Sabbath (3)
Heavenly father, we're so grateful, Lord, to be together this morning. Lord, we know that, being in one room is is so helpful and encouraging, Lord, but, let us never lose focus or never lose sight of the reality, Father, that it's your spirit that unites us with one another through our common faith in Jesus Christ, whether we're in the same room or whether we're halfway across the country. Lord, we know that we have brothers and sisters in faith worshiping the Lord Jesus all over the world right now, and we worship as one church today. And but Lord, I just wanna say that we're grateful for to be here. Thank you, Lord, for this building.
Speaker 1:Lord, thank you for, the resources that you've given us the stewards to make this, gatherings like this possible. Lord, as we, open your word this morning, we pray, father, that it would go forth in power. Lord, that your Holy Spirit would use it to transform us, going down to the deepest parts of who we are. Lord, we pray for your servant Luke. And, father, we ask that you would speak through him, boldly, Lord, that you would give him peace in his mind, peace in his body, and clarity of his speech.
Speaker 1:Father, prepare our hearts. Lord, limit, the distractions of our minds now. Clear the slate, Lord, of our soul so that we can receive what it is that you have for us this morning in Jesus' name. Amen.
Speaker 2:Amen. Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Luke. I'm one of the pastors here, and I'm very excited to get to talk to you about Sabbath. And you might be at the top of that.
Speaker 2:You might be like, what in the world? Why are we talking about Sabbath? You might have a lot of questions, but we'll answer all of them as we go through this series, I promise. So like we've been saying, our theme for the whole year, not just our theme for this series, but our theme for the whole year has been and will continue to be seeking God's face through prayer and Sabbath. Right?
Speaker 2:Seeking God's face like Him Himself, His person. We're not seeking His hand. We're not seeking His blessings. We're not seeking the things that God does for us. We're not seeking the way that God makes us feel.
Speaker 2:We're seeking him. That's what we mean when we say we're seeking God's face. And we're choosing to do that through two ways as a community, prayer, which we just spent a couple of weeks on that topic, talking about prayer and then also Sabbath. That's where we're starting now is how do we seek God through these two things. Pastor Cameron and I were talking about this theme, this idea of seeking God's face all the way back in, I think that was like October, September, something like that.
Speaker 2:And the two things that came to our minds of just like on our hearts of like what we felt our community really needed and our own selves personally was prayer and Sabbath and seeking the Lord. And so that's what I wanna kind of talk about. I do wanna make mention. I know pastor Cameron made mention of this last week, but in the on the back by the doors there are some bookshelves, and on those bookshelves are some books that either we are reading ourselves or have read in preparation for our series, or we find to have been very beneficial. So we've got a book back there on prayer that both Cameron and I have read.
Speaker 2:Well, Cameron read, I listened to, however you wanna dice that up.
Speaker 1:What distinction?
Speaker 2:I say it's reading, but whatever. And then the other book is the ruthless elimination of hurry by John Mark Comer, which I read and was a excellent leaping off point for me and my thinking on this sermon series. And then those are available. We try and make those available at cost for you. And if the cost is still a prohibition for you and you feel like you really need or benefit from a copy, just go ahead and grab it, and that's our gift to you.
Speaker 2:And then next to that shelf is a whole bunch of Bibles. Those Bibles always are free for your use and to keep and benefit from. So we want you to make sure you can have a Bible. So alright. That's enough kind of starting things, but let's start by talking about Sabbath.
Speaker 2:I think that Sabbath is one of the things that has been largely lost in our practice of our faith. And when I say Sabbath, I think there's a couple of things that probably come into your mind. One is that while Sabbath is that thing that has a whole lot of rules and limits, it's kind of this thing that like maybe, you know, ultra conservative Orthodox Jews practice, but Jesus did away with the law. We don't have to practice Sabbath. Or there's some Christians out there that maybe take it too seriously.
Speaker 2:And they just spend all day in church and they can't do anything fun on Sundays. Like that kind of what comes to our mind. Right? And we might just all be wanting to say to ourselves, we're like, well, we're not that we're like, we follow Jesus, and, and Jesus made freedom for us, and we don't have to be bound by it. So, like, why is pastor Luke gonna be up here talking about Sabbath?
Speaker 2:Why why am I gonna bring up something that we've largely set aside and said is something from the Old Testament that we don't have to follow because we follow Jesus? So to kinda just give you a, like, picture, that's where I think that like Sabbath sits for a lot of us. Or we've just never we're just like, I don't know what Sabbath is. Or I have a vague idea, and I'm not even all that sure about this kind of church word that I'm saying. So that's where I think we are.
