Not My Job

Not My Job

Not My Job
a sermon by Rev. J. Christy Ramsey

DOWNLOAD A LIVE RECORDING

Audio from worship at the 10 AM Worship Service January 26, 2025
for ZOOM with Lee Vining Presbyterian Church

edited from a flawless transcription made by edigitaltranscriptions all errors are mine.

  John 2:1-11

 Sermons also available free on iTunes

Should the church be run like a business?  People tell me that, throughout my career in the ministry in 40 years, and they come in, you know, church has to be run like a business.  And they usually don’t know that I have a business administration degree from Grove City College with cum laude.  So they think this is news to me, God bless ‘em.

And I was wondering, you know, when I’m in a more festive mood, with is almost always, I admit it is a problem, I ask them, well, if church is run like a business, what’s its product?  I mean, what is it selling?  I mean, that’s basic business that you know your product.  What’s a product?  You know, it gives them pause because, I mean, you all think of that, I ain’t going to put you on the spot because, you know, it’s like being in the front row at a comedy club, you know.  You know you’re going to get picked on if there’s only, like, six of you.  So don’t answer out.  I’m not putting you on the spot.

But what would you say is the church’s business?  What’s the product?  What are we making?  Oh, you’re going to – you’re going to – you’re, yeah, are we making Christians.  That’s one of the A-plus answers.  I would go A-plus on Christians, disciples, yeah.  You know, others would say, you know, Laurie, others would say, well, you’re making worship services.  You know, some people say that.  Or, well, you’ve got to maintain the building, you know.  Or some people would say, you know, you’re feeding the hungry, and Matthew 25, and the thirsty, and you’re doing that stuff.  And I don’t know if you’d get agreement from everyone in a room about what the product is for the church, if it was run like a business.

And then it gets even more complicated because then you’ve got to say, okay, we’ve got a product, maybe.  You would say, well, who’s our customer?  What’s our target audience?  Who are we working for?  And I’m sure Laurie knows the answer.  It’s always God.  God’s always the correct answer in any children’s message or sermon.

Well, some people say God’s the customer.  Okay.  Other people would say, well, the people who pay the bills.  You’ve got to keep them happy.  You’ve got to keep the people happy who’re paying the bills or you don’t have a church.  They’re the customer.  Well, sure, God, but you know, oh, I’ve got to keep the money folks happy.  Some people would say that.  Some people say, well, it’s the church board.  I mean, I don’t know if anybody would say that.  Maybe one or two would say you’ve got to go with the – or maybe a couple would say the pastor has to be happy.  That’s rare, but that could happen.  I’m sure that’s happened.  You know, who are you trying to please?  Who are you working for?  Who’s the customer?  That’s a difficult one.

What if they went beyond that and said, okay, well, now, who owns the business?  You know?  Who?  Is it a nonprofit?  That’s problematic in a church, if you don’t have profits.  If you do, well, what’s the business?  What is that customer?  Who owns it?  Who is in charge of it?  I mean, the Presbyterians have gone all the way up to the Supreme Court about who owns the church.  And the Supreme Court, way back, oh, ‘70s, said, well, that PCUSA owns the church, but please make it more clear in your constitution.  So we’ve been – we struggle with that in reality of who owns the business of the business?  That’s important, too.

Well, you know, we shouldn’t be surprised that we have these questions and answers, and that we can’t get consensus and move around because even Jesus Christ had trouble, as we saw here, skipping over the dynamic of why you’re calling your mother “women,” that doesn’t sound good to us English-speaking ears that you go “woman.”  But maybe it’s better in the Aramaic, I’m hoping.  But Jesus had some troubles about his jobs and where he was doing and what he was doing it for.  And, you know, a mother, the mother, you know, you don’t want your mother coming up to where you work and saying you’re not good at your job.  I mean, that’s not good.  That’s a bad day right there.

And, you know, and I don’t know, you know, can you imagine, I don’t know if we can be Jesus, but you’ve got these world-changing powers.  You want to change the world for good.  You want to help people, you want to get love all around, forgiveness and all that, and your mom wants you to solve the lack of wine at a three-day blowout party for people you don’t know.  You know, Jesus Christ is fully human.  I can see him being a little upset about that one.  And not just, you know, hey, bring a bottle of wine.  I mean, come on, it’s a party, bring the wine, what are you?  You know, we’re talking multiple gallons of water turning to wine.  We’re talking 20 to 30, what is it, six times 20, help me out.  It’s over 100 gallons of wine.  That’s a lot of wine.  Of course, you know, Mary didn’t say, hey, go get 100 gallons.

