One Seventh & Six Sevenths

Isaiah 58:9b-14

If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday. The Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your needs in parched places, and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail. Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in.

If you refrain from trampling the sabbath, from pursuing your own interests on my holy day; if you call the sabbath a delight and the holy day of the Lord honorable; if you honor it, not going your own ways, serving your own interests, or pursuing your own affairs; then you shall take delight in the Lord, and I will make you ride upon the heights of the earth; I will feed you with the heritage of your ancestor Jacob, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

Luke 13:10-17

Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God. But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.” But the Lord answered him and said, “You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?” When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame; and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing.

This week, both Isaiah and Jesus are talking about the Sabbath. Now, you might think the Sabbath started when Moses came down the mountain with that crazy glowing tan and a couple of tablets, but it actually goes back to the very beginning when God finished all the work of creation in six days and THEN, on the seventh day God rested, blessed the day, and made it Holy.  But why did God rest on that seventh day? Was God tired? Were the Patriots playing? Did God wrench the Divine back creating the Himalayas? NO! It’s God! God didn’t NEED to rest… God was MODELING for US how to live as humans in this new creation! As a species we didn’t really take the Divine hint back then… and frankly we haven’t gotten much better since. So… God wrote it down and Moses brought it down the mountain!

Now, contrary to some folks idea, the ten commandments aren’t God’s way of keeping us from having fun. They are meant to be the manufacturer’s instruction manual for being human in God’s creation. These commandments were MEANT to be a gift… our operators manual… so we didn’t have to just GUESS how to live the life we were created to live. They’re also not random either. They’re in that order on purpose with the top part of the list full of instructions for how humans would best interact with God and the bottom part of the list for how humans would best interact with other humans.

Now notice, that the one about the SABBATH… the one we’re particularly interested in today… is smack dab in the middle of the two sections. That’s not an accident. THAT’s because it is BOTH about how we interact with God AND how we relate to other people. This commandment is BOTH about Loving God AND Loving Neighbor.

It is absolutely a guide for our relationship with God. It IS meant to tell us that spending 1/7th of our lives plugged into God is part of our human design. Some people get very distracted by what that 1/7th of our time has to look like or on what day and hour it begins and ends or whether you should be able to buy beer or not, but I think God cares WAY more that we simply understand that when we plug ourselves into God for 1/7th of our lives, our lives simply run better!

But the God-oriented dimension of this commandment wasn’t the main trouble that Isaiah or Jesus had. And even though church attendance is down in our country, I really don’t think the God-oriented dimension is our biggest trouble with this commandment either. The real trouble is forgetting that the Sabbath ALSO has an equally important dimension that tells us to how we are to live with our neighbors as well. What Isaiah saw in his time was a people who were trying to connect with God for 1/7th of their lives, BUT who spent the other 6/7ths of their time living in opposition to God’s ways in how they treated their neighbors.

In the passage for today, Isaiah makes it inescapably clear that the specific injustice happening in that other 6/7ths of their lives was an economic injustice. It’s the “yoke” of unjust economic practices filled with selfishness, greed, indifference and exploitation piled onto the most vulnerable in the community, like a yoke on an ox… that was the problem. An oppressive economic “yoke” turns out to NOT be the way to “love your neighbor” and God tells the people through Isaiah that until you remove that yoke, all of your worship will be just talking to the Divine hand! If you want to show your love for God in 1/7th of your life, then make sure you are showing your love for your neighbor in the other 6/7ths!

Sabbath is not just meant to connect us to God, but it is also equally meant to be a check on our own selfishness for the good of our community. The thing that will truly “delight” the LORD, this passage tells us, is a community formed around economic justice… a community that notices the neighbor, not just as individuals noticing the needs of other individuals, but as the community as a whole noticing the needs of the neighbor in ways that inform and then transform community policy and are put to action for the benefit of the WHOLE community.

The people in Isaiah’s day… the leader of the synagogue in Jesus’ day and I think a whole lot of us, including me… We all seem to continually get sucked into this place of self indulgence, where we begin to believe that WE can buy, earn, construct, or manipulate the world around us so that we will really be living! We slide into this notion, that with enough effort and good ideas, we can find a way to live in the world that’s a BETTER way to live than the way God designed us to live. But guess Who turns out to be better at knowing how humans can really live the abundant lives they were created to live? Yeah, that One! The One who gave us a commandment that reminds us that the best way to connect to God for 1/7th of our lives, is to love our neighbor and create a neighbor-loving community out there in the other 6/7ths of our lives. THAT is what will Delight the LORD, and the Delight of the Lord is the best, and ONLY way we have, to really have life and live it abundantly! Amen.