Good morning everyone. This morning there are two readings. I'll start with the first from Exodus chapter 20, verses 8 to 11.
Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them. But he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
Second reading is from Matthew chapter 11. And these are the words of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Exhausted and in Need of Rest
Good morning everybody. It's nice to be back in front of the microphone. Hands up. Who generally feels exhausted most of the time.
I did kind of hope that some retired people would go. No. Now that I'm retired, I feel great all the time. But apparently that doesn't happen.
I thought maybe it was just having kids that made you tired. But no, I think it's pretty much everybody. As you get older, it's it's hard.
And so this is why we're talking about Sabbath, really. Sabbath is for you if you generally feel like this. And as we explore this idea of Sabbath today, I'm going to ask that age old question, which I think is the key to wisdom in the first step in obtaining knowledge.
What would Jesus do? It's a classic.
Sabbath in Its Jewish Context
One of the really important things about understanding what Jesus would do is who Jesus was as a Jewish man growing up in a Jewish community. And the Old Testament is a Jewish book or books.
And the 12 apostles were all Jewish. So much of the New Testament is also best understood when you understand the context, the Jewish context in which it was written.
And that's especially true when we think about the Sabbath, because the Sabbath was an extremely important part of what it means to be Jewish in the past, and for them now as well. So I want to look at how the Sabbath has been understood over time in different contexts.
So we're going to look at both the Jewish and Christian. And we're not just going to ask, what would Jesus do, but we're going to ask, what would God do? What would the apostles do? What would the Pharisees do? What would the Jewish rabbis do?
What would early Jewish Christians do, and what would current Jewish people do? Because all of that's going to give us a little bit more context and insight into what Sabbath is about, and how we can use it now and answer the question, what should I do with respect to this idea of observing the Sabbath, the day of rest?
Sabbath from Creation to Covenant
The story of the Sabbath is one of the oldest stories. On the seventh day of creation, God rested from his work and this is pre Israel. It's before the people of God were officially a thing.
God instigated this idea that one should rest from their work and set that day apart as a day of rest for all. It was a part of the creation story even before the fall.
Now, if you know about Sabbath as a modern Christian, you may well have put it in that box of Old Testament stuff that we don't need to do anymore or don't need to worry about, which to some extent is true. But the fact that God instigated it before the law existed, and that it was meant for the benefit of all people, makes me think that it's still a very valuable thing for us.
Now, in the Old Testament, the laws shaped the practices of the people of Israel. And that created a community with a really distinctive look and feel. It became a really recognizable shape about how they were perceived from the outside by other nations.
Now, as Christians, we talk about that we are free from the laws, and we wonder, what is it that creates that same recognizable shape of the people of God now? And when you read the Bible, you see that the New Testament writers talk about it being the love that we have for one another.
So our community is shaped by love and that love in the same way as the laws. The love is meant to shape how we treat each other and how we look to the outside world. They were seen as distinctive because they had these rules.
They had this day where they didn't work, but we should be seen distinctive, and it should be obvious that we love one another. And I pray that that continues to be true of us more and more.
Traditional Jewish Sabbath Practice
But Sabbath traditionally went from sundown on Friday night until sundown on Saturday night. And personally, I like quite like the flow of that instead of kind of one 124 our midnight to midnight kind of period.
You actually experienced the transition from work into rest on a Friday evening at 5:00, and it's tools down, and you have permission to kind of rest, and not necessarily in a rush to get up the next morning unless the kids have sport.
But although it's not necessarily a rule that we have to follow, Sabbath, I think represents a really appropriate love for oneself, a rest and care for your body, amongst other things, and something that God established and modeled for us. It's like amazing that God actually like not Jesus, but God modeled this thing for us at the very start of creation.
So he rested on the seventh day and set it apart. And then in Exodus, we see the Sabbath laws begin to be clarified by Moses, and we see that Sabbath observance is also a sign of the covenant between God and Israel.
