Text:  Mark 2:23-28                                                                                            2^nd Sunday after Pentecost

Workaholics Anonymous

            In the name of him who is Lord of the Sabbath, dear friends in Christ:  In preparation for this morning’s message, I did a little research on the topic of “workaholism”.  I’m sure you’re familiar with it:  it’s sort of the honest, good, ol’ fashioned American work ethic on steroids – a good thing taken to a self-destructive extreme.  Workaholics are those people who spend pretty much every waking hour either working at their jobs, thinking about working at their jobs, or when absolutely forced to do something else, feeling guilty because they’re not working at their jobs.  Their careers are their lives.  They find their identity and reason for being in their work.  And instead of pursuing happiness with a conventional balance of satisfaction with all the things that make life worth living, they derive their sense of self-worth and measure their relative success, solely by their performance in their chosen fields.

Perhaps you know folks like that – or maybe you are one yourself – or at maybe you exhibit some of the symptoms.  I know that for a while I sure fell into it.  Back in certain phases of my soldiering days, it was pretty much standard for me to put in six or seven days a week, working from 5:00 AM to somewhere between six and eight PM every day.  All I did was work.  Time off was simply out of the question.  And since you were only allowed to have a maximum of 60 days accrued leave, it happened several times that at year’s end I’d lose several weeks worth of unused vacation time.  But that was okay, because the job was all that mattered.  Many of my colleagues felt the same way.  In fact, I think that there is something about military life that encourages it.  It’s part of the group culture.  And peer pressure was a big part of it.  We didn’t work so much to impress our superiors – we despised anything that even remotely looked like brown-nosing – no, we worked to gain the respect of our peers, because they were the ones who shared both our burdens and values.  We knew were doing okay if the other guys in the same situation thought well of us.  And no question about it, it was a pride thing.  But we looked to each to determine the standard, and in so doing we unconsciously pushed each other to work more, because in order to feel good about yourself you had to work as much or more than the others.  And boy did we look down on those worthless fellows who were not quite so committed, who knocked off and went home at 5:00 PM, and who took weekends off, and who went on vacations and such.  In our minds, they were only half a step above the sort of pond scum that actually shirked duty and tried to come up with ways to avoid work. Not to say that we never took a break – but when, once in a blue moon, we did, we’d go out on the town with other military couples, and we fellows would sit and talk shop.  And so we turned our time off into work.  But it was all we knew.  I suppose it made us think of ourselves as good soldiers; but it also made us lousy husbands and fathers.  But we didn’t know how to turn the work off.

            And that, incidentally, happens to be one of the sure signs of workaholism:  the inability to separate business and pleasure.  Workaholics are always on duty.  Wherever they go, they take the work with them.  They can never simply relax and just take it easy and rest. Even when forced to go home or take vacation, they’re worrying about the job, or reading work related materials, or doing something … anything that keeps them feeling like they’re working – and that’s essential, because their identities are so wrapped up in what they do, they fear that if they aren’t working, they’ll become nobody. And though I’ve given the example of military life, I’ve seen the same sorts of things around here – perhaps especially among folks who are in farming; it’s easy to fall into when you’re self-employed.  But I’ve seen it in a lot of other folks too … even a few fellows serving in the pastoral ministry (though, thank goodness, I don’t suffer from it any more!).

            Well anyway, in my research this past week, I came across a couple of articles that said that we need to have some workaholics around.  The argument was that our system of free enterprise capitalism depends on it. Workaholics, they said, are at the very core of the reactor that powers the whole economy.  Now, I don’t know if that’s true; but if it is, then our system relies on human sacrifice to keep running, because workaholism is ultimately self-destructive.  Those who fall into it are burning the candle at both ends, and sooner or later it catches up with them.  Because they don’t take time for rest and relaxation they throw away their health. The mind and body need time for rest and recovery.  And because workaholics never bother to pursue other important interests, they suffer socially, especially from marriage and family problems.  Somewhere in their late forties or early fifties, they usually find themselves unloved and alone, with some kind of heart condition, and nothing to look forward to but the one thing they fear the most: retirement – which if they make it to, ends up being exactly what they feared it would be.  Because they were their work, when the work stops they become nobody.  They spend their last few years in lonely isolation, and pass away unmourned.  They literally work themselves to misery, loneliness, and an early death; and the saddest part is that they do it to themselves.

