Hovering

Exodus 20:8-11

January 15, 2023 • Mount Pleasant UMC

It’s an old joke, and maybe you’ve heard it before, but you know we preachers only have so many stories, so sometimes you have to put up with repeats. The story tells of a group of scientists who were fed up with the literal interpretation of Genesis and the creation story. They wanted to prove that anything this so-called God could do, they could do as well, so the scientists went to talk with God about the whole thing. They invited God to participate in a “human-making contest.” “We’ve got it all figured out,” they told God. “We can make a human being faster and better than you can.” So God agreed to the contest and invited the scientists to go first. And just as the scientist bent over to scoop up some dirt, God stopped him. “Uh huh,” God said. “That's my dirt; you get your own dirt.”

Maybe funny, maybe not, but it does remind us our human tendency to try to be like God, or to try to take God’s place. Our so-called modern world has convinced us that the ancient whisper of the serpent is true: “You can be like God!” (cf. Genesis 3:5). Never mind that every time we do try to take God’s place, every time we try to do what we should let God do, or every time we try to be like God, we end up creating a mess. Chaos. That’s a big part of why we are in the place we are these days, why we have a world that is “In the Chaos.” And so for these first few weeks of the year, we are attempting to not just look at or notice the chaos, but to find ways for us, as followers of Jesus, to live faithfully in the midst of a chaos that doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon. Is there a way to counteract our tendency to try to take God’s place?

I admitted to this last week, but when the world is chaotic, or especially when my own personal world becomes chaotic, I want to try to fix it. I told you last week that when I was first diagnosed with my heart murmur, at eighteen years old, I asked the doctor right away, “What are we going to do to fix it?” I wanted it fixed right then, and preferably right there! When my car breaks down and interrupts my plans, I want to get it fixed right then. I remember on 9/11 when the planes hit the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and Somerset County, Pennsylvania, when the world seemed to be falling apart, I had this overwhelming desire to do something, to fix it. I knew I couldn’t fix the whole situation, I don’t have that kind of power, but when the call went out for blood donations, I decided that was something I could do. I hate needles, and I hate being stuck, but I could make that “sacrifice” just to be able to do something to help. And though I can’t do it myself anymore, that’s why we hold blood drives, like the one that’s going on today. When the pandemic hit three years ago (has it really been three years?), we all wanted to do something. We didn’t want to stay home; we wanted to fight this invisible enemy. Surely there was something we could do! I know when my kids were growing up and someone hurt them or something happened that made them upset, I wanted to fix it. What can I do to get rid of the chaos that has come into their lives? Even when I have to go to the doctor or sit in any sort of waiting room, I tend to bring something to read so that I can use the time. I have this drive in me to not waste time, and I’m not alone if the number of smart phones being stared at in waiting rooms is any indication. We tend to live by the motto, “Don’t just stand there, do something!” Can anyone relate to this?

But here’s what I’m learning, what I seem to have to learn over and over again: my way is not God’s way (cf. Isaiah 55:8). God works in the world an entirely different way than I think he should. And God’s way of doing things is rooted in creation itself. Last week, we talked about how God brought order out of chaos. The very creation story is an exercise in ordering the world out of what was a “formless and empty” mess (Genesis 1:2). And then, day by day, God sets about creating things to fill the world, to order the world until finally, on the sixth day, God reaches the crowning achievement of creation: humanity. When man and woman are created, creation is not just “good,” it is “very good” (Genesis 1:31). And then do you remember what happens? Genesis says this: “By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done” (Genesis 2:2-3).

It’s a strange image if we think about it much, isn’t it? It’s like God wipes his brow, looks at what he has done, and then lays down on the couch to take a nap. I mean, do we really worship a God who is easily worn out? Sure, creating a whole universe would be a lot of work for you or me, but I’d like to think there isn’t such a thing as “too much work” for God. Is there something more going on here? As you can probably guess, there is more going on here but we don’t really know what for sure until we get to the book of Exodus.

