You are very kind Liturgist and your posts are a treasure trove of Church history etc. What is sad is that I have no argument against Christians who still observe the Saturday sabbath. My argument is that only the Sabbath is sacred and accusing Sunday resurrection worship ( Matthew 28:1-9 etc.) as wrong or pagan. I believe it is equally wrong to say the Sabbath keepers are Pharisees or whatever.
I sometimes get confused in Orthodoxy in that we regard the Saturday sabbath day and observe it with Vespers. We live more with sabbath principles on Sunday actually. I think the confusion can hit me because there are times I do janitorial work at the church on the Sabbath day of Vespers & then go to chant or read during Vespers.
I wouldn’t complain about Sabbatarians celebrating on the seventh day at all; the majority don’t bother us and I enjoy warm relations with a number of Messianic Jews on this website and have also met some lovely SDAs.
As you may know, I support EO-OO reunification on the basis of the agreement between the Syriac Orthodox (OO) and Antiochian Orthodox (EO) church from 1991, and the similar agreement between the Alexandrian Greek Orthodox and the Coptic Orthodox (it delights me both Popes of Alexandria, His Beatitude the Greek Orthodox Pope and Patriarch of Alexandria and All Africa, and His Holiness the Coptic Orthodox Pope of Alexandria, are named, by coincidence, Theodore II (Tawadros II in Bohairic Coptic and Coptic-accented Egyptian Arabic). And likewise, I hope to see the Assyrian Church of the East and Ancient Church of the East reunite with the Chaldean Catholic and Syro-Malabar Catholic Church and in the process with Rome, and then hopefully Rome and the continuing Anglicans, confessional Lutherans and other traditional Western Christians enter into communion with us once certain issues with the Western churches concerning liturgical abuse and degradation, the replacement of traditional Western hymns that are doctrinally rich (in some cases on a par with ours; indeed many Julian-calendaar using (but not Old Calendarist) Orthodox churches in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and the diaspora, sang Silent Night yesterday on Julian-calendar Christmas, sexual morality (and those who advocate marriage outside of Scriptural-Patristic norms), with praise and worship music which tends to be doctrinally vacuous and emotionally manipulative; I met one unfortunate man who thought ordination was unbiblical despite attending a non-denominational church with an ordained pastor (I advised him to read Acts, the ordination of St. Matthias and the Seven Deacons including St. Stephen the Protomartyr), and who then expressed a desire to “get some more worship in”, by which he meant dancing to Christian rock music.
At least most Sabbatarians worship in a manner that is solemn, in my experience. (Note, the service in question was a rather well-attended midweek service called a “Bible Study” but it was not that different from their regular Sunday service in that it had the rock band et cetera; the main difference was purely expositional preaching from the pastor, and frankly I can’t remember what he talked about, only that it spanned multiple books and was not obviously eisegesis, but his excessive use of the phrase “can I get an amen?” was distracting. At least they had a prominently displayed cross; some regard even the Holy and Life Giving Cross as a “graven image”, including Oliver Cromwell, the infamous Puritan tyrant who overthrew the pious King Charles I of England and Scotland and presided over his execution, and then subsequently dissolved the Long Parliament and ruled by decree.
Rather, like you, my view is that it is completely wrong to accuse us of engaging in sinful or Pagan behavior by celebrating the Resurrection of our Lord on Sunday. All ancient churches worship on the Seventh Day, even the Armenians (who are unique among the Oriental Orthodox in that they only serve the Eucharist on Sunday and major feasts such as the Nativity, which they celebrate together with Theophany on January 6th, which means in Jerusalem, where all Eastern and Oriental Orthodox use the Julian Calendar, they are the last to celebrate the Nativity on January 19th Gregorian; however, the full Divine Office is said daily at the Holy Sepulchre and the Armenian Cathedral of St. James in Jerusalem, and their main cathedral of Holy Etchmiadzin in Armenia, and their other principle cathedrals such as the see of the Catholicos of the Great House of Cilicia in Lebanon, the sight of the miraculous appearance of Christ that allowed St. Gregory the Illuminator to convert them to Christ (and which in turn led to the baptism of Georgia, which was evangelized by an Armenian princess, known in the Georgian language as St. Nino and in Armenian as St. Nina, venerated by the Orthodox as Equal to the Apostles along with St. Mary Magdalene, St. Theclas, St. Martha of Bethany and others, and like the Eastern Orthodox, they commemorate the repose of our Lord on the seventh day.
