Coloring Outside the Lines

“ ‘Observe the Sabbath day, to keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter or your male servant or your female servant, or your ox or your donkey or any of your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates, that your male servant and your female servant may rest as well as you. You shall 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.

Mark 2:23–3:6 ESV

One Sabbath he was going through the grainfields, and as they made their way, his disciples began to pluck heads of grain. And the Pharisees were saying to him, “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?” And he said to them, “Have you never read what David did, when he was in need and was hungry, he and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God, in the time of Abiathar the high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and also gave it to those who were with him?” And he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.” Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there with a withered hand. And they watched Jesus, to see whether he would heal him on the Sabbath, so that they might accuse him. And he said to the man with the withered hand, “Come here.” And he said to them, “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?” But they were silent. And he looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart, and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. The Pharisees went out and immediately held counsel with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.

The problem with neat little boxes

I love this passage from love it for a few reasons. The first reason I love it is because ten years ago this summer, hundreds of people saw their prayers for healing answered when our little son was born. He was born happy healthy, and with two great hands. Any stories or imagery about hands or healing in scripture really gets me now as a result.

And just love it when Jesus sees people others are ignoring - people who are in pain or struggling to get by. I’ve felt like that person nobody sees or cares about and the people who saw me are the ones in whom I have most clearly seen Jesus through. Not only that, but it annoys the blind followers of rules and the “this is how we do it” club when Jesus walks past them to be with people they see as “less than”. And there is something really satisfying about watching Jesus annoy the Pharisees.

So I just love this passage about the healing of the man with the withered hand. It doesn’t say if he’d had polo or arthritis or even amniotic band syndrome like my son did, but that’s not the point of the passage. The point is that Jesus is so compassionate it makes people angry.

Think about that. That’s the crux of the issue in the latter part of our passage: Jesus sees someone in need of compassion, of healing, of justice, and he grants that to the man. Because he’s Jesus! Of course he does! So what if it’s the Sabbath!? How in the world could healing someone be considered a bad thing? Deuteronomy says that the Sabbath is given as a matter of making sure everyone is taken care of! It’s a remembrance that once God’s people were oppressed, but God delivered them so that they might have rest.

Rest and work, freedom, and bondage. That is what we’re talking about in this passage here.

In the first section of our passage, Jesus and the disciples were just taking a walk through a grainfield and they grabbed a bite to eat. It’s still in practice today in Galilee that farmers leave some unharvested grain at the edges of their fields for travelers and hungry folk. So the Pharisees aren’t upset that Jesus took grain - they are upset that he did work on the Sabbath.

If you’ve never walked through a grainfield, try it some day. It’s beautiful. It’s peaceful. It’s hardly “work”, even if you do reach out and grab a few heads of grain.

In the centuries since God first mandated that the people set aside one day of every seven for rest, there had been great debate about what exactly constituted “rest” and “work.”

Out of this debate arose a legal system so complicated it could be argued that something as innocuous and restful as plucking a few heads of grain in a field could be construed as “unlawful work on the Sabbath” because the disciples were “threshing” the grain with their hands.

The Pharisees had put their human interpretations of God’s law above the human needs of the people and had instead of creating rest, created so many rules that it caused more work to follow them than to simply rest. They weren’t prepared for anything that didn’t fit into their neat little box of right and wrong - even if their neat little boxes of right and wrong wound up contradicting the original intent of Sabbath.

Sabbath is grace, not law

Jesus’ answer to the pharisees in part one of this narrative was a bit unusual. It doesn't seem at first to be a direct answer to the Pharisees’ issue. Rather he harkened back to when David and his men were hungry and could find nothing but holy bread to eat.

That bread was consecrated, set aside. But the hunger, the physical need of David and his men was greater than the need to adhere to the ceremony surrounding that bread. Like David, Jesus was following the spirit of the law, not the letter of the law as interpreted by the people trying to follow it.

Again, as he dismays the hard-hearted pharisees by healing a man on the Sabbath, Jesus reminds everyone that God’s good work of compassion and healing is more important than human rules and regulations - even those based out of scripture.

