At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry and began to pick some heads of grain and eat them. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to him, “Look! Your disciples are doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath.”
He answered, “Haven’t you read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? He entered the house of God, and he and his companions ate the consecrated bread—which was not lawful for them to do, but only for the priests. Or haven’t you read in the Law that the priests on Sabbath duty in the temple desecrate the Sabbath and yet are innocent? I tell you that something greater than the temple is here. If you had known what these words mean, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent. For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.”
Going on from that place, he went into their synagogue, and a man with a shriveled hand was there. Looking for a reason to bring charges against Jesus, they asked him, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?”
He said to them, “If any of you has a sheep and it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will you not take hold of it and lift it out? How much more valuable is a person than a sheep! Therefore it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.”

• Matthew 12:1-12

“Six days do your work, but on the seventh day do not work, so that your ox and your donkey may rest, and so that the slave born in your household and the foreigner living among you may be refreshed.

• Exodus 23:12

So the priest gave him the consecrated bread, since there was no bread there except the bread of the Presence that had been removed from before the Lord and replaced by hot bread on the day it was taken away.

•  1 Samuel 21:6

“‘On the Sabbath day, make an offering of two lambs a year old without defect, together with its drink offering and a grain offering of two-tenths of an ephah of the finest flour mixed with olive oil. This is the burnt offering for every Sabbath, in addition to the regular burnt offering and its drink offering.

• Numbers 28:9-10

Boilerplate

I was born into a Presbyterian Church.  For all my life up until now, I have been a member of one Presbyterian Church or another.  It is told that the founding fathers were wondering how the organizational structure of the US Constitution should be set up and a founding father who was Presbyterian showed how it worked in his church.

So, if anyone has had enough time to screw up bureaucracy and the church as a whole, the Presbyterians are great at it.

I had someone tell me that I do not sound like a member of the Presbyterian church, and I replied that I might just be a Reformed School Dropout.  This is a play on words.  Reform school is what they used to call a special school for juvenile delinquents so that they could be incarcerated and given an education at the same time.  They do not have these schools anymore or they call them something different.  Presbyterians and a few other denominations are considered Reformed Theology instead of protestant, but the military could not understand the distinction, so my dog tags read PROTESTANT, meaning Christian and not Catholic.  And of course a school dropout is someone who quit before finishing.  Thus, I think I really dropped out of the reformed way of thinking and the bureaucracy of the denomination when I accepted Jesus into my heart.

When my heart is moved to do something, I feel that it is the work of the Holy Spirit.  Once I suggested that I was going to buy a banner to show where people were being persecuted for their faith and I simply wanted a prayer made on a specific day, the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted.  The pastor said he would send that to the worship and discipleship teams for approval.  As usual, it was buried in committee until after the specific day.  Bureaucracy had triumphed and the Holy Spirit was grieved.  The next year, I bought the banner.  I handed out prayer cards to my Sunday school class.  I displayed the banner each Sunday for a month before the day of prayer, and I took the banner down before a bureaucrat caught me.

Yes, I am a Reformed School Dropout.

Discussion

This first topic is about how Jesus challenged the rituals of His day when people were more important.

The disciples were gleaning a little grain to satisfy their hunger.  They were accused of “working” on the Sabbath.  They were accusing Jesus based on the letter of the Fourth Commandment, where none in your household does any work, not even the animals.  But everyone needs sustenance, even those animals.  And since Jesus and His disciples did not have a home to live in with left over bread from the previous day, a little grain did not hurt anything.  The grain came from the edges of the field, left unharvested so that the poor and the traveler could have food.  That is what Ruth was doing when Boaz spotted her in his fields, and he asked his workers to leave a little more than usual so she would have enough.  The disciples were not stealing grain, but they “gathered” the grain on the Sabbath.

I have known people who always ate out on Sunday so they would not work, but they made others work, and the Fourth Commandment includes all servants.  We could really get crazy with this rule, and the Pharisees had done so, counting their steps and then at the limit, sitting down until sunset.

Jesus countered their being offended with the priests giving David and his men consecrated bread, for there was no other bread.  What?  Make David and his men go away hungry?  What was the right thing to do?

Then Jesus reminded his detractors that the priests did more work on the Sabbath.  They had special Sabbath Day sacrifices in addition to the other sacrifices that were usually made every day.

No, Jesus was not following the manmade rules that were added to the Levitical Law, so Jesus must be dealt with.

Sure, the disciples could take a little grain, but only after we bring it up to the ruling body of the church, which met last Monday night, so you have to wait a month, and like they always do, if they are unsure about the rules that apply, they send it to committee.  That usually means that it is forgotten, but it might surface a few months later…

By then, the disciples have starved to death.

Sure, there are some decisions that need wisdom or funding, but when the Holy Spirit grabs you, you need a method where it just gets done for the sake of the people involved.

Notice that when Jesus was crucified, Pontius Pilate had the crowd to blame.  The religious leaders had their bureaucracy to blame while each member could claim that it was not them.  It was bureaucracy that formed the pattern for the execution of our Lord and Savior.

And when Jesus returns, He will come when the Father says to return.  The church bureaucracy will indeed stand in the way, but they will not pose even the slightest bump in the road.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.