It's a key element of their identity and their distinctiveness, but also it's a key part of what they are meant to do in response to God's provision and love. And then in Leviticus, numbers. In Deuteronomy, more detail is added to what that means and what people should do.
And it also adds this social justice dimension which we heard in our reading. It's not just rest for the Jewish people, it's rest for slaves and foreigners and even animals. It's also later in Exodus, applied to wheat fields and grapevines and orchards.
They need to be left fallow every seventh year, so even the earth has a Sabbath rest. Now, the first five books, those first five books of the Bible are called the Torah.
And as a whole, it presents this idea of Sabbath as a really sacred time that mirrors God's rest and expresses a sense of equality and compassion. Its purpose is to care for people and for the world.
And it's also this covenantal sign between God and Israel, and an outward demonstration of the people of God, a community that has rules that establish rest, compassion, care and justice, which were very rare in those times.
A Psalm for the Sabbath Day
The next point with Sabbath kind of comes up as you read through the entire Bible, which I'm sure you do regularly, is Psalm 92. It's entitled A Psalm for the Sabbath Day.
There's a part in it that says, the righteous will flourish like a palm tree. They will grow like a cedar of Lebanon planted in the house of the Lord. They will flourish in the courts of our God.
I do have a slide for this. Sorry. They will still bear fruit in old age. They will stay fresh and green, proclaiming the Lord is upright. He is my rock and there is no wickedness in him.
I love that image that they still bear fruit in old age. They'll stay fresh and green. And in my mind, that's because they got to rest on the Sabbath. As we go through life, kind of, we start to be beaten down and eaten away at.
And the Sabbath's purpose was to recreate us, to build us up. And so that every week we were more than we were the week before and not less. That Psalm has a really joyful sense to it.
if it was a psalm to kind of use on the Sabbath day, then it was a psalm that was joyful and where people delighted in what God had provided for them, and the way that he had sustained them, which is a great kind of element of how we worship as well.
Prophets Calling Israel Back to Sabbath
After Psalms, we look at the books of the prophets. So Isaiah and Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos, Hosea, Malachi. And in all of these books we see them calling people to come back, come back to observing the Sabbath and come back to this practice that they had started to fall away from.
They started to, kind of be involved with all the other nations, but because they weren't keeping up this important practice, their identity was starting to merge into the world and their agreement with God has started to fall apart. In Amos, it specifically mentions there are merchants who are impatient for Sabbath to end so they can start trading again.
And that really misses the point of what Sabbath is all about, this kind of sense of joy and delight that it's meant to bring. In the book of Malachi. People are profane the Sabbath by doing business on that day, and the prophet confronts the nobles of Judah for selling goods and bringing in goods on the Sabbath, reminding them that their parents actions led to disaster, which was when Israel was invaded, and that this current profanity will bring more wrath from God.
And this is a call to come back to their covenant agreement with God. God sustains them, and they were supposed to act in a way to reflect that. Malachi is the last book in the Old Testament that kind of ends there.
Between Testaments: Pharisees, Rabbis and Sabbath Laws
But what comes after that is a period called the Inter Testament period, and is 400 years where there were no prophets during that time and up until Jesus. And it's actually a really important period, because it's when the Pharisees and Sadducees, which we read about in the New Testament, when they came up in the Jewish religion, when they started to kind of be a thing.
And then there was many oral traditions and laws were formed during this time. And that really shapes the context of what we read about in the New Testament in relation to the Pharisees. So as Christians, we kind of get to this point and we move into the New Testament and the life of Jesus.
But for Jewish people, there's other collections of teachings that also speak about the Sabbath. And I think some of them are quite interesting to give us some context and a hint of kind of the tradition that was happening in those times.
There's the rabbinic literature. So in the second to sixth centuries, and the Pharisees that we read about in the New Testament, they kind of evolved into the rabbinic tradition, the rabbis, they were all about teaching and about laws.
And they had two books, the Mishnah and the Talmud, which contained those teachings of the rabbis. And there's an entire volume in the Talmud dedicated to Sabbath laws. And they define 39 different categories of work that you're not allowed to do on the Sabbath.
