From Sampler to Sower

I’m stealing an idea from Josh Griffin at morethandodgeball.com.  Here’s a brief rundown of what went down last week at Water’s Edge.  I always find Josh’s interesting.  Maybe you’ll find ours the same:

Weekend Teaching Series: Write them On My Heart (A series on the 10 Commandments)

Message Title: Word Four: You will pay careful attention to the Sabbath

Sermon in a Sentence: God instituted the idea of a Sabbath rest to challenge the way we understand our place in the world.

Text(s): Deuteronomy 5:12-15

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 5of 10, The message pretty much wrote itself, and the music wasn’t a challenge, but there were multiple video clips to challenge the tech crew.

Message Summary: We flipped the service again this week.  Sermon first, music afterward.  Began by using the Highway Video’s Identity video to ask the question “Where do you find your identity?” Then we talked about how we see ourselves.  Used several “About Me” sections from students’ facebook pages to look at the words we use to describe ourselves.  From there we transitioned into the categories the world uses to identify us.  Here we played a clip from Baraka (a great movie you’ve probably never heard of) to provide visuals while I spoke from the back of the room.

Here’s a part of that clip that’s available on Youtube.  We started a bit earlier than this, and ended the clip with the chicken coops at about 5:29 of this video.

With these pictures of bustling people, fast-paced production and the rich parallelisms of people-herding and chicken farming playing, I spoke of how the world seeks to identify us in terms of 1) What we do, 2) How much we produce, 3) What we buy and 4) What group we belong to.

Then we compared this culture with the people to whom the fourth word was spoken – a people just brought out of slavery where they were not humans, but human resources, a people whose only value was measured in how many bricks they could produce, a people who were always segregated into one of “them,” and perhaps most importantly, a people seeking to find their new identity in the world.

And to a people who measured themselves in these ways, God called them to stop, to cease, to sabbath.

Borrowing some ideas from Walter Bruggeman’s commentary on Deuteronomy we talked about what the Sabbath really is.  It is an act of civil disobedience.  In a world that wants to classify us according to what we do and how much we make, we stop working and refuse to be classified in that way.  It is an act of radical equality. It’s not just the rich and powerful who are allowed to rest, but God specifies that everyone is to cease working.  Not just you, but your children, your servants, your animals, even the foreigners living among you.  Every barrier comes down whether generational, economic, racial, even special (i.e. pertaining to species).  On the Sabbath there is no more us versus them – there’s only us. And finally it is an act of counter-cultural simplicity.  In a culture which requires credit just to survive, God calls us to live differently.  You can’t consume more than you produce if you’re going to rest on the sabbath, let alone allow the ground to lie fallow for a sabbatical year.  Sabbath observance requires us to make a concsious choice to make a little less, and to do that we must choose to consume a little less. Then with the

Senior Highers, who I felt could understand, we talked about how hard it is to really live this way.  It runs so diametrically opposed to the direction in which our culture flows, it doesn’t come naturally.  The natural tendency is to slowly let Sabbath observance slip and to begin thinking of ourselves in the same categories the world uses.  But God calls us to stop.  To cease.  To rest.

Volunteer/Student Involvement: Still struggling here.  Student involvement was great: in the praise team, running computers and lights.  And it’s awesome to watch Bryant, who last year was one of the students, grow into our new worship leader.  Adult volunteers are still lacking.  I’ve gotta fix that soon.

Element of Fun/Positive Environment: No games or giveaways tonight.  The encouragment came not from high energy entertainment (which we do from time to time) but rather from the reminder that while the world may try to identify us one way, God reminds us that we are His Children and citizens of His Kingdom.

Worship Set: Let My Words Be Few, How Great is our God/How Great Thou Art, Did You Feel the Mountains Tremble, You Never Let Go

Favorite Moment: Had to be in the Junior High service, where we got way distracted by the very idea of a Sabbath day.  Had tons of questions stemming from the fact that the idea someone could actually take an entire day off from working was so unbelievable.  (Perhaps a sign of just how poorly the modern church has fallen into viewing themselves with the same lenses as the surrounding culture.)  “You mean my Mom can’t make me do chores on Sunday?”  (How do you answer that?)  It’s always exciting to see genuine curiosity about Scripture in students.  Now if only they’d live that way.