There are not ten commandments; there are only nine.
That other one, the one about resting and not working on the Sabbath, that’s really just a suggestion. No one, not even the most observant Christians — with the possible exception of Hobby Lobby and Chick-fil-a — take it all that seriously, and even they simply close their businesses. Whether or not they actually rest and remember, as the commandment requires, is anyone’s guess.
Business Insider lists In-and-Out Burger, Marriott, and Forever 21 as three of the top seventeen most religious companies in the country but they all pretty much ignore the fourth commandment, as does Walmart who claims to run their company based on the principles of Christian servant leadership.1
And all this is so if you interpret “Sabbath” as Sunday. If you interpret it as sundown Friday through sundown on Saturday, as did the ancient Hebrews, first-century Jews, and the early, primitive Christian church, then just about everyone except the Jews and the Seventh Day Adventists have tossed out that “Never on Sunday” commandment.
It wasn’t always that way, though.
There was a time, about 2,000 years ago when people, religious people, Jewish people took that commandment very seriously, indeed. In fact, they took it so seriously that they spent a great deal of time and effort trying to determine what constituted “work” so they could be sure that they didn’t do it on the Sabbath.
Let’s take a minute and talk about that, shall we?
Remembering and Resting2
Shabbat, the Hebrew word for what we call Sabbath, is the only religious rite that is established and proscribed in the Ten Commandments. It is therefore the most important of all Jewish religious observances.
We pretty much take for granted the five-day work week, but that is a relatively new thing. In the times of the Bible there was no such thing as a weekend. The rich took time off whenever they liked, the poor, never. There was nothing to protect them from an employer who would make them work from dusk to dawn, seven days a week.
This commandment created one 24-hour period out of the week, from dusk on Friday to dusk on Saturday, as a time set aside for two things:
It was a time for 1) resting, and 2) remembering.
Resting meant not working, but it didn’t mean not working at all. Some types of work were permitted, such as those actions required for religious rituals or preparing to eat a meal that had been cooked beforehand. Work that contributed to the remembrance part of the day was also allowed – playing music, reading aloud, recitation, those kinds of things.
Work that wasn’t allowed was called, in Hebrew, melachah, which generally refers to the kind of “work that is creative, or that exercises control or dominion over your environment.” Also prohibited would be any work that achieved the same purpose. Specifically, the early rabbis listed 39 tasks that were prohibited along with any other task which was undertaken for the same purpose. (see Appendix on p. 139)
These tasks are, basically, the kinds of work that was undertaken to build the temple and, since the building of the temple was always halted for Shabbat, it seemed appropriate that that kind of work should always be halted for this sacred and holy day of the week.
Also, the time of resting wasn’t supposed to be spent taking naps but “remembering the significance of Shabbat, both as a commemoration of creation and as a commemoration of our freedom from slavery in Egypt.” Singing songs and recounting these important stories in poetry and literature were a big part of the Sabbath observance.
A thousand years later, in the first century CE, things had gotten a little twisted.
The law as it comes to us in the Torah was given to human beings by God to draw us closer to God and to each other. Its purpose was not arbitrary or accidental. It was meant to help us create a community of faith and justice where people live together in peace.
But human nature being what it is, this same law that was given as a gift to make for a just, peaceful, fair, equitable, and faithful society had been seized and reshaped by the religious/political leaders of that very same community and turned into something that does the opposite of what it was intended to do.
It was dividing and separating the people into subgroupings based on ethnicity, economics, place of birth, education, and religious practices. And it was separating people from YHWH.
This was all being done in two ways represented by the two stories that the gospel writer, Mark, placed before us this morning.
An Illegal Nosh
In the first story, the law had been perverted into a club for beating people into submission and a trap for ensnaring heterodoxy (unorthodox ideas).
Jesus and his disciples were walking through a field of grain on the Sabbath and as they walked some of the disciples absentmindedly stripped some grains off of the stalks, rolled them in their hands to remove the chaff, and popped them into their mouths to eat. It was a common way to snack in the fields. What, in Yiddish, is called a “nosh” (snack).
Some Pharisees who apparently were walking with them for reasons not explained, pounced on this violation of the Shabbat rules. Harvesting was not allowed on the Sabbath and this picking and eating of grain constituted harvesting. Gotcha!
They asked Jesus why his followers were willfully breaking the laws about Sabbath observation, a violation which, if they really wanted to push it, was punishable by death (Exodus 31:14).
Jesus answered a question with a question: Haven’t you read in the sacred texts how David was starving and broke into the temple and tricked the priest into giving him some sacred bread that only the priests could lawfully eat?