And they discuss beyond those kind of prohibited work. They discuss the boundaries to that. So you wouldn't want to accidentally do work on that day. So let's also not do these things.
They talk about it being a fence around the law. The law is here. We're going to build a fence around it so you don't even get close to breaking it. and so you weren't allowed to carry things or cook anything or start a fire or, it goes into great detail, but it also talks about the intent of the Sabbath and the importance of preparation.
And taking joy in Sabbath observance. So it still keeps that sense of that. It's about a day of peace and connection with God. And they also add in this element that it's a good day to study the religious laws.
Then, as we move into the kind of medieval times in the 12th century, there's a number of medieval Judaic rabbis and philosophers who wrote about the Sabbath as well. So, Rabbi Moses Ben Maimon wrote the Laws of the Sabbath in the 12th century, and they were practical laws about how to rest and how to pray, and that the Sabbath was a testimony to creation and to deliverance from Egypt.
And he has this language around having joyful meals and wearing clean clothes, and making it a time of spiritual preparation. And the language he uses is kind of the opposite of the language of mourning. So it's a language of kind of celebration and joy around the Sabbath.
And then in the 13th century, there was another writer who. Another rabbi who started to think about Sabbath as a taste of the world to come. So you can see that the sense is that that the Sabbath is something that's wonderful and amazing, something that's a joy and a delight, something that you look forward to.
And it's even this kind of taste of heaven. And they start to think about it in a little bit more of a spiritual and mystical way, as a time when you become connected with God.
Then there's more modern writings, and one in particular, which I thought was really interesting. In 1951, a guy called Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote a book called The Sabbath, and he describes the Sabbath as a cathedral in time, which is a visual metaphor that that I really like.
He was very focused on this idea that the modern obsession with space and possessions and doing things and achieving things, you know, it wasn't necessarily immoral, but it was certainly not what humans were created for. So he felt like we needed to have this cathedral in time, not a place dedicated to God.
But a time period and it didn't move. Like a cathedral doesn't move. It was set this cathedral in time. And it was a day for him, for holiness, joy, contemplation and presence with God.
And he emphasized that Sabbath wasn't that it was always for everyone, not just Jewish people, and that it's a great gift from God. He talks about the feelings that he has when he knows that Sabbath is approaching. Are like the feelings he had approaching his wedding, which his wife would have quite appreciated the comparison, but he was very excited.
The Sabbath was like the highlight of the week, this time of rest and connection with God.
Jesus, the Pharisees and the Heart of Sabbath
Let's just jump back now then, to Jesus having kind of that in mind, how it's kind of evolved in the Jewish tradition. Jesus was living in that period of Judaism where there was still a temple in Jerusalem. There were priests, and there were Pharisees, and the Pharisees were known for that really strict adherence to the law, both the written and the oral law that developed in those 400 silent years.
And at that time the Gentiles did not. Sorry. They did work continuously. They did not have a day off. There was no weekend. There was no rest day. Everyone just worked all the time. Romans had festival days where they would have a day off, but they weren't weekly and they weren't fixed.
so the Jews were very unusual in that they had this weekly succession of labor. And there were a couple of Roman authors, one whose name was juvenile, which I thought was cool. who actually mock the Jewish Sabbath, and call it strange and unproductive.
which is interesting because I think that the guy who wrote that book in 1951, he was purposefully saying, yes, it's unproductive. That's the whole point of it. This means that Jews stood out culturally, and that Sabbath observance was a visible marker of that religious community in the Roman world.
And so that's the context in which Jesus started being questioned by the Pharisees when his disciples were picking heads of grain on the Sabbath. And we read about it in Mark. So they were walking through the green fields, and they began to pick heads of green.
And the Pharisees said, why are they doing what's unlawful on the Sabbath? And Jesus said. You talk to them about a time when David and his companions raided the temple, which was unlawful on the Sabbath, and then he says, the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.
