Scripture: Mark 2:23-3:6; 1 Samuel 3:1-10; Luke 2:29-32 Series: After Pentecost
Preached June 2, 2024 on Mark 2:23-3:6, this sermon uses paradoxes (chicken-or-egg, ship of Theseus) to reframe Jesus’ saying that the Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath. Sabbath and prayer both challenge an identity built on productivity. When two of God’s commands conflict (keep Sabbath vs. heal and love neighbor), the letter kills but the Spirit gives life; faithfulness means loving the neighbor most, not doing the most clear and defensible thing. Drawing on Eli’s gladness at God speaking through Samuel and Simeon’s song, Pruitt rejects a scarcity, zero-sum rivalry with God, who is uncreated and not on our plane. The real question is where we put our faith: in the law, Bible, or church, or in the God who gave them. Citing Herbert McCabe, prayer is not a work but God praying in us; Sabbath rest is both future and now.
Illustrations: chicken-or-egg, ship-of-theseus, airbnb-rules-list, kids-given-rules, kant-categorical-imperative, kids-dishwasher-care, stone-god-cannot-lift, song-of-simeon, mccabe-god-prays-in-us
June 2
Sabbath and Prayer
Mark 2:23-3:6
Now the boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord under Eli. The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread. At that time Eli, whose eyesight had begun to grow dim so that he could not see, was lying down in his room; the lamp of God had not yet gone out, and Samuel was lying down in the temple of the Lord, where the ark of God was. Then the Lord called, “Samuel! Samuel!” and he said, “Here I am!” and ran to Eli and said, “Here I am, for you called me.” But he said, “I did not call; lie down again.” So he went and lay down. The Lord called again, “Samuel!” Samuel got up and went to Eli and said, “Here I am, for you called me.” But he said, “I did not call, my son; lie down again.” Now Samuel did not yet know the Lord, and the word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him. The Lord called Samuel again, a third time. And he got up and went to Eli and said, “Here I am, for you called me.” Then Eli perceived that the Lord was calling the boy. Therefore Eli said to Samuel, “Go, lie down, and if he calls you, you shall say, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.’ ” So Samuel went and lay down in his place. Now the Lord came and stood there, calling as before, “Samuel! Samuel!” And Samuel said, “Speak, for your servant is listening.” - 1 Samuel 3:1-10
One Sabbath he was going through the grain fields, and as they made their way his disciples began to pluck heads of grain. The Pharisees said 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 and his companions were hungry and in need of food, how he entered the house of God when Abiathar was high priest and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and he gave some to his companions?” Then he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for humankind and not humankind for the Sabbath, so the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.” Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand. They were watching him to see whether he would cure him on the Sabbath, so that they might accuse him. And he said to the man who had the withered hand, “Come forward.” Then he said to them, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save life or to kill?” But they were silent. He looked around at them with anger; he was 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 conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him. - Mark 2:23-3:6
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Now you need chicken to make an egg. You need an egg to make a chicken. What we have here is a paradox. It’s a nearly unanswerable question. It really depends on your definitions of chicken. Because we could go to a point in history where a pre-chicken animal is not quite a chicken. Lays an egg. That is a chicken. That’s why my answer is usually the egg, But it’s not super straightforward. Any bird with enough chicken like qualities to lay a chicken egg, we might as well just call it a chicken.
The Ancient Greeks loved paradoxes. They had many, many more than we moderns do. One of my favorites is the ship of Theseus. The paradox of the ship of Theseus is as follows. Athens has preserved Theseus’s ship for posterity. Every time a board rots, it is replaced. At what point does it cease to be the same ship even when every part has been replaced?
It would work the same thing with a car. It would work the same thing with a house. Makes you think about the idea of a ship, the purpose of it. When we come back to the chicken and the egg, we think about the idea of a chicken, the idea of an egg, what they mean. These thought experiments, I think, can be helpful in this kind of way. It’s not a waste of time. A good thought is never a waste of time.
In the gospel reading for today, Jesus is challenged about the Sabbath, and he leaves these words: The Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath. The Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath. Depending on how they are presented, rules are often given as a burden. Don’t do this. Do that. Don’t do this. Do that.
When you give your kids a lot of rules, they don’t take it as a sign of freedom. If you’re renting an Airbnb in a place and the rules list is 3 pages long of things you can’t do, it doesn’t feel like freedom.
Sabbath can feel constraining. There’s a focus as much on what you don’t do is what you do. Sabbath is about being unproductive. A lot of us get to certain points in our life where our own productivity becomes a big part of our own identity. We get things done. We do the things. We follow through. We do a good job. It’s a helpful and sustaining aspect of identity. Sabbath challenges this.
Prayer also challenges this. Christians have moved away from following Sabbath as it was in Second Temple Judaism, but we still pray. And prayer is incredibly unproductive. We can sometimes have distorted notions prayer that fixates solely upon intercessory prayer. When we read about Sabbath here, I want us to think about prayer.
If you don’t pray before a meal, is that a sin? If you don’t remember someone in your prayers, does God forget them, too?
We should challenge our expectations of prayer so that we have some idea what we are doing. This is what Jesus is doing with Sabbath.
Jesus is challenging expectations of the Sabbath. Jesus doesn’t take the law away. He fulfills the law. Here he says he’s lord of the Sabbath, ruler of the Sabbath. And the Sabbath is for a purpose. God didn’t create people for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath for people. These constraints of the Sabbath are a gift. They’re not a noose. And some things in this world can go beyond Sabbath obligation.
There are a lot of systems in this world that don’t make space for exceptions. These systems seek to defend themselves from slippery slopes. If we have one exception, that means everyone will take an exception, and so we no longer have any structure. Whether they know it or not, they’re following in the footsteps of Immanuel Kant. That is deontological ethics. Kant focused on a singular principle for moral action. “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law” Kant didn’t like exceptions. A moral principle had to be universal, or else it ceased to be a moral principle. It had to be right from cause to effect. It had to be right.
