Sabbath love is our measuring stick
Proper 5B | 1 Samuel 8:4-20, 11:14-15; Mark 3:20-35
It’s a good thing we dealt with Sabbath last week, because we’ve got two big theological challenges to wrestle with this morning. And they both benefit from having that foundation of the Sabbath command.
So let’s go over that real fast.
God commands their people to remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. And we get two different reasons for it:
- Because God did this in creation and established this pattern for us.
- To remind us of our liberation from Egypt.
This makes Sabbath a command to rest and to free others as we have been freed. It is for us to receive and to give.
Sabbath is God’s antidote to human sin. A way for us, as individuals and as communities, to grow and live. And Jesus defines Sabbath as quintessentially about living. So we don’t just take breaks because we have to, but because it is in this freedom that we actually live.
So Sabbath is all about freedom.
Now let’s talk about kings and tyranny.
In the two books of Samuel, we see the people’s transition from a self-governing people, to the monarchy. And we’re feeling echoes of this in our lives now.
Of course, we totally get where these people are coming from.
They want someone to be in charge. Because it’s messy when there isn’t “a guy”.
But it’s actually worse than that. The problem is that we take this concept for granted. That there is just one leader at the top of a pyramid. And the familiar phrase organizes our thinking for us: “the buck stops here.” One person, a singular authority, the deciding vote, the decisionmaker.
This isn’t a truism about humanity or human society: it is but one way of ordering us that puts one person in charge—and everyone else below.
And then, when that one person is in charge of all things, not just, say, liturgy, or payroll, or product design—but all things…only one person has any power at all—the one who has it all.
It is also notable the reason the Hebrew people wanted a king wasn’t about keeping the trains running on time exactly. Nor was it because they were devout monarchists. They were tired of being special and wanted to be the same as their neighbors.
Here’s where we remember:
God forbade kings.
Kings are heretical by design—because in them we place divine authority. We literally entrust them with the material of the trust we are to give only to God.
So naturally God is insulted. And shares that insult with Samuel.
Now, Americans famously rejected the authority of a king. But we didn’t give that authority back to God. We merely offered about three-fourths of it to an elected president.
But we also aren’t merely talking about the intricacies of American government. This is about our relationship with God and our operating assumptions.
We still want people to make decisions for us, singular authorities to govern over us, and ultimately, this offers us a passive relationship with our environment. Instead of being a divine family, ordered by God to mutual benefit, we let decisionmakers do all of the dirty work—freeing us to live an ignorant life—but restricting our active participation in it.
It is a tempting desire, isn’t it? To seek freedom from the challenge of maintaining community by picking a figurehead to simply “deal with it all.”
That’s the first theological challenge. The second is just as interesting. And related.
Jesus redefines family.
And not just in a way that we like to use the concept of family when we might refer to this congregation as our “church family”. We sometimes say it that way. But always with that signifier. Always in that direction. We call it “my church family” rather than “my family”.
We also might compare it to a family, saying that we are “like family here”. But we don’t say our “real” family is like our church.
And we never do what Jesus does to his Mother: say This is my real family.
You may have seen a thing in recent years that seems to transcend this mythical boundary between the families we make with our neighbors and the families we’re born into or make through marriage. And that is a kind boldly public surrogacy we see at Pride events or in certain communities. It often comes in the form of “Mom hugs” or “Dad hugs”—a kind of fleeting public adoption. People saying to each other: “If you don’t have one, I will be your family.”
This vision doesn’t just transcend cultural norms. It highlights the unessential character of our family of origin—that it is merely a way people have chosen to order ourselves. There are other ways of making family.
And Jesus says that there is always a higher order than the birth family.
We are the children of God.
Which means we are family. And this family comes first.
And not this family as St. Stephen’s. Or this family as Episcopalians. Or even this family as Christians.
This human family comes first. We are the real and primary definition of family.
And therefore, our desires for control, ordering by blood and skin color and race and nation, are anathema to the Sabbath freedom offered with grace by God. These aren’t things which spark freedom and joy and life. Nor do they provide safety to all of our family—they pit siblings against each other! It is merely the whims of wannabegods who can never be as good and loving as God is.
Of course there are always critics.
Critics who like the way things are. Who think safety can come from strength and peace through war. Or those who fear conflict, so they will let others undermine the gospel: those wanting it to be more tolerant of authoritarian tendencies. Kings who don’t take the title of king, perhaps.
Mostly though, Jesus’s biggest critics aren’t those who actually want a king or who truly believe he is demonic. It’s those who don’t want our faith to make them different. They are exhausted by the work of God’s dream and want someone to just tell them what to do.
Or they are so afraid of the truth about our self-imposed divisions: our families of origin, our neighborhoods and nations: race and income: that we refuse to participate in Sabbath freedom or building up this family.
We have so invested in the nuclear family that we see our relationship to anything else, even God and God’s dream for all of creation, as a threat to it. As something to prevent.
The nuclear family is a kind of exile.
To be separated from true family and home. Trapped in a land of toil and oppression.
We can love our families of origin and the families we make where we are. And they are not bad. They are not inherently stifling.
But they can be isolating.
And our commitment to placing these above all else has a way of shackling our souls—not to mention seeming like a total insult to God.
Fathers are not kings. Nor are mothers queens. Not if we are to be children of God.
This is the irony—intentionally made—that we insult God with our need for control and then we pretend to be the victims. That God, Samuel, and Jesus would insult us by suggesting that this is a real expression of family.
Just like siblings fighting and then complaining about Mom and Dad.
This is the group project.
And group work can be messy. Sometimes people don’t pull their weight. Other times they are busy doing your work and not their own. And sometimes, when everyone is doing their own thing, there is no cohesion.
But this isn’t a failure of the project, but of our vision. Our own desire to not trust, not invest in the family. To want it to be easy and let other people do their own thing.
The work of this divine family, Siblings in Christ, is Sabbath. To bring Sabbath love and Sabbath freedom and Sabbath joy to all who are shackled or exiled. Bringing Sabbath to people enslaved by work or financial insecurity; by hunger or restlessness; by fear and isolation.
This is our responsibility to the family as Children of God. To give each other rest, love, hope, respect, joy. To save people’s lives.
May we embrace this responsibility with conviction and faith. May we draw from the deep wells of Sabbath rest in our own lives and offer their fill to others. And may the true joy of Christ make us all beacons of love to save the lives of every member of this motley human family.