Is that Jesus’ job?  I don’t know.  We struggle with that in the church.  We’re struggling right now about what is the church’s job.  I mean, folks will say let’s get politics out of the church, doo to doo to doo, you know, they want to say that.  And you know what, I’ve noticed over the years, I mean, I’ve been around a little bit, politics just kept getting wider and wider and wider.  You know?  It used to be you could go buy craft supplies and not worry about politics.  Now you’ve got to say, well, that one’s Republican and that one’s Democrat.  Politics are just freaking everywhere.  You know, and people wear them, you know, as part of their clothing, their politics.  It is politics, politics, politics, politics everywhere.  And it affects – and it’s not just politics.

Politics affects our lives, affects our health, affects our neighbors, affects ourselves, affects our family.  You know, we say, well, it’s just politics.  Well, no, man, it’s morality.  It’s reality.  It’s how we live.  It’s how we structure society.  It’s how we help one another.  And even now we saw right now that a bishop, you know, we don’t have bishops.  I don’t know.  Sometimes that’s good; sometimes it’s bad.  I don’t know.  But we don’t have bishops.  But that’s like, you know, up there, you know, big hat, in charge of church and stuff.  And the bishop in the church, okay, that’s kind of a big thing, bishop in the church there actually makes it a cathedral when the bishop’s in the church.  So the bishop in the cathedral saying a sermon, you know, the bishop in the cathedral in a sermon, you think that’s religious.

But some people say, oh, no, that’s politics.  They can’t say this.  They can’t say that.  They’ve got this to do.  They’ve got this to do.  They’ve got to be in this box.  They can’t be this.  And oh, my gosh, I want to tell you about how the bishop in the cathedral preaching a sermon should be.  I say get the politics out of the church.  I say get the politics out of my life.  My life belongs to Jesus Christ.  Don’t be telling me I can’t follow Jesus Christ because you don’t like the politics.  And don’t be coming into a cathedral and telling the bishop what he can say in their own pulpit.  No.

We have trouble with jobs, with what is a job.  I mean, even today we have trouble.  You know, we say we might get upset about oh, my gosh, he should have said into this.  Oh, my gosh, that’s not her job.  Oh, she shouldn’t have made the wine.  I mean, I’m sure that there were some people, well, Jesus, you know, you shouldn’t be making that much wine for drunk people.  I mean, that is a reasonable criticism.  I mean, Laurie can help me out here, but I’m thinking that’s enabling.  I mean, that’s like master-class enabling right there.  These drunk people need more wine.  I mean, the steward flat-out said they were already drunk; you know?  And why do drunk people need more wine, I don’t know.  And people could criticize that, and I don’t even think that would be political.

But what is the job of the church?  It’s something we’re going to be struggling with, I’ll tell you.  We’re going to be struggling with that.  And, you know, between ministers, and it’s especially a struggle because, you know, when you get in a ministry you can sort of say, good, the ministry will figure that out; you know.  But when it’s just y’all, you know, you’ve got to figure out what is the church.  Does the church do this?  Does the church do that?  Is that our job?  Should we have services even though none of us lives in Lee Vining and we’ve got a lot of weather?  Should we do that?  I mean, it’d be really nice to have a minister decide that.  But you don’t, so you’ve got to decide that, oh, you know.  So what do you do?

Now, let me change gears a little bit.  Palisades Fire.  Have you heard of it?  Palisades Fire.  Now, I don’t know it you know about Palisades.  Kind of a rich people place.  But, you know, they have a severe homeless problem.  They’ve got a lot of folks there that are hungry, don’t have housing, don’t have food.  But the disaster is a disaster.  I can’t imagine losing everything you own.  I can’t imagine that.  There’s been loss of life in the double digits, I think it’s up to 23 or so.  Whole neighborhoods washed out.  I mean, one of the Presbyterian execs lost her home down there, one of my friends, Wendy.  I can’t imagine that.  Everything, you look around, everything gone.

Another one of the ministers at the Palisades church, he had time to run down – you’ve got to read it.  It’s on the PCUSA website, that Palisades fire, and was in the Presbyterian newsletter last week.  But the pastor had enough time to run from the church down to the elementary school, grab his kids, because there was just cars everywhere, nothing was moving.  There’s parents trying to get their kids.  Had enough time to go down, get his kids, take them back out to the car, and flee the church.  He didn’t take anything out of his office, and the church burned to the ground.  I can’t imagine, what a tragedy.  I want to say that, that it’s awful, it’s a tragedy, it’s a horrible thing.  Suffering is real.  And that’s one of the things the Church knows.

But I do want to tell you about jobs.  When we’re talking about jobs, for at least a little while, for at least a couple weeks, there’s no hungry person in the Palisades.  There’s no one hungry.  There is no hunger because World Food Kitchen rolled in there with the food trucks.  They rolled in, and they said anyone that’s hungry, come and eat.  And we’re not checking your ID.  We’re not seeing where you’re living.  If you’re hungry, come and eat.  We’ve got food.  Come on down.  And good food, too.  And they got stores there that are open, and they’ve got brand new stuff for babies, and clothes, and if you lost something, come on in and don’t pay.  There’s no charge.  The donations are there, and they’re here for you to pick up, and God bless.

So we can do that.  It takes a fire.  It takes a disaster.  It takes a horrible thing.  Now, in Mary’s case the disaster was we ran out of wine at a social event.  Okay, a little bit of a disaster.  But the disaster that we have here that wiped out entire communities was enough to say, oh, yeah, we can feed every person and not charge them.  We can clothe the naked and not charge them.  We can do that.  So when you say to me, oh, well, we can’t do it, you know, we’ve got to run like a business, and we’ve got to have profit and loss, so we’ve got to have [indiscernible] and negative, yeah, I’d say, well, yeah, I understand that, I mean, I did get an A in accounting.  But for at least a couple weeks we did it.  We could do it.

We could stop making billionaires and now trillionaires.  We’ve got a couple people on the way to trillionaire, hoo-hoo.  We could quit making them.  And we can start making people that are fed and housed.  We can do it.  I don’t want a fire to wipe out a whole community to figure out how we can be Christians and make sure everyone’s got fed, clothing, and housing.  I’d rather not.  I’d rather we just decided, yeah, this is something we could do.  And you know, it’s not just the church’s job.  I mean, we say, well, the church ought to do that.  They should have a lot of money and social things and all this.  You know, Matthew 25, where it talks about the naked, clothing the naked and feeding the hungry and visiting the imprisoned and all the things that folks say, oh, I don’t know if we can afford all that.

It doesn’t say the church is going to be judged by that.  It doesn’t say that individuals are going to be judged by that.  We would like it to, oh, my gosh, that’d be so much easier.  You know, oh, I’ve done good.  I’m okay.  I give things.  I’m helpful.  No.  It says the nations will be judged.  The nations of the world line up and are judged.  Our Bible says, our Savior says, our gospel good news says right there in black-and-white, that the nations will be judged by how they take care of one another.  So if you take comfort like I do, well, I’m a good person, I don’t hurt anybody, I’m nice, uh-oh.  The nations are judged by that.  

Well, that’s pretty heavy, Christy.  My gosh.  No wonder they only let you in once a month.  Hey, let’s talk about the servants.  Did you notice the servants?  It’s hard.  They don’t have any speaking parts.  I mean, that is just plain unfair right there.  Because you look at the Scripture, the servants are doing all the work.  They’re going, they get ordered over here, I mean, there’s this Mary person.  Who’s she?  She’s not part of the household.  Mary has to go over here, and he goes, talk to the stranger; you know?

And here’s the thing, you know, if I’m a servant, you know, and I’m thinking this, I’m not saying it out loud because servant, you know.  But I’m thinking, you know, we’d have the wine if this guy didn’t bring all his big burly Galilean fishermen to drink all the wine.  You know, I’m thinking that was an issue.  I don’t think they planned for that.  You know, his whole entourage comes, I mean, I’m thinking, those are some wine drinkers there, buddy.  You know?  And so makes sense to talk to this guy, do what this guy says.  And they’re saying, oh, okay, I guess we’re servants.  I guess we do that.