One other thing we need to know: dividing the days into sets of seven was not unique to the Hebrews and it’s not unique to the Bible. The ancient people observed that the moon had a 28-day cycle and so they divided their time into four sevens—what we now call “months”—but nowhere else in the ancient world is there this idea that out of those seven days you take one of them to rest. One complete day of rest and worship out of every seven (cf. Oswalt, “Exodus,” Cornerstone Biblical Commentary, Vol. 1, pg. 444). One of God’s answers to the chaos of the world is to…do nothing. To stop everything and rest. God takes my way of wanting to do things and turns it on its head: “Don’t just do something, stand there.”

In the book of Exodus, this principle from creation becomes a commandment. It is the fourth commandment, the first one after all the commands about how we relate to God, and it is the one with the longest explanation, the most extensive rationale. I think that’s because God knows it may be the most difficult commandment to accept (cf. Goldingay, Exodus & Leviticus for Everyone, pg. 81). I mean, we get not killing and not stealing and not lying and not committing adultery. Those things make a certain amount of sense if you’re going to have a stable society. Even if we don’t obey them, they make sense. But resting? Taking one day off out of seven? Especially in our hyper-driven, over-producing, work-focused society, taking one day off out of seven makes no sense. Think how much more we could produce if we work every day! There are things to be done, and especially in an agricultural society, such as the original Hebrews lived in, not doing the work might mean you have nothing to eat next week, or next year (cf. Goldingay 81). Into that culture, and into ours, God says, “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy,” and because God knows we will probably ask what that means, God spells it out. “On [the seventh day] you shall not do any work…” (20:8, 10). How much work can we do? Some? Part-time work? God says, “None.” And, even more than that, God says we are not to expect or require those who work for us to work either. Or our children. Or even our animals (cf. 20:10). Why? Because God “rested on the seventh day” (20:11). So God’s resting at the conclusion of creation was not about God being tired. It was about setting an example for us.

And so, as we tend to do, we took the idea of Sabbath and we made it legalistic. Many if not most of us grew up with some idea of things you could and couldn’t do on Sunday, ideas that came mostly out of the 19th century “holiness” movement, but the roots of legalism centered on the Sabbath go back a lot further than that. Over time, the Jewish leadership developed a long list of do’s and don’ts. “By Jesus’ time, there were 1,521 things you could not do on the Sabbath. The Jerusalem Talmud [the guide for Jewish life] had 64 pages and the Babylonian Talmud had 156 double pages of specific rules dealing with the sabbath” (Kalas, The Ten Commandments from the Back Side, pg. 47). Here are some of them: if you had a toothache, you couldn’t gargle with vinegar on the Sabbath, but you could use a toothbrush dipped in vinegar to ease the pain. You could dip a radish in salt, but you couldn’t leave it sit in the salt because it might pickle and pickling was considered work. You can only walk about a half a mile away from your home on the Sabbath, which is why many lived close to their synagogue. Often the synagogue was in the center of ancient towns. And it didn’t get any better after the first century. One of my favorite examples of Christian legalism concerning the sabbath is a man in seventeenth-century Scotland who was arrested and put in jail for smiling on the Sabbath. Because, you see, your face muscles must work to smile. Any wonder why people think Christians are sour people? Joy Davidman, the wife of C. S. Lewis, once said people had changed the fourth commandment to read, “Thou shalt not enjoy life on Sunday” (Kalas 47).

But legalistic practices were never the point of the Sabbath. Jesus said, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). If you remember the context, the Pharisees are criticizing his disciples for picking and eating grain from a field on the Sabbath. It is “unlawful” to do that, the Pharisees say, because that constitutes work: harvesting and milling. But Jesus reminds the legalists that the purpose of the Sabbath was never about rules. It was about rest. It was about joy. It was about creating space so that chaos would not and could not rule our lives. As one author has said, it’s not so much that we keep the Sabbath but that the Sabbath keeps us (cf. Kalas 49).

