I don't know what you're planning for this weekend. Labor Day is a big thing in my family. My brother-in-law, Jay, his birthday is always Labor Day weekend. So in our family we celebrate, we call Jay-ber-day, and we all get together.
The first time I heard of this, I laughed really hard. I look forward to Jay-ber-day every year. Meredith and I were going to Alexandria early tomorrow to be there for Jay-ber-day. But Labor Day is a little more complicated in backyards and barbecues.
And when we think about Labor Day, it's the official end of the summer. It might be the time for us to get one more little trip out of the way to just to get ready for the school year to get going. Our calendar is kind of resetting. But Labor Day has some kind of interesting roots.
I dug into this week, but Labor Day really is founded. After the Civil War, there are two things happen in America. Number one, we went into a really big recession. And two, we, the Industrial Revolution, hit.
And so you have just this tumultuous economic time in the life of the country. And it's also where the modern labor movement started, where unions became important. My grandfather was a union steel worker. And I remember, like, a cigar box full of his union dues pins for like 40 years.
We found him when he died. I was just kind of cleaning stuff out. And I found just decades and decades of this. But the labor move was important because it was people saying, hey, you know, it's time for us to think about what does it mean to have good working conditions and to take care of the people who are working hard.
But the movement was also wrapped up in 1870s and 1880s politics. And so alongside of the labor movement, people were just saying, hey, we're in the factories 18 hours a day. It's too dangerous for us. There was also anarchists and socialists that were part of this movement.
Kind of crazy to think about those things. But in 1887, there was a big protest in Chicago. There was a labor union protest. And in it, a group of anarchists threw a pipe bomb in the middle of the crowd.
And the police officer was killed. And then the police officers were tallying at the people that were protesting. It's kind of too familiar now, isn't it? And so Grover Cleveland, who's president at the time, realized we need to get around this before this absolutely destroys our nation.
And so let's look at the fact that part of the American dream and this belief of working hard, but it's also individuals that are able to come together to accomplish just tremendous things. And so they began instituting Labor Day across the United States as a way to commemorate the power of the American worker. And it finally became nationalized in the 1890s. Just a few years after this, it was called a Haymarket affair with this riot and this horrible time.
But so much was about the fact that we're going to take one day a year and it's going to be a work day. It's not going to be a weekend. It's going to be a work day. We're going to stop everything and celebrate who we have become through our hard work.
In some ways, Labor Day is seeing this defining characteristic of the American ideal. Like this is who we are when we are at our best. And so we're going to stop one day and celebrate this together. And so this Sunday, I want to talk about Sabbath.
And I want to talk about it in a different way, but I want us to think about it because Sabbath, really and truly, that it is a defining characteristic. Not just of Judaism as a religion, but also as a people, as an ethnic group, but also the ways that they governed themselves in Bible times. Sabbath was a very important thing to them. No, we first find out about Sabbath in Genesis, chapter two, and says God, on the seventh day, he rested from his labors.
He rested from his work. Then next to this, when the Ten Commandments came in, he said, remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. I want you to have a different relationship with work and a different way that, well, you think about how I provide for you. We're going to talk more about that in the future.
Now, what I thought was really interesting, though, is if you look at the historical record, and many of the cultures of the ancient Near East, even though it was thousands of years ago, kept like really good records and we occasionally run into them at time to time, that it was a well-known fact. If you want to fight with the Jewish people, if you want to destroy their nation, you attack them on a Sabbath. The historical record shows us every single time Jerusalem fell in antiquity, it fell on a Sabbath day. The Babylonian Empire knew that go attack them and give it everything you've got on the day they don't fight.
So think about, if you're, hold up in your city, you're under siege, it's everything, you're terrified of everything being taken away from you, would you logically stop defending yourself one day a week? Does that make sense to anybody else? They believe in this so much, it's such a defining characteristic of their life, that they would stop defending themselves on these days and it was a well-known way to overtake them as a people. But ultimately, Sabbath is about being set apart.
