I’ve long been very grateful to the good folk of the United Reformed Church by the English Bridge in Shrewsbury - and it was nice a few weeks ago to have the opportunity to say so to their minister in person. Their notice board outside the church always has such a good line in to-the-point messages, and those wayside words have been the inspiration or at least the starting point for quite a few of my sermons and Sunday talks over the years. Today’s being no exception. Here I am talking to you on the Sunday of a Bank Holiday weekend, and I remember they had a sign which read, as you passed it in your car or on the park and ride bus, "Happy holidays!”
Except that if you looked just a little more closely, you saw it was actually “Happy holy days." And I reckon there’s a load of things you can take from those three words. First of all, I’m simply reminded that holiday and holy day are really the same word. In the dim and distant past when our fore-fathers were mostly serfs and villeins, the only time they would be able to take off from their labours would be the saints’ days and holy days authorised by the church.
Some of our modern bank holidays still happen on the dates of those old Church festivals, though Whitsun has now been dislodged from the real Whit Sunday, and this weekend’s holiday is just a day off for late summer, and a chance for a last trip out before everything starts up again in September. It looks as though the weather's going to smile on us today and tomorrow, and so of course every road will be packed and every beach will be crowded, and anyone with any sense will realise it might have been best to stay at home.
But then you’d probably end up working, creosoting that fence or cutting that hedge, and all work and no play is never good for anyone. People need their times of rest and recreation, and indeed of celebration and fellowship; and that word 'recreation' if really of course re-creation: we’ll get used up and worn out and wasted if we don't rest. All work and no play leaves us less effective not only as useful and productive workers, but as human beings. I’m sure that's why Isaiah the prophet, speaking God's word to the people, told them to keep the Sabbath in order to be right with God, and for God to bless them.
For bank holidays and other special away times or off times are important, but so is the regular break from work that the Bible calls the Sabbath. It’s a holy time. Isaiah told the people that they should also honour the Sabbath by desisting from work and not pursuing their own interests.
Now that to me is an interesting phrase: not pursuing their own interests. Isn’t there quite a big clue there as to what the Sabbath is all about, and what it isn’t all about, but so easily could become. Jesus put it better than anyone else, of course: the Sabbath is made for us, rather than we for the Sabbath. Where keeping the Sabbath has become something oppressive and restrictive and downright difficult, we’ve got it wrong. In fact, the Sabbath is given us not just as a rest and break from, but as a positive means towards. Which is why Isaiah goes on to talk about 'finding our joy in the Lord'. Remember, the sign outside the URC Church said ‘HAPPY holy days’. Why is it that so often in the course of Christian history people have tried to make holiness something dull and dreary. That’s not what it should be at all, it should always be a joyful time. Sabbath is time away from the routine and drudgery of work; but for Christians it’s also our opportunity each week to tune ourselves back into the things that are divine. Our opportunity for re-creation, for which we need to be seeking the mind and heart of our Creator.
So, here’s the thing. True religion should be a liberating thing, but instead all too often religion has forgot that it’s supposed to liberate, and has instead turned into something that cramps and imposes and divides - with the keeping of Sabbaths as one expression of this.
So let’s reflect for a moment on the story we’ve heard from St Luke’s Gospel, the story of something good that happened on the wrong day (for some, anyway) because it happened on the Sabbath. Jesus is in the synagogue, and there he responds with generosity and good purpose to the desperate need of a woman deeply afflicted by something that sounds a lot like rheumatoid arthritis. But it's the Sabbath, and the leader of synagogue must have feared he might lose control - after all this his Sabbath service, not a free-for-all healing session.
"There are six other days in the week," he tells his people. "Come and be healed on them, and not the Sabbath!" Now hearing those words, I can’t help but wonder how I might have reacted had someone stepped forward and done something like this in one of the churches for which I had responsibility in my time as a vicar. Like today, I’d have had stuff prepared and written down, not to mention a watch on my wrist and an idea of how long the service should take and when I might get home afterwards.
