Sabbath Seeing – Sermon for August 21, 2016

Sermon for the 14th Sunday after Pentecost, August 20-21, 2016, for St. Peter Lutheran Church in Greene, Iowa. This week’s lectionary texts are Luke 13:10-17 and Psalm 103:1-8.

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.
Amen.

There are a lot of parts of the Bible that are hard to understand. The Wednesday men’s Bible Study has been working through Luke’s Gospel, and there are some tough passages!

The reading we just heard from Hebrews about the awe of approaching God and our call to give thanks is another one that takes some unpacking.

But this story about Jesus healing the crippled woman is relatively straightforward to visualize.

We have three characters.

First, of course, there’s Jesus. Our story opens on the Sabbath, and as a good Jewish Rabbi, Jesus is spending his day teaching in the synagogue. There’s a crowd of Sabbath worshippers listening to him, and as he’s teaching, he picks out a woman in the crowd.

Our second character is a woman who is crippled, bent over for eighteen years. We know precious little about her. We don’t know if she has family, we don’t know her age.

Maybe she’s here at worship surrounded by friends and family, or maybe she’s a faithful widow alone in the world. Maybe she’s young, crippled for most of her life, or maybe she lived a normal, successful life before something happened to her.

Maybe her ailment is physical and she has some sort of spinal or back problem. Or maybe when it says a spirit has crippled her it means she’s so depressed that she can’t stand up, can’t stand up out of fear or sorrow.

The advantage of knowing so little about her is that we can see ourselves in her. What’s keeping you bent down? What are you carrying? What do you wish Jesus would set you free from?

As he’s preaching, Jesus notices her. And he doesn’t just notice her, he really sees her, maybe in a way no one else has. She doesn’t come up to him and ask for help, she just puts herself at the synagogue where she belongs, and Jesus sees her, calls her over, and lays his hands on her, saying “Woman, you are set free from our ailment.”

Hear those words from Jesus. “You are set free.” That’s powerful. “You are set free.”

Immediately, the woman stands up. Her life is changed. She’s encountered Jesus, and she’s never going to be the same again. And she reacts the only the way she can. She begins praising God. Not only has she been healed, she recognizes who’s responsible. All she can do is give thanks.

Some of the most enthusiastic, faith-filled people I’ve met have had a life changing encounter with God. Maybe it’s as dramatic as this woman’s story, or maybe it’s something more mundane, but when your life is changed, you want to do something about it. You want to live your life giving thanks to God.

Sometimes those of us who haven’t had such a dramatic experience fall into the trap of forgetting what God’s done for us. That’s what’s so important about gathering to hear each week the story of a God who loves us enough to die for you. All we can when faced with such wondrous love is give thanks.

This is all we hear about this woman, the only place she shows up in the Bible. We don’t know the rest of her story, but we do know she begins praising God. We don’t know her exact words, but as a good Jewish woman, she would likely have known the Psalms by heart. Maybe her words of praise came from Psalm 103.

I can picture her saying, “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and do not forget all his benefits— who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases.”

Afterwards, I can’t imagine she goes home like it’s been just a normal Sabbath. I think her entire life is different from then on. I’m sure she’s telling people from then on about her encounter with Jesus.

There’s a third character in this story, the leader of the synagogue, and he’s not happy. This is a man who’s given his life to seeking to please God and to serving in the synagogue. He’s responsible for making sure things get done correctly, in good order. I’m sure he cares about the woman, and is happy she’s been healed, but that’s not what’s supposed to happen on the Sabbath. The Sabbath is a time of rest, of learning, and teaching. There are six other days to get stuff done.

It’s a slippery slope, and he’s a law and order kind of guy. Couldn’t the woman have waited until the next day for healing? Or rather, couldn’t Jesus have noticed her some other time? There’s a way things are supposed to be done, and this isn’t it.

Can’t we respect just one day for God? Can’t we have reverence for just one day?

And of course, he’s not wrong. Sabbath is a good thing, but it’s fragile. We give up Sabbath time so easily. Even today, Sabbath is worth protecting.

The idea of the Sabbath is to have a dedicated day of rest, and that’s something we need today as much as ever. I think we’re worse at doing it than pretty much ever in history. We’re addicted to keeping in touch, to always being available. I’m as guilty as anyone. Most days my phone is the last light I see at night and the first thing I look at in the morning. The idea of disconnecting, and intentionally resting is hard!

There are two ways you can go wrong when you make the effort to try to take time for Sabbath. One way is to do what the religious leader in this story does, making the Sabbath overly legalistic. Lots of religious groups have done this, like the Puritans, who took the commandments so seriously they made doing anything on Sunday a legal crime. In this story, Jesus points out how ridiculous this strict legalistic enforcement is.

Demanding rest can become selfish. It can become just turning in on yourself and ignoring the world, or it can slip into trying to control what others do. Sabbath is not supposed to prevent us from doing good.

But you can also go too far the other way. God gave us the Sabbath as a gift, not a burden. It’s supposed to be a time to celebrate what God’s done for us, a time of resting from work in order to intentionally focus on God. Too often we lose any sense of Sabbath rest on Sunday as our time fills up with getting done everything that we didn’t have time for during the week. I suspect most of us could use a little more intentional Sabbath time with God.

Of course, another danger of Sabbath is that focusing on God has a tendency to change us, especially how we see God and other people.

Last week, we heard Jesus talk about bringing division, and we looked at some ways following Jesus might lead to division and controversy, just like we see here.

When Jesus sees the woman, he knows what he’s doing. I don’t think the religious leader’s reaction surprises him. Healing the woman creates a controversy, but if a controversy is the price to pay for setting her free, then there will be a controversy, because Jesus cares far more about this woman’s suffering and her condition than he does about keeping everyone else happy.

Jesus doesn’t see her as a problem or a nuisance. He sees her as someone in need, sets her free, and then he names her for who she is—a daughter of Abraham, a child of God.

So, which of these three characters are we?

Are we like the woman whose life Jesus changes, responding in praise to God?

Are we like the religious official, valuing the law and protecting Sabbath time? Or are we like Jesus, setting people free, even when it’s controversial?

After reading this, I still wonder, are we supposed to keep the Sabbath, or are we supposed to do stuff on it?

I believe we’re called to both. We need intentional time to gather in worship like we’re doing right now.  We need intentional rest time to focus on God. When we focus on God, though, we expect to be changed. When we encounter Jesus, it should lead us to see others in a new way.

The woman sees what Jesus has done for her, truly realizing that God cares even for her. The synagogue leader realizes that people are more valuable than rules.

As we gather today and every week for much-needed Sabbath time, may the way we see others and ourselves be changed. May we see people as Jesus sees them.

And we trust that like the woman, we are seen by Jesus, the one who meets us here and in the world, the one who notices us and sets us free. Bless the Lord, O my soul, for such wondrous love. Amen.