A Palace In Time

A Palace In Time

A Sermon on Mark 2:23-3:6 and Deuteronomy 5

By Griff Martin

For the Beloveds of First Austin: a baptist community of faith

On The Second Sunday Following Pentecost

June 3 2018

Incarnate and Resurrected God, we ask that you once again take the Word and transform it into a living and breathing new reality we can all together experience. Be present here in this space and in these words God for if you are present here then nothing else will matter, but if you are not present here then nothing else will matter. In the name of the Creator, the Christ and the Comforter.  Amen.

I love that our Gospel refuses to avoid the conflicts of life. Our Gospel is not the perfect picture but the real picture (which is one reason it can speak so profoundly, it’s honest about all that we are not honest about). Think of it like the family Christmas card picture. We send out the perfect one, the one where we are all looking at the camera and smiling and perfectly digitally fixed up. The Gospel is not that picture, the Gospel is the picture before that picture… the one where Dad is looking off camera and Mom is annoyed because Dad was running 15 minutes late because he got caught at work and brother and sister are in the midst of a fight because they hate wearing matching clothes. Another way of saying it is that our Gospels include all the mess that we edit out of our Christmas cards. That is our Gospel, a picture of real life and that includes conflict.

And today this conflict is about time. 

Our Gospel passage finds Jesus and the disciples out on the Sabbath traveling and while they are doing so they pluck a few heads of grain because they are hungry- this is not some prophetic act or even theology disguised as performance art. They are hungry so they pick something to eat. 

All hell breaks lose with the religious leaders, “What you are doing on the Sabbath is not lawful.” And then Jesus words: “The Sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the Sabbath.”

And then Jesus offers a bit of performance art as commentary for the religious leaders: they all go to the Temple, still on the Sabbath day, where there is a man in need of healing and Jesus heals a man. Jesus knows well that if this man in his present state, crippled, would not be allowed into the temple. So Jesus heals him so he can be included.

In both of these brilliant and beautiful scenes Jesus is doing the same thing: reminding us that on the Sabbath we need to find ways to be fed… and that might be grain from the field or it might be sitting in a sacred place. Feeding the body and feeding the spirit are sacred work, work that we must make time for, work that we must do if we want to be any good at all in our world. 

I don’t know that we fully understand today’s text, I don’t hear a lot of arguments anymore about time because the truth is we don’t have the time to argue about time. That is the refrain I hear most today: I don’t have time, we don’t have time, time got away from me, who has the time. Which are all very theological statements we are making, don’t forget that time is a gift from God, a precious and valuable one that we are simply destroying. 

I could give a lot of examples of how we are doing this…. How 2/3 of working parents feel they didn’t get everything done in a day they wanted to, how 57% of working parents worry they are not spending enough time with their families, how we sacrifice sleep for work, how 46% of us say we have no time for leisure even though it is what we enjoy most, or simply that 60% of us don’t take our vacation time.

I could give examples of how busy we are… too busy to make friends, too busy to date, too busy to sleep, too busy to have sex, too busy to eat dessert, too busy to vote, too busy to take a vacation, too busy to take a lunch break… busyness is actually a social status these days, the busier you are the more important.

I could talk about the role technology plays in all of this, pointing out how often we check our smart phones (once every 10 minutes) or how our very phones allow us to never be away from the office or unreachable or even simply just plain old lost. 

I could even talk about the guilt we have when we are not busy, how quickly our mind comes up with all that we should be doing.

But that is not Gospel…. The Gospel invitation this morning is to rest… it’s Jesus once again standing up to the world, to the way we our doing things and the systems we have created and on our behalf demanding that we have time to be fed. To feed our bodies and to feed our souls.

And Jesus’ solution is as old as time itself, Sabbath. It’s one of our commands: Observe the Sabbath and keep it holy. And God not only commanded us to do so, God showed us how to do so. And on the seventh day, God rested. And then God saw that rest was so good, God blessed the day of rest and called it holy (in fact make sure and note that in Genesis 1, creation is good, the day of rest is holy… the first mention of holy, of set apart, of sacred, was not a thing but time, a day of restoration).