Speaker 2:This is where we're gonna go. I'm gonna give you my, like, point for every sermon for the next couple of weeks. Sabbath is an invitation to break with the pattern of the world by creating time and space for God and his good gifts in our life. Right? Sabbath is an invitation to break with the pattern of this world, pattern of this life that we are stuck in.
Speaker 2:It's a place for us to create space and time to meet with God and to experience and celebrate his good gifts in our life. That's where we're gonna go. And before I get there, I'm going to spend some time, I'm going to probably spend the bulk of the time today highlighting sort of the problem. When we preach, we are primarily tasked with preaching the Bible, opening this book, seeing what it says, and applying it. Right?
Speaker 2:That's that's the primary thing. We don't want to neither Cameron or I are interested in coming up here and giving you a bunch of ideas that are just ours off the top of the head because we think they sound cool. We wanna primarily, we want to show you what the Bible says and what God has for us. One of the other secondary things that we try and do is to understand the context in which we currently are. Right?
Speaker 2:Who what does Jesus was saying some things back then, and it was specific to them at that point, and it stays true to us now, but some of the context has changed, and now we need to understand what Jesus is saying to us today. In order to do that, we have to know where we're sitting. So I say that to say that I'm going to spend a little bit of time here in my sermon, not opening the Bible right away. We promise that we will. But I want to spend just a little bit of time talking about your experience, my experience, our experience in culture, in our time right now.
Speaker 2:And I think if we understand where we're at first, when we open up the Bible today, we're gonna hear Jesus and what he's saying to us a lot more clearly than we might otherwise. So here's a question. Someone comes up to you, and they say, Hey, how are you doing? What is what's like one of the things that you're most likely to say? Fine.
Speaker 2:And then I heard busy. Right? Fine, busy. Good. Right?
Speaker 2:The classic, like, I'm good, busy, but good. Right? Like the calmest common like combination there, right is saying like, we're busy. I was reading a article on somebody I could not figure out if this actually happened or not. But he was talking about what would happen if someone was to come into America, and they were trying to learn English.
Speaker 2:And it would be, they would probably end up thinking that busy means good. Because that's how we use it so often. Right? How are you? I'm busy.
Speaker 2:Oh, I didn't realize that's how you could be. Just busy. Right? Is that a good thing? So so busy is this is this term that has begun to begun to define who we are and how we think of ourselves as constantly busy.
Speaker 2:There was a analysis from by Ashley Willems of some Gallup data that found that the percentage of employed Americans that reported so, like, employed Americans who said, I never have enough time in the year 2011 was 70%. And then in 2018, that it rose 10% to 80%. Eighty % of employed Americans who were surveyed said, I don't have enough time. Like, we could just do like an informal poll here. Well, actually, let's just do that.
Speaker 2:Who here feels like I don't have enough time resonates for most of their weeks. Right? I think that's a that's a thing we feel. We're like, I'm busy. I'm full.
Speaker 2:I don't have enough time to do things that are important. There's actually there has been this new new term that has been made up that social sociologists have starting to use called time poverty. Time poverty refers to the experience of lack of sufficient time to fulfill responsibilities, pursue interests, or engage in activities that contribute to one's well-being due to various demands on their time. Right? We're starting to, like, have terms made up to describe the fact that people feel like they just don't have time, like it's constantly slipping through their fingers, and they can't seem to be doing that really important thing.
Speaker 2:I know that so many of us have things, oh, you know, that would be a really good thing to do. I just you know, maybe maybe next season, you know, maybe after the kids sports are done, maybe whenever I get through the holidays, or when summer gets here, or when school's back in school, like, there's always another demarker that we put on our schedule that we say when we get there, I'll finally have time to prioritize these things. I want to read for you. I want to read for you a article from Time magazine. And just I'll just it's it's it's fairly short, so I'll read it very quickly.
Speaker 2:Says this, how do Americans spend their day compared with thirty five years ago? For one thing, their leisure time has not increased at all. Contrary to popular opinion, rather American men today are spending more time on the job, a lot of it admittedly of the moonlighting variety, and their wives are spending even more time taking care of their children at homes. University of Michigan sociologist John P. Robinson told the annual meeting of American Sociological Association in San Francisco last week that a length that a lengthy survey indicates that leisure time takes up about five hours a day, about the same portion of days from the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 2:And that television now accounts for about a third of it. But Americans have not lost interest in other things. In addition to working longer, they spend more time on hobbies, washing and grooming themselves, activities away from home. But just as radio listening has lost ground, so is reading, eating at home, visiting relatives, playing cards, dancing, pleasure driving, and participation in sports. Furthermore, both men and women now sleep less.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Now the hard pressed American housewife may have already suspected the outcome of Robinson's research into labor saving quality of clothes, washers, dishwashers, and automatic devices at home. The expectation that time on housework would decrease with the advent of more household appliances is not supported by the data, he says dryly. Now, you may have noticed from the language of the article that this was not written recently. This was written in the 1960s, comparing the time and the expectation of how things would have changed from the 1930s to the 1960s.