And he goes, go fill up those big old honkin’ jars.  I mean, you know, it’s like 55-gallon drums, if you can imagine.  Not quite that big, but, you know, roll them around and fill them up with water.  I mean, who knows where that water is?  Could have been, you know, a couple blocks away; you know?  Lot of work there.  They do all that.  And they’re thinking, this guy’s nuts.  Why is he giving water?  We’re out of wine.  We should be going around and getting some wine, and now he’s having us do this busywork and then go do that.  And then they go, they bring that.  And then Jesus says, “Go take the water to the chief steward to inspect for wine.”  They go, what craziness is this?  They’re going to yell at us.  This is ridiculous.  Why are we bothering the stewards?  I don’t want to get involved.

And the guy, the steward said, you know, this is really good wine.  And, you know, the servants are going, “Crazy white people,” you know.  What?  What?  We put that in there.  It’s water.  We know.  And they go, oh, yes, it’s great wine.  And they tell one another, you know, should we say something?  Should we tell them?  No, we shouldn’t say anything.  I don’t want to say anything.  We’ll get along just fine.  And then says the disciples believe.  I think the servants just thought he was crazy, crazy folks.  But, you know, where are the servants?  You know?  You know, he says, go do whatever Christ told you to do.  Even though it’s crazy.  Even though it can’t possibly work.  Even though we know better.  Even though we know it’s going to fail terribly.  Go ahead and do it anyway.  Go ahead and do it anyway.

What if Jesus says go over to Palisades and feed all the hungry over there?  Oh, that’s not going to work.  I can’t possibly do that.  That’s ridiculous.  Go do it anyway.  That’s where we’re at.  You know, we’re not around, sitting around saying, oh, let me think about what Jesus should be doing, what the job of the church is, and where are we going, and what’s our profit and loss, and what’s our five-year plan?  What’s our objectives, you know, specific measurable attainable and time-related.  What should we do?  It’s to follow Jesus and do whatever he tells you.  That’s our job.  That’s our job.  If we do that, Jesus will be revealed, and people will believe.  Amen.

Not My Job

Thorns and Crosses

Crosses and Thorns

Crosses and Thorns
a sermon homily by Rev. J. Christy Ramsey

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Audio from worship at the 10 AM Worship Service September 15, 2024
at St. Peters Episcopal Church at Carson City, Nevada

edited from a flawless transcription made by edigitaltranscriptions all errors are mine.

  Mark 8:27-38

 Sermons also available free on iTunes

This is a homily, not a sermon.  Father Mike was very emphatic on that fact.  You may not know the difference.  Michael was concerned that I did not, that somehow, three years of seminary, that didn’t come up.  But for the rest of you, let me see how I can explain this.  A sermon would be a segment on “60 Minutes.”  You know?  And a homily would be a Public Service Announcement.  The more you know.  For those of you under 50, thanks for coming.  A sermon would be a YouTube video by MrBeast, and a homily would be a TikTok video.  I worked all night on that.  Okay.

Another thing that people get confused is between thorns and crosses.  Now, thorns we find in 1 Corinthians 12, and of course crosses that we bear are here in Mark 8.  People get those confused.  They think a thorn is a cross, and that’s not true.

Now, a thorn in the side of Paul is something annoying.  It could be a physical malady, some kind of sickness, some kind of chronic thing.  Or it could be a person, you know who you are, don’t look around.  Could be that, too.  But something that annoys you, that puts you off, that reminds you that you are not in control of everything, and basically you’re not God, and that there’s other things going on than you.  For those that aren’t God people here, it’s not – the world does not revolve around you.  That’s a thorn.  Something annoying, something painful, something that puts you off – you, you, you, you, you – that tries to remind you you’re not all that.  That’s a thorn.

A cross, totally different.  Have you ever seen those ads that say whatever, and then it goes “Serious inquiries only”?  That’s what cross says.  Cross is serious inquiries only.  It’s not about suffering.  It’s not about pain.  It’s not about discomfort.  This is not that idea of the cross.  That is not what Christianity, Jesus Christ is about healing, reconciliation.  It’s about making the world better, about redeeming creation on God.  It is not about the pain and the suffering and hard.  That’s a thorn.

If you see what I mean, if you go with the cross and the pain, you’re still about you, you, you, my pain, my upset, oh, oh, oh.  That’s not a cross.  And also notice that the cross is something you pick up.  It’s not something that picks up you.  Something that you choose.  It’s a vocation, a choice, something that you want, you’ve decided to do.  There’s going to be troubles, there’s going to be suffering, it’s going to be long term, sure.  But it’s not a thorn.  It’s not something that’s done to you.  It’s something you do for others.  And there’s a test.  If it’s about you and yourself, it’s a thorn.  If it’s about others and creation, the community, and the kingdom of God, then it’s a cross.