Jewish scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel once said, “Sabbath is the most precious present humankind has received from the treasure house of God” (qtd. in Barton, Embracing Rhythms of Rest and Work, pg. 3). But it’s largely a present we don’t unwrap, mainly because we don’t know how to stop. We have this idea that if we stop working, if we stop doing what we believe only we can do, the world will fall apart. Or someone might be mad at us. Or we might lose value. Maybe we find our fulfillment and our worth in our work, and we’re secretly afraid if we don’t work we won’t be worth anything. And yet, research has discovered is when we don’t stop, when we don’t rest, any fulfillment we find in our work decreases exponentially. Dr. Ellsworth Kalas describes it this way: “Fatigue not only makes cowards of us all, it also makes us pessimists. Even the most beloved tasks become drudgery if we are unduly tired. We lose all ability to see our work with objectivity, let alone with optimism and thanksgiving” (48). Is it possible we create more chaos because we don’t rest, because we won’t stop? Maybe God was on to something. In creation, God brought order to chaos and then he rested.

Or he stopped, actually. The Hebrew word for “sabbath,” shabbat, really means “stopping” or “ceasing,” not just sitting down for a rest. I mean, after all, the psalms tell us God neither slumbers or sleeps (cf. Psalm 121:3-4). He doesn’t need a nap. Rather, what the Bible tells us is God stopped working. He brought order to chaos and then he stopped—as an example to us. When we’ve done all that we can in six days, we are commanded to follow his example. Stop. Cease. To not do so is a kind of smack in God’s face. It’s like we’re saying, “Well, the world may be okay if you take a break, but if I do, it will fall apart” (cf. Kalas 47). In other words, we’re saying we’re more important to the operation of the world than God is! Bishop Will Willimon once said our workaholism is evidence that we think we’re more vital than God himself.

Now, I’m not saying rest is more important than work. Both are necessary, especially as we’re seeking to bring order to the chaos. The Biblical model is for a rhythm between the two. Six days of work. One day of not-work. “God did both, and the goodness is in the movement back and forth between the two” (Barton 23). Or here’s a image maybe you can relate to. Picture work as an inhale; without the inhale, we cannot live. Sabbath is the exhale, and without the exhale you can’t inhale again. Try it—take a deep breath in and hold it. Now breathe in again. You can’t, or at least not very much. Okay, you can let it go. Our lives depend on the rhythm of inhaling and exhaling, and our spirits depend on the rhythm of work and ceasing from work (cf. Barton 25).

I’ll be honest: sabbath and I have a back-and-forth relationship, and there are times in my life when it has been easier to practice than others. First, a word about the day of the week. Legalistically, “sabbath” in Biblical understanding is Saturday, the seventh day. That’s why Jews and Seventh-Day Adventists still worship on Saturday. Early on in the history of the church, when Christianity became its own faith rather than a Jewish sect, the church began to worship on Sunday, the day of resurrection, and it was known as “The Lord’s Day.” Sabbath was still Saturday. For us, I don’t believe the actual day matters as much as that we take a day. I had someone years ago arguing with me that no one should work on Sunday; he was very legalistic about a lot of things. When I pointed out that I work on Sunday, he said that was different. But there are people—first responders, hospital personnel, church staff—who have to work on Sunday. I can tell you when I’ve been in the hospital, I’ve been very glad there were nurses and other staff there on Sunday to help care for me! The point of sabbath is to find a day, one day in seven, when we stop doing what we do, when we stop our work. For me and for our church staff, that’s Friday. That’s why the office is closed on Fridays, to provide a space and a time when our pastors and staff can stop their work.

But while I’ve always had a day off, I’ve struggled with sabbath because it’s awfully easy for me to take that day off and fill it up with all sorts of errands and activities. And I end up at the end of that day off not having rested, not having honored God and not having renewed my spirit. I don’t believe there is anything wrong with activity on the Sabbath. I don’t think you have to sit around in quiet with your hands folded all day. If Sabbath was made for us, as Jesus said it was, then what we do that day should accomplish two things. It should reconnect us with our creator, with God, and it should renew our spirit. So I’ve tried to, as much as I can, stop doing certain things on Friday, my Sabbath, because, let’s be honest, shopping at Wal-mart neither connects me to God nor does it renew my spirit. I have known people who spend time exercising on their Sabbath, maybe praying as they run or work out. Others might work in the garden or the yard because, for some reason, that’s refreshing to them. I don’t get it, but God made us all different, right? For some, physical rest might be the highest priority. Rabbi Yalkut Reubeni, a seventeenth-century Jewish teacher, said, “Sleep on the Sabbath is a pleasure.” And others have suggested we should spend part of the day studying the Scriptures and the other part feasting (cf. Kalas 51). The point is to do something different than what you do the rest of the week, something that will renew your spirit. Sabbath should not be about rules and regulations; it should be about relationship—with God and with each other.

