Rest for the Wordy—A Sermon on Spelling and Sabbath

Grace and peace from God our Creator, hope in our Redeemer Jesus the Christ, and the promised gifts of the Holy Spirit are with you, always.

Here we are, the last Wednesday of classes, the last worship together for this school year. You are, presumably, busy with writing and reading, as usual, and with planning for moving and with logistics for your summer. Let’s take our semi-annual last-week-of-classes deep breaths, shall we? All together now, breathe in….and out. And another one, breathe in….and out. And once more, breathe in….and out. Excellent. Keep breathing.

You may be aware that last week contained an extremely important sporting event, shown live on ESPN in primetime. No, not the NBA Finals, the Scripps National Spelling Bee. You are probably not surprised to know that I watched several hours of the Bee, including those prime time final rounds. I love spelling and I love learning and I love the drama of kid geniuses. I watched these kids—aged 7 to 14—spell words like haecceitas (heck-see-uh-tas), chaudfroid (shoh-frwah), bewusstseinslage (buh-voos-tines-lahga), and paucispiral (poss-iss-piral).

In the end, 14-year-old Karthik Nemmani correctly spelled “koinonia” and won $40,000 and a humongous trophy. It was awesome. Dozens of spellers stood up there one at a time, pretty awkwardly, and—after hearing their word—asked the pronouncer a series of approved questions: the language of origin, to use it in a sentence, any alternate pronunciations, the definition. They hope that one of these answers will clue them in as to how it’s spelled. One kid, Jashun Paluru, showed off his skills by turning the questions around. He asked, more than once, something like “does the word contain the Greek root philo meaning love?” before asking for the language of origin or definition. The commentators—oh yes, there are commentators in the spelling bee—were very impressed.

I’m telling you about this in part because I just wanted to say all those fancy words, and because our reading today came from Deuteronomy, which is a hard word to spell, and is actually a kind of erroneous translation. Deuteronomy is book five of our Bible, the last book of the Pentateuch—from the Greek words penta meaning “five” and teuchos meaning “scrolls”—also known as the Torah. The word Deuteronomy contains the greek word nomos, meaning “law”. It also contains the Greek word deuteros which means “second”. It has been assumed that this is because it is the second book of laws, but it may actually have been because the manuscript that got translated was a copy of the original law scroll, hence, second law. Aren’t you glad you know that? I sure am.

The texts this week from Deuteronomy and from the Gospel According to Mark are both pretty straightforwardly about the Sabbath. In Deuteronomy, we’re on commandment four of ten: “Observe the sabbath day and keep it holy, as the LORD your God commanded you” (Deut 5:12). The author goes on to explain just how that is done and why. Six days of the week shall be devoted to work, and the seventh shall be a day of rest.

I am reading a book called Mudhouse Sabbath, by Lauren Winner, a former Orthodox Jewish woman who converted to Christianity, but maintains many of the rituals that ordered her life. She wrote that, “There are, in Judaism, two types of commandments (mitzvot): the mitzvot asei, or the ‘thou shalts,’ and the mitzvot lo ta’aseh, or the ‘thou shalt nots.’ Sabbath observance comprises both. You are commanded, principally, to be joyful and restful on Shabbat, to hold great feasts, sing happy hymns, dress your finest….The cornerstone of Jewish Sabbath observance is the prohibition of work in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5….Over time, the rabbis teased out of the text just what the prohibition on work meant, first identifying thirty-nine categories of activities to be avoided on Shabbat, then fleshing out the implications of those thirty-nine.” [1]

We are not going to go over the thirty-nine categories, but the point of this is that the prohibition of work is not messing around. Anything that seems like it might be work is work. Rest is mandatory.

We squirm a little when we read the rest of this commandment, because it includes mention of enslaved people among those who should not work on the sabbath. But! Think about that! Even enslaved people should cease work one day out of the week. God’s intention is not that one day out of the week people with power will do no work and everyone who works for them will do double work. The day of rest is for everyone. “The fourth commandment is counter culturally egalitarian...and the sabbath comes as a weekly reminder that all are equally valued in God’s economy.” [2] You deserve to do meaningful work, and you deserve to rest, and so does everyone else.