Jesus, self-proclaimed Lord of the Sabbath and Son of Man did not appreciate the Pharisees’ complicated interpretations of God’s Law. If anyone had the right to be offended by too much work on the Sabbath, surely it was the Lord of the Sabbath himself! But instead, he charged that the ceremony that had come to surround the idea of Sabbath was not to be put ahead of the actual needs of people.

Just as the well-being of David and his army was more important than the consecration of the bread , the well-being of the disciples was to Jesus more important than the Sabbath ceremonies observed by the Pharisees.

This isn’t just a one-off instance of Jesus warning people to address the earthly needs around them. In , Jesus says that anyone who ignores the sick, the poor, the naked, the imprisoned ignores HIM.

The greatest commandments? Love the Lord your God with all your being and LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF! Nothing complicated or hard to remember. Just. . . LOVE.

Time and time again, Jesus puts love and care of the real needs of people above the rules and regulations and lists and ceremony of man.

Sabbath is goooood. Sabbath was made for man. It is a valuable, needed rest and reminder of God’s goodness. But if the Sabbath is creating, rather than addressing needs and distress, something has gone very wrong. Sabbath was originally about justice for a formerly enslaved people. To use Sabbath to essentially enslave people to a bunch of rules completely defeats the purpose of it!

When our plans aren’t God’s plans

The second reason I love this passage is because the version of this story we see in is the first passage I preached on in seminary. In that sermon, I preached only on the first part in which Jesus and the disciples get busted for picking grain on the Sabbath. I was all set to preach this great sermon on how we as budding pastors had to learn how to not get too set in our ways so that we can listen to the Holy Spirit.

And the day before I was supposed to preach that sermon, the Boston Marathon bombing happened. As a marathoner myself, that was a big deal. And the next day, runners around the world planned to wear marathon race shirts as a show of support for our fellow runners who had been injured, killed, or otherwise affected by that violent incident.

That posed a very difficult problem for me. See, I have a ton of race shirts. But I had bought a new outfit to preach in that next morning in class. I was going to look the part of a bona fide preacher. Because preachers look nice in the pulpit, you guys! They don’t wear their gross old race shirts!

At first I thought I’d just change into my race shirt when I got home. I could still wear the clothes I had carefully chosen for that morning to keep up the right appearance for class and then show my solidarity later. Or maybe I could put it under a button down shirt. . . kinda like Superman.

And then in that funny way He likes to do. . . God worked up a conviction in my heart that I was doing the same silly thing I was getting ready to tell all of my classmates not to do. He took my own stupid sermon and preached it right on back to me! I learned two lessons that morning. The first is that the best sermons are the ones I have to learn the hard way while they are being formed. I can almost guarantee that whenever you hear me preach something that really feels like it sticks - it’s because I managed to screw it up myself and wrestle with it all week long or longer before preaching it.

The second thing I learned is that Jesus doesn’t always color inside the lines and neither should we. You see, there were other runners and people from Boston there at my school and in the congregation I served and all over Pittsburgh. Our country - especially a subculture I'm actively involved in - was shocked by the news. People I run with were there that day running the Boston marathon. I was sure to run into people that morning who would recognize why I was wearing a race shirt and I’d be offered an opportunity to pray and give support – an opportunity my own silly preconceived notion about my outfit would have squished.

You see, there are other runners and people from Boston here at this school and in the congregation I serve and all over Pittsburgh. Our country - especially a subculture I'm actively involved in - was shocked by this news. People i run with were there yesterday running the Boston marathon - people I have had and will again have an opportunity to minister to and pray with because I'm a part of the running community. I’m sure to run into people today who will recognize why I’m wearing this shirt and I’ll be offered an opportunity to pray and give support – an opportunity my own silly rule about my outfit would have squished.

Preaching a message the day after a news story like the Boston marathon bombing started to feel empty to me if I didn’t- at least in some small way acknowledge the trauma that happened to some of the people around me – even if it messed with the sermon and ceremony I had already planned in my head.

