The Discipline of Celebration
June 10, 2012
Intro:
I’d like for you to think for a moment of one of the great celebrations you have been a part of. One of the ones you look back on very fondly, that brings a smile to your face even in the remembrance of it. Take a moment or two and remember it, relive it just a little, bring that memory to the forefront of your mind and hold onto it there. Anyone willing to share?
Premise:
My premise for this morning’s sermon is simply this: celebration is God’s idea, celebration is one of the defining characteristics of the Kingdom of God, and we need to celebrate more. And I think I figured out where we have gone wrong with the whole idea of celebration: we’ve generally made it a reward centered around us, instead of a regular discipline rooted in our enjoyment of God. We’ll come back and unpack that more in a few moments.
Celebration in Scripture:
There are a lot of places we could go to study celebration in Scripture. I’ve chosen the book of Leviticus – which might surprise some of you who might not have Leviticus jump to mind when we think about Scriptures to read that tell us how to celebrate! But one chapter in particular, 23, does exactly that. It outlines the entire year, in an annual cycle, for God’s people.
Now, it is important to place this in context: this book is rooted in the very early, formative years of the nation of Israel. It is one of the books of Moses, so before the people had entered and settled the Promised Land (though parts were likely added and edited in later years). The book of Leviticus, in particular, is often seen as kind of a manual, especially for the priests, describing how the people of God were to live and to worship. Our chapter for today, 23, is in the middle of a section known as the Holiness code – here is a really simple outline (from Wikipedia):
A. Sacrifice and food (ch.17)
B. Sexual behaviour (ch.18)
C. Neighbourliness (ch.19)
D. Grave crimes (ch. 20)
E. Rules for priests (ch. 21)
F. Rules for eating sacrifices (ch.22)
G. Festivals (ch.23)
H. Rules for the tabernacle (ch.24:1-9)
I. Blasphemy (ch.24:10-23)
J. Sabbatical and Jubilee years (ch.25)
K. Exhortation to obey the law: blessing and curse (ch.26)
Does anything in that outline seem a little out of place? Rules for priests, rules for eating sacrifices, rules for the tabernacle. Missed one! Festivals. Does that seem a little odd, in the middle of a bunch of rules? Let’s have a look; God is teaching us something important here.
Leviticus 23:1-3
The Lord said to Moses, 2 Give the following instructions to the people of Israel. These are the Lord’s appointed festivals, which you are to proclaim as official days for holy assembly.
3 You have six days each week for your ordinary work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath day of complete rest, an official day for holy assembly. It is the Lord’s Sabbath day, and it must be observed wherever you live.
Now, most of us associate the idea of Sabbath with a list of things we are not allowed to do. No working, no shopping, nothing but going to church in the morning and then sitting around with our feet up on the couch all afternoon. This, my friends, is a terrible distortion of the weekly celebration which Scripture calls the Sabbath. At its root, Sabbath is about one whole day per week that is supposed to be different from the other six. It is the day to stop and enjoy: enjoy the results of the work you have done the previous 6 days and how God has blessed that, enjoy this incredible world God has created and given to us, and even more importantly to enjoy God.
When is the last time you did that? When did you last take an entire day to stop and enjoy life?
I can hear the excuses piling up. I hear them because I am saying them!
there is too much to do
that would be lazy
maybe when I retire
I have way too many responsibilities
and so on
And then I wonder why life is dry. Why the joy is lacking. Why it seems there is never enough time to actually stop and enjoy life. Why God seems quiet, or hard to hear. It is because we don’t obey God’s command to take one day each week and set it aside to enjoy life and God.
It is not about abstaining from things like work. Instead, it is about creating space to enjoy life and God. I took a day off this week – an extra one, actually – on Thursday. I worked outside in my yard and garden. Actually, I worked TOO hard outside in my yard and garden – I was exhausted! But something else happened: I put on my headphones and listened to a couple of worship CD’s, and got my hands into the dirt, and tended some young pea shoots, some potato plants, I moved a small apple tree, and so on. And my spirit worshipped the God who created all of this. I felt a longing for Sunday morning, when I would gather with you whom I love and sing songs of worship to the God whom I love, and then head out to picnic together and celebrate.
I worked hard – but it was actually worship. See the point? Sabbath is not about doing nothing, it is about doing the most important thing imaginable: creating space to enjoy life and God. And in those spaces, God speaks. God encourages. God heals. God is present to us.
Lev 23:4-
The Scripture continues, and lays out the entire year. I’ll pop a graphic up, and then just read some snippets from Lev. 23.
4 In addition to the Sabbath, these are the Lord’s appointed festivals, the official days for holy assembly that are to be celebrated at their proper times each year.
5 The Lord’s Passover begins at sundown on the fourteenth day of the first month. 6 On the next day, the fifteenth day of the month, you must begin celebrating the Festival of Unleavened Bread. This festival to the Lord continues for seven days.
9 Then the Lord said to Moses, 10 Give the following instructions to the people of Israel. When you enter the land I am giving you and you harvest its first crops, bring the priest a bundle of grain from the first cutting of your grain harvest.