Speaker 2:And they were like, yeah, it hasn't gotten better. It's gotten worse. But so much of this just applies still to us. This article is still just as relevant as it was when it was written. We still people thought that, oh, email and technology is going to make it so much easier to get so much more work done.
Speaker 2:We're going to be so much productive at work that we're going to have more time to spend with friends and family and things that are important. What has happened? The opposite. Because of the advent of the smartphone and email and all of these apps, now we're expected not to work less, but to work more because we can. We found that this is like, it's continuingly to speed us up.
Speaker 2:I actually I saw this commercial. I do not remember what this commercial of because it's a commercial for like a candy bar in India or something like that. It was it was a really strange and unique commercial. So this would not have been in the Super Bowl ads. But this commercial, it was like, don't tell me how don't ask me how this relates to a candy bar.
Speaker 2:But this guy is like sitting here at his desktop, he's working. And his boss messages him and say, Hey, I need this project done. Now. I need it in five minutes. He's like, I can't do that.
Speaker 2:He's like, yes, you can use AI. Use AI and get it done faster. So he does. And then it like fasts forward into the future, into a future where AI does everything, and humans are just expected to approve what AI does. But we're working more, not less.
Speaker 2:You see, like, that's the that's the idea that everybody is selling right now when they talk about AI in a positive light is they say, Oh, don't worry, AI is going to make it so much easier, going to save you so much more time. I'm hesitant to believe that because that's the same thing that we said about the smartphone and email, and that proved to not be true. I don't think it's going to be proved to be true of AI either. I think it's just going to be the expectation for you to finish things faster and get more done is just going to increase. See, what's happening is technology and tools and all these things are increasing the speed at which we can do things.
Speaker 2:And so we are expected to keep up with it. Well, now we have a I remember I didn't have cable growing up, so I remember the nightly news, and there was like, you know, the news happened from 06:00 to like eight, you know, on one of the channels that you watched. And that was it. That was the news. But now like there's the twenty four hour news cycle.
Speaker 2:And there's but not even then that's not even on like normal broadcasting things. That's on your phone. That's on your your little news app or your email or your Facebook, or Twitter, or whatever feed you're looking at, you have this constant influx of new things that you are expected to be apprised of to know of this great thing and this awful thing that's happening. And then that is just kind of like, that's creating a world in which we're expected to do more and more to be more aware of to be able to do things more and more, even just the car. Right?
Speaker 2:The thing that got most of us here this morning, some vehicle, right? It is this thing that we've become so accustomed to. But have you ever thought about how that has sped life up? I remember watching and reading. I loved westerns growing up as a kid, so I'd read western novels or watch western TV shows and movies.
Speaker 2:If Paul was going into town, that was going to take all day. And so like some of the kids, they're all going to go into town today, and they're just going to spend the whole day going to the general store because it took that long to get there and to get everything in, and it was just a different pace of life. Now, what do you we do when we go to Wegmans? Well, I got to go to Wegmans, I got to go to the pharmacy. And well, I got to go to Wegmans and then Aldi's because the price of groceries is terrible.
Speaker 2:And then I got to go over here, I got to drop the dog off to the groomers. I got to pick the kids up from daycare. Like, how many more things do we just fit into our schedules simply because we can because we have a car, because we can drive all that much faster. As technology and life speeds up, so do we. We live in a world of subscriptions.
Speaker 2:How many things are are you how many I didn't look this up. This would be an interesting thing. But how many things is the average, like 20 to 30 something Americans subscribe to? Right? Like, you sit down to watch like a or tell a friend, oh, you should see this new new television show or something like that.
Speaker 2:Oh, which streaming services on Hulu, HBO, Netflix, Disney plus ESPN thingy? Like, what what is it? Like, what subscription do I have to have in order to watch that television show? Right? Or how many apps do we download that want us to to get this and someone says, oh, get this free thing, and you'd get a subscription to their email and all of these things that are just like on automatic, that want our attention, that want us to pay attention, that want us to stop and look at the advertisement that they're giving us and buy the thing and make it so that you can get the thing on automatic and just it just speeds us up.
Speaker 2:Life becomes kind of this reoccurring subscription where we get subscribed to things. Get subscribed to the newsletters in our email, the text messages we get, the apps that we pay for, that we pay for for them to take our attention away. Here's the thing is when it comes to the smartphone, and all of those free apps that you download, they're not really free. They're they're costing you your time. They're costing you your attention.
