Forward Movement is an official, non-profit agency of the Episcopal Church whose mission is to create compelling content for Christian living. Since 1935 we have published the quarterly devotional Forward Day by Day, as well as pamphlets, booklets, and books that encourage and nourish people in their lives of prayer and faith.
THURSDAY, September 30 (Jerome)
Luke 6:1-11. But some of the Pharisees said, “Why are you doing what is not lawful on the sabbath?”
When I was young, my closest buddy attended a church that kept Sabbath from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. Being separated on Saturday was a trial for us. His family’s Saturday hours of prayer, reflection, and rest weighed heavily on his restless soul, and he spent much of the day watching the clock and imagining his friends running free in the neighborhood. My buddy’s church had a lot of rules taken from the Old Testament, and as he grew up he broke most of them.
The early Christians not only celebrated Sunday as the day of the resurrection, but kept the Jewish Sabbath as well. Gradually, however, Christians let the Sabbath go, though many kept Sunday as a day of rest as well as worship. Until the second half of the twentieth century, it was illegal in many places for businesses to open on Sunday.
In Jesus’ time the Sabbath law was both onerous and full of loopholes for the informed. But the idea was good, and as I look into the exhausted faces of the twenty-first century, I realize how much we need a Sabbath, and how little chance there is for most people to have one. (2003)
PRAY for the Diocese of Ife (Province of Ibadan, Nigeria)
Ps 105:1-22 * 105:23-45; Hosea 5:8—6:6; Acts 21:27-36
View the daily Lectionary Readings at Satucket.com.
Or view the Bible passages at Biblegateway.com.
A Meditation for Pentecost
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As for needing and having a Sabbath, I challenge myself to have a weekend that winds way down, to keep family first, to keep "the world" at bay (no news)before meditation, to reclaim the sanctity of life (no violent tv shows, no store shopping on Sunday. Just like school prayer, we can impose the discipline on ourselves rather than wait for government to impose upon us.