The Sabbath

Here is my message for Sunday. The text was Mark 2:23-3:6Mark 2:23-3:6:

On Monday as we celebrated, or observed is probably a better word, Memorial Day, I read an article by someone who was arguing that we should stop celebrating Memorial Day. His reasoning was that because we don’t really do what the holiday was set aside for, which was to go to cemeteries to honor those who had died in service to their various countries, and so because we are much more separated from those who paid the ultimate sacrifice, we should therefore stop celebrating Memorial Day. Now I will state for fairness that the author argued it should instead be combined with Veteran’s Day, since most people don’t know the difference anyways, and that we should reconsider and rethink all holidays, which could include removing others and possibly adding some new ones. But what struck me, especially in thinking of this message for today, was that he believed that because we didn’t celebrate the right way then we shouldn’t celebrate it at all. That if we just used it for barbequing and watching baseball then we’re doing it wrong and therefore shouldn’t get the day off at all.

And so maybe it’s a stretch to try and connect it to laws that get worked up about the sabbath, but it seemed very similar to me about all the rules that get made up around celebrating, or recognizing, the sabbath. And let’s be honest that all the sabbath rules we tend to think about at the time of Jesus, and how we think they’re a little crazy, and yet we can still do the same thing these days. Most of us remember when there were blue laws to keep us from doing things on Sunday. Even today you may have seen in the news that a stretch of beach in Ocean Grove, New Jersey has just been ordered to be open to public usage on Sunday mornings, which it hasn’t since the mid-19th century. And in one of the irony things, you could use the beach after noon, it was just forbidden in the morning as we’re not going to go overboard on sabbath laws because that would be crazy, right? You can have fun in the afternoon, but don’t you dare try and do it in the morning when you should be in church, although we’ll also conveniently ignore the fact that Sunday is not the sabbath. That’s still Saturday, as we worship on the first day of the week, so even at that we are violating the rules of the sabbath, and we should take that in and of itself as the ability to move beyond the rules in order to make a rest that works for us.