We are now entering a week that, I pray will be for all of us a week of returning to our own center -
a week filled with family time, time with friends, time that we might call "sacred time."
The days around Thanksgiving can give us that - but they are a patch, not a cure.
Because we need sacred time every week - the kind of time that makes and keeps us whole.
Every week.
That's the challenge.

The Hebrew word for "holy" means "set apart."
Sacred time is time we set apart.
For Kay and me, it's Sunday afternoon and evening.
Saturday doesn't work because I'm usually still in a wrestling match with Sunday's sermon.
Week nights won't do because of meetings.
So we chose Sunday afternoon and evening.
The idea was - and is - to put no pressure on this time: no chores, no rules, no obligations.
We could spend it as we pleased.
We could even waste it.
The freedom to waste time together is one of life's underestimated good things.

In today's reading from Mark, Jesus and his disciples are wasting time on the Sabbath...
they're just taking it easy, enjoying some down time, strolling past a grainfield,
  and several of the disciples pick some corn.
They aren't hungry - they've just come from a big wedding feast.
But they never knew where their next meal was coming from -
they depended on friends and strangers to take them in as they walked from town to town,
  and sometimes they camped out in the hills.
So they picked some corn - and several Pharisees saw them do it.

The Pharisees were good people who, if they were reincarnated as constitutional scholars today,
   would be what we call "strict constructionists," 
  and in their own day there were strict constructionists about the Sabbath -
they were the loud voices defending the blue laws:
  you were supposed to pick your corn, to do your "shopping," the day before.
So to Jesus they said, "Why are you letting them do what is not lawful on the Sabbath?"

I think Jesus was caught a little off guard,   
   and he didn't really want to get into an argument on his day off,
  so he answers them with a case study which he thinks is bulletproof
because it is a story about King David, whose memory was revered like a god.
David and some of his men were on the road, they were hungry,
and they had walked into a temple and eaten the consecrated bread -
  bread only the priests were allowed to eat: it's right there in 1^st Samuel 21.

Now, in truth, Jesus is pushing the envelope here, and he knows it.
David and his men were desperately hungry.
Jesus' disciples were far from it.
They had picked the corn without thinking - and technically, they were in the wrong.
But Jesus understood that ardently religious people, like the Pharisees,
  could give religion a bad name because of their petty finger-pointing;