Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy is one of the 10 Commandments. I am particularly drawn to the extended text of the Prayer Book commandment:
“Six days shalt thou labour, and do all that thou hast to do; but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God. In it thou shalt do no manner of work, thou, and thy son, and thy daughter, thy man-servant, and thy maid-servant, thy cattle, and the stranger that is within thy gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it”.
It is obvious that we work in some way or other and welcome a day of rest on the Sabbath, although if you are in ministry of any sort, including the Choir, the Sabbath may not feel like a day of rest, as believe it or not, those working to prepare for worship will have worked hard to prepare it beforehand, rather than just playing it off the cuff and hoping for the best.
For many of us these words will be well outside our comfort zone. For instance, how many of us have a man-servant or maid-servant (I wish) and unless we are farmers, we don’t have many cattle in Urban, Belvedere (Unless you know different of course). But the sentence I want to concentrate on is “the stranger that is within they gates”.
I suspect that many of us will take this to mean someone we don’t know, someone newly arrived in our neighbourhood, someone perhaps of a different racial, ethnic, religious or cultural background to ours, but I think that that conclusion is pretty stereo typed.
If you look around Church (when we are in it) and we meet each other wearing masks and socially distanced, we will recognise each other if we know each other well enough, even by sight, even if we have forgotten, for a moment or two, their name. But are we kidding ourselves, do we really know them well?
No doubt we think that we are heeding that other greatest commandment about “loving our neighbour as ourself” but how can we truly obey that essential second greatest commandment if we don’t really know them?
If we haven’t made the time to speak to them, to socialise with them or to have shared our lives with them wider than the short meeting in Church on a Sunday, if we have not engaged enough to know their full back story, about them and their family and in return, shared our story with them.
Without that sort of engagement how can we truly say that we are obeying the commandment?
Of course, not everyone feels confident to engage in the way described, there might be inhibitions about meeting people in that way. That famous “British Reserve” even “Stiff Upper Lip” might be getting in the way of our being truly able to assent to the commandment, And of course, we are hesitant to invade peoples personal privacy or space, or perhaps unsure of ourselves, not wanting to be that “nosy neighbour” poking their nose in where not wanted, not wanting to be rebuffed, not wanting to be embarrassed.
But if we hesitate to commit to extend our network of fellowship in Christ, perhaps those I write off, share most of those same traits or inhibitions, perhaps waiting for the other to hold out the hand or breaking the ice and offering the hand of Christ in welcome, love and friendship and fellowship that we need to both build our gathered community of God, but also in building his Kingdom.
Might I suggest something quite obvious? The idea of the “stranger within our Gates” goes back to that “Ministry of Welcome” that is portrayed in the commandment. It is an invitation for us to look beyond ourselves, to see each other, including the “stranger” as someone created in God’s image as we are, someone who we need to invite into our community, our lives, not just in a shared communal act of worship (though that is central to what we do and who we are as people of God), but as friends, as family, as a fellow member of God’s people, just like us, with all or flaws, strengths and weaknesses and by doing this, we build the Body of Christ, here in Belvedere and his Kingdom wider in the world. I for one know I have more to do in this respect.
How about you?