And what God has made holy we have made profane. (This is the only commandment we boast about breaking)

And our task is to reclaim that.

And let’s start here… There is a difference in Sabbath and Worship. Worship can surely be part of the Sabbath and both are needed and commanded, but they are not one in the same. To be biblical, the Sabbath is Saturday and The Lord’s Day is Sunday and Acts has a bit of evidence that Christians rested on Saturday and gathered to proclaim the Risen Christ on Sunday until things go a bit divisive and Jews took the Sabbath and Christians took Sunday… maybe it’s something we need to reclaim, both acts: to rest and worship.

Of course Sabbath is not a day, it’s a rhythm of life… a rhythm of work and rest, work and play, work and joy… it’s a pattern that brings us life. It’s the inhale to each and everyone of our exhales.

It’s a time for us to remember that the world will go on without us or maybe actually even more basic the world can go one without us, it’s a reminder that there are times work is done even when it’s not finished, it’s a time to remember that God said this world was good, it’s a time to reclaim that God says you are beloved, it’s to remind yourself that you are so much more than what you do or make or accomplish, it’s a day to look deep inside ourselves and to be visited by memories and dreams, in short it’s a day to be reminded of who and whose you are and your calling.

It’s taking time to remember that God loves you and God wants you to enjoy the world that God created for you. 

It’s healing. It’s where peace begins. 

Sabbath is the ability and the gift of saying no. No to commerce, no to working, no to driving all day, no to email and internet, no to 24 hour news, no to a to do list no to my ego and it’s addiction to doing. And with that no comes s a yes to joy and delight, rest and restoration.

It’s a day to live out the truth that Anne Lamott so brilliantly says, “Almost everything will work again if you unplug it, including yourself.”

And maybe it’s worth repeating: it’s a command from our God. 

Last Christmas Abby and I went out to dinner and we spent most of the dinner talking about our life here in Austin and how the transition has affected us. At one point she said to me, “You work a lot more here than you did in Louisiana and I think you work too much. You say you take off Friday for Sabbath but you just work from home that day. You have to do better.” And so I have…. I joined a gym, I made time for coffee with a friend twice a week, I am trying to things like mow the yard and read and rest on Friday (I should confess that I actually love mowing the yard, it’s not work for me). I can tell you as your pastor that my first year here I failed at Sabbath keeping, but I am making changes to that and I feel more energized and passionate and restored this year and I hope that inspires you to do the same.

So what does that look like? It might be fly fishing in the Llano River, it might be a great book, it might be a long walk around Lady Bird Lake, a nap, sitting on the porch with a cold drink, getting up early in the quiet hours for a cup of coffee, a movie, listening to your favorite music, lunch with your dearest friend, a date with your partner, swimming with your kids….

It’s that and knowing that is prayer and that God takes delight in that, God created that for you. That is Sabbath.

What is the thing that most restores you, that most affirms you are loved, that gives you life and energy, because that is Sabbath for you. And that is what you need to make time for each and every week.

Lewis Carroll tells the story of an old clockmaker in an old village, he literally kept the time for the village because he was the only one who could repair clocks and watches. When he died he had no apprentice to do this work, so naturally clocks and watches began to break…. Some ran too fast, some too slow and soon the midnight bells might chime at 3:00 in the afternoon. Until one day when a renowned clock-worker happened to pass through the village, and quickly realized that the village was literally out of time. The villagers begged him to stay for a week to help fix the problem, he began by taking a look at all the clocks and watches and soon called the town together to announce that he would be able to fix some but not all of the time pieces, the only time pieces he could fix were the one’s whose owners had kept them wound, they were the only pieces which would still be able to keep time.

There is a lesson in that. Only those of us that stay wound can keep time. Sabbath is our dewinding and our winding. 

So this morning can you let Jesus into the conflicted areas of your life… the places where time…. And let God step into those place and offer you a chance to rest, to feed your body and your soul because you deserve it, bc Sabbath and rest are holy callings God gave us, gifts and tasks God gave us and then simply said “the rest is up to you.”

Amen and Amen.