This sermon was preached at Glenwood and Canoe Ridge Lutheran Churches, Decorah, Iowa, on June 3, 2018. It’s based on Deuteronomy 5:12-15. If you’d prefer to listen to it, find it at https://soundcloud.com/stacey-nalean-carlson.
Deuteronomy 5:12-15
12Observe the sabbath day and keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you. 13Six days you shall labor and do all your work. 14But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, or your son or your daughter, or your male or female slave, or your ox or your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you. 15Remember 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.
I have two recurring dreams. Nightmares, really.
The first is that all my teeth fall out. Maybe that’s a sermon for another day.
The second takes me back to the halls of my high school. It is there, with only weeks until graduation, that I realize I haven’t earned all the necessary credits needed to graduate. In every iteration of the dream, there’s always one class for which I’ve registered but then failed to attend. And it is that class that now stands between me and graduation, and there is no way for me to make it up in time. There’s no way for me to do enough. I’ve somehow forgotten what is required and now I will not graduate with my classmates.
I was reminded of this recurring dream earlier this week, as I read Walter Brueggemann’s Sabbath as Resistance.1 Reflecting on Moses’ words to God’s people in Deuteronomy (our first reading for this morning), Brueggemann writes, Do you, when you wake up in the night, remember what you were supposed to have done, vexed that you did not meet expectations? Do you fall asleep counting bricks? Do you dream of more bricks you have to make yet, or of bricks you have made that were flawed? We dream so because we have forgotten the exodus!
Now replace bricks (the reality for God’s people enslaved in Egypt and required to satisfy Pharaoh’s demanding quotas) with whatever it is that wakes you up at night—or keeps you from falling asleep in the first place—or manifests itself in a nightmare that feels all too real. What were you supposed to do that you didn’t get done? What is still waiting on that endless to-do list? Do you fall asleep counting the emails that you haven’t opened, let alone responded to? The cards you haven’t sent? The phone calls you haven’t made? What are your bricks? What’s your recurring nightmare?
We are commanded to remember that God has set us free! This is good news for those who feel the pressure to produce in a culture that rewards achievement and glorifies busyness, but it is also good news for those who feel no longer able to produce in a culture that measures our worth by our ability to perform. God has set us free to be people distinguished not by anxious productivity, to use Brueggemann’s language, but by committed neighborliness.
When we are anxious to produce, our neighbors become threats, competitors, ones to envy (covet) rather than to love and support. When we are anxious to produce, our neighbors become just another commodity, a means to get ahead, a way to demonstrate our value by working harder than them, being better than them. But in God’s reign, freed by God’s grace, our neighbors are our brothers and sisters, and their welfare is our concern. Their wellbeing is our wellbeing.
Logan came home from school on Friday and told me that some of his classmates were saying, pastors aren’t useful. Apparently, among the second graders that day, pastors were being compared to nurses. Nurses are more helpful than pastors, those second graders concluded. I love nurses. My mom is one of them. But how is it that eight-year-olds feel compelled to pit two professions against each other, evaluating them in terms of usefulness? Is this the culture of competition we’ve created?
God has created a different world.
The command to observe the Sabbath day is radical not only in its call for the Israelites to rest, but for all in their circle of influence to rest—their children, their slaves, their livestock, even the resident aliens in their towns. This command for Sabbath rest is a leveling.
Brueggemann puts it this way, Sabbbath is the great day of equality when all are equally at rest. This one day breaks the pattern of coercion, all are like you, equal—equal worth, equal value, equal access, equal rest. And can’t you just imagine, that if there is one day each week when all are equal, we might be compelled to labor for a world where every day, all are equal.
Brueggemann says, Sabbath is not simply a pause. It is an occasion for reimagining all of social life away from coercion and competition to compassionate solidarity…Sabbath is not simply the pause that refreshes. It is the pause that transforms.
You can rest today. You can come to the table and receive bread and wine freely given, strength for the journey freely given, the very presence of our Savior freely given for you.
You can rest today. You can trust that in God’s reign, you are precious and valuable not because of your usefulness, not because of what you do, but because of who you are—God’s beloved.
You can rest today. You can view your neighbors not as competition, but as sisters and brothers in Christ.
You can rest today. You are free. Amen.
1 Walter Brueggemann’s Sabbath as Resistance can be explored and ordered here: https://www.wjkbooks.com.