Which brings us to the story from the Gospel According to Mark. There are two different stories in here, one where Jesus maybe breaks the rules by quote-unquote harvesting grain on the sabbath, and the other where he heals a man with a withered hand. The religious authorities who are present are very concerned about this man who dares not to break the rules of the sabbath, per se, but to claim that he understands the sabbath more clearly than they do, as he shares in the authority of God. “Jesus is making a bold claim, aligning himself with the creator of the Sabbath.” [2]

When God created the universe, the story goes that God spent six days working and then, on the seventh day, rested. God designed life to include rest. God made our bodies and minds to do all sorts of incredible things; chief among those things is sabbath. “The sabbath represents a time for healing and wholeness of humanity.” [3]

Theologian Diane Chen wrote about these stories from Mark’s Gospel, reminding us that “God’s original day of rest precedes the law that regulates its observance. The sabbath is God’s gift to serve people; people are not to serve the Sabbath. The issue is therefore one of priority, not whether Jesus is playing fast and loose with God’s commandments….if assuaging his disciples’ hunger brings restoration, then the prohibition against reaping is overridden. To do otherwise actually undercuts the true purpose of the Sabbath.” [2] Since the sabbath is for restoration to wholeness, feeding your body is a reasonable thing to do. Jesus’ disciples are hungry, and he feeds them. Since the sabbath is for restoration to wholeness, healing a physical ailment is a reasonable thing to do. This man has a withered hand, and Jesus heals him.

And the man’s withered hand is not only a physical ailment, “it also has social and economic dimensions. His ability to earn a living is hampered by his physical limitations, and his standing in the community is diminished. Jesus wastes no time in healing the man, because even a few hours to the end of Sabbath is too long a wait to restore a person to wholeness.” [2]

I want to be careful here, because physical disability should not be looked at as a problem to be solved. Bodies of all kinds are created in the image of God. Jesus cannot, with the snap of his fingers, reorder the society to not ostracize people with disabilities, nor can he reorder the economy to support this man even though his labor is minimal. People with all types of bodies are beloved of God, and it is us as a society that need restoration in this case, need to be made to understand the wholeness and goodness of people who do not contribute to capitalism. What he does in this story is heal the man’s hand, so he can be embraced by his community. What we can do is embrace every body in the Body of Christ. If everyone is equally valued on the sabbath day, we can move toward equally valuing everyone the other six days of the week.

You may be thinking that this whole understanding of the sabbath as a time for us to restore ourselves and one another to wholeness sound a bit like...work. Providing adequate time and space for all of God’s beloved creatures to rest, relax, and recharge does not require work on the sabbath, but it requires preparation for the sabbath. If the work that we are doing the other six days of the week is good, and just, and righteous, we can spend our sabbath knowing that all is well.

Sometime in the next several days, you will turn in some pretty important work, and then you will be done with school for the quarter. I hope that you are able to spend and least part of this summer resting. If you are going to be working, I hope you are taking care to have some days off and some sabbath, for your body and for your mind. For LEVNeers, I hope you are making good use of your days off, and not cramming too much into your minds and hearts. It’s important that we honor the God who created us by following God’s example of balancing work and rest.

Lauren Winner’s chapter about sabbath contains this great quotation: “‘What happens when we stop working and controlling nature?...When we don’t operate machines or pick flowers or pluck fish from the sea? When we cease interfering in the world, we are acknowledging that it is God’s world.” [1]

That’s the work of sabbath—giving over our own labor, power, and privilege as a reminder that the world and all its creatures are beloved of God. Breathe deeply, rest well. Amen.

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[1] Lauren F. Winner, Mudhouse Sabbath: An Invitation to Spiritual Discipline, 4-7.

[2] Diane G. Chen, “Proper 4 [9]” in Preaching God’s Transforming Justice: Year B, 269-274.

[3] Emerson B. Powery, “The Gospel of Mark” in True to Our Native Land, 127.

Great Expectations—A Sermon on Maundy Thursday

Grace and peace from God our Creator, hope in our Redeemer Jesus the Christ, and the promised gifts of the Holy Spirit are with you, always.

