Year B
Mark 2:23-3:6
The Rev. Denise Vaughn
The Not So “Ordinary” Time
Last Sunday, we began the long Season after Pentecost which many refer to as ‘Ordinary Time’. Not to say that this time will be boring or uneventful as the meaning of ordinary might infer. It just refers to the Sunday’s after Pentecost Sunday by ordinal numbers 1-33. This year the Sunday’s number 1-27. Today is the Second Sunday after Pentecost. Our task for the months ahead in this season which extends to the end of November is anything but ordinary. Our task is to look at what Jesus taught his disciples and see what is in these teachings for us as we seek to carry out the work of the gospel today. Jesus promised his disciples a helper, the Holy Spirit who would stand with them making the work possible. This same helper, the Holy Spirit, stands with us today to help and guide us in carrying out the work of Christ.
These weeks for the church in the northern hemisphere are connected with growth and fruitfulness in the Christian life. We come to understand that through our “ordinary” lives we live out our Christian faith. From the beginning, the church founded at Pentecost had to grow in its understanding and it had to take in-assimilate-and continue the life and work of Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit while actively anticipating his second coming, and so we too must do these same things.
Joan Chittister, well known author and theologian today writes, “Every Sunday during this time celebrates Easter; Christ is risen. Week after week we go back to the center of the system, not because there is some unusual event going on but precisely because this is normal to the faith. The resurrected life of Christ pours into his church! Through the scriptures of Ordinary Time, we are led “along the path of salvation history,” which makes us part of the crowds who follow Jesus from one situation to another. Week in and week out, we enter more deeply into the resurrected Christ and gain understanding of his life and ministry.”
So let us begin this season by becoming a part of the crowd that follows Jesus during these 27 weeks of “ordinary time” and let us see what is in the teaching today that Jesus would have for us to help us live out our Christian faith. In this section of Mark’s gospel, Mark is using a series of stories to show the way in which Jesus begins to perplex the Jewish religious leaders and also to demonstrate the beginnings of opposition to Jesus and his ministry that will only grow in time. The religious leaders assume that they know all about Sabbath observance and that assumption reveals their pride and arrogance. They know the details of the law, but have forgotten the One who gives it.
When I was growing up, the observance of Sabbath was a day when most everyone I knew went to church and the whole American culture shut down. It was a day for being, not doing, and that was part of the gift of the day called Sunday. Although for the Christian, Sunday is our Sabbath, not Saturday as it is for the Jews, our whole culture inherited its understanding of the Sabbath from Judaism. The way we spent our Sunday’s when I was growing up, was very similar to how good Jews had kept the Sabbath for several thousand years. Within Judaism the Sabbath teachings were central. A good Jew kept the Sabbath as a way of honoring God, as a way of remembering God, as a way of renewing the human side of the God-human covenant. Rituals, prayers, and songs expressed the teachings and spirituality of Judaism. All the gospels say that Jesus went to the synagogue on the Sabbath.
Today if the Sabbath, Sunday, is to be a holy day of worship and rest, we need to make that a priority. We have forgotten me included how to keep the Sabbath. And in a way this is what Jesus is saying and doing when he concludes his incident with the Pharisees by saying, “The Sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the Sabbath.” Yet, keeping the Sabbath in Jesus’ day was not easy either because it was governed by many laws. No one was supposed to do any work, no cooking or selling and a Jew could get into trouble with the religious authorities if he or she were to break any of the Sabbath laws. This included a law that said you were not to help anyone in need. On this particular Sabbath, Jesus breaks the laws of the Sabbath by allowing his disciples to pluck heads of grain to feed themselves and then he heals and restores a man’s deformed hand. Jesus obviously sees these actions as part of keeping the Sabbath. They are hungry. They are being fed. Someone needed a cure. So that person is cured.
We see Jesus breaking the Sabbath over and over because the keeping of the Sabbath laws needed to be changed to take into account human need, human hunger, to include what matters to humankind and to God. This highly symbolic story sets the stage and tone for much of what Jesus’ ministry is all about. He is not recommending that the secularized weekend replace the religious and cultural observances of Judaism. Jesus is not telling his disciples not to keep the Sabbath, nor is he diminishing the importance of the Sabbath, or recommending it be abolished. He is allowing it to be humanized. He knows that on the Sabbath people need to be fed, with physical and spiritual food. The laws need to be broadened to accommodate human hunger. We are hungry and in need of many things. We need food, water and shelter, and we also need God’s love and presence. We need regular contact with God and God’s people in community.
And that is the reason we come together each week to share the meal of God we call the Eucharist which has very few rules that govern it. We do need clergy and baptized people, some prayers, bread, and wine. We don’t have to necessarily dress up but we do have to be here to be fed. After we are fed, the Spirit of God continues it work in us. When laws fail to take into account human need, or violate compassion and respect for all human life, Jesus gives us a model of change. And disciples continue to break laws in his name. Being a Christian in today’s world is not easy. Living into the Sabbath takes discipline and courage, as we resist the pressures to conform to the world. But as we are fed, week after week, by God’s Word and sacrament, by God’s people in love and friendship, we find keeping the Sabbath is what we know we need in order to live.
Paul in his 2 letter to the Corinthians gives us words of encouragement for our journey as we are reminded that God acts in ways that do not fit into the world’s criteria, and this is what Jesus is reminding us, that the Sabbath is made for us as a gift for living our lives with each other and with God because the world gets more and more frantic every day. Let us remember in these “Ordinary Days” the importance of keeping the Sabbath, as a time for being, a time made holy to receive and be fed, to reflect and learn what Christ would have us understand about his life and ministry. Then send us out Holy Spirit to do the work we have been called to do.