Keeping Sabbath, Practicing Trust, Living Shalom

Summary

This sermon is in many ways part 2 of my sermon a few weeks ago on chaos. In fact, I had intended to include aspects of Sabbath in that sermon, but for various reasons, not least of which was the length of the sermon, I dropped the Sabbath aspect. The discussion in the sermon response class, however, prompted me to focus on Sabbath for this sermon, as I think Sabbath is a good counter-balance to chaos.

For those of you with memories like mine, you won’t have even remembered that I preached a few weeks ago, let alone what I preached on! So, let me in a couple sentences, summarize what I said. Scientists have discovered that when they track chaotic systems over a period of time, there is built into chaos itself, an order or boundary to that chaos, and with computers, they can see the patterns that emerge out of chaos. As we experience various kinds of chaos in our own lives and in our world, this scientific discovery can assure us that chaos will not have the last word. Creation itself was an ordering of chaos, which happened at the Word of God, so we can trust that in the midst of chaos, God is at work and God is control.