Here we are in our holiest of weeks, on the first day of the triduum, the Three Days: Maundy Thursday. There’s a lot of fancy church words happening right there, but Maundy is just a shortening of the Latin word mandatum, which is how the word “commandment” was translated in the Latin version of the New Testament.

The choice to call this Maundy Thursday, or Commandment Thursday, is to underscore that the core of what Jesus offered his disciples at the Last Supper was that new commandment—love one another.

This is maybe like starting with the punch line, but since we tell this same story every year, and I just read the Gospel lesson to you, I hope it comes as no surprise to you that Jesus says, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this, everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”


This is where we get our bumper sticker slogans like “Love Your Neighbor” and our camp songs like “They’ll Know We Are Christians By Our Love.” On a really important night—the last of his life—this is what Jesus wanted his friends to remember him by.

Because of the way each culture keeps its calendar, every once in awhile, our Holy Week coincides with the festival Jesus and his disciples were about to commemorate, Pesach—the Passover. The eight day celebration of the Passover this year began on Monday night of this week, and will last until the Tuesday after we celebrate Easter. At the meals that Jews around the world have been sharing this week, called seders, a question is asked. “What makes this night different from all other nights?” The answers to the question are about the various practices of the seder celebration, and how they are different than regular meals shared throughout the year. To be clear, the Last Supper was probably not a seder, because it took place before the festival began. However, I wonder if we can’t still ask the question, what made this Maundy Thursday night different from other nights?

On this night, Jesus ate a meal with his friends. Not that different from all other nights. On this night, Jesus spoke cryptically about his friends’ behavior and confused them about his impending death. Not that different from all other nights. But during dinner, Jesus did something different. He got up from the table and knelt in front of his friends and began to wash their feet. This sounds like a super weird thing to do, for us, because we do not routinely have our feet washed as part of the hospitality provided by our dinner hosts. In Jesus’ time, however, this was something that people expected, but they expected it from the servant of the household, not the Rabbi. This flipping of expectations is Jesus’ signature move.

To a world that expects isolation and individualism, Jesus says, “love your neighbor.”
To a world that expects its leaders to show strength through military might, Jesus says, “love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.”
To a world that expects illness and suffering, Jesus says, “your faith has made you well.”
To a world that expects death and destruction, Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life.”
And to a room full people who expect to be served rather than to serve, Jesus says, “I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.”

In our world today, just as in the time of Jesus, there are a lot of competing systems of morality and authority. This week we consider the power of the state and the power of the people. We contrast the reality of death and the reality of life. We ponder the uses of violence and the uses of forgiveness. This is a week of wonder. So on this night, Jesus makes it as simple as possible: love one another.

Amen.

History is Happening—A Sermon on Abraham, Nicodemus, Jesus, and Us

Grace and peace from God our Creator, hope in our Redeemer Jesus the Christ, and the promised gifts of the Holy Spirit are with you, always.

Here we are in week 2 of Lent, in week 10 of the quarter. If you’ve been keeping up with a Lenten discipline that involves fasting—giving up meat, perhaps? Coffee? Sugar? Chocolate?—you might be feeling a little...tense. You may be wishing you’d given up finals for Lent.

Whether you're fasting or not, in the season of Lent, we take time to reflect on our sin, our shortcomings, our growing edges, the things we’ve noted in the margins to remember to do differently or better next time. And yet, we do this every year. We know that, over and over, we will need to return to this season of reflection. The new goals we set, the new selves we envision, the patterns we try to unlearn are so precarious that we just pencil in six weeks of “reset” every year. Hey, at least we’re honest.

This self-awareness does not always extend to the collective, though. As a church, as a society, as a nation,  we have a tendency to make the same mistakes over and over again, with no recognition. But we even have a little catch phrase for when this happens: “history is repeating itself,” we say. “Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it,” George Santayana philosophized.

So we turn to the lectionary, our system of studying our history. The gospel reading for today is a pretty famous exchange between Jesus and a pharisee named Nicodemus. He comes to see Jesus under cover of night, asking his burning questions. I love Nicodemus for this. I can just imagine that he has been lying awake at night for days. He has heard that this man, Jesus, is called the Son of God; he has heard him declare forgiveness of sins; he has heard him proclaim freedom from the systems that oppress. Nicodemus has probably tossed and turned, wondering how this could be. As a Pharisee, it’s his job to know everything there is to know about God and about God’s relationship to the Jewish people, and how they are to be in relationship with one another. Everything that Jesus says throws him for a loop, because it challenges his knowledge and his assumptions. Jesus speaks of new ways of being children of God.