Elizabeth Johnson said it this way: 

Jesus speaks of losing our lives for his sake and for the sake of the gospel.  Taking up a cross means being willing to suffer the consequences of following Jesus faithfully, whatever those consequences might be.  It means putting Jesus’s priorities and purposes ahead of our own comfort or security.  It means being willing to lose our lives by spending them for others using our time, resources, gifts, and energy so that others may experience God’s love made known in Jesus Christ.  Elizabeth Johnson.

Hamilton City, California.  Jose has a thorn.  Every time it rained, being fire chief, he got out, out of his bed, and went out to the levee because it was a hundred years old, and every rain threatened to undermine it and flood the town.  And he was out there stacking the sandbags, hoping that this wouldn’t be the time that the levee failed.  That’s a thorn.  That’s a pain.  That’s annoyance.  That’s interruption to your life.  That’s a reminder that you are not in control.  Thorn, thorn, thorn, thorn, thorn, all the way down.

Jose decided to stop the flooding.  He got the Army Corps of Engineers out there.  He got the project done, how to restore the wetlands, how to make a floodplain so that it could flood without destroying the town.  He had all this done.  It only took him 25 years.  Hundreds of tamales to raise money to hire the experts that they needed to get the  environment.  It only took him multiple cross-country trips on the red-eye there and back to save a hotel room night, to lobby it, to go every year to try to get and do the budget.  It only took him 25 years of working so closely with others, he actually married the one that was working on it.  And I don’t know, I think their time together might have been reduced.  25 years.

He was asked, other people come and say – because it was finally done.  Finally, after 25 years, it was done.  The floodplain was restored.  The wetlands were there.  The river was tamed again, and the levee was gone from a hundred years ago, and the town was protected.  And from all over people came and said, “Jose, how did you do it?”  And he goes, “Are you sure?  Are you sure you want to know?  Because I tell you, 25 years ago, if someone had told me what it would take to get this done, I don’t know if I would do it.”  That’s cross.  That’s vocation.  That’s giving yourself, your time, your life for others, for the restoration of creation, for building community and healing.  That’s taking up the cross.  Throwing another sandbag on the riverbank is a thorn.  But now, when the rains come, Jose and the rest of town can turn over and go back to sleep.  That’s what happens when you bear a cross.

Now, this suffering isn’t suffering for pain or for heartache or anything like that.  It’s suffering of the consequences of restoring creation, of giving yourself and your life for others.  September 11th was about a year or two after Mr. Rogers did his final show of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.  He didn’t have a farewell tour, a closing finale or anything.  It’s just another day, and he didn’t want to upset the children.  And he just left it, and lights were turned off, and the set torn down and delivered to the Children’s Museum in Pittsburgh.

But then came 9/11, and the country was at a loss.  And Mister Rogers came back to TV with a PSA.  Even in the aftermath of 9/11, Mister Rogers maintained his fidelity to his principles that drove him:  Love your neighbor and love yourself.  Here’s the inspiring words of Mister Rogers after September 11th:  “No matter what our particular job, especially in our world today, we are all called to be tikkun olam, repairers of creation.  Thank you for whatever you do, wherever you are, to bring joy and light and hope and faith and pardon and love to your neighborhood and to yourself.

Crosses and Thorns

Are Dreams Real?

from Matthew 1:18-25

(Click to listen to this message.)Dreams are the only time I get to be with my brother Ric. He will have been gone 30 years ago next month. Every now and then, he visits me in my dreams. He is real then. The fights are long past and only the familiar remains. I can feel his love and his kindness and wake up comforted.

