Moses said: Observe the Sabbath day and keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you.

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Sharon Morgan
5 years ago
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1 Moses said: Observe the Sabbath day and keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you. What does it mean to observe the Sabbath Day and keep it Holy. This is the central issue that Jesus and the Pharisees are wresting with in the gospel today. If you go back a couple of verses in Mark, you ll see the people involved in this discussion are Jesus and his disciples, the Pharisees and their disciples and John the Baptist and his disciples each of these groups of disciples practice their faith through spiritual disciplines that s where the word disciple comes from discipline. So, as disciples of Jesus, are we gathered here today as an act of discipleship? Are we here to practice the commandment to keep the Sabbath holy? In my reflection on Sabbath, commands and practice this week I picked up a book from my library called Mudhouse Sabbath by a really interesting Episcopal Priest Lauren Winner. Winner was raised in the South in the reformed Jewish tradition. She went to Colombia University at age 16 where she converted to Orthodox Judaism. This is a very brainy and serious girl. She was a very devout Orthodox Jew. She studied Aramaic so she could read Talmud every day, ate kosher and spent most of her free time with friends from the Orthodox student group. She was adopted into an Orthodox family from the upper eastside where she observed Sabbath or Shabbat every week.

2 As she studied American History, she became interested in the history of American Protestantism, because the history of our country is so entwined with the history of the church. One of the ideas she found compelling was the idea of incarnation. As someone new to the idea and someone who viewed all spiritual practices as paths to God, she was fascinated by the Christian idea that God would come to mankind through the incarnation. That God loved humankind so deeply, God wanted to experience what it was to be human, to feel human emotion and struggle, pain and joy, love and all of it. Then, sometime during her last year couple of years at Colombia she had a dream that was really a pivotal moment in her spiritual journey. So, she s not only a serious and brainy girl, she is also a girl with a crazy, wild imagination. In the dream she was kidnapped by mermaids. They took her to live down under the sea for about a year. She was trapped down there. Then one day she was rescued by a group of older men with grey beards, who were led by a younger man in his 30 s, who looked a lot like a young Daniel Day Lewis. After she woke up she was really disturbed because she knew this younger man was Jesus Christ. So here she was a devout Orthodox Jew, dreaming about being rescued by Jesus. (As an aside she was also disturbed by the idea that she was rescued by a group of men but that s a different part of the story) So she can t shake this dream and she decides to do what a lot of us do with this kind of dream, she describes it to a some of her friends. Her Jewish friends say Oh, so you were rescued by Elijah?

3 Next she asks a Christian friend who responds in that annoying way just like my psychologist sister always does with well, what do you think it means? Winner confesses she thinks it s Jesus rescuing her and the friend says, yep, that s what I thought too but I didn t want to lead you on. She puts the dream aside for a couple of years and then she moves to England to study at Cambridge, she starts going to church and then converts to Christianity. After about seven more years of discernment and study and a whole lot of other tricky things she became an Episcopal Priest. Now, I see a couple of lessons in her story. The first is that our faith journeys can be crazy and unpredictable and downright upsetting. The other really amazing gift Lauren Winner brings to our community is a deep understanding of Jewish Spiritual practices and how those practices can open up our understanding of our own Christian practices. And this is what she does in Mudhouse Sabbath, she describes several of these Jewish practices and builds connections to our Christian practices. In the chapter on Sabbath she writes about the Sabbath or Shabbat experience of woman who, has recently converted to Judaism. The woman describes the frenzy of shopping, cooking and preparing for Shabbat. Because all work is prohibited for the next 24 hours. So it s Friday night and she get off work and she has to shop for and cook everything she and her family are going to eat for the next 24 hours, and clean the house and set the table and shower. As sunset approaches, and everything falls into order, she notices the quiet calm that begins to descend on her household, and then, the peaceful slowing of time

