“Do We Only Have Nine Commandments?”
By Rev. Dayle Barrett
Sunday, September 22, 2024
Reading: Matthew 11:25-12:8
It's happened again. I had a chat with Reverend Jason earlier in July, and he let me know the first time that I was going to preach, what the series was. I said, “What is it?”
He said, “we're doing a series called Rude Praise.”
I said, “what's that?”
“I want you to pick a psalm that nobody likes and preach about it.” Your first time preaching at TEMC is going to be on something like that. So, I thought, okay, the summer's over, we're doing something new in September. Maybe he'll give me something easy this time, right? Something everyone's going to love, like, five reasons why Jesus loves you. That'll be a nice sermon series to have. Nope. When he came into my office he said, “Dale, I want you to preach on September 22.” And he said, “I'm doing a series called, Let's Get Fired.”
Nice of him.
I said, “I just got here. I kind of like it at this church.” Then I had to think about what I could possibly preach about that could get me in that kind of trouble. So, I did a bit of reminiscing, and I remembered the conversation that I had with a gentleman that attended one of the last churches I ministered to. I was standing at the back greeting people as they left the sanctuary, and this gentleman comes and shakes my hand and says, “good service today.”
I said, “thank you very much.”
He said, “But I have a question for you,” and you've always got to brace yourself when that happens. He says, “I don't understand why we worship on Sundays. I've been in the United Church for a long time. I'm come here on Sundays because I love this church, I love this congregation, I love this community, but I just don't get it. The Bible clearly says in the 10 Commandments, we are to keep the Sabbath day holy, and everybody knows that the Sabbath is a Saturday. So, what is it do?” We only have nine Commandments now. Now Lucky for me, I was on my way to another service after that, so I didn't have time to finish the conversation, but it did make me think, what's the deal with the Sabbath? There are 10 commandments clearly laid out in scripture that pretty much all Christians agree on, right? These things are still things we should be doing today. Commandment number one, “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt. You shall have no other God but me.” We can all agree on that, right. Monotheism. We just worship one God. Okay, glad we're on the same page there. Number two, “you will not make any graven images.” You will not bow to these graven images. Long story short, don't worship idols. We still in agreement. Okay, good, good.
Third one, “don't take the Lord's name in vain.” Now, I know some of us are terrible at that when we stub our toes, but we'd all agree that's not what we're supposed to do, right? Everyone knows we're not supposed to take the name of the Lord in vain. But for some reason in modern Christianity, we get to number four and go, yeah, but I was busy. I've got stuff to do. A family member had a sports game that day. There are other things going on. I was too stressed out. I just couldn't make it. I was tired. We've got five billion reasons why we don't have to keep the Sabbath day holy, and yet we wouldn't dare do that with any of the other commandments. We don't look at the one that says “Thou shalt not murder” and then say, yeah, but I didn't like him. We don't look at the one that says “Thou shalt not commit adultery” and go, yeah, but she had a really nice smile.
We don't do that because we know that the moral law we were given by God is actually forever. They're laws that are good for us. They give us a better society, and one of them, like it or not, is that we should keep the Sabbath day holy.
The thing is, though, this isn't just an issue in modern Christianity. One of the doctors of the faith, Saint Augustine had this idea, he said. The ten commandments, most of them, that we should take literally, but that one about the Sabbath day, we should take spiritually, and that we keep the Sabbath day holy by turning from servile work, by which he meant sin. Nice idea, Augustine.
However, I'm going to do something that might get me in trouble in Western Christianity. I'm going to disagree with saint Augustine, because the idea that we often use to say why we don't have to keep the Sabbath day holy comes from this. We say, well, Jesus broke the Sabbath. So, if Jesus broke the Sabbath, surely, we can. Jesus broke the Sabbath all the time. He was doing all kinds of stuff on the Sabbath that you weren't supposed to do on the Sabbath, except, he wasn't. I'm going to argue today that not once did Jesus ever break the Sabbath, and in the story we just heard, perhaps he was teaching us how to keep it.
So how does the story begin?
Jesus is in a field with his disciples on the Sabbath day. They're walking through and his disciples get hungry, so they begin to pluck the heads of the grain from the tops of the wheat. The Pharisees catch wind of this, and they warn Jesus and his disciples that they shouldn't be doing that. It's unlawful to do that on the Sabbath day.
