A sermon for Bloomsbury Central
Baptist Church
10th September
2023
Deuteronomy 5.12-15
In last week’s sermon,
we looked at the ancient Hebrew economic principles of Sabbatical and Jubilee,
and saw how these offer a persistent challenge
to unregulated systems of capital acquisition,
with their call to forgiveness of debts
and a less exploitative relationship with the land.
We also saw how this theme of economic and ecological ‘forgiveness’
is rooted deep within the Christian tradition,
with the Lord’s prayer itself calling us to forgive the debts of others,
even as our own debts are forgiven by God.
And we learned how these two principles, of Sabbatical and Jubilee,
are themselves the logical extensions of an underlying principle,
that of Sabbath;
which the Hebrew Bible tells us
is written into the fundamental relationship
between God, humans, and creation.
It’s written into the creation account of Genesis,
and codified as a divine law in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy.
And despite whatever else it might come to mean for us,
the Sabbath command is also an economic command.
It is a demand that people should not work on the seventh day,
that they should not earn money, for one day per week.
In preparing this week’s sermon, I’ve been greatly influenced
by reading Walter Brueggemann’s wonderful book ‘Sabbath as Resistance’,
and I commend it to you
if you want to take what we’re talking about this morning a bit further.
He describes a variety of ‘resistances’
that he identifies as emerging from the Sabbath command
to desist from work one day in each week,
including ‘Resistance to Anxiety’,
‘Resistance to Exclusivism’,
‘Resistance to Multitasking’,
and the one that is relevant for our reading this morning,
‘Resistance to Coercion’. [1]
In Deuteronomy 5, we find ourselves in the world of the Ten Commandments,
the laws originally given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai,
as the Israelites made their way from slavery to freedom,
from Egypt to the promised land.
The forty years of wilderness wandering
depict an Israel that is trying to work out what it is going to be,
what path it will follow,
how it will live as God’s chosen and holy nation.
In the time following their initial act of great faithful obedience,
following Moses through the waters of the Red Sea
into the wilderness of Sinai,
the people of Israel then find themselves
having a crisis of confidence in the desert.
You know the story well:
Moses leaves the people to go up the mountain,
and all the anxieties of Israel come to the surface.
Their God seems distant and their prophet is absent,
and in their acute anxiety they gather their gold,
their precious earrings, their most treasured possessions,
and they make their own god.
In that moment of anxiety,
they imagined that they could somehow purchase security in the world,
and to this day ‘God-making’ amid anxiety
remains a standard human response.
We think we can buy and build security,
and we make our own idols of gold
that we devote ourselves to in the hope they will not let us down.
But Moses, returning from the mountain after his conversation with God,
broke the tablets of stone
on which God had written the words of the covenant,
and had to go back up the mountain to try again,
receiving a new list of commands
to help the people learn to live in trust and relationship with God
in the midst of an anxious world.
And one of those commands is the Sabbath command.
The years and decades pass in the wilderness wandering of Israel,
and eventually the people came to the Jordan river,
ready to enter, at long last, into the promised land.
But it was a long time since Sinai,
and a new generation had grown up who didn’t remember the golden calf,
and so an aging Moses gives Israel renewed instruction
for what it will mean for them to live in their new land.
This long sermon is found in the book of Deuteronomy,
and lasts for thirty chapters.
Moses clearly regards the move to the new land as a high-risk venture,
and he wants to be sure that Israel understands
that the old, desert covenant still pertains
to the new agricultural territory, they are about to enter.
So Moses stands on the bank of the Jordan looking over at Canaan,
this fertile land flowing with milk and honey,
and he regards it as an enormous temptation
and a huge seduction to his people Israel.
He knows that the affluence of the land
is sure to create a crisis in covenant faith.
The problem before Israel is that the new land will work so well,
that they will come to think that they can manage on their own.
They will be tempted to autonomy,
without due reference to the Lord their God.
And whilst they might not make another golden calf,
they will still build their idols of gold and trust them for security.
The wilderness less of manna and quail,
of food that is given each day, enough for that day alone,
and which will not keep for tomorrow,
is about to be forgotten in the glories of fields and farming,
of barns and storehouses.
The reason Israel will be tempted to autonomy
is that this new land will make them inordinately prosperous.
