The Rev. Dr. Pamela Dolan
October 8, 2023
The God Who Rests
Text: Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20
While I was on sabbatical this summer I didn’t engage with the news as much as I usually do, but there were a couple of trends that were virtually inescapable. Taylor Swift and Beyoncé made headlines for their stunningly successful concert tours, while at the movies we had two brilliant movies open on the same day—Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie—somehow leading to the amazing Frankenstein creature of a cultural singularity known as “Barbenheimer.”
And yet the phenomenon that might well turn out to have the most staying power and import was only tangentially related to the stage and screen. An August headline in the business section of the L.A. Times read, “Corporate greed, low unemployment, [and the] housing crisis: That’s the recipe for hot labor summer.” Much of the media’s attention on Hot Labor Summer was focused on Hollywood, but in addition to screenwriters and actors, the list of those who have been involved in strikes or other actions includes baristas, truckers, health care professionals, graduate students, and auto industry workers.
The Episcopal Church teaches that it’s important for people of faith to grapple with economic, social, and political issues as the context for out time together in prayer and worship, and certainly our context shapes how we approach Scripture.
The people of Israel who followed Moses into the wilderness were no strangers to unjust working conditions and systemic inequality. During their time of enslavement in Egypt, they were seen as both a threat to Pharaoh’s power and a source of cheap labor. Pharaoh’s whole strategy was to keep them working so hard that they could never rise up and become a political or military force in opposition to his regime. As it explains in the first chapter of Exodus, “The Egyptians came to dread the Israelitesand worked them ruthlessly. They made their lives bitter with harsh labor in brick and mortar and with all kinds of work in the fields; in all their harsh labor the Egyptians worked them ruthlessly.”
When the Israelites continued to thrive despite this treatment, Pharaoh’s methods of oppression became punitive to the point of outright cruelty. It is interesting to note that in the first interaction between Moses and Pharaoh, the first appeal Moses makes on behalf of his people is not an outrageous demand for total freedom, but only a rather polite request for a three-day holiday of sorts, a time apart to offer sacrifices to God. The response to this reasonable request is telling: “The king of Egypt said, why are you taking the people away from their labor? Get back to work.”
In the escalating exchange that follows, Pharaoh keeps accusing the Israelites of being lazy, even as he continues to heap impossible demands on them. “Get back to work” and “do more with less” are the relentless refrain of an oppressive system that can only ever see human beings as so much grist for the mill.
At last, God steps in and through a series of plagues (you remember: boils, frogs, flies, locusts, rivers of blood and all that) convinces Pharaoh to let his people go. And thus begins the exodus from Egypt and the long journey to freedom.
This is the narrative context for today’s passage from Exodus, which takes place a few months after the Israelites have fled Egypt. They have passed safely through the Red Sea and been led through the desert, with God miraculously providing food from the heavens and water from a rock. And now God is offering them something more: insight into how to become the community they want to be. This is a way to be a people that is based on right relationship with God and with others. It does not allow for exploitation, oppression, or covetousness. And most fundamentally, it replaces the Egyptian gods of insatiable production and consumption with Yahweh, the God of creation, of mutual care, of justice, and of rest.
It is easy to simply read the Ten Commandments as rigid rules imposed to keep people out of trouble. They have certainly been used by self-appointed morality police to shame and frighten people. I am offering a different interpretation, one that draws heavily on the work of the Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann. [See Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now] The basic argument is this: the fourth commandment, the commandment to keep the Sabbath holy, is the bridge between the first three commandments, which are all about our relationship with God, and the final six, which are all about our relationships with each other.
Unfortunately, the lectionary for today leaves out a couple of key verses that help to make this point clearer. Let me read these verses in their entirety: “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” Notice that the Sabbath is not just a rest for the Israelites; it is for everyone. And it is because of these verses that we can confidently claim that the God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who is manifest in Christ Jesus, is a God who rests.
There is no struggle for emancipation or justice or human rights that succeeds overnight. A single Hot Labor Summer, or an autumn focused on climate change solutions, will not do the trick. The journey to freedom and equality is long and uncertain. But no matter how important the cause and no matter how much we want to see progress made, we need to find ways to sustain ourselves over the long haul.
The great Oscar Romero, who gave his life for the liberation of the people of El Salvador, knew the reality of struggle, and the limits of what any one person or movement could do. He wrote,
“This is what we are about. We plant the seeds that one day will grow. We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities. We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.”*
In our lives together and in our struggles for justice, we need to know when to push and when to let go. We need bread for the journey. We need each other. And most of all we need to cultivate a right relationship with God, the God who calls us to lay down our burdens and delight in the goodness of creation, so that one day we and all who labor will find our rock and our refuge in the shadow of the God who rests. Amen.
*I am grateful Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and to the Rev. Jim Richardson for alerting me to this passage.