Are dreams real? Did Ric really come to visit me? Or was it just a dream? How do we know something is real? Havelock Ellis points out that “Dreams are real while they last, can we say more of life?” As the riddle about a tree falling in a deserted forest, that asks if there is a sound if there is no one there to hear it points out, reality is biased toward what is observed. If no one experiences an event…did it happen, and how many witnesses does it take to make a reality? Some of you are way ahead of me, we have recording devices and scientific methods to determine what happens even without observations. Sure. I’m a big fan of tech and science…but somewhere along a line someone will observe the recording, publish the theory, open the box with the cat. Until that happens…

Can your outlook, your thinking, your perception change reality? Well it depends. There is a thought experiment proposed by David Foster Wallace in a commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005, we have video with a bit of it with added graphics here…

 << Video since removed >>>

What is your default dream setting? Joseph had a dream. Marry Mary, settle down in his hometown, do some carpentry, raise a family. Maybe some volunteer work. Go to Jerusalem for Passover. A nice quiet respectable life. But Mary turns up pregnant. There can only be one explanation, and he wasn’t the answer to that question. There was only one thing to do, return the pregnant girl and get a new one.

Then he had a dream. Now here is a tough Bible question. At least for us sophisticated post-industrial scientific American Christians…did an angel REALLY visit Joseph? If you say “Yes!” then dreams are real. For the angel came to Joseph in a dream. I know a mystery wrapped in an enigma tied with a riddle.

Today Dreams are dismissed. Even in the Hebrew Scriptures, Joseph of the Old Testament, Joseph brothers call him “The Dreamer” because he had dreams of being more powerful than his older brothers…yet by faithfulness and God’s grace he lived into his dream. Martin Luther King told the nation about his dream and moved a nation to greater justice and equality. Nelson Mandela dreamed of a South Africa that was at peace with itself. In a Long Walk to Freedom, wrote “A Winner is a Dreamer Who Never Gives Up.” He lived his dream and it took decades in prison for reality to catch up his dream.

A dream changed Joseph default setting of pregnant woman needs to be quietly shunned to one of most honored of women, a favor instead of a curse, a joy instead of sorrow. Private shame to Savior of the world.

You can choose your dream now and every day. How? Start with the Lord’s Prayer, you know the part that goes “Thy kingdom come…” Mediate, consider, and if you dare quietly pray… Thy dream come, for kingdom of God is more like the dream God has for humanity than an area of land of God’s control. God’s is more interested in how much area he has in your hearts and minds…your dreams.

I submit to you that the measure of reality of Ric visiting me in a dream, the reality of who you are standing in line with at the checkout, the reality of an angel in a dream thousands of years ago, is measured not by ectoplasm detectors, NSA records of metadata, nor biblical archeology and scholarship. The measure of whether something is real, is the effect that it has. If I am brought peace and feel love when Ric visits in dream and am patient and kind to others in turn, that’s real. If I can build up community instead of tear down individuals in a checkout line that’s real. If angel changes man who quietly puts away a pregnant fiancee in need of love and care into one who sacrifices to make scandalous respectable, protecting the vulnerable, and caring for a child not your own…it doesn’t get any realer than that.

God’s dream about humanity is already real in Jesus, we just have to choose to live it.

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Good Sabbath

Luke 13:10-17 Christ Presbyterian, Garnerville

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“Good Sabbath” is a greeting among the Jews. If you could design a perfect sabbath day what would it be? Brunch? Going to church? Sunday comics? A good nap? Football? Being with family? Sleeping in until noon?

We struggle with what a Good Sabbath is. Sunday is now the second most popular shopping day of the week. I used to go out with a group of church folks to dinner every Sunday after worship and considered all the people working to keep the restaurant open, including our members. What is a good Sabbath, taking off work to go to church and then having servants work to bring lunch?

Struggling over what a Good Sabbath means is as old as creation. Exodus 20:11 roots the Sabbath in creation, in recording the 10 commandments,

For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.

Before the revolutionary war in this county, by law Sabbath would include church attendance. Activities from car sales to sales of alcohol to shuffleboard have been excluded from the Sabbath day’s activities in the effort for a Good Sabbath. In 1961 the Supreme Court described a Good Sabbath when it upheld mandatory closing laws:

“However, the State’s purpose is not merely to provide a one-day-in- seven work stoppage. In addition to this, the State seeks to set one day apart, (apart) from all others as a day of rest, repose, recreation and tranquility - a day (on) which all members of the family and (all the) community have the opportunity to spend and enjoy together, a day on which there exists relative quiet and (a) disassociation from the everyday intensity of commercial activities, a day on which people may visit friends and visit relatives, who are not available during normal working days.”