So the Son of Man is Lord, even of the Sabbath. And this idea that Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath, I think, is really important. I actually wrote this in, Annual Performance Review at work. Once in the self-evaluation second section, I wrote this Bible verse.
And, because I was really annoyed about a lot of rules and processes we had in the work, that seemed completely pointless to me. And when my boss kind of read it, he was like, what on earth are you talking about? that's the end of that story.
But Jesus been clear here that the Sabbath was created as a blessing and a benefit to humans, not just for the sake of having rules. And following the rules had become the end in itself. And the purpose of those rules, the God's intent was forgotten.
Jesus also gets into trouble for healing people on the Sabbath, as that's seen by as work by the Pharisees. And he shows them, even from their own oral tradition, that doing good on the Sabbath is lawful. And he emphasizes this idea of compassion over ritual observance, and that understanding that the true purpose of Sabbath is to bless people, to build people up, to restore people.
But we do also see that Jesus has a practice of attending the synagogue on the Sabbath and continuing to follow general Sabbath practices. So it's not that he's rejected it outright or anything like that, but he's refocusing its purpose and making sure that people understand God's intent for it, which was a day of mercy, healing and restoration.
From Sabbath Law to Rest in Christ
So for us, Sabbath is not abolished, but we talk about it being fulfilled in Christ. So through the mercy of Jesus and through his ability to understand God's intent for that day, he has fulfilled it, but not abolished it.
And we start to understand a bit more about what that means. As the Apostle Paul picks up and starts to write about the Sabbath to the early church. So and how we see the early church also respond to that in act.
And we see that they do continue to attend the synagogue on the Sabbath to preach and participate. And so those early Christian practices remain rooted in Jewish customs. But at the same time, there's Gentile converts who begin gathering on the first day of the week and marking that as the and as the resurrection of Jesus, the time to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus on the first day of the week.
So for a time, there was kind of both. There was Sabbath observance happening, and there was Sunday worship beginning to emerge alongside it. And as Paul starts writing the letters to these churches, we learn a little bit more about that.
and keep in mind that Paul was a Pharisee. He was like the head of the Pharisees. He loved the laws of the Pharisees. They were his special subject of interest. But in Romans he speaks about freedom, which is the complete opposite of what he would have been talking about as a Pharisee.
The laws, were not as important as the freedom that we have around how to find this connection with God and this restoration. He's saying it doesn't matter whether we worship on Saturday or Sunday. That's not the important part.
And in Colossians he says, let no one judge you in regard to food, drink, festivals, new moons or Sabbaths. These things are a shadow of the things to come. But the reality is Christ.
So we start to see that Sabbath is almost a symbolic thing pointing to spiritual rest in Jesus. And he warns us in Galatians about returning to those kinds of rules and observing specific days. It's pretty clear that the Gentile Christians should not be told that the Sabbath is a binding legal requirement for them.
He sees the Sabbath as fulfilled in Christ, and he shifts the focus from that literal observance of the laws to finding spiritual rest, grace, and inner renewal through Jesus. And the writer to the Hebrews develops this further into a more broader theology of rest. He talks about the Sabbath, prefiguring the ultimate rest in God in heaven.
So believers enter that rest through faith and in Christ, not through a sense of legal observance. So does develop into this idea that it's a bit of a spiritual metaphor, and this eternal rest and peace in God's presence is what we are looking forward to, rather than having a particular day of the week where we rest.
And for Christians, celebrating Jesus resurrection on the Lord's Day, which is Sunday, that's become our practice. But because we have these mentions of the Sabbath being fulfilled in Christ and the ultimate Sabbath rest in heaven, the question I guess we ask is, does still we still get to rest now? Do we? Do we get a day off?
and Sabbath isn't a law for us anymore, but it is something that still seems to have great value and I think is a really important spiritual discipline.
Growing Up with Sunday as Sabbath
So growing up we had Sunday as a day for church and rest from work, and one of the things that I really grabbed hold of was that home work was a type of work. It's right there in the name.