When I first read this passage, I actually thought the Sabbath day was the least of their problems. No one ever mentions the fact that this is somebody else's field. Jesus is just traipsing through somebody's field with 12 guys from the wrong side of Galilee, and they're yanking off heads of grain like nobody's business, and everyone's worried about what day it's on.
I thought theft would have been the problem, but that's because in our culture, we have a different idea of personal property than they did under the Torah. In the last verse of Deuteronomy, 23 God says this to the people, “If you're in your neighbor's field, you can pluck the heads of the grain with your hands, but you may not take a sickle to them.” The principle is this, if you're needy, where there is abundance, you can take what you need, but don't be greedy and take more than you need, because that's when it ran into theft. In fact, farmers were told to leave a certain area of their fields unharvested so that the poor and the widow and the oppressed could go and glean from them. Okay, so good news, this is not a band of criminals. But what is happening? They're plucking these heads of grain on the Sabbath. And the Pharisees are upset because, to them, they're doing something you shouldn't be doing on this special day. This is a day that you're supposed to set aside for God and not do any work. And by their interpretation, just plucking these little heads of grain for something to eat was work.
They were trapping people. They were placing burdens on people. The law was becoming oppressive. But what if that's not what the Sabbath was ever about? What if we understand what the Sabbath is really for? We won't see it as a burden, as something that restrains us, but we'll see it as something that sets us free.
So, let's do a quick recap. Genesis, chapter one, God creates the heavens and the earth in six days, and then the seventh day, God does something different. What does God do on day seven? That's right. God rests on day seven, and then some stuff happens, and he chooses this special people called Israel. He calls them out, and then some more stuff happens. They end up in slavery in a land called Egypt. They're oppressed, they're weighed down, they're beaten, they're treated like less than human. And they're forced to work every single day of their lives for this system run by a cruel Pharaoh. They weren't able to worship God how they were supposed to, how they wanted to, how they desired to, because they were under an oppressive hand that forced them to live a life of slavery and oppression.
Then God speaks to Moses. He uses Moses to call the people out, from Israel, from Egypt, into freedom. He takes them through the wilderness, up this mountain called Sinai. Moses meets God on the mountain, and God gives him 10 Commandments. One of them goes like this. “You shall remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.” In six days, you will labour and do all your work, but on the seventh day, you will rest, not just you, but your wife and your manservant and your maidservant and the stranger that's in town, your oxen, your sheep, your donkey, and all of your cattle, everyone in your community is to rest on this day. Why? Because in six days, God created the heavens and the earth, and on the seventh day he rested. Therefore, God hallowed the seventh day and made it holy.
What's the principle here? The reason why the people of Israel were to keep the Sabbath is because it showed them who they were. They were no longer slaves to this system that Pharaoh had placed upon them. Rather, they were to imitate God. They were the image of God on the earth. They were God's chosen people, and so they were supposed to do the things that God does.
Some more stuff happens. For 40 years, they wander in the wilderness, not able to get into the promised land, this place of rest that God had given them. And so, when the next generation is ready to enter the land, they have to hear these 10 Commandments again, because these new people don't know it yet. In Deuteronomy chapter five, we see the exact same 10 Commandments given to the people of Israel, except this time there's one commandment that's different.
The fourth one, God still tells them to keep the Sabbath day holy. But this time he gives a different reason. He says, “Because you once were slaves in the land of Egypt, and God brought you out with a strong hand and with an outstretched arm, therefore you will keep the Sabbath day holy.”
So, what's the Sabbath about? If you ask me, it's about liberation.
The first time the Sabbath was given to the people of Israel, was to bring them out of slavery. The second time it was given to the people of Israel, it was to bring slavery out of the people. They'd been bound. They'd been oppressed. They'd been beaten down by this system that kept them working and working and working and unable to see the God that was with them. So, God gave them a day as a gift and said, “Take this day to understand who you are and whose you are. It is a sign between Me and you.” This is Exodus, 31 verse 13, “speak also to the children of Israel, saying, ‘Surely my Sabbaths you shall keep. For it is a sign between Me and you throughout your generations, that you may know that I am the Lord who sanctifies you.’”
