You know how you get.......

God knows how we get, so God tells us to remember......Remember the Sabbath to keep it holy.

If I were to summarize the volumes that have been written about this commandment, few authors and historians would focus on the word remember.  Theologians to lawmakers to your grandmother have weighed in on what it means to be holy.  A few groups are focused on which day constitutes the Sabbath.  But few focus on the word remember.

And yet it is so easy to forget.  The pressures of this world, the very minutia of staying afloat from grocery shopping to laundry to home maintenance can overwhelm the best intentioned of schedules.  Add in a little leisure plus the necessary hours of sleep and you begin to understand that sustaining a day set apart for Sabbath requires some discipline.  If your life is like mine, post-it notes keep me from losing things down a rabbit's hole.  Perhaps we need an extra bright, extra large post-it that says simply  Remember!

But of course, divine commands to remember point to more than simply managing a calendar and making choices.  A great deal of the biblical story is a process of remembering........remember when you were slave in Egypt......remember when the Lord provided bread in the desert.........remember when David danced before the ark.........remember the meal Jesus shared.   Remembering in this way brings us back to our origins, to those moments in our history when we were formed, our character shaped, our values established.  The prophets are continually sending us back to those formative moments in our relationship with the Divine, and calling on us to remember.

But it is even deeper than that.  This kind of remembering is intended to actually bring us back - to take us back into that moment when it happened for the first time.  We become a part of that first instant - we are tasting freedom from Pharoah for the first time, we are eating bread with the disciples around a table.  It is a kind of remembering where time falls away and we are one across the eons.

Remember the Sabbath?  The day when God saw that all was very good and God rested?  It was the day set apart for human creatures to pause, to catch their breath, to be restored and refreshed....and to remember the Creator God who gave all of this to them as a gift.  Do you remember the first intentions for Sabbath?  How it was gift and not obligation?  How it was designed for you, God's beloved human?

Perhaps now we can grasp the power of the word 'holy'.   Sabbath is a moment to re-connect with the Holy One, the source of life, the giver of blessings.  Sabbath is not a negotiated benefit from the HR department; it is a gift of the divine so that all God's creatures might return to those moments when all of creation was 'very good' and rest was possible. The act of remembering is as important as what is or is not done on that day.  This day of rest is to be sacred - not infringed upon by the day to day drudge,  the 24x7, 365 work of slaves.  You need it.  God knows you need it.

....because you know how you get when you drink not love.

The Lord is my shepherd.......

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

Green pastures.  Still waters.  Rest and respite.  Protection by the Good Shepherd.  These are wonderfully powerful images.  We can picture the Good Shepherd cradling the little lamb (while surrounded by perfectly clean sheep!) in his arms - cradling us in his strong arms, in comfortable safety.


When Jesus says, "I know my own and my own know me: we are flooded with the relief of no longer being alone, out there in the world making our own way, fighting off the wolves for ourselves.  Now we belong to a flock, and not just any flock but the flock that is watched over by the Good Shepherd.  Someone else stands guard; someone else is tasked with being vigilant.  We can, finally, rest.........and have our souls restored.  Both the young and the dying find deep comfort in the promises embedded in this image.....

....although those 'in between', that is, in between the innocence of youth and the final call of death are challenged by the simplicity of it all.  We know that life is a lot more complicated than this.  There are wolves attacking the flock; there are huge patches of dead grass; the waters are polluted and frankly, the shepherd is so busy playing Angry Birds that she has no idea what's going on.  Jesus calls this inattentive, cowardly shepherd a 'hired hand.'  We call her the Congress or our boss or our neighbor or sometimes even a family member.  Disease and disaster, hunger and sorrow are not erased; the green pastures are not paradise.

Today, as we begin the work week, as we take up again the burden of responsibility, as we put one foot in front of the other, let us hold fast to this image of the Good Shepherd cradling us in his arms, protecting us from all harm and danger.  Tomorrow we will do the hard work of considering whether these green pastures are our destination or simply a rest stop along the way.

Today, eat a little green grass, drink from the cool refreshing water, bask in the sunshine, knowing you are his.