            But my purpose this morning is not so much to warn you of the dangers and pitfalls of workaholism – though that would probably be good; no, what prompted me to look at the subject this past week were the Pharisees that show up in today’s Gospel reading.  We find them buzzing around Jesus and the disciples like so many busy bees – or perhaps more accurately, like those nasty brown biting flies that show up around this time of year.  To Jesus and his disciples, they are certainly about as welcome. 

It’s slow Saturday afternoon in the mid Galilean summer.  Jesus and his followers have spent most of the morning at a village synagogue, where Jesus has had the opportunity to expound the Scriptures to proclaim the good news of the coming Kingdom of God – thus providing comfort and hope to many harried and careworn souls, and arousing the ire and suspicion of the local Pharisees.  They didn’t care much for what the Jesus had to say, but neither could they find any way to prove him wrong.  And so, as he and his disciples walk along a path that passes through a wheat field, making their way toward the place they will camp for night, the Pharisees follow, painstakingly scrutinizing everything Jesus does or says, looking for any reason to find fault and so to discredit him.

They think they’ve found it when they notice that some of the disciples, as they walk along, are absent-mindedly plucking off wheat heads, working them apart in their hands, and snacking on the kernels.  This was all perfectly acceptable.  According to the Law of Moses, as a basic kindness to travelers, anyone was allowed to take food from the edges of the fields and orchards they passed through while journeying.  The objection the Pharisees raise is that this is the Sabbath, and as we heard in the Old Testament lesson for this morning, no work was to be done that day. Ah, but here are the disciples of Jesus harvesting, gathering, threshing, winnowing, grinding, and according to the Pharisees’ way of thinking, performing at least half a dozen other chores forbidden on the Sabbath day.  It proves to them conclusively that Jesus is an incompetent teacher and leader, with virtually no understanding of or respect for the Law of God.

And there’s a sweet bit of irony here, because the Pharisees who are complaining about others working on the Sabbath, are themselves your classic, textbook case workaholics – but their workaholism pertains to religious or spiritual matters.  That is to say, they’ve all got jobs where they work to earn their livings; that’s not the problem.  Their workaholism is directed toward fulfilling the laws and commandments of God. They took a good thing, the desire to lead a godly life that pleases the Lord, and turned it into an all-consuming preoccupation with rules and regulations worked out into infinite detail. They were obsessed with doing things right, and so each one of them became a living, breathing rulebook.  And here again, pride and peer pressure kept raising the stakes.  Over a period of centuries, each law was analyzed and dissected and argued over by like-minded, workaholic Pharisees until they transformed it into a long list of do’s and don’ts – many of which were absolutely ridiculous – that they believed by keeping made them partakers of the blessed life and recipients of God’s favor.  But in their zeal to obey the most minute letter of the law, they robbed the law of its spirit and purpose.  And that’s what workaholics do:  by making work the reason for living, they rob life of everything worth living for.

The Pharisees had thus made huge, intricately detailed structures that were really hollow caricatures of all of God’s laws.  And they did their best work (if you can call it that) with the Third Commandment:  the one that prescribes the Sabbath rest.  Like good workaholics, they took what was intended to give them a needed break from their labors, and turned it into a list of unbearable burdens that they thought perfectly satisfied the requirements for not working.  Just for example, they had calculated how many steps a person might take before it would be considered work.  And so, on the Sabbath, they carefully counted each one of their steps to be sure they didn’t exceed the maximum and so violate the law.  This is just one small example, but you see how it might play out.  Let’s say (for argument’s sake) they said you could take a thousand steps.  At day’s end, the Pharisee who had taken only 890 could say to himself, “The Lord must be really pleased with me, for I had 110 steps to spare.  I’ve really rested today, just like God commanded.”  He could also feel smugly superior to other Pharisees who had taken a few more steps.  And hopefully all this helps explain the Pharisees’ sharp criticism of Jesus and his disciples who, in their way of thinking, are now in outrageously flagrant violation of the rules regarding the Sabbath for plucking a couple heads of wheat.

In response to their attack on his good name and reputation, Jesus directs them to the Scriptures to reveal how mistaken their way of thinking is. They’ve entirely missed God’s whole plan and purpose in commanding his people to keep the Sabbath.  What he intended as a gift for man’s joy and benefit, they’ve turned into an arduous obligation to satisfy a nit-picky and demanding God whom they’ve reduced to little more than a divine scorekeeper. Jesus tells them that they don’t understand:  Man was not made for the Sabbath, the Sabbath was made for man.

