20040516Easter6CComeSunday

Our theme this morning, as you may have guessed, is the Sabbath; and I would like to begin

with two images.

The first is from my childhood. I grew up in a conservative Protestant tradition, the Christian

Reformed Church. Our Sundays included Sunday School and two church services, morning and

evening. I was the good girl and always attended; my brother was mysteriously ill on many Sunday

mornings. After church there was a big Sunday dinner, followed by a nap, and then a family gathering

next door at Grandma’s house. There was no work and no TV

The other image comes from a song by Kris Kristofferson, “Sunday Morning Coming Down,”

which begins like this:

Well I woke up Sunday morning,

With no way to hold my head that didn’t hurt.

And the beer I had for breakfast wasn’t bad,

So I had one more for dessert.

Then I fumbled through my closet for my clothes,

And found my cleanest dirty shirt.

An’ I shaved my face and combed my hair,

An’ stumbled down the stairs to meet the day.

I’d smoked my brain the night before,

On cigarettes and songs I’d been pickin’.

But I lit my first and watched a small kid,

Cussin’ at a can that he was kicking.

Then I crossed the empty street,

‘n caught the Sunday smell of someone fryin’ chicken.

And it took me back to somethin’,

That I’d lost somehow, somewhere along the way.

And we may not be able to identify with either the Sunday of my childhood or with

Kristofferson’s picture of Sunday morning, but maybe he has a point; maybe we have lost something

along the way. Maybe it’s time to get it back.

All of the readings for today touch on the Sabbath. In the first reading, the apostle Paul joins

Lydia and other women who have gathered at the river to worship and pray on the Sabbath. The next

reading from Revelation gives us a vision of the eternal Sabbath and the river of God flowing through the

middle of the streets of the new Jerusalem. And in the gospel reading is about a healing that occurs on

the Sabbath. It was an event that galvanized Jesus’ enemies because he broke the rules that said you

couldn’t heal on the Sabbath.

Back then, keeping the Sabbath was one way Jewish people had to order their lives as people

in the midst of Roman oppression. Jesus kept the Sabbath, but he challenged the Sabbath laws when he