The lowlands of the Israel between the river and the sea
are wonderfully fertile, for growing wheat and grazing crops.
And Moses knows that prosperity breeds amnesia.
So he warns Israel about amnesia:
[T]ake care that you do not forget the LORD,
who brought you out of the land of Egypt,
out of the house of slavery. (6:12)
[T]hen do not exalt yourself, forgetting the LORD your God,
who brought you out of the land of Egypt,
out of the house of slavery. (8:14)
Moses is worried that the Israelites might forget where they came from,
forget the circumstances they had left behind in Egypt.
They might forget that they had lived under a system of unbearable coercion
where they had to meet impossible production schedules
of more and more bricks at the hands of the Egyptian slave-masters.
Moses anticipates that if they do not remain alert to the God of emancipation,
they will just end up right back in another system of coercion.
The problem is that because the land is fertile,
its produce will make Israel safe and happy.
And the inescapable logic of production
is that if Israel can increase its produce,
it will be even safer and even happier.
In time Israel will discover that the sky is the limit!
The fertility of the land,
and the domestication of the wheat that grows there,
and the productivity of the systems of agriculture they will invent,
will make Israel acquisitive;
Ancient Israel will come to think that the goal of its life as a nation
is to acquire, and acquire, and acquire.
And in order to keep on acquiring,
Israelites will inevitably end up in competition with their neighbours,
and the system of ever-increasing acquisition
will turn a neighbour into a competitor,
and a competitor into a threat and a challenge.
And so Moses warns Israel to ‘Watch out!’
or the land in its productivity will transform Israelites
into producers and consumers,
and will destroy the fabric of covenantal neighbourliness
to which they have been called.
Moses understands, as do the prophets after him,
that being ‘in the land’ poses for Israel
a conflict between two economic systems,
each of which views the land differently.
On the one hand, the land is regarded as property and possession,
to be bought and sold and traded and used.
On the other hand, in a context of covenant,
the land is a birthright and an inheritance,
one’s own land as a subset
of the larger inheritance of the whole people of God.
If the land is possession,
then the proper way of life is to acquire more.
But if the land is inheritance,
then the proper way of life is to enhance the neighbourhood
and the extended family,
so that all members may enjoy the good produce of the land.
It is clear which of these perspectives
was appropriate to Sinai and the years in the wilderness.
But in its amnesia and wealth, Israel may forget its covenantal frame of reference,
and generate an economy that is anti-neighbourly
in order to have more, and ever more…
And so, in his great interpretive manoeuvre,
Moses asserts that:
The Lord our God made a covenant with us at [Sinai].
Not with our ancestors did the Lord make this covenant, but with us,
who are all of us here alive today (5.2-3)
Moses remembers the ancient covenant of Sinai,
made to a previous generation in Israel,
but he asserts that this covenant is still immediately relevant
for the new generation of Israel who are about to enter the land.
This is the core argument of the book of Deuteronomy,
that the economy is not a rat-race
in which people remain exhausted from coercive goals,
as they were in Egypt,
but rather the economy is an outworking of covenant
for the sake of the whole community.
Even in a new circumstance of agricultural possibility,
the old desert covenant is defining.
And Moses expects Israel therefore
to reject the acquisitive culture of its neighbours,
for the sake of a more neighbourly covenantal alternative.
And so Moses repeats the Ten Commandments,
a generation on from when they were first given at Sinai (recorded in Exodus 20),
including the command to observe the Sabbath:
Observe the Sabbath day and keep it holy,
as the LORD your God commanded you.
Six days you shall labour 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. (Deut. 5:12–14)
Moses proclaims Sabbath as the great day of equality
when all are equally at rest,
humans enslaved and free,
and animals and land alike.
Not all are equal in production,
some perform more effectively than others.
Not all are equal in consumption,
some have greater access to consumer goods.
Moses knows that in a society defined by production and consumption,
there are going to be huge gradations of performance
and, therefore, of worth and significance.
And he knows that in such a social system,
everyone is in danger of being coerced to perform better,
to produce more, to consume more,
to be the perfect shopper and the perfect worker.
Such valuing, of course, creates ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’,
the significant and the insignificant,
the rich and the poor,
people with access and people denied access.
But, he says, all are equal in rest.
Sabbath breaks the gradation caused by coercion.