What was the purpose of the Sabbath? Not to restrict the behaviour of the people of Israel, not to make sure they weren't having any fun on a Saturday. The purpose of the Sabbath was to show them who they were and whose they were. It was a day for them to remember you are not slaves to the system that is around you or to the people who are over you. You don't have to spend your whole life in cycles of work and labour and stress and fear, because I your God who created you and the world rested, and I call you my chosen people to do the same. A sign. A symbol, a seal between God and God's people, that invites you to know who you are and whose you are.
By the time we get to the prophets, we're taught that the Sabbath isn't just something we're supposed to perform, but it's something we're supposed to take pleasure in. Isaiah 58:13 says this, “if you turn away your foot from the Sabbath, from doing your pleasure on My holy day, and call the Sabbath a delight, the holy day of the Lord honorable and shall honour him, not doing your own ways, not finding your own pleasure, not speaking your own words, then you shall delight yourself in the Lord. And I will cause you to ride on the high hills of the earth and feed you with the heritage of Jacob, your father. The mouth of the Lord has spoken.”
This time of rest, this time where we put aside all of the things that the world says we're supposed to be preoccupied with, and we set this time aside for God, this is something we're called to delight in it's a source of freedom. It's saying, I know I have a lot of responsibilities. I know there are a million things for me to worry about right now. I know that I could spend my whole life being stressed to the nines, but just this day a week, I'm going to let it all be about the God who created me. I'm going to remind myself that God freed me and wants me to live in the freedom that he has been gracious to give me, and it will be my delight to keep the Sabbath day holy.
But more stuff happened. You see, as people became more wise and learned, a professional class rose up among the people who spent a lot of their time debating and deciphering the law, trying to figure out exactly how people need to keep the Sabbath day holy, exactly how they can rest, exactly how they should not be working until the very thing that was supposed to free the people bound them instead. And so, if you want to ask me what I think Jesus was doing in the Gospel we just read. I would say, like I said before, he was teaching us how to keep the Sabbath.
How do I know that? Because of how the story started, the first three words in that passage are “at this time”. Now, here's a clue for my Bible readers out there, if you're reading a passage in the gospels, and it begins with “at this time,” the author is trying to tell you something, what they're trying to tell you is, read what happened before, if you want to understand what's happening now and just before this story of Jesus and his disciples in the fields, he says this prayer, kind of out the side of his mouth that I think the Pharisees didn't like very much.
He says, “Father, I thank you that you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned and revealed them to babes.”
Now, I know we don't think very much of that line but imagine if you were a Pharisee and you heard someone praying that Jesus shows up with 12 ragamuffin looking dudes from North Galilee. They're not even from the right side of town, and he is standing in front of you, an esteemed scholar who trained in Jerusalem, of all places, who knows the Torah like the back of his hand. And he prays in front of you that he thanks God, that you have no idea who God is, and that these babes, these ruffians, are the ones that really have seen God.
Oh, they were mad. They wanted to show Jesus a thing or two, and so they followed him and tried to catch him out of place. But what was Jesus teaching us about the Sabbath. He was teaching us this, that when we come to God, no matter what we're bearing, no matter what we have with us, when we decide to take a day aside and say, it's not about all that stuff in the world, it's about my relationship with you. When we decide that we trust God with all the things that can burden us and weigh us down, and we choose to take a day to live in God's rest, then God grants us that rest. He says, “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart. My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
Augustine wasn't all the way wrong. There is a spiritual sense in which we take the Sabbath. But it's that Jesus is our place of rest, that he who died and rose from the dead is the place we come to feel the comfort and the peace that comes only from God, and the way we set a day aside to do that is we choose his day of resurrection. We remember the day that He rose from the dead, the first day of the week. And we gather together as God's people. We come here and we meet Jesus, because he said, if two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in their midst.
This is what I want to tell you today, my friends. Maybe you came with a shoulder full of burdens. Maybe you're physically tired because you're always working, even when you go from here, you've got a ton of emails to reply to, phone calls to make, studies to do, things you're concerned about with the next working day. Maybe you're emotionally exhausted because you spend your whole life trying to convince others that everything's okay when you know it's really not. You labour, you're heavy laden and you're weary. I want you to know that Jesus is here today in the presence of his people, and he invites you to come to him with all that in you so that he can give you rest.
Take his yoke upon you, for his yoke is easy and his burden is light, and that, my friends, is how we can keep the Sabbath day holy. Thanks be to God. Amen.