Higher than the Holy Book

Sermon manuscript for Sabbath, February 21, 2015

At Green Lake Church of Seventh-day Adventists

One Sabbath, Jesus and his disciples were walking on a path through a grain field. The disciples picked heads of grain, rubbed the husks off in their hands and ate them. Pharisees observed this and protested to the disciples, “Why are you breaking the Sabbath laws?”

Jesus cut in and answered for his disciples, “Surely, you have read the story of how David fed himself and his men when they were starving hungry. David went to the house of God and ate the holy bread. He also gave it to the men with him, even though it was unlawful for anyone except the priests to eat it.

Then Jesus said, “The Son of man is Lord, even of the Sabbath.” Luke 6:1-5

This may sound like a quaint, ancient tale, completely irrelevant to people living in 2015. In fact, it addresses the most burning question in religion today. Before we consider it's modern application, let's set the cultural stage for the ancient story.

It was customary in the Middle East that if you were walking along by some food crop, you could help yourself to a snack. You couldn't fill a bag with your neighbor's produce, but you could pick some grain and munch on it. You could help yourself to an apple from a tree beside the road. So the people who challenged the disciples were not worried about what the disciples were doing—picking and eating grain—but when they were doing it—on the Sabbath day!

The people who scolded the disciples, the Pharisees, were the conservative believers of their day. One of their highest values was to maintain a clear wall of distinction between the people of God and the people of the world. For the Jews, the Sabbath had become one of their most important banners. It was their flag. Respect for the Sabbath was an essential mark of Jewish faith and identity. Over the previous couple hundred years devout rabbis had developed very strict rules for the observance of the Sabbath. They studied every Bible command regarding the Sabbath and worked out in great detail precisely how those commands should be interpreted and applied. These applications had become increasingly strict. In Jesus day, the major conservative movement, called the Pharisees, was hyper-conscientious in their rules for Sabbath-keeping. These were the people challenging the disciples.

It is important to note that the conservative scholars did not invent their concern for Sabbath-keeping out of thin air. The Jewish holy book was quite explicit.

Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you are to labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall not do any work, you or your children or servants or foreigners in your household. Exodus 20:8-10

Six days you shall labor, but on the seventh day you shall rest; even during the plowing season and harvest you must rest. Exodus 34:21 NIV

Six days do your work, but on the seventh day do not work, so that your ox and your donkey may rest, and so that the slave born in your household and the foreigner living among you may be refreshed. Exodus 23:12 NIV

Work shall be done for six days, but the seventh day shall be a holy day for you, a Sabbath of rest to the LORD. Whoever does any work on it shall be put to death. You shall kindle no fire throughout your dwellings on the Sabbath day. Exodus 35:2-3

Conservative rabbis reflecting on these Sabbath commands came up with a list of 39 specific activities that were prohibited on Sabbath. These rules were a natural development of the commands explicitly stated in the Bible. At their core, the rules were believed to be the logical application of the plain reading of the text.

When Jesus' disciples picked heads of grain, rubbed them in their hands and blew the husks away, they were breaking the Sabbath rules which specifically prohibited reaping, threshing and winnowing.

(Now, if you are not a Sabbath-keeper, the whole story is mysterious. Is it really possible that anyone could actually care about whether some guys rubbed some grain in their hands before eating it? Don't be silly. But I'm not being silly. It did matter.

Last Friday, I attended the military burial service for Colonel David Grauman. The feel of the service was not heavy and tragic. The leader of the service joked with the family a bit. But the color guard executed every move with utter precision. When they folded the flag, their movements were precise. When they raised their rifles to shoot the salute, they moved in perfect formation. As someone with no military experience of any kind, it was all very foreign to me. But for people who have served in the military it would have been familiar. And if any item of the service had been improvised, if any step in folding the flag had been omitted or muffed, the offending service member would have expected a stern reprimand later.

Perhaps we can best understand the Sabbath rules if we compare them to the rules in the military that govern how one salutes, how one folds the flag, how one addresses superiors. You don't mess with those traditions.

Jesus jumped in as soon as the Pharisees stated their condemnation. He did not leave it to his disciples to take on the challenge from the conservative scholars.

My guess is that if the disciples had responded to the Pharisees, they would have said something like this: Yes, we know our religion forbids reaping and threshing and winnowing grain on Sabbath. But come on. How far are you going to push that? Pretty soon you're going to be forbidding eating on Sabbath because picking food up off a plate is harvesting. You can't really call what we did “reaping, threshing and winnowing.”

The disciples would have tried to minimize their actions. They would have tried to argue that the Sabbath law didn't really reach all the way to their specific actions. Their actions that Sabbath afternoon were a special case that was not covered by the standard Sabbath rule. Surely God wouldn't be that picky.

The problem with this kind of argument is that eventually the hyper zealous always win. Even if the majority of people in a religious community think a more relaxed, flexible approach is the wisest way to interpret the commandments, young zealots will end up determining the public culture because they will be the most emphatic, the most active in pushing their views. They will appear the most devout. They will claim the moral high ground. They will ultimately win the cultural argument.

Religion advances as it is passed from one generation to the next. Part of the necessary contagion that causes faith to leap from one generation to another is an element of fiery zeal. If our religion consist only of watering down the rules of a previous generation or softening the words of a dead prophet, our religion will die. It will not offer our children the essential fire required for a vital spiritual life.

On the other hand, when we confine our religion in the increasingly rigid regulations of a fossil religion, eventually the only way forward for our children will be to shatter the system.

So how did Jesus respond to the conservative challenge which attempted to keep his disciples in the tight box of traditional Sabbath regulations?

First, Jesus did not minimize the violations of his disciples. Jesus did not argue that they didn't really reap, thresh and winnow. Instead, Jesus bluntly challenged the entire conservative approach to rules and regulations. Jesus rejected the conservative instinct to guard against the loss of any rule or regulation once given by God. And curiously, Jesus appealed to the Bible in making his case.

“Haven't you read about David?” Jesus asked. “Surely you know his story.”

The story is found in 1 Samuel 21.

David was the most famous warrior in the nation. He was a member of the royal court. But King Saul had become insanely jealous. More than once in a fit of rage, King Saul had tried to kill David. The fits hardened into a fit intention to eliminate David. David ran for his life. He came to the town where the tabernacle (the Jewish place of worship) was located and asked the priest for some bread.

The priest said he didn't have any regular bread. The only bread he had on hand was the holy bread which only priests were allowed to eat. The rules in the laws of Moses were very clear. There was no ambiguity. There were no exceptions. This bread was to be eaten only by priests.

The priest gave David the bread and David shared it with his men.

The inescapable moral of the story: If David could eat holy bread and share it with his men, then obviously, there can be nothing wrong with me and my men violating the Sabbath commandment in order to feed ourselves.

The respective prohibitions on lay people eating the holy bread and my disciples picking grain on the Holy Day are spiritually equivalent. Since the Bible approved of David's violation of holy restrictions, you are obviously out of place to reprove my disciples for a similar violation.

At the end of his telling this story, Jesus said, “So, you see, the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.”

Here is how I interpret Jesus' statement about the Son of Man. By calling himself the Son of Man, Jesus highlighted his role within humanity. What Jesus did was applicable to all humanity. What was right for Jesus was right for every person. What was required of Jesus is required of us. What was allowed to Jesus is allowed to us.

Just as David included his men in the privileges he assumed in eating the holy bread, so Jesus included all humanity in the privileges he protected when he defended his disciples eating on the holy day.

The error of the Pharisees was their presumption that preserving the binding authority of the Sabbath rules was a higher value, a more noble virtue, than tending to human need.

In this story and repeatedly throughout his ministry, Jesus taught the opposite. The supreme test of religion is its efficacy in serving God's children. In a parallel Sabbath story in the Gospel, Jesus announced, “The Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath.” God did not make people so they could keep Sabbath. God made the Sabbath to serve the well-being of humanity.

This same principle applies across the entire range of religion. God did not make people so they could populate and fund the church organization. God founded the church so it could enrich the lives of God's people. God did not create people so prophets could have devotees. God spoke through prophets to challenge complacence in evil and to encourage goodness. God did not make people so they could read and revere the Bible. God made the Bible to serve the well-being of people.

Now a most pointed application: So, if some statement in the Bible diminishes human well-being, we are morally obligated to reinterpret it or disregard it. In this story, Jesus pointedly rejected the validity of Sabbath laws when they were interpreted in a way that contradicted the basic human need for nutrition. Jesus did not get rid of the Sabbath. That would lead to another kind of impoverishment. But Jesus taught us the proper response to zealous conservatives who would push the application of some particular Bible passage in ways that damaged people. He cited other Scripture that demonstrated God's highest regard for human well-being.

Sometimes when conservatives seek to contain the work of God within the rigid walls of ancient commands, we have have to boldly declare there is a higher authority than ancient laws, a higher authority than quotations from prophets no matter how venerable. Human well-being is in and of itself a mighty authority.

Let's be clear. Under the powerful influence of Jesus, Christians have been doing this for two thousand years. Even the most conservative Christians ignore or reinterpret passages in the Bible. We have been doing it so long we don't even realize we're doing it. It is this ignoring of some Bible passages or radical reinterpretation that makes Christianity a humane religion.

If we try to revive a pure, perfectionist Bible religion, we will end up with something that looks like ISIS.

We are appalled at the savage behavior of ISIS. We recoil in horror at their practices of execution, slavery, and the subjugation of women. These are ghastly behaviors. We may be tempted to think: Those people are unspeakably evil. We would never do anything like that.

