Sermon Tone Analysis

Announcements, Joys, & Concerns

Spirit of the living God,

Fall afresh on me

(repeat)

Melt me

mold me

fill me

use me

Spirit of the living God,

Fall afresh on me.

Call to Worship:

Leader: We will give thanks to you, O LORD, with our whole heart; we will tell of all your wonderful deeds.

All: We will be glad and exult in you; we will sing praise to your name, O Most High.

Leader: O magnify the LORD with me.

All: Let us exalt God’s name together!

—from & , NRSV

Opening Prayer

There is a place of quiet rest, near to the heart of God,

a place where sin cannot molest, near to the heart of God.

O Jesus, blest Redeemer, sent from the heart of God,

hold us, who wait before thee, near to the heart of God.

There is a place of comfort sweet, near to the heart of God,

a place where we our Saviour meet, near to the heart of God.

O Jesus, blest Redeemer, sent from the heart of God,

hold us, who wait before thee, near to the heart of God.

There is a place of full release, near to the heart of God,

a place where all is joy and peace, near to the heart of God.

O Jesus, blest Redeemer, sent from the heart of God,

hold us, who wait before thee, near to the heart of God.

Merciful God, you pardon all who truly repent and turn to you.

We humbly confess our sins and ask your mercy.

We have not loved you with a pure heart, nor have we loved our neighbor as ourselves.

We have not done justice, loved kindness, or walked humbly with you, our God.

Have mercy on us, O God, in your loving-kindness.

In your great compassion, cleanse us from our sin.

Create in us a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within us.

Do not cast us from your presence, or take your Holy Spirit from us.

Restore to us the joy of your salvation and sustain us with your bountiful Spirit through Jesus Christ, our Lord.

Amen.

—based on

Declaration of Forgiveness

Gloria Patri (Glory to God)

Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost.As it was in the beginning, it is now and ever shall be, world without end.

Amen, amen.

Musical Meditation: Erin Williams

Witnessing God’s Work

Prayer for Illumination (understanding)

Scripture Readings

Message:

Gimme a Break

There is still slavery in the world today.

But most of the slavery in the world today is well hidden or is happening far away in another place.

Our country has a terrible history of slavery, but that was a long time ago and none of us sitting in this room were there to see it first hand.

It can be hard for us to imagine what life must have been like for the Israelite people in slavery in Egypt.

We can get a small glimpse of it by reading accounts from slaves in other times and places, or by watching movies or looking at art that imagines the horror the people went through there.

But we will never fully understand it.

It was physically grueling work.

It’s been imagined by some that perhaps the Hebrew people helped to build large monuments like pyramids or palaces and other government buildings.

They would have had to do so by hand, from scratch.

They would have had to make bricks, cut stone by hand, haul that stone from the quarry site to the building site.

They worked day in and day out under the cruel eye of their Egyptian taskmasters.

They were exhausted.

Many of them probably didn’t know what it felt like o not be exhausted.

It was physically exhausting, and I’m sure it was emotionally exhausting as well to be working day in and day out for nothing more than a slave’s room and board.

And while many generations had passed, they still passed down the stories and faith of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Surely they wondered when they would be free of this meager existence to move back to the land of their ancestors.

Finally, after Moses leads them into freedom and they are headed back to the land they’d only dreamed of, God gives them some guidance as to how to live their lives.

They’d been immersed in someone else’s culture and worldview for so long, they needed a reminder of what God’s community looks like.

God begins by establishing who is in charge - who the world is created and established by.

They have been living among people worshipping many gods and this was an important reminder that there is only one true God.

Then, before moving from the “treat God like this” commandments to the “treat people like this” commandments, there is this interesting one that is - on the surface - about loving God, but it’s also about loving neighbor because it talks about other people.

And it’s also about loving self.

There is a commandment about self-care.

I can only imagine the emotional and physical fatigue that came from a lifetime of slavery and hard labor, followed by the exhaustian after fleeing Egypt, walking through a dry sea, watching the army that was chasing you drown in that self-same sea, then beginning the hard desert journey back to where they were headed.

So God says, “Whoa.

Slow down.

Even I took a break from creating after making all the things you see around you.

You’re pretty full of yourselves if you think you don’t need a break sometimes too.”

Rest is a gift.

It is a gift to be able to say to oneself, “You know what?

Today is for rest.

Today is the day I recharge.”

That was probably really difficult for these people who had literally grown up overworked.

From day one, it was work work work.

But God said to stop.

Rest.

Take a day to refresh your relationship with God, make sure everyone around you is able to take that opportunity as well, and for crying out loud, stop working for a day.

Our bodies, minds, and spirits are all connected.

You cannot separate them.

And when one is unhealthy or exhausted, it negatively affects them all.

By the time Jesus rolled around, this commandment had become a super weird a legalistic thing.

There were all kinds of nitpicky rules about what you could and couldn't do on the Sabbath.

One of those rules was about harvesting.

Because they weren’t supposed to be doing any work on the Sabbath, Jesus and the disciples shouldn’t have been “harvesting” on the Sabbath.

Except what they were doing was literally just grabbing heads of grain as they walked through a field.

This was perfectly legal, for the record, to grab some grain from a field, there were provisions in the law that people were to share a bit of their harvest with others in this way so that nobody went hungry.

So they weren’t in trouble for stealing.

They were in trouble for grabbing a tiny bite of food as they walked through a field because that was work and you can’t work on the Sabbath.

Jesus’ response is key here.

First of all, he points out that God’s law was never meant to be so rigid it hurt people.