Speaker 2:Like, like the world is not that principle. There's no such thing as a free lunch hasn't changed. Social media is Yeah, you don't have to pay for those apps. But they earn money from you by taking your attention and getting you to pay attention to to advertisements. And here's the thing is that even it's not even professional advertisements anymore.
Speaker 2:It's people who are just doing goofy funny videos, but are holding a special drink on the side to get your attention to try and sell you something. We live in this place where we could even start to talk about subscriptions, not just in the digital world, but we could talk about just the fact that we get subscribed to these expectations on our life. Oh, it's this event. I have to go to this event every single year. Or, oh, well, you know, like, I I'm on social media and I have Facebook, And I can keep up with everybody I've ever met on Facebook.
Speaker 2:I can keep up with all my people from high school who I haven't seen in a couple decades. And I I can keep up on this, and I can follow this. And so maybe I should. Here's the thing that technology and social expectations have raised the level of how much we can do, while disregarding how much we should. We've just bought this lie that Oh, you can keep up with everybody you've ever met on Facebook.
Speaker 2:You can drive to all of those places, you can get all those subscriptions. Oh, you can do all of these things. You can stay constantly connected, constantly online, constantly replying. You're able to do that because technology has made it possible. But should you?
Speaker 2:Because the question is what is that doing to us? How is that affecting us? I think that we are losing ownership over our time, attention, and we have lost our intentionality as we are carried on the conveyor belt of the modern world. Everything is just automatic and preprogrammed and is just carrying us along. Let's just keep going.
Speaker 2:Let's keep doing this more of that, less of this. That's the kind of world that I think we live in right now, and it's becoming more and more of that. And I think that we're losing well, the thing that scares me the most is that lost intentionality. That we're like, we're losing how our intentionality when it comes to how we spend our time, how we spend our attention, what we're thinking about, what we're talking about. Was this is why I wasn't planning to say this, but I was thinking about this the other day, and I was on I was on social media, I was scrolling on Instagram, And I saw this ad, it was not the thing that they were selling me.
Speaker 2:It was like a, like a generator, like this big generator for like a home or something like that. But the house that the generator and the advertisement took in, I was just, wow, that's such a cool house. Oh, it's so pretty. Like, how like, it's it's very minimal and none of that. And I just like, in my heart, after I'd seen that ad, I was just very dissatisfied with my own home.
Speaker 2:And I was just very ungrateful. And I was very upset. And I was like, woah, where did all that come from? Why did and like, who is this advertising company that I give them permission to say that to me? Like, this is the thing is that when we're scrolling on social media, we're interacting more and more with people we don't know, never met.
Speaker 2:And we're letting them speak into our lives for ninety seconds at a time. You might see somebody's video on YouTube or wherever, and they've got something to say to you. Who says that they're a voice worth listening to? That they get to speak into you that they get to tell you whether or not you have the latest and greatest water bottle? Right?
Speaker 2:Whether it's Stanley or Awala or Nalgene or whatever, it's going to be next year. Right? Like who gets to say that they get to have that kind of voice in our life? And I think that we just include so many voices that are speaking things into our life that maybe they might be good, but they might just as well as be very detrimental to us. So there is the book that I mentioned at the beginning, John Mark Comer's ruthless elimination of hurry.
Speaker 2:He has in the beginning of his book, this little 10 question little survey. He says it's the 10 symptoms of hurry sickness. Says hurry, being busy, this constant on the go. He says these are the 10 things. He's like, it's not the most scientific survey in the world, but I think it's helpful.
Speaker 2:He says the more of these things you can say yes to, the worse your hurry and your busyness has begun to creep into your life and have an impact on you. His first of those symptoms is irritability. Are we just disproportionately irritable over small things? It's just, it's grating on me. Stop chewing.
Speaker 2:Like whatever it is. Right? Whatever it I get it. I am the loud chewer. But like, whatever that irritability that begins to creep into us where we're just like, disproportionately Hypersensitivity.
Speaker 2:Are we just easily upset? Are we easily hurt? Does our emotions just feel disproportionate and big to what's happening? We're easily hurt, easily offended. Restlessness.
Speaker 2:You just can't sit still. There's it's quiet. I don't like that. Like, we're just not used to it. We're not interested in sitting still.
Speaker 2:We have to be constantly on the move. Workaholism. I just want to be I just got to grind. I got to be at work. I got to do this.
Speaker 2:Like, this is work needs me. I got to show up this way. I see more and more and more of this emotional numbness. We're not in connection with what our emotions are. Someone were to ask you like, how are you really doing?
