Sermon 07.12.2026: Sabbath Means Freedom

The "morning after" our country’s 250th, we turn to a similar would-be dynasty with its own ancient treasury scandal, arbitrary system of discrimination, and freewheeling corruption. As in Queen Esther's time, we live somewhere between our nation's promises and betrayals. And yet miracles still find us! It's as if, all along, they were waiting "for such a time as this."

Scripture

Deuteronomy 5:12-15; Matthew 11:28-30

Deuteronomy 5:12-15

Keep the sabbath day to sanctify it, as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee.
Six days thou shalt labour, and do all thy work:

But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thine ox, nor thine ass, nor any of thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates; that thy manservant and thy maidservant may rest as well as thou.

And remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and that the Lord thy God brought thee out thence through a mighty hand and by a stretched out arm: therefore the Lord thy God commanded thee to keep the sabbath day.

Matthew 11:28-30

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.

For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

Sermon

The Ten Commandments have been in the news recently, with several states embroiled in court battles over whether to post them in public buildings. During oral argument in a Texas case, Justice Scalia said, “I think probably 90 percent of American people believe in the Ten Commandments, even though 85 percent couldn’t tell you what the ten are.” 

The fourth commandment, the Sabbath commandment, is indeed one of the Ten commandments, but do people “believe” in it? The Ten Commandments appear in two places in the Old Testament, in Exodus, and then in Deuteronomy, which we read this morning. “Observe the Sabbath day and keep it holy, as the LORD your God commanded you. 13 Six days you shall labor and do all your work. 14 But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God; you shall not do any work...” I’m going to go out on a limb and say this might be the least “believed,” the least observed commandment, even by people who consider themselves faithful Christians. Let me be quick to say I’m NOT talking about the kind of observance that some of us remember. My Scottish grandmother wasn’t allowed to do needlework on Sunday, and even when I was a kid, most stores were closed—that’s hard to imagine today when Sunday is the biggest shopping day of the week. There was a time when our American culture assumed everyone was Christian, or ought to be, and most places had restrictions about what people could do on Sundays. Blue laws, they’re called. I lived in Texas in the 1970s and on Sundays, there was a great big sign across the beer section of the grocery store: NO BEER SALES ON SUNDAYS. There were also other things you couldn’t buy that never made sense to me. You could buy garden hoses and fertilizer but not hardware or cookie sheets or pillowcases. 

One problem with Sunday blue laws is the same problem with posting the Ten Commandments in public places: Not everyone in our culture is Christian. People of different faiths have different sabbaths, many people have no connection to organized religion, and no one should be forced to observe a Christian holy day. In fact, the Sabbath that’s assumed in the Ten Commandments isn’t Sunday. Genesis tells us that God created the world in six days and on the seventh day God rested. The Jewish Sabbath has always been the seventh day, Saturday. Early Christians first observed Sabbath on Saturday but over the centuries, they began to celebrate on Sunday, the day of Resurrection, and in 321 Emperor Constantine tried to clear up any confusion by declaring Sunday as the Sabbath for everyone in the Roman Empire – a very imperial thing to do. That means if Christians observe Sabbath at all, they observe a Sabbath, not the Sabbath. 

But should we observe the Sabbath, or a Sabbath? Must we? And why? The Ten Commandments appear first in Exodus, right after Moses brought the tablets down from Mount Sinai. Here in Deuteronomy, the people Israel are about to enter the Promised Land after 40 years in the wilderness, and Moses wants to remind them about God’s covenant and God’s laws because he knows how easy it is to forget them, to forget where you came from, forget who you are and whose you are when you’re surrounded by a different culture. While the Exodus version of this commandment refers to God’s rest after the six days of creation, this version refers to freedom from slavery: 

“Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the LORD your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.” 

Exodus tells us in passionate terms how Pharaoh demanded that the Hebrew slaves produce more and more bricks to build more and more storehouses for Pharaoh’s surplus wealth. There was no day off, no time off, only more work. Into this hopeless weariness erupts the God of the burning bush who hears the despair and fatigue of the people, and sends Moses to liberate them. [ii] The Sabbath commandment acknowledges that God’s people are not commodities to be dispatched for endless production. As Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann put it, Sabbath is resistance; resistance to the system that would have us work more, accomplish more, possess more, and consume more. It’s resistance to a system that is dehumanizing, that would have us be nothing more than economic drones. 

Here in Deuteronomy, we see that this applies to all of humanity, regardless of status. Deuteronomy pays particular attention to widows, orphans, and immigrants; to all those needing protection, the people on the margins of society. While Exodus also commands that servants, livestock, and resident aliens are to rest, Deuteronomy adds, so that they may rest “like you.” “Like you.” It’s really quite radical, when you think about it. Rest is not the privilege of the powerful or the worthy or the insiders, but the right of everyone. The Sabbath commandment points us toward not only valuing our humanity but toward valuing the humanity of everybody. Think about it: When everybody rests, we all look the same—poor and rich, ruler and slave, weak and strong, healthy and sick, old and young – all those labels disappear. When we’re at rest, nobody is ahead or behind; nobody is better or worse. [iii] On Sabbath days or Sabbath times, your vulnerable, exposed neighbors are “like you.” They get to rest and just be children of God.iv Like you. The Sabbath commandment announces, “This is a hard one, former slaves, so listen up: You really are supposed to stop. All of you, every week, every thing, no exceptions. You’ve been delivered from a life of slavery, where your output was the sole measure of your value, and any weakness or need was a life-threatening deficit.”v “Remember instead that you’re made to care for one another, including all those vulnerable people in your midst, just like God cares for you. You must stop, regularly, to remember this, or all the other commandments will become simply another way to measure, compete, and dehumanize yourselves and others. You’ll forget the God who saves you and the freedom you’ve been saved for, and you’ll go back to being slaves.” [vi] 