Specifically, when God first gave it to his people at Mount Sinai, as it’s recorded in Exodus, it was to be a reminder and celebration of Creation.  The idea was that God took six days to create the heaven and the earth and everything in them, and he rested on the seventh day. The command was, in recognition of that fact, you take one day off from your work to rest and enjoy what God has done in creating you and giving you this wonderful world to live in.  You rest in God’s accomplished work.  When the law was restated in Deuteronomy, as we heard this morning, the Lord added a second reason to keep the Sabbath: “Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there...”  When you were slaves, all you did was work.  You never got to rest.  And all your work didn’t do a thing for you.  No matter how hard you worked, at day’s end, you were still a slave. And after a whole life of meaningless toil and drudgery for someone else, you died.  But the Lord reached down and saved you from that.  His work brought you out of bondage.  And he gave you an inheritance, a land of your own, where your work benefited you and the people you love.  So, he said, keep the Sabbath to remember that all your work never got you anywhere – but the Lord’s work set you free.  Now, you rest in the Lord’s work.

And this is the application to us.  Because whether or not we are workaholics with respect to our careers and callings, we all have a certain affinity toward being religious workaholics. Like the Pharisees, we think that the Lord keeps score, and that we can move up or down the ladder of spiritual success by doing things that we think please him.  And I can prove it to you.  On the front of the bulleting jacket this morning we see the Third Commandment:  Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. If I asked you to describe in the simplest of terms how one fulfills this command today, I suspect that part of virtually everyone’s response would be the requirement to attend some sort of worship service on Sunday if at all possible.  Those who do that are making an effort to keep the command.  Those who don’t are in violation.  And if you’re honest about it, you’d probably have to admit that there’s a pride and peer pressure thing going on in your mind right now in that regard.  At some level, you’re likely thinking, “Well, I’m here.  I’m keeping the command.  Chalk one up for me.  But I don’t see the so and so’s … I wonder where they are? … Oh, and that other guy … no surprise I don’t see him.  He’s hardly ever here.”  And on the Sunday’s you don’t make it … how many of you wonder and worry a bit about what the others are going to be thinking about you?  That’s the spiritual workaholism.  It’s the taking of a gift God gave us so that we could rest and enjoy the fruit of his labor, and changing it into a religious obligation that God has made it our duty to fulfill.

But the Sabbath isn’t about duties or obligations or about any work that we could possibly do. Rather, it’s time set aside for us to rest in God’s accomplished work.  The Lord would have us rest in work of his creation.  He would have us stop working and worrying about all the mundane chores we have to do, and take the time for relaxation and recreation. Our minds and bodies need that. The Lord knows it, and he gave us a day off because he loves and cares for us.

More importantly, however, the Lord has given us the Sabbath for us to put down even heavier burdens that we carry.  I speak of the guilt of sin we lug around, the grudges and feelings of resentment and anger we hold onto, the nagging feeling that we haven’t done enough to please God this week, the feelings of superiority because we imaging that we’ve done more than our share … these are the sorts of burdens that are common to spiritual workaholics.  These he wants us to put down, because if worldly workaholism leads to misery, isolation, and an early death, religious workaholism leads to intense spiritual suffering and the eternal isolation of death in hell.  

You see, The Lord put the Sabbath into our week primarily to remind us of an even greater work he has done for us:  the work of salvation.  We are to remember that we were slaves to sin and death, but the Lord reached down and rescued us from that.  We couldn’t save ourselves no matter how hard or long we tried.  But he went to work when he became a man born under the curse of the Law for us.  He finished that work when with his arms outstretched on a cross he suffered and died for our sin.  And now we take our spiritual Sabbath rest by remembering and hearing again how the Lord finished the work of salvation for us, and how he, our God and Lord, rested in the tomb on the seventh day.  We rest in his accomplished work.

And that should be our motivation and purpose in gathering here on Sundays. It’s not a weekly religious obligation – it’s more like a meeting of spiritual Workaholics Anonymous.  We come because we have problems and needs.  We come to be set free of the burdens, misunderstandings, and delusions under which we vainly labor.  And here in the Gospel message, God gives us rest in his Son Jesus Christ, and ushers us into the kingdom of his glorious eternal inheritance.  May we always make every effort to enter that rest through him who is Lord of the Sabbath. In his holy name.  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria!