August 21st Sermon by The Reverend Loree Reed

Isaiah 58:9–14
Luke 13: 10–17
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.
I don’t know anyone this morning who couldn’t use the blessing of a Sabbath rest.  And I don’t mean just a physical rest.  I mean a deep rest and a deep healing — of heart, soul and spirit.  Some of us are worn out after struggling for nearly three years with all the concerns of this Covid pandemic.  Others are feeling crippled by economic forces beyond our control.  Still others are troubled by the environmental crisis, the uneasy expectation of extreme weather.  And almost everyone, I think, is troubled by the political polarization that has divided our nation to such a degree that we cannot agree on what is basically true.  Finally, of course, there’s Ukraine and all the sad ravages of that war.  Wherever we look, there are concerns, concerns that leave our hearts sick and our souls suffering.  We have all been affected by these concerns, and we can all relate to the weariness of the woman Luke describes for us this morning.
We don’t really know what else she was facing, but we do know she was a woman who’d been crippled by disease, maybe osteoporosis or arthritis.  Whatever it was, it had bent her almost double for eighteen years, unable to stand up straight, unable to see much more than peoples’ dusty sandals on the road.  I can’t imagine how her back must have ached by the end of each day!  But it wasn’t just physical pain that caused her weariness.  For in those days, people assumed that physical ailments most likely had spiritual causes.  Even Luke the Physician assumed that this woman’s back ailment had been caused by some spiritual malaise.  So besides her physical pain, she had to deal with the pain of other peoples’ judgement – their assumption that she must have done something wrong, and so had been punished by God.  It was a heavy load indeed.
No wonder she had made her slow, laborious way to worship at the synagogue that morning!  She needed some word of encouragement, some word of grace from God.  And — who knows — after the service, maybe some kind soul would invite her home for a Sabbath meal.  But she was about to get a whole lot more than a Sabbath meal.
For as she makes her way into the synagogue, Jesus notices her — and not just notices her but calls her over to him.  Never mind that he had already begun to teach the crowd gathered there.  He wasn’t too busy to notice her pain and do something about it.  So as she approaches him he says, “Woman, you are loosed from your ailment.” And then, as he reaches out and touches her, she straightens up and can finally behold him — the source of her healing – face to face.
I can only imagine this woman’s praise at being set free – and the cries of delight and astonishment as others in the synagogue saw her straighten up right before their eyes.  But their delighted cries were quickly silenced by the angry objections of the synagogue leader.  His focus was not on the miraculous healing, but on his indignation that Jesus had healed someone on the Sabbath.  To his way of thinking, this healing Jesus has just done is work – and keeping the Sabbath free from work is something he sees as his own job description.  “The commandment says there are six days on which work is to be done,” he reminds everybody.  “Come on those days to be healed.”
He is objecting, you see, to Jesus disrupting the regular Sabbath schedule of the synagogue – his synagogue.  He is objecting to Jesus messing with religious tradition, a tradition he thinks he knows backward and forward.  Worse yet, Jesus has placed a socially expendable, physically disabled woman at the center of that tradition – and the synagogue leader is outraged. ¹
What the man has missed is the heart of the Sabbath, the heart of God’s law, the heart of the tradition –which is love.  To his credit, he has tried to uphold orderly worship and right belief.  But what he has missed is Jesus’ compassion – a compassion that sees the broken body, the broken soul, the broken spirit before it sees the broken commandment. ²  What he has missed is his own legalism — that places his self–concern and his own interpretation of the Law before the needs of those he has been called to serve.
So for us, this morning, the synagogue leader becomes the poster child for every wrong way of practicing our faith, the wrong ways Isaiah the prophet spelled out in our Old Testament passage.  By pointing a finger of blame at this poor woman, who has endured shattering social stigma and real physical pain for eighteen long years, the synagogue leader has actually profaned the Sabbath rather than upholding it.
So what does this have to do with us?  In our day, Sabbath rest is understood and practiced less and less.  But originally the Sabbath was given to the people of Israel as one of the ten commandments.  As He gave it to them, the Lord said, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.”  So Sabbath was given as a gift of freedom – a freedom to lay work aside and trust God to supply what we need.  A freedom to do things God’s way, and not our own.  Then, the Lord says, we will be hallowing the whole week.  Then, the Lord says, we will be inviting God to come into our lives to give us that deep sense of peace, that deep sense that we belong to him and can trust him to accomplish all the things we cannot do.
What we don’t want to do is to practice Sabbath as the leader of the synagogue did in our story from Luke this morning – as a series of ‘Thou shalt nots’.  What we don’t want to do is what Isaiah warns against – pointing the finger of blame at other people and speaking evil of how they are doing things.  And that brings us — full circle — back to our own day.
What if, on this Sabbath day, we were simply to thank God for keeping us and those we love safe from Covid, to thank him for doctors and nurses, vaccines and masks?  What if we were to thank him for an improving economy and a good jobs report, trusting that these small signs were harbingers of wellbeing for all?  What if we were to ask his forgiveness for the ways we have contributed to our own environmental crisis?  What if we were to pray for our enemies – like Vladimir Putin — instead of against him?  And what if we were to forgive those whose politics differed from our own – no longer pointing fingers of blame, but offering compassion and peace?  It’s an old idea, but it just might work.  It just might bring us the peace of God that passes all understanding.  As Saint Francis prayed, eight hundred years ago,
Lord, make us instruments of your peace.  Where there is hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy.  Grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love.  For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. 
I wish you all a holy Sabbath rest.
Amen
¹ Debie Thomas   Sermon for the 11th Sunday after Pentecost, 2022   A Sermon for Every Sunday

² Ibid.
 
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