It's not saying, I want you to set this apart because I am holy and you were my people. And I've set you apart, sent you out of all the other nations to be holy like I am. And so in many ways, practicing Sabbath, especially in the Old Testament, when it was, was hey, this is a day where we symbolize the relationship that we have with God and this is part of our life, this is part of our practice. And if we see ourselves as set apart, that we are going to set apart time.
So this is much more than just not working, or much more than the gas station being closed on a Sunday. But the way that we rest tells a story about the way that we trust. And so we're gonna get two stories of that Jesus interacted with people in the gospels over Sabbath. And we're just gonna think about how we rest and how we trust this morning.
So we're gonna open up the book of Mark. It's gonna be on the screens behind me, you can read it on your Bible. The passages are also built into my foundry.life from the message notes, but I hear these words, two stories. When Sabbath is Jesus was walking through some grain fields, his disciples began breaking off some heads of grain to eat.
But the Pharisees said to Jesus, why are they breaking the law by harvesting grain on the Sabbath? And Jesus said to them, have you read in the scriptures what David did when he and his companions were hungry? He went to the house of God during the days when Abathar was high priest and broke the law by eating the sacred loaves of bread, so only the priests are allowed to eat. And he also gave some to his companions.
And Jesus said to them, the Sabbath was made to meet the needs of people and not people to meet the requirements of the Sabbath. So the son of man is Lord, even over the Sabbath. Jesus went into the synagogue again and noticed a man with a deformed hand. And since it was the Sabbath, Jesus' enemies watched him closely.
If he healed the man's hand, they plan to accuse him of working on the Sabbath. And Jesus said to the man with a deformed hand, come and stand in front of everyone. Then he turned his critics and asked, does the law permit good deeds on the Sabbath or is it a day for doing evil? Is this a day to save life or destroy it?
But they wouldn't answer him. He looked around him angrily and was deeply saddened by their hard hearts. And he said to the man, hold out your hand. So the man held out his hand and it was restored.
And it once the Pharisees went away and met with the supporters of Herod to plot how to kill Jesus. Now both of these stories, they occur back to back and they occur early in the Gospel of Mark. And you're making this thinking, why on earth does Mark feel the need to tell us about Jesus and his approach to the Sabbath? So early in the story of who Jesus is.
And there's two things that are happening, one each of these stories that help us begin to reflect and to think about what does it mean to rest? What does it mean to trust? But the first one is there and in 227, I love that. The Sabbath was made to meet the needs of people and not people to meet the requirements of the Sabbath.
I don't know about you. You've probably heard me tell these stories before. I remember being a kid and being at my grandparents house. Like I remember one time, like very Facebook, I got a toy and I was really excited about it.
I think it was like when a laser tag was a thing, it was like a laser tag gun for the first time. And my grandfather didn't think to get batteries for it, but we got there on a Sunday in super rural East Texas. There weren't no place to get batteries on a Sunday. And I remember like that was my thing.
Like this kind of more restrictive idea, but Jesus says the Sabbath was made to meet your needs. The prophet Ezekiel says this in Ezekiel 20, verse 12. He says, I gave them my Sabbath days of rest is a sign between them and me. It was to remind them that I am the Lord who had set them apart to be holy.
You know in scripture, one of the reasons Jesus is so passionate about this is he says, this day is for us. This day is not about us keeping a law or rule that stops God from being angry at us. This was given to us as a gift. You know, for us to think about Sabbath, we have to think about work.
And it sounds really weird to think about it this way, but work actually pervades all of scripture. You know, especially back in the day, back in Bible times, most people's understanding of God or gods where they were this deities that sat above him and didn't do anything. Like they had a good life. Like when you're a kid or you're a kid now and you read the stories about Greek mythology.
Like the gods just sit back there and eat grapes all day long. It's very much of a passive idea. What we see in scripture though is God is very opposite of that. He's a creator.
He's a maker. The God is a worker. God is actively engaged in the good of his work. The first action he gave Adam after creation was giving Adam a job to do.