Like the pharisees, we like rules. They make us feel safer. They make us feel secure: like we're in control. They make some of our decisions easier. When subjectivity and ambiguity are the enemy, specificity and well-defined lines are our friends.

Before you start thinking I’m even more of a rule-hating rebel than you’d realized, please remember my silly wardrobe dilemma. I like rules and plans and ceremony. I want to know what to expect. I have school aged children in my house- I would be nuts to treat the rules too carelessly. Without rules, things would go very bad very fast. But -and please don’t have my Presbyterian credentials revoked for saying this - rules and order and ceremony, my friends, are not the end all be all to living the Christian life.

People are leaving the church in droves because they are tired of hearing all rules and little love. “Don’t legalize this thing because it’s against our religious rules.” "UNlegalize this thing because it's against our religious rules." “You can come here, but here are the rules.” “Look like this.” “Dress like that.” “Talk like me.” “Vote like him.”

“If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.”

We the church are all too often but a noisy gong in the ears of the world around us.

Grace in the Text

Jesus’ answer to the pharisees was a bit unusual. It doesn't seem at first to be a direct answer to the Pharisees’ issue. Rather he harkened back to when David and his men were hungry and could find nothing but holy bread to eat.

That bread was consecrated, set aside. But the hunger, the physical need of David and his men was greater than the need to adhere to the ceremony surrounding that bread.

The greatest commandments? Love the Lord your God with all your being and LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF! Nothing complicated or hard to remember. Just. . . LOVE.Time and time again, Jesus puts love and care of the real needs of people above the rules and regulations and lists and ceremony of man.

Sabbath is goooood. Sabbath was made for man. It is a valuable, needed rest. But if the Sabbath is creating, rather than addressing needs and distress, something has gone very wrong. Sabbath was originally about justice for a formerly enslaved people. To use Sabbath to essentially enslave people to a bunch of rules completely defeats the purpose of it!

The Greatest Commandment

We must find a way to move from being that noisy gong to being a voice of comfort: that much is clear from this passage.

And that is where it gets exciting, friends!

We have a unique opportunity to be that voice of comfort.

At the risk of sounding corny, I assert that WE are the future of the church! Those of us sitting here right now. It all leans on us. This particular church will sink or swim because of what we do from this morning onward. The church in our country and around the world is dramatically affected by how we choose to live out our calling here as a church family. God has called us into leadership at this very moment to help guide His people! I don’t care if you feel like you’re a leader or not. You are one of the people who cares enough to be sitting in the pews today and that earns you a spot as a leader. As we discern our future together as a congregation, let’s not forget that first and foremost we are called to care for God’s people.

We aren't some sort of religious referees running around the field of life blowing whistles at every infraction. That’s not our calling. Our calling is to reach out and take care of the children of God, no matter what they look like, dress like, talk like, live like or even smell like.

We are called to expect the unexpected and set aside our ceremony when it happens. That means that “but we’ve always done it that way” is not a valid excuse anymore, dear ones.

Life is full of surprises – both joyful and devastating. In attending to the concrete needs of those around us – needs of food, comfort, brotherhood, water, shelter, love – we are called out of our comfortable rules, ceremonies and plans in order to live out a truly Christian life.

Church isn’t always very pretty (can I get an amen?). It very rarely follows our rules or expectations. There will always be someone or something unexpected knocking at your door. If there isn’t, you might want to re-visit how to make your door more welcoming.

And the unexpected ones will always matter, even if it’s not food pantry day. They will always matter, even if they are interrupting your sermon writing routine. They will always matter, even if they are sitting during the standing parts and standing during the sitting parts. Even when they are saying something completely off the wall in Sunday school - they matter and what they have to say matters. They will always matter, even if you can’t hear the sermon over the sirens or the dog barking or the squeaky pews or whatever.

Caring for the needs of and embracing the people around us must be one of our very highest priorities because it is one of Jesus’ very highest priorities and because Jesus shows us this same love and respect.

Jesus sets aside the rules and ceremony for us so that we might truly experience and celebrate Sabbath rest. Let us go and do the same for others.

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