4 as they light the candles and sit for the meal that ushers them into their observance of Shabbat. She writes Shabbat is like nothing else, time as we know it does not exist in these 24 hours, and the worries of the week soon fall away. A feeling of joy appears. The smallest object, a leaf or a spoon, shimmers in a soft light, and the heart opens. Shabbat is a meditation of unbelievable beauty. * * * What can we glean from this observance about approaching our Sabbath Day? Is it possible to set aside our business and our need to consume and produce, to slow the pace of our busy lives so that we can open our hearts to the gift and beauty of God s presence in creation? The observance of Sabbath is a function of God s commandment; the fruit of the practice is a deeper understanding of our place in God s creation. Winner claims that practice is to Judaism what belief is to Christians. This is a nice way saying that we like to stay safely all up in our heads. But it s in the practice of faith that we learn what it means to be a person of faith. It s not what we work out intellectually as much as it is what we learn from the core of our being through practice.

5 This is the practice time of year in our church calendar. We call it ordinary time. In Godly Play we call the Sundays that fall after Pentecost and lead up to Advent the great, green, growing Sundays. This is the time the church sets aside for us to grow and stretch in our faith. Sometimes that growing and stretching can be painful. I wonder if you ever experience doubts about your faith? Or, if you ve felt a moment of groundlessness entertaining the thought that all of this might mean nothing? Most of us experience ups and downs in our lives of faith there are not that many people whose faith story looks like a flat line. And coming to a place where doubts overwhelm you can be really scary and disturbing. Winner says Judaism accepts that this is a normal part of a faith journey and suggests that it s in the repeating of the practice, the maintaining of the discipline, that a doubters faith will return. What do you do when you can t feel God presence, when you re not sure what you believe? When you become indifferent to your faith life. The rabbi s suggest that you practice. This concept is explained by a midrash (a rabbinic commentary on a biblical text) that interprets a curious line in Exodus: we will do, and we will hear. At first glance this is an odd order for keeping a command, how can you do what God commands before you hear the commandment? But the midrash explains that it is in acting out God s commands, the actual doing of what God asks that we begin to hear, and understand, and then believe.

6 Get out of your head, and into your body and experience what God has to offer to you. Our bodies, our souls have the innate capacity to grasp what our minds cannot. So for us, the Jewish understanding of Sabbath reminds us that the gift of Sabbath observance is the opportunity to cease all of the craziness and business of our lives, and rest in the knowledge that all of this, that all of us, belong to a God who, as Psalm 139 says so beautifully, knows us and loves us profoundly, deeply, thoroughly, even before we are conscious of ourselves, God is there with us. Whether we know it or not, believe it or not, feel it or not God is there. For Christians the Sabbath takes on an even deeper significance. It is a day of rest and remembrance that God not only drew our ancestors out of slavery into freedom, but it is also the day that we remember the Resurrection of Jesus sets the whole world free. It s the day that we celebrate our adoption by the Holy Spirit as members of the new Body of Christ. Our Sabbath is the day we remember that we are bound to one another as the body of Christ in the world. It s our community day, our day to remember that we are the church. It is the time we set apart to help each other discovers ourselves. The time we come together as church to be strengthened, to be equipped so we can be church out in the world all week long. I think this is what Jesus means when he says: The Sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the Sabbath.

7 God commands us to keep the Sabbath but Jesus teaches the command is God s gift to humankind, it is a way for us to draw closer to the truth of who we are as children of God. It s a path for us to follow to come home to God. It s a way to remember and observe and practice the love God gives to us and wants us to extend to all, especially those who are hungry or hurting and need healing. Jesus knows the importance of keeping God s commandments with an open heart, that there is no justice without mercy. My prayer for us is that we come to this day, to this moment in our week with the intention to slow the pace of our lives and to listen for the rhythm of God s life within us and among us, so we might live our lives with open hearts, more deeply tuned to God so we can respond to the world in God s way. Winner, Lauren F. Mudhouse Sabbath: an Invitation to a Life of Spiritual Discipline. Paraclete Press, 2016.

The noted Jewish philosopher Achad

The noted Jewish philosopher Achad A MONTHLY STUDY ON THE JEWISH ROOTS OF CHRISTIANITY Limmud למוד This month s study with Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein Shabbat: A Day of Delight Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Leviticus 23:42 The