We observe the Sabbath because no one—not us, not anyone—should be a slave. So maybe, by keeping Sabbath, by observing a Sabbath rest, we just might grow in our longing for a system where no one is a slave; where no one is a commodity; where all people have a living wage and time for rest and worship, too.vii And you know, maybe that includes thinking about the people who make the things we buy, and whether they are being treated like slaves. 

Now, we might think, “Isn’t it wonderful that everyone’s included; I’m all for inclusion but I’m not a slave; I’ve never been a slave; this doesn’t apply to me.” 

Or—does it? 

Do you wake up at night, remembering what you were supposed to get done, vexed that you didn’t meet expectations—yours or someone else’s? Do you fall asleep counting bricks—and by bricks, I don’t literally mean bricks but whatever it is that you’re supposed to produce, accomplish, check off your to-do list; the 21st century equivalent of bricks in your job, or your home, or your volunteer work—whatever? Do you dream of the more bricks you have to make or of the bricks you did make that were flawed?[viii] I confess there are times that I do. We might not be slaves in the way the Israelites were or some people still are, but certainly plenty of us have to work long hours and many of us have a harder and harder time disconnecting from work. We can be reached by cell phone or email 24/7. If you work in global industries, you deal with folks in Bangladesh or Shenzhen when those people are awake. And then there’s the depressing and exhausting daily news cycle; it wears us out, right? Life, for people at all levels of the economic ladder, is hectic and demanding; it grinds us down. Maybe you actually love your job; maybe you feel terrific about your volunteer work, but even good work needs to have limits.ix In Exodus, Moses had the people build the tabernacle, the tent in which they worshiped as they wandered in the wilderness. Presumably that was good work, rewarding work, right? But still, God made it clear in God’s tabernacle instructions that even good work needs time off. [x]

Couldn’t we all use a Sabbath? A day of rest? The Matthew text invites the question, “Who among us isn’t weary?” God knows we need a rest. People need down time in order to heal, recover, reconnect with themselves and their humanity, and therefore the humanity of others and the God who commands us to love our neighbors as ourselves. That is how Sabbath transforms—by reconnecting us to God and humanity. But the really hard question, and one I think we’ll be wrestling with in these three weeks we’re talking about Sabbath—is how do we observe Sabbath—either the Sabbath or a sabbath—in 2026? What’s realistic? Those of us who work all week do our laundry and shopping on weekends. People with kids generally find weeknights full of homework and weekends full of sports, recitals, and birthday parties. Plenty of folks have not one job but two—or more—just to make ends meet. We might long for our relationship with time—and therefore with God—to be different, but how? 

I think this will take some experimenting, both in terms of our own schedules—and how we make space for everyone to get real, quality time off. I read about an ER doctor and her husband who work conflicting schedules, making a family sabbath impossible. Instead, she takes “Sabbath time,” which she puts in quotes because it’s not a full day and not always the same day of the week. She writes, “My son and I read, sing, put together puzzles, make cookies, go to a museum, tromp through the woods. Nothing that needs to be scheduled unless it is wonderful and joyous ....” [xi] 

Wonderful and joyous. Because we were created for good work, to be sure, but we were created to be free—free to experience what’s wonderful and joyous. Free to reconnect with God, with the people we love, with ourselves, for crying out loud. We worship the God who says, “Take a break. You need a rest. You are not a slave.” As Brueggemann wrote, “To cease, even for a time, the anxious striving for more bricks is to find ourselves with a ‘light burden’ and an ‘easy yoke,’” just as Jesus offers. “It is now, as then, enough to permit dancing and singing into an alternative life.” [xii]

Dancing and singing into an alternative life. Doesn’t that sound—restful? May it be so for you, and for me. Amen. 

© Joanne Whitt 2026 all rights reserved. 

i Walter Brueggeman, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2014, revised 2017). 

ii Brueggemann, 5. 

iii Kara Root, https://kara-root.blogspot.com/2016/10/work-rest-repeat-aka-belonging-training.html 

iv Brueggemann, 45. 

v Root, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/narrative-lectionary/preaching-series-on-sabbath/commentary-on-deuteronomy-512-15-matthew-1128-30 

vi Root, ibid. 

vii Dorothy C. Bass, “Keeping Sabbath,” in Practicing Our Faith (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1997), 84. 

viii Brueggeman, 42. 

ix Carol Bechtel, Celebrating Sabbath: Accepting God’s Gift of Rest and Delight (Louisville, KY: Horizons 2022-2023), 51. 

x Exodus 35:1-3. 

xi MaryAnn McKibben Dana, Sabbath in the Suburbs: A Family’s Experiment with Holy Time (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2012), 45-46. 

xii Brueggemann, 19.