And here comes someone stepping up out of the congregation, and not authorized and ordained to be a minister, and he messes about with my carefully planned and organised service. I can’t help thinking: Would I have rejoiced that one of God's children had been released from slavery and suffering? Or would I have found myself moaning and complaining about the lack of discipline and the fact that things were not being done in the right way? Might I not have felt that my nose was being pushed out of joint?
I hope I would have applauded, but if I'm honest I’m rather afraid I might have moaned. But the leader of the synagogue did I suppose have more reason than I had to complain. For it wasn’t just that his own nose was pushed out of joint; it was clear to him that Jesus had offended against God’s law by breaking the Sabbath. But had he, really? Thinking back to what Isaiah wrote, Jesus hadn't been pursuing his own interests or attending to his own affairs. It surely was in complete accordance with God’s will that this woman should be released from her imprisonment to ill health and disability. What better day to do that than on a holy day? It would surely have been a misuse of the Sabbath to make it an excuse to postpone her release. For the Sabbath is given us - given us by God - for our own benefit and health, and indeed for our own liberation, and certainly not to oppress or imprison us. He made the Sabbath for man, not man for the Sabbath.
Years ago, as an industrial chaplain at a time when the old Sunday trading laws were being relaxed, I found myself arguing the case for the Sabbath in radio debates and the like. Or at least, the case for one day in seven to run at a different pace from the others. I wasn’t interested in imposing a Sabbath on everyone just because Christians wanted a special day - but I did want to argue very strongly that it wasn’t just a religious custom or discipline, but something we really do need. Everyone needs to be re-created.
As it happens, of course, Sunday isn't the Jewish Sabbath, which is the last day of the week, Saturday therefore. Our holy day is a celebration each week of Easter, so it happens on the first day of the week, on Sunday. But it's certainly been used as a Sabbath, as a day when no work should be done, as a day of enforced stillness and inactivity that was imposed on the whole of the land, so that (if you look back far enough in recent history) nothing was bought or sold, no buses or trains would run, and even the pubs stayed closed.
You may feel that today the pendulum's moved too far the other way. Many people now have to work on a Sunday, not least because the leisure industry has become one of our major employers. Many churches now find they need to open up during the week to cater for people who couldn't come on a Sunday even if they wanted to. Sunday leisure activities have burgeoned, and leisure is big business these days, sport also. A lady was saying to me just the other day that no-one under the age of forty comes to her chapel because they’re all playing football or - well, there’s a multitude of sporting activity now on any Sunday. And people tell me they might come to church more often, but we’ve got to visit the family and there’s no other day, or even they’ve got to do their shopping, and there’s no other day. They just can’t spare the time.
I’m not in the business of insisting that my holy day should be kept by those who don’t believe what I believe. And I certainly don’t want to go back to the days when Sundays were grey and oppressive days when busy mums like mine hung their washing up in a damp kitchen so that the neighbours wouldn’t be scandalised by seeing it blowing out there on the line.
But I do hope that Christians of all persuasions will be alive to the positive reasons for keeping a Sabbath, maybe not as a day of absolute inaction, but certainly as a day of blessing and prayer and of re-creation. It’s a chance for us each week to bear witness to our faith by keeping our holy day when the world around us doesn't, and by keeping it as a happy holy day.
But remember, Sabbath is God’s gift to us, as something that should make our lives better and happier, not to test us or oppress us. It deserves to be taken seriously, so we should certainly be paying it more than lip service; but it doesn’t need us to be so super-zealous that our Sunday is kept with an in-your-face smugness. It isn’t about being holier than thou, just doing honour to the God who loves us, and who also loves, as my tutor at college always told us, the guys that are washing their cars or playing Sunday league football, even if they haven’t quite woken up to him yet.
So let’s keep our Christian Sabbath seriously but also joyfully. For every Sunday is a celebration of Easter, and of death being no more and a broken world being renewed - and people being healed. Every Sunday we keep preaches and proclaims the God of love whose desire is that all should find healing and salvation. To keep Sunday as a happy holy day is my confession that God comes first in my life: and if I’m keep this day as his Sabbath then I’ll do my best to use it in a way that will renew and re-create me, and that will give me the power, purpose and holiness I shall need to take into all the other days of my week.
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