Because Sabbath should remind us that we are not really in control of our time. “Time does not belong to us but to the creator of time” (Oswalt 444), so if we don’t receive the gift of Sabbath that the creator has given to us, “we will be condemning ourselves to be less than what the Creator intends us to be” (ibid). And this explains one of the major events in the Bible—the Exile, when the Hebrew people were removed from their land. You see, God had commanded that not only the people but also the land was to be given rest. The land was to be given a sabbath every seven years, but productivity demands that you keep producing, so the prophets say that because Israel refused to do what God commanded, God took matters into his own hands. The Exile was “collecting on unkept sabbaths.” A similar thing happens to us when we don’t honor God’s directions. When we fail to stop, to cease, to rest, our bodies and spirits and souls give out. It may show up in simply being disillusioned with their work, or even growing to hate their work, or it may show up in an even more serious mental health crisis, what we used to call a “nervous breakdown.” One author says, “It may well be that life is collecting its unkept sabbaths” (Kalas 49). When we don’t carry out God’s instructions, we do so at our own peril.

Now here’s the irony—at least it feels ironic to me. The serpent’s temptation, the promise that got our first parents, Adam and Eve, to go against the instruction God gave them was this: “Your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God” (Genesis 3:5). Here’s the irony: when they sinned, it made work that much harder (cf. Genesis 3:17-19). What makes us “like God” in a sense is Sabbath, when we choose to rest just as he did. In the story of creation, we’re told that the Spirit of God was “hovering” over the chaotic waters. In the chaos that we may have made of our lives, in the chaos that has come because we don’t want to live life God’s way, the Spirit of God still is hovering, nearby. The word used there has the sense that “something amazing is just about to happen, but maybe not yet” (LaGrone, Out of Chaos, pg. 85). Sabbath is like hovering, a reminder that the chaos can be overcome, even if not right this minute. Practicing Sabbath is when we become most like God in this world. The hovering Spirit shows up over and over again in Scripture, not just at the beginning, and when the Spirit hovers, it’s always a sign that chaos is about to be converted, changed, overcome. It’s a sign that “creation is breaking forth from darkness into newness of life” (LaGrone 85). That imagery shows up at baptism, when the Spirit descends and hovers over Jesus, indicating that what he is doing is bringing order to chaos.

Then Jesus dies, horribly, on the cross. There are three hours of darkness and then he dies and is buried. Chaos seems to win. And there is silence from sundown on Friday until sunrise on Sunday. Do you know what that day is? It’s the Sabbath. Even at this pivotal moment in history, the Sabbath was honored. Here’s how musician Andrew Peterson describes it:

Six days shall you labor, the seventh is the Lord's

In six, He made the earth and all the heavens

But He rested on the seventh

God rested

He said that it was finished

And the seventh day, He blessed it

God rested

(“God Rested,” from Resurrection Letters—Prologue)

In his crucifixion and, ultimately, in his resurrection, Jesus is redeeming the whole of creation. He is recreating the world, bringing hope and new life, but before the world started over, God rested. Did God the Father need that time to somehow summon up his strength to push back the stone and get Jesus out of that tomb? Of course not. The day or so Jesus spent in the tomb is a reminder that in God’s creation and even in his new creation, Sabbath remains and chaos is redeemed because of it.

Chaos is overcome not by working harder but by honoring God and practicing Sabbath. This morning, as we pray, I hope you will allow the Spirit of God to hover over you, to give you a vision of what life can be like if you will live it the way God calls you to. This is not the American dream; this is so counter to the way of life we know as to be really radical. Something amazing is about to happen; let the Spirit of God hover over your chaos and call you to rest in him. Let’s pray.