Speaker 2:How are you feeling? Uh-huh. Scroll. Emotional numbness. Out of order priorities.
Speaker 2:Are spending time on things that at the end of our life, we're not going to say, Gee, I wish I had done more of that. Lack of care for your body. Are we taking care of our health? Are we too busy to eat food that didn't get passed to us through a window? I've been there.
Speaker 2:Like, I'm not saying that like all of this stuff is stuff that I've dealt with. Like I thanks to my wife, I don't live this life so much anymore. But like, there was a time where like, I ate most of my meals in my car. And that was very detrimental to my body. Escapist behaviors.
Speaker 2:Gotta constantly have something in front of me. It can't like, I gotta have music playing, I gotta have a podcast going, I gotta be watching something scrolling something. This again, this was something my wife called out on me. She's like, Do you ever eat a meal without watching YouTube? I was like, No.
Speaker 2:Because I gotta I gotta stop the silence. Just so wanting to escape. Slippage of spiritual disciplines are the things most important to our spiritual health slipping to the sidelines. Rather than reaching for my Bible first thing, do I reach for my phone? Do I reach for my coffee?
Speaker 2:What am I reaching for more often than for God's word? And then finally, a feeling of isolation. As crazy as it might sound, and as much as I've ended up talking about technology, I didn't even mean to, as much as that is meant to connect us, it has isolated us more and more and more. So those are John John Mark Comer's ten symptoms of what he calls hurry sickness. And, man, do I think that we feel a lot of those.
Speaker 2:Like, we are just people who are defined by that word busy. So that was me just talking about our situation. Your situation might feel a little different. Maybe you're not on your phone so much, but maybe you're on your television. Or maybe you just have a ton of commitments.
Speaker 2:Your social calendar is so full that you have no freedom to spend time with those that are closest to you. There's a whole bunch of different ways that this could happen. We were having a conversation about this and the question always comes up, has these things, has phones or technology made it worse? I'm like, yes, but we've always been human. I remember watching a movie.
Speaker 2:It was a great it was a fun movie, but it was talking about the busyness and hurriedness of life in the 1940s, 1950s. And it illustrated this by this guy going to work and he gets into the bus to go to his job that he hates, and everybody's sitting on the bus and they're all rustling and every single person on the bus is reading the newspaper, right? We've always had things distract ourselves, to keep ourselves from sitting in silence or boredom, whether that be the newspaper or the phone. Human condition hasn't changed, but we just need to name how it looks right now. So the question then is, what does Jesus have to say to you and me?
Speaker 2:That's the context. What does Jesus have to say to that context? Please turn with me to Luke chapter 10. Luke chapter 10 is this really interesting story because it kind of gives us this very like, there's times where Jesus is doing these things in front of massive crowds. And then there's times where Jesus is doing things that are much more private.
Speaker 2:This is one of the more private interactions that Jesus has. I'm gonna be in verse 38 here of Luke chapter 10. As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, they came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary. Martha and Mary became good friends of Jesus.
Speaker 2:He who sat at the Lord's feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, Lord, don't you care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her to help me. Martha, Martha, the Lord answered.
Speaker 2:You are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed, or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better and it will not be taken from her. So Jesus is traveling. He meets Martha and Mary, these two sisters. Martha's come into my house, we're going to have a meal, we're going to have time together.
Speaker 2:They come in. Jesus is talking and teaching to the disciples and Mary is there and Mary decides that she's going to sit down in the front in kind of the living room open area of the house and and sit there and listen to what Jesus, this teacher, has to say. Martha, in the in the other way thing, is kind of running about, and I can just kind of imagine, like, is just some imagination here. So take this with a grain of salt. I can imagine Martha coming out with the plates, setting them down kind of loud on the table, and kind of walking away.
Speaker 2:And she goes to she kind of slams the kitchen door, and then she comes out with like some of the silverware, she just kinda chink chink. Mary, do you wanna come help me maybe? You know? Mary's just, like, listening. Right?
Speaker 2:Martha's kind of wanting this kind of, like, Mary, what are you doing? Like, help me. There's all of these people, like, like all of these people in our house, and you're just gonna sit there. You're not going to help me take care of this. Like this is like, this might have been something that happened at like your Thanksgiving dinner.
Speaker 2:Right? Like if there's like, well, who's who's who's supposed to be in the kitchen? Who's supposed to be helping out? Who's supposed to be preparing and being the host? And Mary is understandably expected to do that because Martha and Mary are the hosts in this house.
Speaker 2:They're hosting them. And Martha's running around trying to take care of all of these things. And eventually Martha stops and just kind of says, hey, Jesus, like, you're talking about all these good things about all the things we're supposed to do. Tell my sister Mary to do some of those things. Tell her to get up and help me prepare the table.