That our original goal, our original intention for our relationship between God and this earth was to be a steward, to be a caretaker, to be a watcher over earth. And we can make up a word real quick. Like that's what we were supposed to do. Sin, when it entered the world, it broke our idea of the purpose that God had given us.
It could be co-laborers alongside of him as he's active and he's engaged in our world. So that's why we say that when we participate with Jesus and his mission, we find the greatest fulfillment in life. It's because that we were designed to do in the first place. Like that's what was supposed to happen about this.
If God takes a rest, then we're to take a rest alongside of him. What's so interesting is the word work and the Old Testament is the exact same word for worship. Now I don't know about you. It's my surprise some of you doing what I do for a living, but sometimes my work is not exactly worshipful.
I'm sure you might be looking what you spend your days doing and saying, I don't know about you, but that's certainly something more than activity. But it's purpose. God gave us purpose alongside of him. And our Sabbath practice is a day to step back and to reflect our purpose.
But it's also a day for us to step back and realize that every single thing we have is given to us because of God and we don't necessarily need to stress out that day. Today for us to reflect on how we've accomplished the purpose that God has given us. 33 is interesting. We're going to this next story because I'll be honest with you.
When I read this story a few times earlier, when I started preparing, I don't like this story so much. Because if we read it, it's like Jesus knew that confrontation was going to be happening and he decided just to go with it. And the question I keep asking myself is, did Jesus genuinely want to heal this man with a deformed hand or did he want to make a point? And I'll be honest and transparent with you right now, I still don't know what to do with this.
It still kind of makes me feel a little uncomfortable. But what we do know is, this is the only time in scriptures that it speaks of Jesus showing and feeling physical anger in his heart. We think of the story when Jesus comes to the temple and flips over the tables, the money changers, like this is an even different level of emotion than that. Jesus was physically angry at the fact that the Pharisees, the rule followers, we talked about that a few weeks ago.
And most of their rule following had to do with the Sabbath, that they had so missed the point that they believed that it was not possible to heal or to restore or to take care of on the Sabbath. Jesus says, what does this person come here come to the center? Jesus heals this man like not like in the back of the room or not like in this one's go outside. But he's like, no, if we're gonna do this, we're gonna do this.
And causes this man with a deformed hand and heals it in front of every one. He's coming in from it saying, hey, we need to have a conversation about are we destroying life on the Sabbath or are we causing life on the Sabbath? Which of those two things do you think is appropriate? And then we see the Pharisees that the rule followers get so angry, there's anger, it's weird to read about anger in the Bible, but anger's a part of life, it's a normal part of life.
It's weird to see that what they do is they come on, they ultimately say, let's go find the supporters of King Herod. These are arch enemies. These are the people they're actively working against pretty much with every single thing they do. They say, let's go talk to our enemies by getting rid of this guy.
Make sure you think about this, like what would happen, what would conflict your understanding of purpose so much that you'd be willing to work with your sworn enemies in order to go against them? I love this story because it shows the humanity inside of us. And so many times we might struggle in scripture to find and to see humanity, but we see emotions being worked out and just in multiple layers in the story. They think about that, what would have to happen to you?
What would go against your purpose so much that you would go find your enemies to lock arms with them against them? Early on in the story of Mark, we see the Pharisees being willing to cooperate with others to go against Jesus. But when we attempt to regulate the things of God, what we get is restriction. But when we allow Jesus to refresh us, we will experience restoration.
That's what both these stories just show. They show us what happens when we get restrictive and they show us what happens when we allow Jesus to be restorative. And life comes to us when we allow Jesus to do what he wants to do. That this is the idea of Sabbath is something that's laid out for us for the benefit of our lives.
And so there's just two tension points I want us to think about together this morning. It's a little bit different from what we normally do. But these stories, they show the importance of Sabbath and the links to which people have been confused about it before in the past. And when I think of so many things that we deal with as people, what I'm beginning to understand more and more is that the attitude of Sabbath might be the prescription that we need so many times in so many places.
