Deuteronomy 5:12–15 and Saint Mark 2:23–3:6
"Relax. Slow down. Take it easy.” Implored the visiting preacher from New York City, Dr. Harrison Everett Breen, in an impressive stained glass tone reserved only for preachers, to the congregants gather at the All Souls Church in the fictional town of Mayberry, North Carolina.
Even before The Reverend Dr. Breen was three paragraphs into his sermon some of the residents had taken him up on his offer.
Gomer had fallen so sound asleep that his snoring could be heard to from the back of the church all the way to the pulpit causing Dr. Breen to pause for a moment to collect his thoughts.
While Aunt Bea and Clara Edwards sat smiling Barney’s eyelids were also growing heavy and soon he too was beginning to doze only to be bumped awake by Sheriff Taylor.
As parishioners in the pews, you don’t usually get to see this, but clergy do, and it could have been a scene from any church anywhere, in any place in time except this one, this day, I hope.
This episode of “The Andy Griffith Show” first aired in October of 1963 and it’s funny how our problems now seemed to be our problems then as Dr. Breen pointed out:
"Consider how we live our lives today. Everything is run, run, run. We bolt our breakfast, we scan the headlines, we race to the office, a full schedule in a split second. These are our gages of success. We drive ourselves from morn to night. We have forgotten the meaning of the word relaxation?”
“Relax. Slow down. Take it easy.” the good doctor says before he unwittingly plants a seed in their head.
What has become of the old-fashioned ways. Who can forget at twilight the old-fashioned band concert on the village green. The joy and Serenity of just sitting and listening. This is lost to us and this we should strive to recapture. A simple innocent pleasure."1
The residents of Mayberry take his words to heart and decide to have a band concert that very day.
The rest of the episode is all madness as mayhem as they community begins to discover that there are innumerable obstacles to their impromptu band concerts.
Sorry, this is a little sexist, but the ladies have been dispatched to check out the band uniforms which are in a terrible state of disrepair. They are dusty. There is mildew. They are rips and since the band members have grown in size but not in numbers most of the uniforms have to be let out in order to fit properly. Soon there is a battle raging as the ladies’ frustration mounts.
Across town at the bandstand Barney and Gomer discover that it has been neglected to the point of near collapse. There is more than days work to be done and even this will be delayed because Gomer won’t go under the bandstand because “There might be spiders under there.” he tells Barney with a wide-eyed worried look. “I hate spiders.” he tells him just incase he missed the point.
Back at the courthouse Andy is rehearsing the band. Never very good on their best days they have fallen so far out of practice that they make Professors Harold Hill’s River City Boy’s Band sound like “The Chicago Symphony.”
It seems that nobody is relaxing, or slowing down, or taking it easy.
Now at this point, this sermon could take an unhappy turn because for many of us the idea of Sabbath is a quaint, outdated notion yet for the Children of Israel and for us it can contain an important theological truth: Even God relaxed, showed down, took it easy.
As Walter Bruggemann said of God after the work of creation was finished: “I’m not going into the office tomorrow. I’m taking the day off. I’ve put in long hours every day all week and tomorrow I’m putting my feet up and enjoying all that I’ve accomplished.”2
That is what Sabbath is. It is taking time to enjoy all that we have accomplished.
Understand please, I am talking about you and me, what Warren Buffett called winners in “the overian lottery.” He tells shareholders at his annual meeting in Omaha that winning or losing this lottery “would determine their place of birth, ethnicity, wealth, gender and intellectual abilities.” And he always reminds them and us that we are in the luckiest one percent of the world right now.”3
We are not scrounging for scraps or looking for a handout on the street corner. While our lives may not be, in the words of the Tommy Bahama ad, “one long weekend” our lives, compared to most folks in the world, can be considered to be quite good, thank you very much.
And so were the lives of their disciples as they took their stroll through the grainfield and plucked some grain.
They are not stealing grain as they journey. What concerns the Pharisees instead is the fact that they are traveling and gleaning on the sabbath. They should have stayed put and prepared their snacks on the previous day. To the Pharisees, this behavior appears to deliberately neglect the mandate to observe the Sabbath and keep it holy.4
But Jesus has a greater point to make and St. Mark helps him make it for us when he remembers “Another time Jesus went into the synagogue, and a man with a shriveled hand was there.”5
Jesus calls the unsuspecting man forward and asks the crowd. ““What kind of action suits the Sabbath best? Doing good or doing evil? Helping people or leaving them helpless?”6
Everybody, from the learned ones to the toddlers in the crowd knew the answer: There was no violation of Sabbath laws if one’s actions met the essential needs of oneself or of others.
Just as the disciples could have packed a lunch because they were not starving this man could have come back the next day because his condition was not life threatening. But what Jesus is asking a more fundamental question: “If you have a chance to do some good, why not do it now?”
“Sabbath ... was instituted not only to respect God but also to bring rest and wholeness to all members of the community.”7
That’s what the good people of Mayberry forgot and sometimes we forget it too because Sabbath seems like such an arcane notion. Taking an entire day and maybe for some just an entire hour to do nothing just goes against our finally tuned Protestant work ethic but in its original form it was designed to be a time of delight. A day to remind the Children of Israel that at one time in their history they were slaves, in bondage to taskmasters in Egypt. Keeping a “Good Sabbath” was there to remind them every week that slaves don’t get days off. They work when they are told to work and rest at the pleasure of their captures. A Good Sabbath reminded them or who they were and who they are now.
Folks that’s what we are doing right here and right now. We are keeping Sabbath in a radical way. We are taking time to pray, relax, and be fed by the bread of life offered as we gather around the table and remind ourselves that we have been washed clean in the waters of baptism as we all gather around the font with Zoey and her mom and dad to welcome her as she begins her adventure with Jesus.
At the conclusion of the episode of the Andy Griffith Show Dr. Breen reappears and finds the whole gang seated on Sheriff Taylor’s porch looking completely relaxed but, in fact, totally exhausted from the kind of Sabbath Day they had. For them it was not a Good Sabbath it was a hectic Sabbath that has left them completely worn out.
The visiting preacher congratulates himself by complementing them saying, still in his stained-glass peaching voice, something like: “I see you are taking my advice, relaxing and taking it easy.”
Gomer almost spills the beans saying, “Oh no Reverend. It’s been quite a day.” But before he launches into his litany of events that has made the day anything but restful and relaxing Andy cuts him off.
It took them awhile just as it may take us awhile, but they got Jesus' message: The Sabbath was made for us. It is a day in which we are to take time for each other and take time to delight in Jesus.
So, without any guilt, lets heed at least a little of Dr. Breen’s advice and for the rest of this day or at least sometime this week: “Relax. Slow down. Take it Easy.”
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1. “The Andy Griffth Show, episode, “The Sermon for Today” (Chicago, IL: CBS, October 21, 1963).
2. John M. Buchanan, “The Hallowing of Time.” Sermon preached at The Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago, July 9, 2000.
3. Jeannine Mancini, “Warren Buffett Says Winning This ‘lottery’ Is Most Important Thing in Life, and You Have No Control over It - ‘I Am in the Luckiest 1% of the World Right Now,’” Yahoo! Finance, August 8, 2023, https://finance.yahoo.com/news/warren-buffett-says-winning-lottery-171412689.html.
4. Matt Skinner, “Commentary on Mark 2:23-3:6,” Working Preacher, November 11, 2020, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-09-2/commentary-on-mark-223-28-31-6.
5. St. Mark 3:1. (NIV) [NIV=The New International Version]
6. St. Mark 3:4. (MESSAGE) [MESSAGE=Eugene H. Peterson, The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language, with Topical Concordance (NavPress, 2005).]
7. Renata Furst, “Mark 2:23-3:6. Commentary 1: Connecting the Reading with Scripture,” Connections. A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, Year B, 2, no. 3 (2021): 49–51.
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