Speaker 2:Isn't this like a isn't she being a bad host? I want to put a little bit more context on this. If you were a bad host in the ancient Near East, that was the worst thing you could be. Right? We kind of like, this is still like a thing.
Speaker 2:Like, it just kind of depends on your culture and your upbringing. But like, there, we're pretty casual as Americans when it comes to hosting people. Oh, just come in, make yourself at home, like all this stuff. Like, that was not the way it was in the time of Jesus. Like it would have been like, okay, we need to have the servants to come and wash your feet.
Speaker 2:We need to make sure that you have a place to sit and you're not going to lift a finger while you're here. You're just going to sit here and we're going to take care of you. And we're going to make sure there's more than enough food for you to have. We're not going to run out of food. We're not going to run out of wine.
Speaker 2:We're going to make sure we have everything. This idea of being the perfect host was a huge deal. And so there's all of this pressure that Martha is feeling. And some of it's reasonable. Jesus doesn't say that, like, it's a bad thing.
Speaker 2:He just says, Martha, Martha, you're worried and you're upset about many things. But few things are only truly needed. Or indeed, there's only one thing. And Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her. Jesus responds by saying, Martha, look at the big picture.
Speaker 2:Take a moment and think about what's more important, the spiritual food that Mary is eating or the physical food that you're preparing in the kitchen. Which one is most important? And Mary will not be taken away from the thing that she has chosen, is most important. My question is, how would the story play out today? We can imagine, like, we we know what it's like to host people and to feel that pressure, to feel like we're running around so much trying to get everything sorted and everything put together and everything placed right and looking nice that we feel like we hardly get to rest, hardly get to enjoy the company?
Speaker 2:What would it be like if we were inviting Jesus over to our homes? Would we be so distracted by our phones, by the things going on, by the preparations that we wouldn't actually get all that much time to talk with Jesus? I think, it's just my thought, I think that we would actually do worse than this. I think we wouldn't even manage to get Jesus over to our house. Because we'd say, you know, I'm just not we should.
Speaker 2:We should do coffee sometime, Jesus. I don't know when, but we should do it. Right? Like we get into this place where we're just so busy that we can't make time for those relationships we say that matter, but we're just not able to find a place to fit them into our life. So the question is, would we even get Jesus into our house?
Speaker 2:Or are our schedules so full that we never make time? Wanted to share a couple of quotes that I think make this point more and more clear. This is from the author and theologian Ronald Rolheiser. He says, we, for every kind of reason, good and bad, are distracting ourselves into spiritual oblivion. It is not that we have anything against God, depth and spirit.
Speaker 2:We would like these. It's just that we are habitually too preoccupied to have any of these show up on our radar screens. We are more busy than bad, more distracted than non spiritual, and more interested in the movie theater, the sports stadium, and the shopping mall, and the fantasy life they produce in us than we are in church. Pathological busyness, distraction, and restlessness are major roadblocks today within our spiritual lives. He's saying it's not so much that we're bad.
Speaker 2:It's not so much that we dislike God or we don't want God in our life. We're just too pathological busy to make time for it. This is from John Ortberg. He says this, for many of us, the great danger is not that we will renounce our faith. It is that we will become so distracted and rushed and preoccupied that we will just settle for a mediocre version of it.
Speaker 2:We will just skim our lives instead of actually living them. That scares me. We'll just be on autopilot, constantly resubscribed, constantly doing the next thing, constantly distracted so much so that we end up being distracted and preoccupied. We settle for a mediocre version of our faith and life, and we just skim through our life rather than actually live it. That's where I think we're at, and Jesus is inviting us.
Speaker 2:Like I said, Sabbath is an invitation. Jesus is inviting us to sit at his feet. He's saying, stop worrying about all of those things. Come sit with me for a little bit. Here's the question I think Jesus would have for us.
Speaker 2:He would say, there are many, many things for us to be busy with. Have we chosen what is best to be busy with? There's so many good things out there. Not saying that the things that are in your schedule are necessarily bad. Not saying that.
Speaker 2:They might be good things. But if those good things are crowding out the best things, is that is that the way we wanna live? I think God is inviting us to be intentional, to sit down and say, I wanna sit at your feet. I wanna know you. I wanna have a different story.
Speaker 2:I think all of this kind of like the way in which we feel in our modern age, this busyness, this grinding, this constantly moving, feeling more like Martha and less like Mary. I think there's a there's a ancient myth, ancient Greek myth that I think we would that we resonate with as a modern culture. It's called the the myth of Sisyphus. It's a fun name to try and say a lot, so I'm not going to. So the myth of Sisyphus.