15 From the day after the Sabbath—the day you bring the bundle of grain to be lifted up as a special offering—count off seven full weeks. 16 Keep counting until the day after the seventh Sabbath, fifty days later. Then present an offering of new grain to the Lord.
23 The Lord said to Moses, 24 Give the following instructions to the people of Israel. On the first day of the appointed month in early autumn, you are to observe a day of complete rest. It will be an official day for holy assembly, a day commemorated with loud blasts of a trumpet. 25 You must do no ordinary work on that day. Instead, you are to present special gifts to the Lord.
26 Then the Lord said to Moses, 27 Be careful to celebrate the Day of Atonement on the tenth day of that same month—nine days after the Festival of Trumpets.
33 And the Lord said to Moses, 34 Give the following instructions to the people of Israel. Begin celebrating the Festival of Shelters on the fifteenth day of the appointed month—five days after the Day of Atonement. This festival to the Lord will last for seven days.
37 (These are the Lord’s appointed festivals. Celebrate them each year as official days for holy assembly by presenting special gifts to the Lord—burnt offerings, grain offerings, sacrifices, and liquid offerings—each on its proper day. 38 These festivals must be observed in addition to the Lord’s regular Sabbath days, and the offerings are in addition to your personal gifts, the offerings you give to fulfill your vows, and the voluntary offerings you present to the Lord.)
39 Remember that this seven-day festival to the Lord—the Festival of Shelters—begins on the fifteenth day of the appointed month, after you have harvested all the produce of the land. The first day and the eighth day of the festival will be days of complete rest. 40 On the first day gather branches from magnificent trees—palm fronds, boughs from leafy trees, and willows that grow by the streams. Then celebrate with joy before the Lord your God for seven days. 41 You must observe this festival to the Lord for seven days every year. This is a permanent law for you, and it must be observed in the appointed month from generation to generation. 42 For seven days you must live outside in little shelters. All native-born Israelites must live in shelters. 43 This will remind each new generation of Israelites that I made their ancestors live in shelters when I rescued them from the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God.
44 So Moses gave the Israelites these instructions regarding the annual festivals of the Lord.
Celebrate them:
It would obviously be too big a study for a Sunday morning to go through each of these and try to understand them, and although that would be interesting it is not my point. My point is this: God commands His people to celebrate. That is one of the defining features of His Kingdom. The Israelites were commanded to keep celebrating – all year long, all kinds of ways, with different purposes and occasions, but the same theme: stop what you are doing, step back, and celebrate together.
I don’t know if you noticed as I read the passage, but most of those celebrations involve gift giving. Did you notice who the gifts are for? They are for God. As part of the celebration, the people are commanded to bring wonderful gifts and present them to God for God’s enjoyment. Now, generally speaking if we think more broadly about our celebrations, when gifts are involved to whom are they usually given? Aren’t they usually for the person at the center of the celebration? The birthday girl, the grandaunt, the wedding couple. If the gifts are for God, then who is the center of the celebration? It is God.
Hold that thought: but just before bringing that into today, one more thing to notice: Celebrating is a command. God commands us to celebrate. To stop – once a week, and then at specially appointed times and seasons – and celebrate. That is how important God thinks it is!
Who is it about?
Alright, back to my main point: who is at the center of the celebration? In our culture, celebrations are usually about us, it is a reward for achievement. Graduation is a great example: worked hard, finished a prescribed course of study, we have a party. And I agree – but now stop for a moment. Who should the celebration be about? How about a wedding – that is a big celebration, and again, an appropriate one. Same question: who should the celebration be about? Harvest festival: is it about how great the farmer is that he could make the ground produce grain?
No. For Christians, all of our celebrations should have God at the center. See, when we are celebrating us, ourselves, our accomplishments, the focus gets turned inward. We are rewarding ourselves for our hard work, our decisions, our accomplishments, instead of celebrating an incredibly generous God. An incredibly generous God who gave us hands and brains with which we can work. An incredibly generous God who gave us the ability to love a spouse or a child or a friend. An incredibly generous God who gave us another year on earth to enjoy all God has created for us. See? It is about God.
I think that is why it is a command. Sometimes we don’t feel like it – if life is hard we would sometimes rather go home and hide than celebrate God. But the command (assuming we are obedient) forces us to refocus on God rather than on the circumstances of life. So – celebrating is good for us! We should do it more. We need to celebrate our God, and enjoy life and God thoroughly, as He has commanded.
Now, if we are celebrating God, and not just the good things going on in our lives, then we always have the exact same reason to celebrate. Then it is not dependent on the good things going on in our lives because the reality is that our lives are not always filled with good things! If we are celebrating God, then we always have a reason to celebrate, even if our lives are struggles and challenging and difficult. We are not celebrating us, or external good things, but rather we are celebrating God.
And I think we need to do that more. We serve an amazing God, who gave us life, an incredible world, relationships, and above all God gave us His Son, so that we could be in a pure restored relationship with Him. That is worth celebrating! And not in a dull, boring, rut – but rather with enthusiasm and delight. With creativity, with a perspective that recognizes God is at the center, God is good, and God is delighting in our delight of Him.