- U.S. Supreme Court McGOWAN v. MARYLAND, 366 U.S. 420 (1961)

Creation as rest is where our friendly, neighborhood Pharisee gets his idea of what a Good Sabbath is. Note it isn’t just about one day of rest but also specifies six days for work. We’re closed today, come back tomorrow. The Pharisee is reminding people of this traditional and Biblical definition. He makes a good point. While it is allowed to save someone’s life or care for an urgent medical need, in this case, there is no reason to break the Sabbath, she can wait until tomorrow if she has survived these many years.

Pharisee = Presbyterian

Now I have a public service announcement. When you are studying scripture that includes a Pharisee, read it at least once with yourself as the Pharisee. This will be helpful because the good Pharisees back then weren’t too far from the place in society and religion that good Presbyterians hold today. They were the community leaders, the respectable people, the folks you wanted to be a reference for you. They were sincerely religious and upset about how secular culture had become. And finally, if you needed any more evidence of how they are our spiritual companions, they liked their religion done decently and in order.

If you can’t quite put yourself in the story as a Pharisee, then at least, don’t dismiss them as foolish folk. Consider them instead as good, sincere, intelligent, and devout religious folk of their time. You would like them as neighbors and friends. Our friend here is faithfully quoting the practical and traditional view of Sabbath, that had been followed with good effect for centuries, that needs no redefining: if something can wait until after the Sabbath, then it must wait. And the unasked healing of a decades long, non-life threatening condition, could certainly wait another day.

In deference to our spiritual forebearer, lets wait a bit before considering Jesus’ response to the Pharisee.

Free to Rest

What is a good sabbath for a slave? A slave never rests. Only free men and women get to take a day off. In fact in Deuteronomy 5’s listing of the 10 commandments the freedom to rest is cited as the reason behind a good Sabbath. After almost the same wording about resting on the Sabbath as Exodus 20, Deuteronomy has a different final verse as the reason for the command to rest, rooted not in creation but in salvation, freedom, liberation:

Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day.

- Deuteronomy 5:15

Jesus points us that it is allowable even expected to untie an animal on the Sabbath to lead it to food, water, and shelter. Now strictly speaking, untying is work and not allowed, but an exception is made so an animal doesn’t have to suffer. Jesus argues from the lesser to the greater, can’t we treat this daughter of Abraham, this child of God, as well as we do an animal? Releasing her from Satan’s bonds must be allowed, even celebrated on the Sabbath, when we remember that God released us from the bondage of our oppressors.

The Sabbath is not just rest but freedom for all people even for animals! Both Deuteronomy and Exodus state that no work is done by human or beast, by slave or free, by Jew or foreigner. The sabbath is a celebration of freedom not the banning of activity, but the declaration that, at least for today, no one works as a slave to another.

We Don’t Have to Rest, We Get To

We dig under the rule and find the reason, not just we need to rest because God did, but that we can rest because of what God did. God has provided a good creation for us, God has led us into freedom. My favorite Psalm verse: “It is vain to rise up and early and go late to bed, eating the bread of anxious toil, for the Lord provides for his beloved while they sleep.” (Psalm 127:2) combines the idea of freedom from work and rest in the provision of God.

We easily slip into the idea that faith is following rules, forgetting where the rules are rooted. When one of my children would ask me in a whining tone if they HAVE TO do something, like go on a family trip, or to church service, or sports or music practice, or anything requiring effort; I tell them: no you don’t HAVE TO, you GET TO. You have a family to love and spend time with, we have the time, money and interest to take a trip, you have freedom of religion and a God who welcomes you in worship, you have opportunity to learn in school, or play a sport or learn music, you GET TO, not HAVE to. You GET TO have a sabbath because you are free from toil, from oppression, from having to work constantly. You GET TO rest. It isn’t about the burden of following rules, but the reality of God’s grace that frees us from slavery. If the sabbath is a job, you’re doing it wrong, in fact backwards. Sabbath isn’t an exchange of chains.

Approach life and faith as Jesus shows us here, following the will of God to make people free, to lift them out of bondage of working like a slave for others, even if that other is religious rules and rites that bind instead of free people. May we all be freed from our own and others bondage of body and spirit. Enjoy the creation that our Good God made and blessed as good.

All Ends But Love

1 Corinthians 13 by wordle.net Love is a mystery wrapped in an enigma tied with a riddle.

Here is the audio portion of the message Only Love Does Not End recorded on Sunday, Feburary 3, 2013 about what to do after everything ends.

 A different take on the wedding scripture about love, 1 Corinthians 13.