Speaker 2:Sisyphus was not a good guy. He was kind of a jerk. He was kind of a bad king. But he kind of had this knack for tricking all of the gods. So he kind of cheated death a couple of times.
Speaker 2:And he made, you know, Zeus angry and all of these other gods. And so Zeus decides he's gonna punish Sisyphus. So I'm gonna punish you, not by killing you, but by making you live the rest of eternity, rolling a rock up a hill. You're going to get up to the top of that hill, and then that rock is going to roll back down. And then you got to go back down that hill and you just got to roll it back up.
Speaker 2:And for a lot of you, my guess is that life, your week, your years, your months, your quarters, feel a lot like pushing a rock up a hill to only have to do it again. To be in this place of cyclical toil, over and over again, feeling like, well, I got that. Well, that didn't pay off the way I kind of hoped it did. That felt good for a minute. But now there's another rock down there I need to go move.
Speaker 2:I better go do that. I think a lot of us spend our lives pushing different boulders up the hill of life saying, when I get this boulder up, it'll make me feel good. It'll make me happy. I'll be satisfied then. I'll have everything that I need.
Speaker 2:We get that boulder up and we find, there's another one down there that I need to get back up or I thought I had already rolled that one up, but I guess I got to do it again. And we just keep doing it over and over and over. Now the world knows that this is how our life feels in our modern age. There's a philosopher, his name is Albert Camus. And he like, he's kind of like the father of what's called like absurdism.
Speaker 2:And his general idea is this, the world is absurd in a sense. The world doesn't make any sense. There's no meaning to it. And he wrote this whole dissertation and book on the myth of Sisyphus. He says this is our modern world.
Speaker 2:We are all Sisyphus in this meaningless world, meant to toil and push rocks up a hill that we're just always going to have to do again. And Albert came to this conclusion. This is his like final sentences out of his whole little book on this. He says this, I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one's burden again.
Speaker 2:But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain in itself forms a world. The struggle itself towards the height is enough to fill a man's heart.
Speaker 2:One must imagine Sisyphus happy. So what he's saying right there is he's like, yeah. We're all Sisyphus pushing a rock up a mountain, but we should just be happy about it. Like, that's what he's saying. He's like saying, Look, we should just find happiness in just the toil.
Speaker 2:We should just be happy in that. And there's a little bit of truth in that. If you were to read Ecclesiastes, you would find some resonance with that philosophy there. But what he's saying is that there's no greater significance than the rock that you're currently pushing. There's no greater meaning to be found.
Speaker 2:And so you might as well just keep doing it. And another way of saying it, and I think in our more modern term is to say that the solution of the world is to embrace the grind. It is without larger meaning or purpose. We must simply not stop. We must simply keep ourselves busy enough to convince ourselves that there is meaning in our rushing around.
Speaker 2:We must simply be so busy that we just keep ourselves so distracted so that we can at least pretend that we're happy. That's the solution the world offers. The world knows that we're busy. The world knows that we're unhappy with the way that life feels and operates. But the solution it offers is to simply just fuck up.
Speaker 2:But what's the invitation of Jesus? Here in Luke 10, the invitation is to sit at his feet. Let's turn to Matthew chapter 11. Matthew chapter 11 verse 28. These are Jesus' words.
Speaker 2:He says, come to me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. That's a very, very different invitation and solution than what the world gives. It's back into an invitation, what I said at the very beginning.
Speaker 2:Sabbath is an invitation to break with the pattern of the world by creating time and space for God and his good gifts in our life. Sabbath is an invitation to break with the pattern of the world. It's an invitation to stop pushing the rock up the hill. It's an invitation to rest. It's an invitation to come and know Jesus and bear a burden that he calls light.
Speaker 2:To be with a savior who is gentle and humble on heart, to find rest for our souls, to carry a yoke that is easy and a burden that is light. It's an invitation to step out of the constant cyclical busyness and hurriedness of the world and to slow down, to be with him, to know him. It's a place where we can begin to undo those effects of that hurried sickness. Because here's the thing, who has ever become more Christ like by being more busy, by being more hurried, by being pulled in more directions? I am less Christ like the more busy I am.
Speaker 2:I am less likely to operate in the fruits of the spirit. I am less likely to be kind and gentle. I'm less likely to be loving and graceful. I am much more likely to be harsh, judgmental, short-tempered, and irritable. Christ is calling us out of that to be with Him so that we can be more like Him.
Speaker 2:So what does this mean? I have a lot this is just the first sermon. We have more to talk about. There's so much more to talk about, but I want to just start here. This is about subtraction, not addition.
Speaker 2:I'm not up here to tell you, you need to do more things. That's actually the opposite. I'm telling you to do less. Right? Like the young kids now say, say less.