Jesus Christ here offers a different principle. The reality of this world is that principles always come into conflict with one another. Ideologies always come into conflict with one another. Ideals, systems, religions, all of these things will clash. People of good faith with good intentions will come into conflict given enough time. We cannot assume an absence of this clash. Instead, let’s prepare for it. What do we hold onto beyond the letter. This is what Paul means when he talks about how the letter kills, but the spirit brings life. The letter kills because if we compare letter to letter, we’re no closer to what we should do. In this specific context: following the Sabbath is part of Torah, taking care of your neighbor, taking care of the stranger, healing the sick: these are also part of Torah. Which should we do? In one sense and what the Pharisees see is the clear description in Torah is Sabbath. So we should do Sabbath. We should not heal. We could imagine a situation where two kids are left at home by their parents. They are told to take care of each other and to empty the dish washer. One of these things is clear. The other thing is vague. Taking care of a sibling could entail a thousand different things. Emptying the dish washer is one thing so I will at least do that and worry about the vague things later.
What Jesus shows us is that following God is not about doing the most clear and defensible thing at all times. but loving our neighbor the most, whether that means breaking the Sabbath or not. Sabbath is not a way to keep us from our neighbor. God is not a way to keep us from our neighbor.
The beatitudes, which the choir sang for our offertory, give us a super unclear way of following God and loving our neighbor. They provoke us towards faithfulness by challenging our expectations of what a good life is. Blessed are the poor. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are the persecuted. We are not less ourselves when we are these things. And God is not a way to keep us from who we need to be.
We see this in the story of Samuel. Samuel was a child in the temple and he heard a voice. And the only person who could have called him in his mind was Eli. So we went to Eli. Now the amazing thing for us in this passage is not what happens with Samuel, but what happens with Eli. The child Samuel is a earnest boy through and through. He doesn’t get discouraged. He follows what he thinks is right. Eli is the one who has the transformation. Eli goes from thinking this boy is crazy to thinking God is speaking to this child. Eli is open to God speaking to the child in front of him, more than God speaks to him. Eli isn’t jealous. He’s grateful. It reminds me of the song of Simeon in Luke chapter 2, when the infant Jesus is taken to the temple. And Simeon sings, Lord, now may you let your servant go in peace. Your word has been fulfilled. My own eyes have seen the salvation which you have prepared in the sight of every people, a light to fulfill you to the nations and the glory of your people Israel. Simeon is not challenged by the infant Jesus. He is filled. There isn’t a rivalry between the old priest and the messiah. There isn’t a rivalry in first Samuel between the child Samuel and the old priest. They’re both seeking God and the character and nature of God and they are willing to let God be present in different and strange places.
In the gospel reading, there was a rivalry going on. There’s a scarcity mindset going on. There is a zero sum environment that is assumed: it’s either you or me. It’s either him or us. I think the question of the chicken or the egg is a nice intellectual experience experiment. It is a contradiction as much as a paradox. It presents a rivalry between two understandings of generation. There are other kind of contradictory questions that have happened in history. Can God make a stone so big that God couldn’t pick it up? It’s a logical contradiction. Does god’s power as creator, supersede God’s power as mover or as active presence. The answer is no. Nothing can be created that God couldn’t move because all that is is created. The question assumes that God is a part of our material world in our system. I think the question of the makes the same assumption. It assumes that God is on the same plane as humans, that the Sabbath is on the same plane. And we today often fall into this trap where we think of God as, like, a really powerful human. Really big and maybe really far away, but relatable in this kind of sense. Whereas the God of the scriptures is very different. God is revealed in Jesus Christ, the word made flesh, but the nature of God is not created or material. It’s the opposite effect. It is immaterial. It’s uncreated. This is gets us back to how we should respond in this. How we should respond where it seems like 2 commands of God are going against each other. The question is, where do we put our faith? This is what Jesus is pointing out. Do we put our faith in the law or the God who gave the law? Do we put our faith in the Bible or the God who gave the Bible? Do we put our faith in the church or the God who gave the church? Do we put our faith in that spiritual experience or the God who gave us that spiritual experience?
This is faith. It’s the faith of Samuel, the faith of Eli, the faith of Jesus. This is the faith offered for you. Faith is not limited by what we can delineate about God because God is not limited in that way. There have been things that have been revealed about God and the nature of God that we call doctrine. We hold them in the creeds. We hold them in scripture. This is what has been revealed about God, but there’s still more. We do not control it. We haven’t been created for the Sabbath. We haven’t been created for the law. We haven’t been created for the covenant. It was created for us because God loves us. God gave us space to live and to love and respond. God forgave us for the times we thought we were created for the Sabbath.
God offers us prayer, not as a work by other means, but as a means to connect with God. Even more so, as Herbert McCabe says, we are not even the ones who pray.
“Grace is not something that comes at me from outside to constrain my freedom; it is a depth within me more central to me than what I call my self. We must keep this firmly in mind: it is God who prays. Not just God who answers prayer but God who prays in us in the first place.”
Stretch out your hand and be healed. Stretch out your life and let it be changed. God is already here with you. God is already loving you. God is already praying through you. God is already resting in you.
In the early church, sabbath pointed not only to a day of the week but to our final resting place with God, where we will enjoy God forever.
That sabbath, though, is not just in the future. It is now. Live into the kingdom now. Live into prayer now. Live into sacrifice and transformation and new life now. God is here for you. Share with your life that God is there for your neighbors.
Let us pray,
Heavenly Father, thank you for giving us the sabbath. Thank you for giving us prayer. Help us to hold on to the main thing of your love through it all. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen