clothes, sit in the padded pew or chairs to listen to what they view as a motivational message to get them through another week, or give them more items to put on their “to do” list to get them into heaven or to boost their status here in their earthly life. They look at the church as a place to “network”, that is for their own gain, in the financial world, or with their career. And if someone, like a single mother of two or three kids without much of an income comes through their church doors, the members there don’t take time to talk with her, welcome her into their church, or maybe even outright discourage her from being there because they are not “our kind of people”, or “they’re too sinful to be a part of our church, we don’t do the kinds of stuff they do!”, those people are shunned. But if Businessman Bob pulls up in his Lexus one Sunday, wearing his Gucci suit and Rolex watch, wants to come to this church, he’s welcomed with open arms, invited to stay for coffee, or to go out to lunch with others in the church! I’ve even seen in churches I’ve been a part of over the years where the same people hold offices in the church not because they want to go about the task of serving their Lord and spreading the Gospel, but to gain recognition in the community or to puff up their resume. I’ve known men who have been elected as Elders of a congregation, who are fine with making coffee, unlocking doors, being in charge of ushers, show up for monthly meetings, and ring the bell each Sunday, but when it comes to the more difficult tasks, such as visiting the sick and shut in members of the congregation, having to go visit delinquent members who are no longer attending services on a regular basis and invite them to come back to the fold, or other, more serious duties, they come up with excuse after excuse about why these important roles of their offices are not fulfilled each month. To these people, church, the Sabbath, isn’t about rest, it isn’t about God anymore either, it’s about them, what can they get out of it each Sunday.
Every one of us has fallen into that trap at some point in our lives, even if it’s simply believing our church attendance, the fact we’re not Easter and Christmas Christians, makes us better than others. These things we’ve mentioned all make us think that we are “Good Christian People” by doing these works, just like the Pharisees had all of those works of the Sabbath in our Gospel reading for today! However, nothing could be more wrong! The truth is, these attitudes, these things, this checklist, is religious pride. It’s sin. It violates the third commandment. It violates the first commandment too, because we’ve put ourselves ahead of God. St. Paul calls this works-righteousness. God condemns all of our efforts to keep the Sabbath holy by our religious activities, no matter how pious or emotionally uplifting they make us feel!
As I mentioned, this poisons our relationship with God. This mindset turns the Sabbath into a workday. It makes God our boss and us the “employees”, punching a time card each Sunday. Worship becomes not what God is doing for us through the Word and Sacrament, but into our works to appease Him, no matter how pious we make it out to be. Salvation goes from being a free gift Christ won for us on the Cross while we were still sinners, something we don’t have to earn, into a “paycheck” of which we can never quite earn enough. If this is how we view the Sabbath, that our being here, by our service in the church, as something we do to appease God and earn something from Him, we will never, ever earn enough to please God or to save us!
II. The Sabbath is a “day of rest and gladness”!
Well, that covers what the Sabbath is NOT! But we still haven’t answered the question “what is the Sabbath?” The Sabbath, in the words of the title of our sermon hymn for today, is a “Day of Rest and Gladness.” You will notice that our sermon hymn was not titled “O Day of Work and Labor.” There’s a reason for that.
In order to understand that, we first need to understand the meaning of the word “Sabbath” itself. Sabbath, according to our text from Deuteronomy 5, is to be a day of rest. Now when I say “rest”, what do you think of? If you are to rest from something, what does that mean? It means you stop working. You do something that is restful, like take a nap, go fishing, go watch a Cubs game on TV, read a favorite book, go to a movie, but the point is, you’re not working anymore. The Hebrew word for “Sabbath” literally means “cessation” or “to stop.” That’s what the Israelites were being told to do on the Sabbath. They were to stop from their daily labors of the past 6 days, and rest. God wanted them to come to Him to find rest and so He could give them something. It’s the same as when it’s lunchtime out on the farm. When the farmer and the farmhands hear “dinner is served”, they have to stop working in order to receive the food and drink that’s been prepared for them. It’s the same with the spiritual food and drink that God provides for us each Sunday in the worship service. We have to stop what we’ve been doing for the week, come to His house, and then He is able to feed us through the Word and the Sacraments.
In our Old Testament reading, God commanded the Israelites to remember His mighty acts of salvation for them on the Sabbath. To “remember” meant that they gathered together to hear God’s Word, to hear what God had done to accomplish their salvation. For the Israelites, they remembered that they had been slaves in Egypt, unable to rest. But God had led them out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. They couldn’t do it on their own, God was the one who had saved them from their slavery. When the Israelites gathered together for worship on the Sabbath, they set everything else aside that would distract them from that message of salvation. The message of what God had done, was currently doing, and would do for them. The true core of keeping the Sabbath consisted of gladly coming together, hearing that saving Word of God, and learning it.
Martin Luther makes it clear in words many of you memorized in Confirmation when you learned the commandments in the Small Catechism. Luther writes of the meaning of the Third Commandment: “We should fear and love God so that we do not despise preaching and His Word, but hold it sacred and gladly hear and learn it.” Did you hear that? We come to church, we sing the hymns, we follow the flow of the liturgy, listen intently to the scripture readings and the sermon, because we hold the Word of God to be a sacred thing, and we gladly hear and learn it. Not just once or twice a year, but every week. In doing so, we are keeping that third commandment; we are keeping the Sabbath holy. We, like the Israelites of the Old Testament reading, are hearing God’s Word of what He has accomplished for our salvation!
Now God’s command to worship is not His way of ordering us around as our boss. It is the commandment of the One who with a mighty arm on the cross won salvation and rescued us from sin, death, and the power of the devil. He is the gracious giver who gives that salvation to us through the proclamation of His Word, which is what happens each time we gather for worship. Our part is to listen to that Word intently, and learn it, to believe that our sins have been forgiven, that Christ has indeed died for our sins.
To help you picture what keeping the Sabbath, what having a proper prospective of what Worship is about, think about it this way. I remember two sets of feelings toward certain days when I was young. Sunday evenings I dreaded going back to school the next day. I had to study, get up early, behave, work. That was the Pharisees’ picture of the Sabbath, but it’s not ours. The focus and foundation of worship is not our work and our doing. Our Sabbath is more like another feeling, a very different feeling, I used to have. I remember the marvelous anticipation of going to Grandma’s for Christmas—gifts and food and celebration and family. That is closer to what our worship is. The focus and foundation is God’s work and salvation and giving. We come to receive.
Conclusion: Every day of the week seems to have its own personality. Today is Sunday, sometimes you hear it referred to as the Lord’s Day. It is called the Lord’s Day because this is the day he gives and forgives and stretches out his mighty arm to put his mercy through his Holy Word in your heart and hands. Every day has its own personality; this is a day of rest and gladness. We rest and let God give to us. We are filled with gladness because he is kind and merciful. Let us keep the Sabbath in joy and rejoicing. Let us gladly hear God’s Word and learn it.
