Where was Jesus trying to take his disciples?

Addressed to the people of St Andrew's Church, Rugby:

I would like to start with what will sound like a random question: I wonder who we would be together if, for one reason or another, we were not able to worship in this building, in the centre of town?

How, if at all, would our identity change?

The Sabbath was and is something incredibly significant for Jewish communal self-identity; it marks them out as different. It gives them a weekly reminder that they live not for themselves, but for the God who made them. It is more than attending worship on Sunday – it is about a rhythm of life which resists the domination of work over rest and limits the human drive to create, make, accumulate, sell and work. Additionally it protects people from those with power over them to force them to work with no rest, for the whole household, livestock and alien must rest too. This is not a limited vision of rest, but a holistic vision of rest for the whole of created order.

Let us remember it:

Exodus 20:8-11

Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. For six days you shall labour and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.

As an essential part of the Jewish identity, then, the interpretation of the Jewish Law of Sabbath grew and grew, so that work became defined to quite extreme levels. It was this extreme interpretation of the Sabbath law (not the Sabbath itself) that Jesus took issue with.

Jesus was saying that the people had been led to over-identify strict Sabbath laws with faithfulness. Jesus wanted to reveal to them the simple power of the Sabbath as it was first laid down, and to let go of the over-anxious over-the-top interpretation that bound and burdened the people.

In so healing the woman who was bent double, Jesus provides us with an image of someone burdened; she was burdened by the pain of her condition. But someone bent double can symbolise much more for us. We can see her as representing people who are burdened by over-work, those who have no hope in the future – who look downwards and not up. Jesus, in healing her on the Sabbath, was saying - the Sabbath was given to set you free. Let it do its work, let it set people free!

For those who gained power in interpreting and enforcing the strict Sabbath laws that bore no relation to its original meaning, such an action was perceived as threat and dangerous. In the summary of his teaching on the Sabbath, in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus says: “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27).

This summary can be applied to other areas of religious observance and practice. I opened with a question about this building. I wonder if I said: ‘This building was made for man, and not man for the building’, what your reaction, response would be? Our identity as Christians has become to be partly defined by the sorts of buildings we worship in- across our British landscape church buildings tell the story of the faithfulness of the people of this country. Like the Sabbath our church buildings are an easy way for others to read our religious identity, it helps them understand who we are. But the buildings were created by humans, to help us and assist us in our faithfulness to God. Like the Sabbath, the buildings serve us and not the other way around. Perhaps we have grown to over-identify faithfulness with the preservation of this building?

This church building carries an ideology, ‘gothic-revival’ and with it comes a vision that we live in and among, but how far is the vision of this building, still ours today? How far, most importantly, is the building telling us how to live, and to what extent are we telling the building how we are called to live?

I would like us to be a community that knows where it’s come from and knows where it is called to be – and that takes a thorough and clear understanding of the past as well as boldness to see something new, as Butterfield and Ruskin and others did in the late 19^th century. They had a vision of the glorious splendour of God imagined through the use of strong and solid raw materials, worked on by the hand of man, for the purpose of beauty and truth. There are parts of that vision which we can take into our future; but there are also new parts that we need to add. This church community is more than bricks and stone, more than a vision of holiness and mystery, we are also a people called to relate to one another in love and fellowship; called to draw others into our diverse life; and called to be in this place as modern technological people, using the best of contemporary resources, design and skill. What we do, and how we do it is significant, just as it was for our predecessors.

Jesus showed consistently in his teaching that God the Father always exists as the being who liberates us. Jesus forms communities called to love and honour God with all their being, and to love one another as they love themselves. As a community gathered in this visionary masterpiece of architecture, we too must recognise our primary and only calling to prioritise our love and worship of God and loving care for our neighbour, over everything else. My prayer is that together such a vision will unify, strengthen and embolden us to be as visionary as our ancestors were. Amen