On Sabbath:
– You do not have to do more.
– You do not have to sell more.
– You do not have to control more.
– You do not have to know more.
– You do not have to have your kids in ballet or soccer.
– You do not have to be younger or more beautiful.
– You do not have to score more.
Sabbath, the one day of rest, challenges the cycle of coercion,
because in rest all are of equal worth,
equal value, equal access.
And if you can construct a society where all get a chance to rest,
that forces that society to construct an economics of neighbourliness.
In our own society, we have seen this with the rise of the trades union movement,
and the push over the last two centuries for greater workers rights,
for universal healthcare, and the welfare state.
These are the contemporary outworking of the Sabbath principle,
as all receive the benefits regardless of their circumstances.
But back to scripture.
There is a significant difference
in the way the Sabbath command is framed in Deuteronomy
compared to its earlier version at Sinai.
In Exodus 20, when Moses received the tablets of stone on the mountain,
the command to rest was based on God’s act of creation:
‘For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth,
the sea, and all that is in them,
but rested the seventh day;
therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it.’ (Exod 20.11)
Intriguingly, this creation ordinance for Sabbath
doesn’t get a mention in Deuteronomy
as Moses stands on the shores of the Jordan
at the gates of the promised land.
Rather, what we find in Deuteronomy
is that the motivation for Sabbath is not creation.
Rather, Moses says that they are to rest on the seventh day,
because they must remember that [they] were … slave[s] in the land of Egypt,
[that] the LORD [their] God brought you out from there
with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm;
therefore [says Moses],
‘the LORD your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.’ (5:15)
The reason for Sabbath is exodus!
They are to remember
that the coercive system of Pharaoh was disrupted.
They are to remember
that the brick quota was declared null and void.
Moses is here warning the Israelites that if they forge this,
they will give their lives, both personally and corporately,
over to coercive competition.
But if they remember Egypt, and the Exodus wanderings in the wilderness,
they will know that Pharaoh,
and all similar agents of coercion, have been defeated.
You do not need to meet the expectations
of your mother, or your father,
or your work, or your boss,
or your broker, or anybody else.
You are free from the quota, if you remember,
if you situate yourself within the covenant memory.
Moses, in Deuteronomy,
imagines that Sabbath is not only a festival day
but also a new social reality,
that is carried back from the Sabbath day
into days one through six.
People who keep Sabbath live all seven days differently.
So the task, according to Moses, is to “seven” our lives.
There are two key aspects of new life that are made possible
when patterns of coercion are broken
by the faithful observance of Sabbath as a day of deep freedom.
First, we saw last week in our sermon on Deuteronomy 15,
that Moses lays out
the most radical extrapolation of Sabbath in the entire Bible.
Every seven years, in an enactment of “the Sabbatical principle,”
Israel is required to cancel debts on poor people,
And every seven Sabbaticals, at the Jubilee year,
they are to redistribute the land
and release those who have become economically enslaved.
The intention in this radical act of “seven”
is that there should be no permanent underclass in Israel (v. 4).
Moses, in this instruction, anticipates resistance
to this radical extrapolation of Sabbath,
he knows that Israelites may become “hard hearted” and “tight fisted” (v. 7).
But, he says, that is because they have fallen into coercive patterns
whereby the poor are targeted as objects of economic abuse
rather than seen as Sabbath neighbours.
Moses counters such resistance, however,
by appeal to the exodus memory (v. 15).
On the basis of their own experience as slaves in a coercive system in Egypt,
Israel is invited to “give liberally” (v. 10) and “provide liberally” (v. 14),
and so to avoid the temptations
of consumptive excess and economic abuse in their own land.
But second, the book of Deuteronomy identifies the great “triad of vulnerability”
of widows, orphans, and immigrants,
as needy members of society who are without protected rights.
The tradition of Deuteronomy is particularly attentive to their needs:
with numerous commands to protect the needs
of these vulnerable, exposed neighbours.
In this interpretive tradition, Sabbath is not simply a pause.
It is an occasion for reimagining all social life
away from coercion and competition,
towards compassionate solidarity.
Such solidarity is imaginable and achievable
only when the drivenness of acquisitiveness is broken.
Sabbath is not simply the pause that refreshes.
It is the pause that transforms.
Whenever ancient Israel was tempted to acquisitiveness,
Sabbath was an invitation to receptivity,
an acknowledgment that what is needed
is given, and need not be seized.
And so what does this look like in our world,
how does this ancient economic and theological model
take shape in our world, an in our lives?
We, too, know about the vulnerabilities
of those whose circumstances in life make them particularly fragile,
and the next decades of global life
are going to see ongoing waves of people displacement
and a persistent need for a compassionate and generous response
to those who find themselves refugees in the world.
This is why we, as God’s people, need to be active in welcoming refugees,
and reaching out across ethnic and religious divides.
We, too, know about the hurt caused by bereavement or relationship breakdown,
as people have to battle not only with grief,
but often changed financial circumstances also,
and there is a need for communities such as this congregation,
to offer a place of belonging and deep support
for those whose lives are in turmoil.
We too, know how our drive for security in life
can cause us to put our faith in glittering idols of gold,
as we trust in our possessions to the detriment of our reliance on God.
And the pattern of giving money and resources to God
through the community of faith that we are part of,
so that together we can re-balance the economy of faith,
is a vital part of our discipleship.
We too, know about the damage to the earth caused by excessive consumption,
as the climate crisis continues to become ever more tangible,
and there is a need for people such as us
to be willing to see beyond their own circumstances,
to answer the wider call for carbon reduction, pollution control,
and compassionate consumption through ethical trading and finance.
The principle of Sabbath, you see,
not only highlights the darkness of the human soul,
but also offers a way of breaking the cycle.
Friends, we need Sabbath.
as we are called to rest from the ever-spiralling demands of production,
to resist the call to ever greater acquisition and productivity,
to learn that sometimes enough is enough,
and to discover that this might mean
that another person can also have enough.
And so we find ourselves once again at the words of Jesus,
challenging us to a new and better way of being human.
We are his disciples, sent to the world with a message of good news,
as we learn to forgive the debts of others,
even as our own indebtedness is forgiven by God.
[1] The sermon that follows is based extensively on the chapter ‘Resistance to Coercion’ from: Brueggemann, Walter. Sabbath as Resistance, New Edition with Study Guide: Saying No to the Culture of Now. Presbyterian Publishing Corporation. Kindle Edition.
In last week’s sermon,
we looked at the ancient Hebrew economic principles of Sabbatical and Jubilee,
and saw how these offer a persistent challenge
to unregulated systems of capital acquisition,
with their call to forgiveness of debts
and a less exploitative relationship with the land.
We also saw how this theme of economic and ecological ‘forgiveness’
is rooted deep within the Christian tradition,
with the Lord’s prayer itself calling us to forgive the debts of others,
even as our own debts are forgiven by God.
And we learned how these two principles, of Sabbatical and Jubilee,
are themselves the logical extensions of an underlying principle,
that of Sabbath;
which the Hebrew Bible tells us
is written into the fundamental relationship
between God, humans, and creation.
It’s written into the creation account of Genesis,
and codified as a divine law in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy.
And despite whatever else it might come to mean for us,
the Sabbath command is also an economic command.
It is a demand that people should not work on the seventh day,
that they should not earn money, for one day per week.
In preparing this week’s sermon, I’ve been greatly influenced
by reading Walter Brueggemann’s wonderful book ‘Sabbath as Resistance’,
and I commend it to you
if you want to take what we’re talking about this morning a bit further.
He describes a variety of ‘resistances’
that he identifies as emerging from the Sabbath command
to desist from work one day in each week,
including ‘Resistance to Anxiety’,
‘Resistance to Exclusivism’,
‘Resistance to Multitasking’,
and the one that is relevant for our reading this morning,
‘Resistance to Coercion’. [1]
In Deuteronomy 5, we find ourselves in the world of the Ten Commandments,
the laws originally given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai,
as the Israelites made their way from slavery to freedom,
from Egypt to the promised land.
The forty years of wilderness wandering
depict an Israel that is trying to work out what it is going to be,
what path it will follow,
how it will live as God’s chosen and holy nation.
In the time following their initial act of great faithful obedience,
following Moses through the waters of the Red Sea
into the wilderness of Sinai,
the people of Israel then find themselves
having a crisis of confidence in the desert.
You know the story well:
Moses leaves the people to go up the mountain,
and all the anxieties of Israel come to the surface.
Their God seems distant and their prophet is absent,
and in their acute anxiety they gather their gold,
their precious earrings, their most treasured possessions,
and they make their own god.
In that moment of anxiety,
they imagined that they could somehow purchase security in the world,
and to this day ‘God-making’ amid anxiety
remains a standard human response.
We think we can buy and build security,
and we make our own idols of gold
that we devote ourselves to in the hope they will not let us down.
But Moses, returning from the mountain after his conversation with God,
broke the tablets of stone
on which God had written the words of the covenant,
and had to go back up the mountain to try again,
receiving a new list of commands
to help the people learn to live in trust and relationship with God
in the midst of an anxious world.
And one of those commands is the Sabbath command.
The years and decades pass in the wilderness wandering of Israel,
and eventually the people came to the Jordan river,
ready to enter, at long last, into the promised land.
But it was a long time since Sinai,
and a new generation had grown up who didn’t remember the golden calf,
and so an aging Moses gives Israel renewed instruction
for what it will mean for them to live in their new land.
This long sermon is found in the book of Deuteronomy,
and lasts for thirty chapters.
Moses clearly regards the move to the new land as a high-risk venture,
and he wants to be sure that Israel understands
that the old, desert covenant still pertains
to the new agricultural territory, they are about to enter.
So Moses stands on the bank of the Jordan looking over at Canaan,
this fertile land flowing with milk and honey,
and he regards it as an enormous temptation
and a huge seduction to his people Israel.
He knows that the affluence of the land
is sure to create a crisis in covenant faith.
The problem before Israel is that the new land will work so well,
that they will come to think that they can manage on their own.
They will be tempted to autonomy,
without due reference to the Lord their God.
And whilst they might not make another golden calf,
they will still build their idols of gold and trust them for security.
The wilderness less of manna and quail,
of food that is given each day, enough for that day alone,
and which will not keep for tomorrow,
is about to be forgotten in the glories of fields and farming,
of barns and storehouses.
The reason Israel will be tempted to autonomy
is that this new land will make them inordinately prosperous.
The lowlands of the Israel between the river and the sea
are wonderfully fertile, for growing wheat and grazing crops.
And Moses knows that prosperity breeds amnesia.
So he warns Israel about amnesia:
[T]ake care that you do not forget the LORD,
who brought you out of the land of Egypt,
out of the house of slavery. (6:12)
[T]hen do not exalt yourself, forgetting the LORD your God,
who brought you out of the land of Egypt,
out of the house of slavery. (8:14)
Moses is worried that the Israelites might forget where they came from,
forget the circumstances they had left behind in Egypt.
They might forget that they had lived under a system of unbearable coercion
where they had to meet impossible production schedules
of more and more bricks at the hands of the Egyptian slave-masters.
Moses anticipates that if they do not remain alert to the God of emancipation,
they will just end up right back in another system of coercion.
The problem is that because the land is fertile,
its produce will make Israel safe and happy.
And the inescapable logic of production
is that if Israel can increase its produce,
it will be even safer and even happier.
In time Israel will discover that the sky is the limit!
The fertility of the land,
and the domestication of the wheat that grows there,
and the productivity of the systems of agriculture they will invent,
will make Israel acquisitive;
Ancient Israel will come to think that the goal of its life as a nation
is to acquire, and acquire, and acquire.
And in order to keep on acquiring,
Israelites will inevitably end up in competition with their neighbours,
and the system of ever-increasing acquisition
will turn a neighbour into a competitor,
and a competitor into a threat and a challenge.
And so Moses warns Israel to ‘Watch out!’
or the land in its productivity will transform Israelites
into producers and consumers,
and will destroy the fabric of covenantal neighbourliness
to which they have been called.
Moses understands, as do the prophets after him,
that being ‘in the land’ poses for Israel
a conflict between two economic systems,
each of which views the land differently.
On the one hand, the land is regarded as property and possession,
to be bought and sold and traded and used.
On the other hand, in a context of covenant,
the land is a birthright and an inheritance,
one’s own land as a subset
of the larger inheritance of the whole people of God.
If the land is possession,
then the proper way of life is to acquire more.
But if the land is inheritance,
then the proper way of life is to enhance the neighbourhood
and the extended family,
so that all members may enjoy the good produce of the land.
It is clear which of these perspectives
was appropriate to Sinai and the years in the wilderness.
But in its amnesia and wealth, Israel may forget its covenantal frame of reference,
and generate an economy that is anti-neighbourly
in order to have more, and ever more…
And so, in his great interpretive manoeuvre,
Moses asserts that:
The Lord our God made a covenant with us at [Sinai].
Not with our ancestors did the Lord make this covenant, but with us,
who are all of us here alive today (5.2-3)
Moses remembers the ancient covenant of Sinai,
made to a previous generation in Israel,
but he asserts that this covenant is still immediately relevant
for the new generation of Israel who are about to enter the land.
This is the core argument of the book of Deuteronomy,
that the economy is not a rat-race
in which people remain exhausted from coercive goals,
as they were in Egypt,
but rather the economy is an outworking of covenant
for the sake of the whole community.
Even in a new circumstance of agricultural possibility,
the old desert covenant is defining.
And Moses expects Israel therefore
to reject the acquisitive culture of its neighbours,
for the sake of a more neighbourly covenantal alternative.
And so Moses repeats the Ten Commandments,
a generation on from when they were first given at Sinai (recorded in Exodus 20),
including the command to observe the Sabbath:
Observe the Sabbath day and keep it holy,
as the LORD your God commanded you.
Six days you shall labour 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. (Deut. 5:12–14)
Moses proclaims Sabbath as the great day of equality
when all are equally at rest,
humans enslaved and free,
and animals and land alike.
Not all are equal in production,
some perform more effectively than others.
Not all are equal in consumption,
some have greater access to consumer goods.
Moses knows that in a society defined by production and consumption,
there are going to be huge gradations of performance
and, therefore, of worth and significance.
And he knows that in such a social system,
everyone is in danger of being coerced to perform better,
to produce more, to consume more,
to be the perfect shopper and the perfect worker.
Such valuing, of course, creates ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’,
the significant and the insignificant,
the rich and the poor,
people with access and people denied access.
But, he says, all are equal in rest.
Sabbath breaks the gradation caused by coercion.
On Sabbath:
– You do not have to do more.
– You do not have to sell more.
– You do not have to control more.
– You do not have to know more.
– You do not have to have your kids in ballet or soccer.
– You do not have to be younger or more beautiful.
– You do not have to score more.
Sabbath, the one day of rest, challenges the cycle of coercion,
because in rest all are of equal worth,
equal value, equal access.
And if you can construct a society where all get a chance to rest,
that forces that society to construct an economics of neighbourliness.
In our own society, we have seen this with the rise of the trades union movement,
and the push over the last two centuries for greater workers rights,
for universal healthcare, and the welfare state.
These are the contemporary outworking of the Sabbath principle,
as all receive the benefits regardless of their circumstances.
But back to scripture.
There is a significant difference
in the way the Sabbath command is framed in Deuteronomy
compared to its earlier version at Sinai.
In Exodus 20, when Moses received the tablets of stone on the mountain,
the command to rest was based on God’s act of creation:
‘For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth,
the sea, and all that is in them,
but rested the seventh day;
therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it.’ (Exod 20.11)
Intriguingly, this creation ordinance for Sabbath
doesn’t get a mention in Deuteronomy
as Moses stands on the shores of the Jordan
at the gates of the promised land.
Rather, what we find in Deuteronomy
is that the motivation for Sabbath is not creation.
Rather, Moses says that they are to rest on the seventh day,
because they must remember that [they] were … slave[s] in the land of Egypt,
[that] the LORD [their] God brought you out from there
with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm;
therefore [says Moses],
‘the LORD your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.’ (5:15)
The reason for Sabbath is exodus!
They are to remember
that the coercive system of Pharaoh was disrupted.
They are to remember
that the brick quota was declared null and void.
Moses is here warning the Israelites that if they forge this,
they will give their lives, both personally and corporately,
over to coercive competition.
But if they remember Egypt, and the Exodus wanderings in the wilderness,
they will know that Pharaoh,
and all similar agents of coercion, have been defeated.
You do not need to meet the expectations
of your mother, or your father,
or your work, or your boss,
or your broker, or anybody else.
You are free from the quota, if you remember,
if you situate yourself within the covenant memory.
Moses, in Deuteronomy,
imagines that Sabbath is not only a festival day
but also a new social reality,
that is carried back from the Sabbath day
into days one through six.
People who keep Sabbath live all seven days differently.
So the task, according to Moses, is to “seven” our lives.
There are two key aspects of new life that are made possible
when patterns of coercion are broken
by the faithful observance of Sabbath as a day of deep freedom.
First, we saw last week in our sermon on Deuteronomy 15,
that Moses lays out
the most radical extrapolation of Sabbath in the entire Bible.
Every seven years, in an enactment of “the Sabbatical principle,”
Israel is required to cancel debts on poor people,
And every seven Sabbaticals, at the Jubilee year,
they are to redistribute the land
and release those who have become economically enslaved.
The intention in this radical act of “seven”
is that there should be no permanent underclass in Israel (v. 4).
Moses, in this instruction, anticipates resistance
to this radical extrapolation of Sabbath,
he knows that Israelites may become “hard hearted” and “tight fisted” (v. 7).
But, he says, that is because they have fallen into coercive patterns
whereby the poor are targeted as objects of economic abuse
rather than seen as Sabbath neighbours.
Moses counters such resistance, however,
by appeal to the exodus memory (v. 15).
On the basis of their own experience as slaves in a coercive system in Egypt,
Israel is invited to “give liberally” (v. 10) and “provide liberally” (v. 14),
and so to avoid the temptations
of consumptive excess and economic abuse in their own land.
But second, the book of Deuteronomy identifies the great “triad of vulnerability”
of widows, orphans, and immigrants,
as needy members of society who are without protected rights.
The tradition of Deuteronomy is particularly attentive to their needs:
with numerous commands to protect the needs
of these vulnerable, exposed neighbours.
In this interpretive tradition, Sabbath is not simply a pause.
It is an occasion for reimagining all social life
away from coercion and competition,
towards compassionate solidarity.
Such solidarity is imaginable and achievable
only when the drivenness of acquisitiveness is broken.
Sabbath is not simply the pause that refreshes.
It is the pause that transforms.
Whenever ancient Israel was tempted to acquisitiveness,
Sabbath was an invitation to receptivity,
an acknowledgment that what is needed
is given, and need not be seized.
And so what does this look like in our world,
how does this ancient economic and theological model
take shape in our world, an in our lives?
We, too, know about the vulnerabilities
of those whose circumstances in life make them particularly fragile,
and the next decades of global life
are going to see ongoing waves of people displacement
and a persistent need for a compassionate and generous response
to those who find themselves refugees in the world.
This is why we, as God’s people, need to be active in welcoming refugees,
and reaching out across ethnic and religious divides.
We, too, know about the hurt caused by bereavement or relationship breakdown,
as people have to battle not only with grief,
but often changed financial circumstances also,
and there is a need for communities such as this congregation,
to offer a place of belonging and deep support
for those whose lives are in turmoil.
We too, know how our drive for security in life
can cause us to put our faith in glittering idols of gold,
as we trust in our possessions to the detriment of our reliance on God.
And the pattern of giving money and resources to God
through the community of faith that we are part of,
so that together we can re-balance the economy of faith,
is a vital part of our discipleship.
We too, know about the damage to the earth caused by excessive consumption,
as the climate crisis continues to become ever more tangible,
and there is a need for people such as us
to be willing to see beyond their own circumstances,
to answer the wider call for carbon reduction, pollution control,
and compassionate consumption through ethical trading and finance.
The principle of Sabbath, you see,
not only highlights the darkness of the human soul,
but also offers a way of breaking the cycle.
Friends, we need Sabbath.
as we are called to rest from the ever-spiralling demands of production,
to resist the call to ever greater acquisition and productivity,
to learn that sometimes enough is enough,
and to discover that this might mean
that another person can also have enough.
And so we find ourselves once again at the words of Jesus,
challenging us to a new and better way of being human.
We are his disciples, sent to the world with a message of good news,
as we learn to forgive the debts of others,
even as our own indebtedness is forgiven by God.
[1] The sermon that follows is based extensively on the chapter ‘Resistance to Coercion’ from: Brueggemann, Walter. Sabbath as Resistance, New Edition with Study Guide: Saying No to the Culture of Now. Presbyterian Publishing Corporation. Kindle Edition.
