10 Commandment Countdown: #4 Sabbath

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)

 

 

10 Commandment Countdown: #10

Scripture: Exodus 20:17 & Matthew 6:24-33

Preached 03/08/2015

We all know by now, hopefully, how dangerous it is to talk on the phone or text while driving.  But what about simple daydreaming while driving?  Well, a man named William Hampton attempted to answer this question, and his findings might surprise you.  He looked over the data from more than 65,000 fatal crashes that had been compiled by Erie Insurance Group, and found that 1 in 10- so about 6500-could be attributed to distracted driving in general. Of that about 6500 crashes, about 12.5% were caused by texting or talking on the phone.  Any guesses on what percentage were caused by simple daydreaming?  62%.  Five times as many as texting or talking on the phone.

Hard to believe, isn’t it?  Daydreaming seems so normal it just has to be harmless.  I mean, we all day dream.  Even kids day dream! And yet, we have those awful fatal crash statistics, with daydreaming causing more than 4,000 deaths behind the wheel.  It’s jarring that something that seems so innocuous, so natural even, can cause so much harm.

And really, that’s what this 10^th commandment is like.  “¹⁷You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”  Coveting seems like really small potatoes compared to some of the other stuff that’s coming in this 10 commandment countdown- adultery, perjury, murder.  What in the world is something as simple and innocuous as coveting doing on this list?  It’s almost like God had run out of the good stuff and just really wanted the list to be 10, so she stuck this bit of fluff on the end.

Because everybody covets, and we do it all the time.   I know I do it.  When I’m driving to church, I can’t help but notice the Baptist church on the way has a really cool digital sign that changes messages every few seconds- and I totally want one of those for this church.  Or I come in here, and notice how put together you all look, how rested, and that you don’t have spit-up in your hair.  And I want that.  I want and I want and I want, and this cannot just be me.

Because we are surrounded, all the time, by messages designed to get us to want more than we have.  Whiter teeth.  Smoother skin.  Fancier clothes.  A nicer car.  Or, perhaps as a church, more money, more members, fewer hard decisions, and fewer arguments.  And yet there’s this commandment, right there alongside the ones that tell us not to kill each other- ¹⁷You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”  God gave us this commandment for a reason.  And it’s because, like daydreaming, coveting is both rampant and deadly.

Much like daydreaming behind the wheel, the danger of coveting isn’t necessarily about what you are paying attention to. The problem is what you’re not paying attention to- in driving this would be the car crossing your path, or the stop sign that’s there to protect you.  And in our spiritual lives, the problem with coveting isn’t necessarily the things we pay attention to- the things that we want for ourselves like the fancy church sign, new shoes, or lots of members.  The problem is that in paying attention to that stuff we don’t have in front of us, we can’t pay attention to the things that do matter, and that are important.  We can’t serve God and mammon at the same time- mammon being that stuff we covet, because we can’t pay attention to both of them.  When we covet, we are paying attention to that other stuff, and not God.  And that can cause us to veer off in some seriously dangerous directions, following after stuff, after money, after other people instead of on the right path following God.

As Jesus reminds us, our goal for our life drive is to end up in God’s kingdom, a life where we experience God’s righteousness.  Not to die in some distracted crash amd float on up to heaven, mind you, but to make it to see God’s kingdom in this life. God, and God’s righteousness, and God’s kingdom.  Those are the things that really count.  And we can’t see them, we can’t notice them intersecting with our paths, jumping out right in front of us if our heads are lost thinking about the newest, flashiest, nicest thing that we don’t have.  Through this 10^th commandment not to covet, through Jesus’ reminder that we can’t pay give our attention to God and all this stuff at the same time, we are reminded that it’s the Holy intention for us to notice God, God’s righteousness, and God’s kingdom.  We don’t want to just run them over and leave them there on the pavement.

So how do we get ourselves out of the mindless coveting habit, and into the habit of noticing God and God’s intentions at work all around us?  We can return to that daydreaming study for some help here.  Because the experts on safety gave some suggestions of what to do to avoid daydreaming danger.  First, the driving experts suggest playing a game of “what if.”  What if that child ran after a ball into the street?  What if there is a stop sign around the next corner?  We can use this as a spiritual practice as well, to keep us from mindlessly coveting, focusing on the wrong stuff, and missing God.  Rather than playing “what if” about all the bad things that could happen, or about the things that we could have- don’t let this turn into a game that makes you covet!- we can play “what if” with God’s intended work.  “What if the hungry people in our neighborhood were fed- what would that look like?”  “What if the lonely person I know in this congregation got the connection they need- how would that happen?” “What if that person were Jesus?  How would I interact with them then?” Playing this kind of spiritual “what if” keeps us alert for God’s presence all around us, and, so importantly, the role that we might be called to play in bringing about God’s intentions.

The second piece of advice the safety experts give to avoid the dangers of daydreaming might sound a bit strange, but here it is- chew something.  Chewing something keeps your mouth moving, usually involves some taste, and therefore keeps you alert.  So, to avoid the dangers of coveting, chew on something.  Like the scripture we read this morning- write it up, print it out, and keep thinking about it, not stuff.  Mull it over in your mind.  Pray about it.  Read more scripture and chew on what it means for your life.  Keep exercising those little spiritual muscles, get those tastes of God’s wisdom for you, and it’s easier to keep from drifting off into covetous places, and instead keep us on a faithful, God-noticing, not stuff-noticing path.

The final piece of advice from the experts?  To keep from day dreaming behind the wheel, change up your routine.  Take a different route to the store and your brain has to think more and can’t just go on autopilot and daydream the whole way there.  The same advice applies in our quest to keep from coveting- change up your routines. 

This may mean physically changing where you go- like avoiding the Baptist church sign, or not heading to the mall to window shop.  Or it might involve the addition of some spiritual practices into your life path.  If you always read scripture before bed, read it in the afternoon instead.  If you only come to church on Sundays, try joining us for our Wednesday prayers and meals during Lent.  Go out of your way and talk about Jesus with someone.  Break out of your spiritual routine and get yourself working harder, and it’s not so easy to drift into covetous ways, and much easier to see God and God’s intentions in your path.

Your challenge for this week then, is to follow that expert advice.  Avoid the dangers of coveting, of stuff-focused living.  Play “what-if,” chew on something, and change up your routine.  Keep as alert as you can for God’s presence in your path, God’s righteousness, and God’s kingdom appearing before you.  And let God’s grace, love, and power keep you safe from the sneaky dangers of coveting.