Richard Davenport
June 2, 2024 – Proper 4
Deuteronomy 5:12-15
The Ten Commandments. Moses presents them again to the people of Israel here in Deuteronomy. Everything God says is worth hearing again a second time, the Ten Commandments being some of the most important. The Israelites have had a hard time following God since they left Egypt, not that God has made it hard for them, but because the Israelites constantly think there’s another, better way to do things. God doesn’t give them the law to be onerous. Rather it is there to help guide them. If you want to know how to live a life that avoids idolatry, and all of the many problems that go with it, look to the law.
While a number of the laws God gave to Israel were meant for them specifically, others, like the Ten Commandments aren’t just descriptions of how the Israelites should live, they are descriptions of how the world works. Whether you like it or not, the world is designed operate within God’s law, the Ten Commandments in particular. If you fail to follow this law, you throw everything around you into chaos. You may survive like that for a while, but eventually it will catch up to you in a big way. Ignoring God’s law is guaranteed to bring misery to you and those around you.
When Luther examines the Ten Commandments, he sees a clear division. The first three commandments deal primarily with our relationship to God, the rest deal with our relationship to our neighbors. The Third Commandment, which is what we find in our reading for today, deals with God.
Keeping the Sabbath rest. What does that mean? I guess it depends on what you think of when you hear the word “rest.” Are you following the sentiment of the old 80’s rock song that declared, “everybody’s working for the weekend?” Maybe you’re like Huey Lewis and the News, shouting, “all I want is a couple days off.” If so, you certainly aren’t alone.
How many people have worked hard mentally and physically all week and have looked forward to the blessed rest that comes with the weekend? More than I can count, I’m sure. I’ve done it myself on more than a few occasions. The thought of kicking back and relaxing, or at least setting your own schedule and doing what you want to do, rather than what you need to do. It’s really nice having that free time.
Of course, when you start thinking about how enjoyable that free time is, you start to wonder why you can’t have it all the time. Why should I work when I can lounge around? Why should I sweat and toil when I could be doing so many other things I’d much rather be doing? Why do I need to be working my fingers to the bone every day? I could be watching baseball. I could be taking that road trip around the lower 48 states. I could go hiking the Appalachian trail. I could spend more time with my stamp collection. There are any number of things I could be doing that would be far more entertaining than the work I have to do every day.
It’s not a lot different than the life people get to lead when they’re retired, except that when you’re retired you aren’t always in the condition to be able to go and do all of this stuff. That’s why I should do it now, while I’m still able to enjoy it. Of course, even when you’re retired, there’s still things that have to get done. There’s housework to do. Groceries to buy. Bills to pay. All of that just gets in the way.
If you’re going to live that way though, I hope you’re independently wealthy, such that you can just sit back and let your investments pay all of the bills so you don’t have to lift a finger to do anything. At that point, I suppose you can just do whatever you want with your life. I don’t know why God doesn’t just make it so we can all live that kind of life, but I guess it doesn’t really matter as long as I get that kind of life.
That’s one of the things that often gets forgotten in our desire to live a life of idleness and repose. Someone has to do the work. Someone has to grow the food. Someone has to make the clothes. Someone has to serve you so that you can lounge around all day. But that’s all rather secondary. As long as I get to live the easy life of my dreams.
As with most things, we take what is given to us and demand more. We have an insatiable desire for more, never being satisfied with what we have. We don’t just want to rest, we want to stretch that rest more and more and more, forcing others to do our work for us if need be.
God’s laws, and the Ten Commandments in particular, serve many purposes. It isn’t hard to see what happens when we let our desire for rest get out of control. We become perpetual summer teenagers, lounging around in bed for 12-14 hours, only getting up when hunger finally overtakes us, and even then only doing the minimum necessary before flopping back down in front of the television. Even when you’re older, the desire for rest and relaxation, to be waited on hand and foot turns everything around. As Luther would say, we make a god of our own bellies. Everything and everyone else begins to exist only to feed us.
God’s law bounds us on the other side as well, telling us that working endless hours isn’t healthy either. Rest is a gift from God and it is necessary, but only to the point he gives and not more. Here, God explains what the Third Commandment is all about. It isn’t just about rest. It has a greater purpose.
When God institutes the Sabbath as a day of rest, he patterns the week on the original days of creation. God worked creating the world in six days and then the work was finished. Nothing more needed to be added to what he had done. It wasn’t a day of idleness, but a day of completion. Jesus comes into Jerusalem to complete the work of salvation. Six days he spends in Jerusalem, declaring, “it is finished,” from the cross on the sixth day. On the seventh he rests in the tomb because the work was complete. He was still active. He was declaring his victory over sin and death to those who had refused to believe in him before they died.
God gives us a Sabbath to reflect his own. The work for the week is done. That isn’t to say whatever project you were working on at the office is magically complete, or that emergencies can’t arise, or that you aren’t working on other things, household chores, gardening, running errands, etc. But, none of the things you might be busy with during the week are vital to your own salvation. None will bring you eternal life. None will even guarantee your mortal life.
God has completed the work of creation and the work of salvation. Everything necessary for you to live and live eternally has already been taken care of. While there is work for us to do in this world and business to be about, that all must be tempered with the knowledge that both your work and your rest have a purpose. Your work is to deal with the things God has placed before you. It can do no more than this. It can’t be more important than God has made it. Rest also has a purpose. Not just to remind us that work doesn’t save us, but also to give us the time and opportunity to enjoy everything else God has made, to spend time with him especially. Neither of these is good for us when taken out of the bounds God has put in place.
The Third Commandment should be cause for rejoicing. God wants us to spend our lives neither in constant work nor in idleness. Both are good, but neither should be all-consuming. We rejoice because in this, and in many other ways, God has made us to be like him, made in his image, mirroring him in how we live.
God has given us a great gift. We are given rest. Everyone else in the world works and works to try to achieve longer life somehow, or to extend what they have beyond their life by passing on an enduring legacy or something, anything that might make what little they have stretch just a bit further. We have rest. We know that God has everything in hand. He has already accomplished our salvation. Our debt of sin is wiped away. We constantly fall to one side or the other, misusing work and rest, but God’s grace resets us, letting us start fresh.
We also have work. God includes us in the work he is doing for others. We get to be a part of the process of sharing his love and his grace. God works with you and through you to share the good news, that our work doesn’t save, because the work of salvation is already done. We need not work for eternal life when it is already a gift.
Sometimes the Bible describes our life in the resurrection as being in our Sabbath rest. Understanding the Sabbath tells what we are looking forward to in the resurrection. Not idleness, lazily lounging around playing our harps on a cloud somewhere. It is a life that keeps everything in a perfect balance. It is a life that knows work cannot save and doesn’t treat work as something necessary to live, but as something needed to love and serve our neighbor.
Here in Deuteronomy, God calls his people to remember their time in Egypt. They worked and toiled and found no relief. They cried out to God for a chance to escape, to rest from their labors for a time, and he heard them. Their freedom from Egypt was accomplished entirely by God. They didn’t have to work for any of it, but that didn’t mean they were entirely idle. They followed where he led. He saved them and continued to give them what they needed, they only had to follow and know peace.
We gather here at the beginning of the Pentecost season because we have heard the message. We gather to hear again what our savior has done for us, how he has accomplished everything necessary for our salvation. It truly is finished. We gather here because God worked through faithful men and women at Pentecost to share the message, a message that has come down to us today. He invites you here to rest from the work of life for a time and to trust that he will see you through to eternity.