So I was pretty set as a pious 13 year old that homework is not going to happen on Sundays under any circumstances. I was quite firm on that, and at that time, that was the culture of church I experienced was that Sunday was both the day to worship and the day to rest. It was the Sabbath.
but that's, I guess, less common these days, as there's a lot happening on Sundays, but it's still the day that we gather to worship, which is essential.
What Would God, Moses, the Prophets, Pharisees and Jesus Do?
So back to our questions. Try and get this to a practical point. If we ask, what would God do? Well, God would rest from his work and set it apart as an example for us to follow, emphasizing that universal human need for rest and restoration.
What would Moses do? Well, Moses emphasized the importance of the Sabbath for all creatures. We all need rest, and recorded these rules to make it clear and to preserve it as part of the covenant with God and the distinctiveness of the community of believers.
The prophets, they were calling people back to observe the Sabbath as a distinctive identity of the people of God that set them apart from the world and is part of the covenant. What would the Pharisees do? Well, they would observe the Sabbath, avoiding even coming close to doing work, and they would enforce that.
And they built a fence around the law. So not only would you not break the law, but you would avoid doing anything even close, making what I feel like sounds like quite a stressful day where you'd be worried about doing something wrong constantly.
And more importantly, what would Jesus do? So Jesus would prioritize care for people and bringing healing and restoration. He continued the observance of gathering to read the scriptures and other elements of the Sabbath, but he focused on it being a blessing for for people, not for us to be servants to the rules of the Sabbath.
He fulfilled the Sabbath, in that he made eternal rest with God accessible through faith in him. He didn't follow all the rules the Pharisees imposed, but he focused on the principle, the intent that God had for it, which was the care for people in God's creation.
That's what Sabbath was intended for, our blessing and restoration. And so the early Christians started to transition into celebrating Jesus resurrection on Sundays and not following strict rules about the Sabbath, but seeing the Lord's Day as a day of restoration, spiritual rest, and renewal.
Modern Jewish Sabbath Practice
Jewish people now continue to follow the Sabbath laws quite closely. A lot of them. For some, it's very strict, to the point that they won't turn on a light switch, as that's considered work.
They prepare their food in advance for the Sabbath. They make sure they're close together so they don't have to drive. They walk to the synagogue, and then they gather in family groups to eat mostly cold food from the cook to the day before, and they talk and rest and enjoy that kind of as a blessing.
And they would make that time set apart like a cathedral in time for them. It seems to be very practical, though, a lot of the time, physical and emotional or a cultural thing and, not so much a spiritual discipline.
Creating a Sabbath Rhythm Today
But for us, I think there's a lot to consider and learn from all these different contexts. I think it's clear that we need rest. Our lives are hectic, and setting aside a time to rest is important, and I think guidelines and can help to make that happen more regularly and to make it more spiritually beneficial.
If you're asking when should we rest? Well, I think that is up to you to understand how the rhythm of your life works. And that's always been tough for our family. I'm a 9 to 5, Monday to Friday worker and my wife works on weekends sometimes and actually all the time.
Saturdays are rarely free and Sundays are always busy. And a 24 hour period as a family is basically impossible. So we're still figuring it out. But time to rest is essential for us as humans and spiritual people.
So in that sense, Sabbath has evolved for us from a religious law into a spiritual practice or discipline, and it's meant to enhance our spiritual life. So.
Throughout history, Sabbath has been or can be all of these things a delight, a physical rest for all creatures, a celebration of creation, order, a moral discipline, a spiritual time of restoration, a public witness to faith, a taste of heaven, a time of mindfulness, a time of community and thanksgiving.
A day of mercy, healing and restoration a spiritual metaphor and reminder of the rest that we will have with God in heaven, and a celebration of the resurrection of Jesus. And I think if you can find time to set aside regularly, that you can set apart for this purpose and include some of these things in that, I believe you'll find great blessing from that.
And it's different than just trying to take a break. Occasionally, the rhythm that it adds to your life and the anticipation of that time, the intentional nature of it, and knowing that it has a God ordained purpose of restoration will make it more of a joy and more of a transformational experience.