Before we go on, let’s be honest. Mark had just massacred the story that was recounted in 1 Samuel 21. The parallels between David and Jesus were, pretty much, nonexistent. In the David story there was no mention of hunger, he didn’t have any companions with him, he did not enter the house of God, and the high priest is Ahimelech, not Abiathar, and neither David nor his companions actually ate the sacred bread.
Mark had rewritten the story to make a Christian point about the Sabbath and, by inference, the law in general. The law was made to serve human beings. Human beings were not made to serve the law. If David could violate a silly law with impunity in order to serve a greater good, then certainly Jesus should be able to do so as well.
The law was given to draw us closer to each other in community and closer to God. When it ceases to do that it has failed in its purpose and a new law needs to be written.
A Withered Hand
The second story is more serious and more important than the first because it showed the law being perverted in such a way as to dismiss and even condone callousness and cruelty.
Jesus and the disciples entered the local synagogue, which is primarily a place of learning and a sort of local substitute for the temple as a place to worship. Inside the synagogue, he met a man with a withered hand; probably, the language tells us, a malady from birth.
Mark built tension by shifting the camera’s eye from Jesus to his audience, the religious leaders who were watching to see if he healed the man which, they believe, would be a violation of the Sabbath prohibition against working.
Note that neither of these two stories was about whether or not the Sabbath should be kept sacred. That was a given with which Jesus heartily agreed. These stories are about the definition of work, of melachah, and what work was allowed and what was not.
So Jesus invited the man with the withered hand to come forward and he asked the Pharisees, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save life or to kill?” This was not a rhetorical question and the answer would have been obvious to even the most casually observant Jew of that or this time.
Any Sabbath law can be broken to save a life. This applied not just to human life but to animal life as well. The most common example being, if you were walking along the road on the Sabbath and you saw an ox stuck in the mud would it be lawful to do the work necessary to free the ox? The answer is always “yes” because you would be working to save a life. Even if you’re not sure whether or not you’re actually saving the life, if you have reason to believe that you were, that is enough.
And, of course, it is not lawful to do harm, to ever murder another human being (cf. commandment number six), on the Sabbath or any other time. It is unlawful to slaughter or butcher an animal for food on the Sabbath. Jesus was pushing those laws and commandments even further. They had, up to now, been applied to action, and he applied them to inaction as well. What he seemed to be saying was that it was just as wrong to not do good, when you can do good, as it was to do evil.
All this was just too complicated and difficult for the Pharisees who believe that the guy’s hand would still be withered on Monday so why not just wait until then so you don’t have to break Shabbat? But rather than making that argument, they said nothing and Jesus, for the first and only time, shows that he is angry toward them. These religious leaders who had perverted the law in such a horrible way that it made it illegal to heal a suffering soul disgusted him.
With that, he healed the man’s hand and the Pharisees left and began to conspire with the Herodians, a political group for whom they, heretofore, have had no use. Their conspiracy was to kill Jesus, not because he was wrong but because he embarrassed them and showed them to be the hardhearted prigs that they truly were.
Sacred Cows Make the Best Burgers
The point of these two stories has very little to do with the Sabbath. They are not really about the definition of work and what is allowed on the Sabbath and what is not. To let them drag us into that discussion would be very like committing the same mistake that the Pharisees make.
The point of the stories, the issue at hand is, in fact, “sacred cows” and idolatry.
The legal prohibition against working on the Sabbath is, simply, an easy springboard into this broader concern: When have we allowed the sacred cows of our religion to become twisted and perverted so that they become clubs for beating people into submission or traps for ensnaring those who dare to question popular orthodoxy?
Likewise, and more importantly, when have we allowed our sacred cows, our rituals, our traditions, our doctrines, and our dogmas, to become idols that we worship, that rob us of our compassion, our kindness, our sense of charity, and our love of our fellow human beings?
When, in other words, do we allow our sacred cows to become more important to us than our relationships with each other and the Lord, and what do we do about them when they do?
Up to this point I have dealt with this subject in a nice, safe, general way that is sure to offend no one. After all, this passage couldn’t possibly be about my sacred cows, right? My sacred cows are never idolatrous. It’s other people’s sacred cows he was talking about.
Up to now it’s just been a broad, general kind of thing, safe and inoffensive.
But…
I’m going to conclude this sermon with a few specific sacred cows that I believe are currently running loose in our own Christian churches, sacred cows that need to be rethought and possibly re-contextualized. Perhaps some need sent to the slaughterhouse before they become idols that we place at the center of our worship instead of the God who comes to us in Jesus Christ:
The Bible
The first is the Bible.