Speaker 2:I don't know what that means, but say less. But do less. We have to do less things. The invitation is to say, don't let God be the first thing that gets cut when you're busy. Like, this is the pat this is a pattern.
Speaker 2:Like, when we get busy and life gets pushed to the margin, what's the first thing to leave our schedule? Prayer, scripture reading, time at church, time in community. Don't let that be the first thing that gets cut. Don't cut the thing that gives you life. Don't cut the thing that builds into you.
Speaker 2:We spend so many times, so much time doing really good things, but I'm doing a good thing. Yes, you are. But is it life giving? Is it essential to the flourishing of you? Is this the thing that's going to give you strong roots and strong sturdiness?
Speaker 2:Is it going to make you like that tree in Psalm one, a tree planted by streams of living water that bears its fruit in due season? Or are we cutting out the things that are cutting off our roots and cutting off our connection to the living water? So that ultimately, as much fruit as we're trying to bear, we're gonna eventually stop bearing less and less fruit because we've cut ourselves off at the root. I just there's so much more for us to talk about Sabbath and and and all of this. But I just wanna start by saying, I wanna invite you to carve out daily time to simply stop and be with God.
Speaker 2:Like, I'm not talking like an hour. I'm talking like ten minutes. Like, if you have if you're like at a place where you're like, I don't spend time with Jesus except for Sundays and maybe small groups. I'm inviting you to find five minutes, ten minutes in your day to stop, to not be thinking about the next thing you need to do, to not have your phone going off, to not be reachable. You can take ten minutes to not be reachable and just pray.
Speaker 2:Open to the gospels and just read the words of Jesus for ten minutes. Start there. Find places in your day to stop, to Sabbath. That's very simply what Sabbath means, is stop. Just be for a minute.
Speaker 2:That's my invitation for you. It'll feel awkward, just like this silence might feel a little awkward. But in that space, we can begin to meet with God. We can begin to meet with Jesus because everything else is not taking our attention. Jesus is inviting us out of the story of the world, and he's inviting us into God's story.
Speaker 2:Here's the thing. When I talked about that myth of Sisyphus, that's the story of the world. That's the condition we find ourselves in, but it is not the gospel. It's not the story that God wants to tell. Because the thing is, is that, yeah, we have a yoke, we have a burden, we have things that we carry, but we're not the one pushing the burden up the hill.
Speaker 2:We're following after a man who carried our burden for us up a different hill, and was crucified, died, and was buried, and then resurrected, so that we might have a new kind of life, so that we might have new life. Amen. That's the truth. That's the invitation. We aren't carrying up our own burden.
Speaker 2:When Jesus says come to me, my yoke is easy, my burden is light, it's because he's carrying the heavy part. We don't have to be under this constant grind of I have to find significance, I have to find meaning, I have to be a good parent, I have to be a good husband, I have to be a good employee, I have to be a good kid, I have to be whatever it is that you say you have to be, you have to achieve, you have to do, you have to find, you have to escape, those things have already been dealt with. We get to rest because Jesus Christ has called us to a new life. He has died for us so that we might be sons, that we might be daughters, that we might be his brothers and sisters in that family, and that doesn't require we strive at all. It requires that we rest and that we be with God.
Speaker 2:And that as we do that, we become more like him. Let's pray. Heavenly father, I pray that you would help us to slow down. Lord, that those warnings that we heard today of being so busy, not that we would be busy with bad things, but that we would just be so busy and hurry that we would not find time for you. I pray that you would help us to not let that be true.
Speaker 2:That today we would hear an invitation from you to sit down at your feet, to be with you, to know that being with you is the most important thing we could do today. It's the most important thing we could do tomorrow. Lord, I ask that you would help us to know what that means, that you would begin to help us in sitting in at your feet, that we would begin to shift our perspective on everything, that we'd be able to carry with us a spirit that is not anxious, that is not hurried, that is not rushed, that is not full of busyness, but is able to just simply be present with you, to be calm, to know who you are and who you've called us to be. Lord, whatever burden it is that we feel like we have to push up a hill over and over again, pray that you would help us to lay that down at your feet, That we would be able to come and learn who we are because of you, who you've called us to be. And that that might produce in us a different type of life.
Speaker 2:One that is full of you and not busyness. In Jesus name we pray. Amen. I pray that you would hear that invitation from Jesus. Come to me all who are weary and heavy laden.
Speaker 2:Come and find rest for your souls. Come and take a yoke that is easy and a burden that is light. Conduit, as you go from this place, I pray that you would know what it is to sit at the feet of Jesus and to know that he is so, so good. You are loved. Go in peace.