But let's be careful. The individuals involved in ISIS are not are not morally different from any other large group of people. The group includes good individuals and bad individuals. What makes ISIS so bad is their radical commitment to obey every word in their holy book. It is their religious conservatism that has turned them into monsters.

Public executions, the enslavement of women, cutting off the hands and feet of convicts—these things are commanded by their holy book. And that is why they do them. They don't do these things because they are trying to be more wicked than anyone else.

Most Muslims are repulsed by this savagery, but they have no good religious answer to ISIS, because in Islam no one is allowed to question the prophet. No one is allowed to say out loud about some passage in the Koran, “That passage is obsolete. That is a commandment we must not obey.”

In Islam, unquestioning obedience is the only acceptable response to the Koran. Most Muslims know in their gut that beheadings and capturing women to serve as sex slaves and cutting off the hands of petty thieves is evil behavior. But in their religion, there is no tradition of arguing with God. No tradition of arguing with the holy book.

In our religion, the great heroes did argue with God. Abraham and Moses, the two greatest figures in the Hebrew scriptures, argued boldly with God. Moses even got God to change his mind. Then we come to Jesus in the New Testament and find Jesus boldly superseding rules and regulations that came straight from the commands of God in the Old Testament.

If we Christians argue that the highest religion is unquestioning, unthinking obedience to whatever command our eyes fall on in the Bible, we are using the same kind of logic that fuels ISIS. If we read the Bible with the same commitment to unquestioning obedience to every command that characterizes the theologians behind ISIS, we will turn into monsters.

The Bible explicitly commands public executions, usually by stoning. In fact, every man in the community is to actually participate in the killing. When Boko Haram raided a girl's school in Nigeria and captured two hundred girls to serve the desires of their soldiers, they were acting in harmony with procedures outlined in the Bible!

Note this quotation from an ISIS theologian:

Yazidi women and children [are to be] divided according to the Shariah amongst the fighters of the Islamic State who participated in the Sinjar operations [in northern Iraq] … Enslaving the families of the kuffar [infidels] and taking their women as concubines is a firmly established aspect of the Shariah that if one were to deny or mock, he would be denying or mocking the verses of the Koran and the narrations of the Prophet … and thereby apostatizing from Islam.

Compare this quotation from the Bible:

Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. 18 But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves. Numbers 31:17-18

We proudly think of ourselves as Protestants, people who live by the Bible and the Bible Only. The Bible was the tool used to pry open space in Europe for people to be Christian without being under the tyranny of the Roman church system. But the most famous founders of Protestantism, Luther and Calvin, approved public executions of people who disagreed with them. Those executions included burning people alive. Luther and Calvin advocated these executions because they believed this was required of them by the Bible.

In our own time, Christians in America are the strongest supporters of the death penalty. Not because Christians are meaner and crueler than other people, but because they believe the Bible tells us so.

It is time for us to stand with Jesus and say, NO! Continuing an execution system that occasionally kills innocent poor people must be rejected. It does not matter that one can find Bible passages approving capital punishment. The principles of justice demand that we end immediately a system that we know sometimes kills innocent people. If we respect people the way Jesus respected people, we will refuse to use the Bible to justify injustice.

A couple of years ago, a Republican in Arkansas called for legislation to that would allow parents to seek execution for their rebellious children. Where did he get this crazy idea? Deuteronomy 21:18-21. It is important to recognize that we can say it is crazy only if we acknowledge that some words in the Bible viewed through the lenses we now wear are crazy. In Islam if you say that something the prophet said was crazy, you are guilty of blasphemy. In Christianity, if you say that, you are standing with Jesus and Moses.

In America now, there is vociferous Christian movement advocating limiting education for girls. This movement is fueled by the belief that patriarchy, which is obviously every much in evidence in the Bible, is an unalterable rule. We must stand and shout, NO!

How do we respond to these ideas and rules in the Bible that would damage people if they were actually applied today? We do not become mealy-mouthed, mumbling hazy explanations that our kids can see right through. No. We boldly, confidently pledge ourselves to the way and the values of Jesus.

The truest, wisest words of Scripture are those that highlight the goodness—compassion, mercy, responsiveness—of God. The highest obligation imposed on the disciples of Jesus is to join Jesus in serving humanity.

When Jesus said, “The Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.” He makes humanity the master of the Sabbath. We are not tools in the hand of Sabbath. Sabbath is a divine gift we are called to use in our cooperation with God. Every Sabbath as we experience respite from the pressures of the world, we are also called to offer respite to one another and to our neighbors.

Sabbath invites us to rest and to give rest. Sabbath invites us make sure the foreigner and even the donkeys enjoy the same heavenly rest we do. Sabbath is a reminder that the ultimate evidence that we have been filled with the grace of God is the grace that flows from us into the lives of others.