After a lifetime of study and more than thirty years of professional ministry, I have come to believe that the biggest sacred cow, one that has already been placed on the altar and worshiped as an idol in many churches, is the Bible.
We have forgotten that the Bible is not God. It is a sign that points us toward God but it is not God. It is a story that tells us about the relationships of ancient cultures with God, but it is not God. It is an account of the good news of God’s love and mercy and acceptance… but it is not God.
We must free ourselves from that idolatry that is biblical literalism. We must, if we are going to grow in our faith, stop worshiping the Bible, and start wrestling with it, struggling with it, contending with it, discussing it, and, at the very least, studying it. Just reading it and expecting it to work some kind of magic in our lives is not enough.
It’s neither a talisman nor a grimoire.3 It carries with it no magical power or magical knowledge. It is, above all else, a story that needs to be studied, compared, and applied for it to have any meaning or power at all.
Religious Language
The second sacred cow is religious language.
We do love our religious language, do we not? The words and phrases we learned as children and youth gave us comfort and understanding throughout our lives and we loathe to let go of them. But, there are cases where we must let them go if we are going to effectively carry out the great commandment that Jesus gave to us: “Go and make disciples.”
It’s time to purge phrases like “Holy Ghost” and “blood of the Lamb” from our religious vocabularies. They are symbols that no longer speak to anyone outside of the closed circle that is fundamentalist Christianity. They smack of superstition and are most often met with repulsion from those both in and outside of the church.
How can we invite a new Christians into our church and then sing a hymn like “There is a Fountain Filled with Blood” and “Are You Washed in the Blood?” and not expect them to be at least a little confused if not totally grossed out?
The phrase “born again” is utterly without meaning to those who aren’t and to many who are but don’t realize it.
Words like “holiness” may have had meaning 200 years ago when John and Charles Wesley called their first prayer groups “holy clubs” but today that phrase smacks of religious zealotry and fanaticism.
If our missionaries of the past 200 years have taught us nothing else, it is that, when we go into the mission field we must be able to speak the language of those to whom we are taking the gospel. If we go speaking only our own language we will usually accomplish little more than offending and alienating the very people with whom we are trying to establish a bond.
Religious Capitalism
I’m a big fan of economic capitalism. I believe that when it is done right, honest competition in the marketplace can create some pretty great things like America. For all its shortcomings, this is a pretty great place to live. Sometimes I wonder at all the marvelous and amazing things that are available to us in this country and how lucky I am to have been born here. I mean, it’s really pretty awesome, and much of it has come my way because of capitalism.
But I also believe that capitalism must be left at the door of the church.
The church of Jesus Christ is not a capitalistic institution.
It is not a store where we go to purchase spiritual food to get us through the rest of the week. It is not a store where the customer is always right, and to which our only responsibility is to show up, get what we want or need, pay the check, and leave until we need something else.
Even a cursory examination of the New Testament shows this to be the case. We are a community of faith, a family, a body where every organ and limb has an important task to do and without which the body is incomplete. We do not function to make a profit, but to serve a God. The pastor is not the CEO, but the pastor, a word that comes from the Latin root meaning shepherd. The members are neither the customers nor the employees but members of the church, even as the hand and the foot and the eyes are members of the body.
Those are just three institutional sacred cows. There are local ones as well (chicken barbecues, vacation Bible schools, Sunday school classes, meetings, reports, and so on) and even personal ones (the pew I sit in, my favorite hymn, the time the worship service begins, what kind of clothes people in church should wear, and so on).
You can always identify them by asking one simple question: “Is this bringing people closer to God and each other, or is it dividing, separating, estranging people and, in general, creating problems for our life together, but we keep on doing it, anyway, because we always have?”
Robert Kriegel, in his book Sacred Cows Make the Best Burgers, says, “Individuals and organizations that are good react quickly to change. Individuals and organizations that are great create change.”
Rethinking and, sometimes, letting go of sacred cows requires change, change with which all of us are sometimes uncomfortable. Jesus didn’t call his followers to be comfortable. He didn’t just react to change. He created it, not for its own sake, but for the sake of the world, the world which he loved and for which he died.
In the light of that great sacrifice, it seems little enough to ask for us to occasionally loosen our grip on just a few of our sacred cows, whether they are doctrinal, ecclesiastical, traditional, institutional or personal.
After all, sacred cows really do make the best burgers.
Amen.
1. http://www.businessinsider.com/17-big-companies-that-are-intensely-religious-2012-1 and http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/07/24/7-religious-companies-besides-chick-fil-a/
2. A mythical book of magic spells.