Second Sunday after Pentecost
June 2, 2024
Deuteronomy 5:12-15

Suit, tie, and wingtip shoes. That’s what my father dutifully wore every day for years when he went to work. Every morning he would take his coffee, his briefcase, and commute to work. After work, he came home. 

And though I know he thought about work while at home, work didn’t necessarily follow him home. In those days, the days of suits, ties, and wingtips, there were no phones, laptops, and wifi. The strangest thing has happened to the modern workforce. No one wears a suit anymore. But as the dress has become more casual, the expectations have become severe. 

Sure, you can work from home. But your employer knows when you logon to your laptop, and they even track how many keystrokes you make. Sure, you can hop on a Zoom meeting and not have to change out of your slippers, but on Zoom, everyone can see exactly what you’re doing. I get the dream of working from home, and it makes sense. But it has also done something to us emotionally, socially, and spiritually. Because when work and home are the same place, work is always on. I’ve seen it in you, and I’ve felt in me. Without that buffer, without that dedicated space, our work will never let us go. There’s always one more thing, one more email, one more sales call, one more line of code to write. I remember the joy I felt when my father came home from work, carrying just his briefcase and the morning’s coffee mug. But now, there is no coming home, because work is at home. And even if you do go to the office to work, the office follows you. 

That’s what makes the idea of sabbath so amazing. The Old Testament law from Deuteronomy is so counter-cultural. This is what Deuteronomy says. “Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, or your son or your daughter, or your male or female slave, or your ox or your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you.” So that you may rest. This law, this commandment about rest is good for our souls. And it runs against everything we now think is important.

Now, the Old Testament, Deuteronomy, this ancient law about sabbath – don’t get caught up in the details about what day of the week is the sabbath. Is that Saturday? Is that Sunday? Should the day of rest also be the day of worship? And I’m not saying that we should go back to the “good old days” when no one worked on Sundays. In a completely interconnected economy and society like ours, some people have to work while others rest. I mean, if you go home after church today and your air conditioner dies, you for sure are hoping that the repair people are working. We would just expect, that they too would get their rest at some point. I’m not throwing out the biblical law here, I’m just getting to the heart of it. The heart of it is that every human needs a break every once in a while. The really critical thing here, is the divine command to stop work and to rest.

Isn’t it amazing, then, how relevant the Old Testament is still today? This is some of the most important stuff for our emotional, social, and spiritual lives. Rest. Sabbath. Not doing any work. I know, it’s a modern heresy. We’re supposed to be more productive, we’re supposed to be always on, always accessible, in constant contact. With all these modern tools at our convenience, with the ease of working from home, why shouldn’t we work all the time? But what we have failed to ask is the simple question – is this good for us?

The law from Deuteronomy has something to say about that. Notice the reason given for the law concerning rest and sabbath. It says, “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day.” Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt. God is telling the people to remember how terrible it was to work all the time as a slave. You remember that story from the Old Testament. The Egyptians made the Hebrew people build their cities, to make bricks, to gather straw; they were forced to work all the time. And, because God cared for the people of Israel, God delivered them from Egypt. That’s the Red Sea, the wilderness, all of that. God liberated the people from slavery. So, why would the people of God go back to that? If you can have the time to rest, to stop your work, you should totally do it. God went to all the trouble of delivering the people of Israel from slavery, from their forced work. God has given them the opportunity to rest. So don’t go back and enslave yourselves to work.

This is the grace of God. You don’t have to be constantly productive. In fact, God commands it. Your value as a human being, your value as a child of God, is not based on what you do, how hard you work, or what you make. The grace of God is that God does not demand that you check your email while you’re on vacation; God does not command you to wait until you’re retired to get a few days off; God does not command you to take that phone call while you’re at dinner with your family. You know your phone comes with a Do Not Disturb feature. Use it. And if someone complains that you were out of touch, you can say, “I’m sorry, God commanded me to do it.” And this is radical stuff – you can leave your laptop at work. It’ll be fine, I promise. It won’t get lonely. And if you do work from home, put in a drawer or something. You know, let it get some sleep. You don’t have to wear a suit, tie, and wingtips to work, like the old days. But maybe there is something we can take from the old days; by keeping work at work.

And I can guarantee you, that you’ll be more productive when you’re well rested. That’s the irony, isn’t it? If we work too hard and too long, we actually won’t be productive. If we have balance in our lives, the Holy Spirit can accomplish in us more than we could ask or imagine.

Jesus too, is thinking about sabbath and rest. He says, “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath.” See, the problem back then, was that some of the folks were forgetting the point of the command to rest. They had made the commandments into an idol. We are funny creatures, aren’t we? Sabbath isn’t the thing we are supposed to worship. We worship the Lord God who, through grace, gives us a chance to rest. So this is both a warning and grace from Jesus. “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath.”

In the midst of your busy days, even if you already retired, I know the events can stack up on your calendar. You can feel the pressure to keep up appearances, to make a show of being productive. I ask you to remember. “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day.” Remember that God loves you, not because of what you produce but because you are loved, period. Remember that at the end of the day, your job is not to make your boss or anyone else happy. Your job is to live faithfully for Jesus.