Scripture: Exodus 20:8-11 & Mark 2:23-28
Preached 03/22/2015
Rachel Bailey
did not lose her head over temporarily losing her head, reports Eli MacKinnon
of Life’s Little Mysteries.* The 23 year
old Phoenix woman is making a miraculous recovery after a car accident fully
separated her skull from her spine, a rarely seen and even more rarely survived
injury called an internal decapitation.
Internal
decapitation occurs when head trauma separates the skill from the spinal column
while leaving the exterior of the neck intact.
Because of the types of head injury that can cause internal decapitation
usually involve severe nerve damage or severing the spinal cord, the result is
usually paralysis or death.
Quick action
alone saved Bailey’s life. Had skilled
hands not immediately reconnected her head to her spine, she would have been
left, at best paralyzed, or possibly even dead.
So, besides
this story being rather morbidly fascinating, why am I sharing it with you all
this morning? I love when I get crickets
from you all sometimes! Because, dear
friends in Christ, I fear that we are all in danger of being internally
decapitated. I’m hoping you’re all
familiar with the image of Christ as the head of the church- if not, it comes
from the epistles of Paul, and we can talk lots more about it later. In this
metaphor, Christ is the head and we are the body, and I fear that we pieces of
the body are in danger of becoming separated from our head.
It’s true that
all of us look fine from the outside.
We’re attending church, we may sing in the choir, serve on the session,
come to or help out with Wednesday prayers and meals, teach the children’s
class- we might look super connected to Christ.
But that’s how internal decapitation works- it’s tricky and sneaky, and
that’s part of what makes it so dangerous.
We can be disconnected and not even realize it!
It was the
skilled hands of paramedics, and doctors that saved Rachel Bailey from
paralysis or death from her internal decapitation. But we’re not turning to paramedics and
doctors to save us this morning. We’re turning, of course, to scripture: 8Remember
the sabbath day, and keep it holy. 9Six days you shall labor and do
all your work. 10But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your
God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or
female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns.
And maybe
you’re asking in your head what in the world the commandment to keep the
Sabbath has to do with keeping us from the dangers of decapitation from
Christ. Well, it’s because the way we
get dis-connected from him isn’t through some kind of crazy car accident. As
this fourth commandment reminds us, through busy-ness. Through working too much, and not taking time
to simply rest.
This
commandment is a very strange one, if you think about it. Because God is
commanding us to do something that should come naturally to us. Think about it- babies come out of the womb,
and almost immediately take a long nap.
And most of them, my kid excluded apparently, spent their next year
sleeping well more than half the day away.
We are born professionals at resting.
So what happens to us? How do we
get away from that resting time that’s so important to connect to God, and into
the busy-ness that can sever our connection to her?
Well, we
certainly live in a culture that worships and rewards busy-ness. Even looking
back at babies and their sleep, while there might be a general rush to get them
to sleep through the night at an early age, there is certainly also a push to
fill their days with all kinds of activities- play dates, clubs, sports- it
only takes a few years before we fill our kid’s schedules as full as our
own. And as adults, too, we are pushed
to keep busy. We are told that relaxing
is for slackers, and we need to get up and exercise more, or join this group, or
come to this function, or try this or that hobby.
And when we
meet someone, our first instinct is often to ask what they do, or if they look
retirement age, what they used to do.
God forbid someone answer the “what do you do” question with- “I spend a
lot of time relaxing,” right? Because then what would we do with them? We define one another, and ourselves by the
stuff that we do- by the ways we keep ourselves busy. And that’s a problem. A serious enough problem that in the 10
commandments we have this commandment to not
be busy. Because as we are reminded,
as followers of the God we know in Christ, that our ultimate identity is not in
the things we do to keep us busy.
Rather, our ultimate identity is beloved children of God. And Sabbath, a day of rest from all that we
do to keep ourselves busy, is God’s gift to us of a time to reconnect to that
ultimate identity, and to God, Christ, the Holy Spirit.
Jesus’ walk
with his disciples helps us understand what this time of sacred rest and reconnection
is supposed to look like. Because I know us, and I know when I say that we’re
supposed to relax and bask in God, you are wondering exactly what you’re
supposed to do. Well, luckily Jesus understood this human
tendency, and in the short story from Mark we heard this morning, he does show
us that we don’t just have to sit immobile on our couches to rest and
reconnect.
Jesus and his
disciples are taking a walk. And that is
a wonderful example of a way you can connect with God on the Sabbath. Take a walk, if you can, sit outside on a
nice day, or sit by a window on a cloudy one.
And purposely take in your surroundings.
Marvel at the height of an old tree, and the beauty of the shadows that
fall from it. Plant seeds and then watch
them grow into something. Find joy in watching squirrels jump from branch to
branch. Find peace in the sound of a
creek running by. Revel in the smell of black earth, or bright flowers. God
made all that for us to enjoy, so connecting to creation is connecting to God,
and Jesus certainly knew and modeled that.
What else can
we do with our Sabbath to reconnect to God in Christ? The disciples give us
another idea. We can eat something- nobody pass out on your Sabbath because of
hunger, okay? We can eat good food, and through our enjoyment of the simple
pleasures of taste, smell, and texture, connect to the Holy. Jesus’ story of
David and his companions eating the bread of the presence reminds us that food
itself is a powerful way we can connect to God, and how much God desires that
we not go hungry- for spiritual or physical nourishment. I think this story also reminds us- and to be
fair, this may just be me reading into the text what I want to see there- but I
think it reminds us that the Sabbath is also an acceptable time to enjoy those
foods that you usually don’t indulge in. So go ahead and have that brownie or
those potato chips. And rest in the
knowledge you are tasting how good the Lord is and how much God wants you to
enjoy life.
Jesus says that
the Sabbath was made for our benefit. We need Sabbath. We need that time to rest from all the things
that keep us so busy, and to reconnect to what really is important. And we need a day set apart not only to keep
our busy-ness and our resting balanced, but because God knows that as humans,
we just aren’t very good at remembering the rest and reconnect part on our own.
And we need
it. Cut off from our Spiritual head, our
spiritual lives quickly wither away into nothing. As vitally as our bodies physically need to
be connected to our heads, we, members of the body of Christ need to be
connected to our spiritual head. It is
through God, and God as we know in Christ that we live and move and have our
spiritual being, and those 6 days of work can become days of joyful service to
our God.
So my charge
for this week is very simple. Take time
for Sabbath. Whether it’s today or
another day, take as much of a day as you are able- or as many parts of several
days as you can- and just reconnect to God.
Don’t do anything that feels like work. The Sabbath was made for you. So
take it. Rest, savor God’s creation and
love, bask in God’s goodness, and find new life as part of Christ’s connected
body.
(*Opening illustration from sermonillustrations.com)
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