The Syriac Orthodox actually use the same system of daily themes to their worship that we use, with minor variations (like us, they commemorate the departed on the Seventh Day, the Cross on the Sixth Day, the Resurrection on Sunday, but on Wednesday they commemorate the Theotokos, rather than on the Seventh Day, a minor variation; likewise we alone commemorate St. John the Baptist and the Martyrs together on Tuesday and St. Nicholas and the Apostles on together on Thursday.
It should be obvious that you keep the Sabbath; of course, some would argue your cleaning of the parish constitutes work and is inadmissible, to which I would reply that cleaning the Temple is a form of worship which can be performed at any time, and would again lament the legalistic tendency to judge others on how they keep the Sabbath contrary to the words of St. Paul in 2 Colossians 2:16, where he said we should permit no one to judge us regarding the Sabbath, and what our Lord said, “Judge not, lest ye not be judged.”
The grand irony in all of this is that the Jews worship on the First Day; in the US many rest on the First Day as well as the Seventh Day (in Israel the large Islamic population results in Friday and Saturday being the designated days of rest, which is unfortunate for the Christian population; things are even worse in Islamic countries where the weekend consists of Thursday and Friday.
But for a small vocal minority of Sabbatarians, the idea of worshipping and resting on the Sunday, even if one also does so on the Saturday, is intolerable; perhaps it is because some of them, as our friend
@Hentenza pointed out,regard some writings from the 19th century as divinely inspired that refer to Sunday worship as “the Mark of the Beast”; in my view, not only does this contradict 2 Colossians 2:16 and “judge not, lest ye not be judged” but also “Pray without ceasing.” Ironically, many of the same people who attack us for worshipping on Sunday also accuse us falsely of idolatry because we pray to the saints to ask them to pray to God on our behalf, regarding prayer as worship, but then conversely, reject the idea of prayer being worship in the context of “pray without ceasing.”
Thus apparently when we pray to a saint we’re worshipping them, despite insisting otherwise, yet when our Lord told us to pray without ceasing, He did not mean worship, since worship on Sunday is the Mark of the Beast. A paragon of consistency, is it not?
Even our Lutheran friends, who do not engage in intercessory prayers to the saints but do venerate them, and who adhere to Sola Scripture, such as
@MarkRohfrietsch ,
@ViaCrucis and
@Ain't Zwinglian - are horribly attacked and accused of engaging in various Roman Catholic forms of worship; their Sola Scriptura beliefs are rejected, as are those of Anglicans, Calvinists, Methodists, non-Sabbatarian Baptists and so on, because Lutherans, Anglicans et cetera despite embracing Sola Scriptura came to different conclusions about what Scripture meant than the various interpretations favored by various Sabbatarians from different denominations, who set aside their differences in order to criticize Christians who worship on Sunday and to criticize anything they perceive as being of Roman Catholic origin. The bitter irony in all of this is that not only the greatest number, but an actual majority, of worship services on any Saturday happen in Roman Catholic churches, for there are over 400,000 Roman Catholic priests required to celebrate the Mass every ”Sabato” - and far from trying to redefine the Sabbath as Sunday, the Church of Rome, back when it was in communion with the Orthodox, actually changed the Latin name for the Seventh Day from “Dies Saturni” to “Sabato.” Thus our Catholic friends are the most poorly treated of any of us.
And I have begged such members to stop this criticism, repeatedly; I have stressed that none of us would object to them, I point to the good relations we have with many Sabbatarians, but it continues.
And now, you, my brother, my dear
@FenderTL5 , make a post filled with Scripture references and are criticized because your posts are long and devoid of Scripture…. when indeed the length of your post is because of the Scriptural citations you provided!