A lot of people love the Gospel According to John, because it’s so different from the other three gospels, and it has a different way of presenting Jesus. In these chapters, “water is turned to wine, dead friends are raised, feet are washed, women are called by name”—but it is also a very challenging gospel. You know me, I love some both/and Lutheran paradox, and John is just so binary, “so much either-or: ‘I am the way, the truth, the light, the gate, the shepherd, the whatever—believe it, or be condemned.” [1] That’s the general interpretation we’ve had for years and years. It’s hard for me to look at these texts—as someone who knows and loves many non-Christians, especially a particular Jewish man, my fiancé Jonathan—and see any room for anyone else. There is some latent and some blatant anti-Semitism in John’s gospel.

We cannot, as American Christians in 2017, allow history to be repeated like this. We have to treat these stories with extreme care, and we have to treat our history with some of that Lenten self-awareness of wrongness. “We have to tell the truth about this gospel: all that lofty language form a historically dislocated Jesus distracts us from the truth that this gospel is violent. It tells lies about itself. It blames the wrong people….how do we even begin to address this?”[1]

Part of me, and part of you, maybe, just wants to say that these stories are so wrong and so backward that we should just ignore them and give them up. But the trouble is, we can’t do it that way. We have to face our history. We have to acknowledge the way that we have misused the words of Jesus in the past—to hurt Jews, to hurt women, to hurt people of color, to hurt queer people, to perpetuate slavery and apartheid and colonization—and say that we will do so no longer.

In doing this, we can also remember to include our other siblings in our quest for righting historical wrongs. Muslims as well as Christians and Jews lay claim to Abraham as an important ancestor. Our Genesis reading tonight lays out that fundamental claim that Abraham’s faith would make him the father of us all. In our Christian history, we have claimed that Abraham’s faith is proof that it is not the works of the law that free us, but the grace of God. This is true for us, but Abraham’s story is not just ours. An Anglican scholar named Clare Amos wrote about this in her commentary on Genesis. “Surely, Abraham, by definition, cannot be the exclusive possession of any one of the Abrahamic faiths! The portrayal of Abraham in both Christianity and Islam emphasizes that he was….someone who worshipped the One God before the establishment of a specific religious creed or system…’...Abraham was not a Jew or yet a Christian; but he was truth in Faith and bowed his will to God’s’ (Surah 3.67).” [2]

We have one advantage in this change—it’s Lent. We are reading these stories right in the midst of that time we set aside to reflect on the ways in which we have been wrong, and commit ourselves to not being wrong in the same ways again. We can do this. We can read these stories with the whole Jewishness of Jesus in mind. We can read these stories without blaming Jews or Judaism for the wrongs of the society in which Jesus lived and died.

Why is this so critical? In 2017, we are seeing a resurgence in anti-Semitism that reminds us of nearly a century ago in our global history; the events of the Holocaust were so terrible, we pledged “Never Again” as a world community. We are seeing a rise in Islamophobic and other racist violence, too, even here in Davis. The people who perpetrate these attacks—verbal and physical—often identify as Christians, or are bolstered by words they hear from people who identify as Christians. This is where our history can lead us.

Or, we can choose to act from our Christian history of liberation. We can look at Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection and know that exclusion and oppression are not the Way, the Truth, and the Life. We know that the words of Jesus can be life-giving, not death-dealing. We know that all are welcome at the table. We know that the Truth has set us free.



In Genesis, God said to Abraham, “I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing" (12:2). For the rest of Lent, let’s give up lazy anti-Semitism, and let’s take on the hard and good work of blessing. History does not have to be repeated. But the blessings of the good news of Jesus the Christ ought to be repeated, loud and clear. Amen? Amen.

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[1] The Rev. Anne Dunlap, “3.2.17 Resisting Anti-Judaism in John” on The Word is Resistance, from SURJ.
[2] Clare Amos, “Genesis” in Global Bible Commentary, 10.