An Example of Sabbath Practice in Community
I have some friends who some Christian friends who have a Sabbath practice. So every Friday they'll prepare food and they'll have a meal on Friday nights that they invite people to. And that meal has a simple liturgical structure to it.
So their prayers at a few points. And there's a time to share what we're thankful for. And it's a very peaceful environment, and it does feel very restorative. The structure within it means that the experience has a purpose, and it stays on track and ensures there's a spiritual focus, and it doesn't just turn into hanging out.
there's lots of examples of the way you could do that, but I think, yeah, there's there's certain elements that make it Sabbath and not just having a nap.
A Personal Reflection on Finding Sabbath Time
For me personally, I don't find Sundays very restful. once church is finished, start thinking about work tomorrow morning. There's a lot to do. There's a lot happening.
So Friday at 5:00 is actually the time when I feel like I have permission to rest. There's the whole weekend ahead of me. If there's still work to do, I can stop and just do that on Sunday night or something.
There are no more urgent requests are going to come in so I can finally feel like I can rest. Saturday night is always busy. Saturday afternoon there's jobs to get done. But that time for me as an individual Friday and of work until kind of sometime on Saturday morning, I feel like I feel like I can actually rest.
And what I want to do is to have some structure in that time, which is something I'm working on to. Yeah, to give it purpose. I like the idea of having some community in that time as well, and we often think about a similar thing having people over on Friday nights to and having a simple kind of quiet meal and liturgy.
But as an introvert, in my current job, which is talking non-stop all day, every day, I generally just want to hang out by myself. So I'm still working on that. I still have plenty of work to do, but if you can find a way to have some kind of time that's regular every week to put aside where you're not working, you're not cleaning or cooking or organizing or fixing jobs in the house, and you incorporate a time of family or communal prayer or reflection.
Incorporate relaxing activities like being outdoors, some solitude, which we've talked about, and you set it apart and make it regular and start to look forward to it. I think that'll be a great blessing and you'll start to feel the benefits of that spiritual discipline.
Practical Suggestions for Sabbath as Spiritual Discipline
You could get a copy of the prayer book and use the morning prayer. You could write your own structure. In a way that helps you both rest and contemplate and connect with God.
You've got to make sure it's not a chore. You don't want it to be hard work, but you do want to have some structure in there. I think the benefits of that it is a sacrifice to put aside time to stop being productive. Stop achieving things.
That is a bit scary, but I think the benefits of it are really, really great if we can make that an intentional spiritual exercise. So the key things is a time set apart that's regular, that there's rest, there's no work, some community, some food prepared earlier or ordered perhaps no phone and no TV.
That seems to make a big difference to whether it's actually a recreating experience and some time to quietly reflect. Add some structure, add some accountability, if that helps. usually that means doing Sabbath with other people so you don't just forget about it.
I think this will make a difference to your life physically and spiritually. And I know it's challenging because we all have very busy lives with many obligations, but it might have been easier for you if I'd said that not observing the Sabbath is a terrible sin, and if you don't do it, you're going to be in big trouble.
But unfortunately it's not. But using some of those traditional Sabbath practices can focus us and can help us to shape our life and to continue to make the community of God distinctive. It can support that sense of being able to love one another because we're recreated.
We have that love from God within us and that experience of God's love. Then we can then pass on to others and shape this loving community that will be distinctive in our culture.
And Australian culture already has a big element of looking forward to the weekend. I often write Happy Friday in emails to clients. We're all looking forward to not working, but Sabbath as a spiritual discipline is more than that.
It's a sacred time that's structured to be spiritually restorative, something that recreates us so that we're more whole and more like Jesus than we were the week before. Not going backwards.
So I pray that we can all find even a small Sabbath practice that we can look forward to. That will be a great joy for us and a highlight of our week.
Rest in Jesus
Our reading from Matthew really reinforces that intent and what that rest should feel like that Jesus wants for us. So not the heavy burden of following a bunch of complex rules, but real rest for our bodies and souls.
Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
Amen.