So two tensions. The first is that Sabbath draws a boundary around our urge to acquire. We live in a world now where we have to work 24-7. How many of you have gotten tagged or pinged on something involving work this weekend?
Like it's kind of an expectation now, isn't it? Like I love this thing and I hate this thing, but this has changed our life in so many ways. But if we think about it this way, when we live an idea where it takes us 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to simply get by, is that healing? Is that restorative?
Or is that restricting and taking life away from us? Merritt, a couple of years ago, got me this print. And I used to have it hanging over my desk. I don't have it hanging over my desk at the house anymore, but it was just a big white print.
And in gold screen printing letters, it said, hustle. I used to have a phrase that I'd say quite often is all aboard the hustle bus. I prided myself in a sinful way on my ability to work harder than other people. It was something that I took pride in.
It was a way that I ended up dehumanizing other people, because I simply felt like I can work harder than you. I can work better than you. I can work longer than you. And I'm going to make this happen.
When you think it can't happen, I'm going to figure out a way to do it. And friends, that just steals life from us. And our world is expecting us to live at that break and neck speed right now. And there's absolutely nothing restorative about it.
It's possible for us to get to the point to where working harder is simply not the answer. No matter what we do, no matter what's going on, there will be a point where working harder is simply not the answer. That we will come to a point in time, whether it's personally, whether it's vocationally in our job, whether it's amending a relationship that's broken, no matter what it is, where we will get to the point in time where you cannot work hard enough to fix this. Then instead, you will need to go through a journey as a principle of transmutation, where you will have to change in order to go to the next place.
And here's the thing. When we are absent from the presence of God in our lives, we won't be able to hear that. We won't be able to understand that. We won't be able to discern what this next step or what that next thing is.
And when we are going 24-7, simply trying to keep up is going to be almost impossible for us to find and experience the presence of God in our lives. We have to be intentionally aware of that. The second thing, the tension point that brings us, is saying, how do we place ourselves inside a rhythm of life that gives trust and authority over to God? You know, Sabbath is about us saying, God, we believe that you give to us so graciously that I don't need to stress out about working 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
And how will I trust in you? What story am I telling? How am I speaking about your sufficiency over my life? The way we rest tells a story about the way that we trust.
Or perhaps maybe if we rest so bad that we can't even understand what sufficiency looks like. When is the last time you're able to say, I've got enough? I've got enough. Resting is not the same as crashing.
And so many times we are going so fast at life, we end up literally crashing down and having to rebuild ourselves before we attempt to go back out at the exact same speed. I love that old movie, The Fly to the Phoenix. Remember that? There was an update about 10 years ago.
It's not as good as the original. As far as the group of people literally crash in the desert and have to rebuild their playing out of the parts, they're still working in an attempt to get out of the desert. The sad thing is that, at that point in time we say, you know what, I'm going to land this thing before it crashes. And so what I want us to think about just for a moment is this.
What do we say yes to in life? What are the things that cause life, that cause trust in your life? And how do you say yes to those things? The other thing to think about is what do we say no to?
What are the things that happen in our life and where they don't need to be present? What are the things that stop us from spending that time with ourselves, from spending that time with others in a way that leads towards restoration? So I encourage you this week to make a list of those things. Make a list and share that with somebody.
Make a yes list, make a no list and think about that. Thinking about what your story of rest tells you about how you trust God. But the Apostle Peter said this, cast all your cares on Christ because he cares for you. The things that cause you stress, the things that cause you anxiety, the things that cause you nervousness, all those things.
Cast them upon Jesus because he cares for you. That Jesus has the abilities, the presence of God, in our relationship to equalize out the things that draw us away from him. When we say he is big enough, what we're saying is, you know, he's gone through this thing, he saved that for you already. He can come to you in a way that sanctifies even what gives us the most grief in life.
We find these things by being attentive to his presence. And he did not leave us without many different ways to be attentive to that. But one of those ways is what we celebrate once a month, and we take communion together.