Set Free on the Sabbath

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August 26, 2013

Luke 13:10-17

¹⁰Now Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. ¹¹And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. ¹²When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, "Woman, you are set free from your ailment." ¹³When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God. ¹⁴But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, "There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day." ¹⁵But the Lord answered him and said, "You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? ¹⁶And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?" ¹⁷When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame; and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing.

Sermon: “Set Free on the Sabbath”

I love Sabbath.  I love it celebrated in worship here as a community, as we embrace a day to remember that the world and our lives do not revolve around us, but around God.  I love covered-dish luncheons like last week’s, and oh boy, do I love Sunday afternoon naps, y’all.

A lot of us pastor folk also like to say that our “Sabbath” is actually our day off during the week, which for me is Friday.  That “Sabbath” day looks like sleeping in, reading novels in coffee shops, lazily cooking soul-satisfying fare, having dinner with friends, curling up with my dog, not checking my email.  Yes, most pastors would say this is a description of what Sabbath is for us.

And we would be wrong.  You see, Sabbath and a day off are not the same thing.  Days off are necessary for all of us: a day to remember that we are not nearly as important as we think we are, and that the world will keep spinning all the same if we take a break.  A day to recharge our bodies and souls so that we have energy to do all the things God calls us to do.  Retired or still working, we all need days off.  But what the world needs is Sabbath.

It’s one of the 10 Commandments, you know: Sabbath.  Right up there with not murdering anyone and not coveting your neighbor’s donkey.  And so it wasn’t just a gentle suggestion by God.  “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy” is a non-negotiable as far as God is concerned.  But how do we do this?

Remembering the Sabbath and keeping it holy does not just mean taking a nap or showing up for worship (or napping during worship).  Scripture shows us that Sabbath, which we have sought to simplify into meaning “rest”, actually has many meanings.

In Genesis, Sabbath was God taking a satisfied look at all of creation and resting.  But Sabbath came to mean many other things as well.

In Exodus, Sabbath meant the economic sacrifice of not working one day a week.

In Leviticus, the land itself takes a Sabbath on the 7^th year to rest from bearing crops, that it might be more fruitful the next year.

In Deuteronomy, Sabbath was set apart as a day to remember God’s great deeds in freeing God’s people from slavery in Egypt.

In Isaiah, the Sabbath was described as a day of holy delight.

And then Jesus came along, and rolled all of these ideas about Sabbath into one.  He managed to make the religious folk furious as he did it.  (The fella sort of enjoyed doing this.)  You see, those who were trying to get this so-called Son of God stopped used the Sabbath to do it.  They constantly tried to prove that Jesus was “breaking” the Sabbath.  And Jesus constantly responded by showing them that the Sabbath was for the “broken.” 

When his disciples were hungry and plucked and ate grain from a field on the Sabbath, and got in trouble for it, Jesus (good Jewish fellow that he was) reminded the religious leaders that David had once eaten consecrated bread on the Sabbath when he and his companions were starving, “breaking” the Sabbath.

 

And Jesus told them, “The Sabbath is made for people, and not people for the Sabbath.”  Which is a cryptic way of saying, the Sabbath is made to bring life to people, not to take it away with prideful rules.  Then, never one to stop short of heresy, he said, “I am the Lord of the Sabbath.”  Oh you know they loved hearing that.

But Jesus’ Sabbath stirring up didn’t end there, y’all.  He went on and healed a man with a withered hand on the Sabbath, and when those same religious folk got angry, he said, “Is it lawful to do harm or good on the Sabbath, to save a life or to kill?”

Finally, we come to our story in Luke.  You can bet that the synagogue leader let out a sigh of frustration when Jesus walked into the synagogue.  He knew there would be trouble.  And there was.  A woman who was bent over with pain for years and years (we might call it severe arthritis or fibromyalgia these days) came.  She did not come directly to Jesus to be healed, though.  She came to the temple to worship, on the Sabbath.  And Jesus happened to see her in her pain and suffering and decided the Sabbath was for her. 

When the synagogue leader was about to chuck her out for groaning too loudly and disrupting the hymns (she didn’t even sign the friendship pad, y’all!), Jesus called her over.  And right there, right smack in the middle of the synagogue, in plain sight of everyone, he healed her.  Well, in Greek, he loosed her bonds.  He set her free.

That worship leader was irate.  Instead of addressing Jesus directly, he sort of passive-aggressively started stirring up the congregation:  “Do you see this, y’all!  There are six days to work, this lady should have come on one of those days.  This is the Sabbath day, and that means no work!  That means rest.” 

Jesus responded with his favorite pet name for the religious leaders: hypocrites.  (They didn’t like this nickname very much.)  He said that every person there cared for their animals on the Sabbath, not letting them starve and feeding them.  How much more worthy of care was this woman?  Eighteen years was long enough for her to be bound by suffering and sorrow.  The Sabbath day was the perfect day for her to be set free. 

You see, for Jesus, the Sabbath was about rest and recharging, and it was about worshipping God in community.  But it was also about setting people free, right in the midst of that community; a way to honor God by honoring the humanity of a child of God.

Jesus and that synagogue leader read from the same play book, they both knew what the Commandments said, “remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.”  But they interpreted them very differently. 

You see, Jesus did not understand holy to mean free from imperfection or suffering, like the synagogue leader thought holy meant, keeping the wrong sort of people out of worship.  No, for this Lord of the Sabbath, holiness was found in liberating all of God’s children, especially on a day set aside to remember God’s great liberation of the people of Israel from slavery. 

A nice idea, isn’t it?  But you might be thinking, “Okay, so Jesus got it right, he healed people on the Sabbath, I get it…but what does that have to do with me?  I don’t see him coming in here to interrupt your sermon by healing us from heart issues and aching joints!”

And you would be right: Jesus doesn’t promise us healing in that way.  (Though it might be nice if he did come interrupt my sermon some time, don’t you think?!)  But he does bring us freedom if we’ll open ourselves to it.  That bent-over woman was open to the freedom he brought, because she knew that she needed him.  She came when he called her, and so she found it.  The synagogue leader could not see the ways he had made God’s beautiful law a chain to bind himself and others, and so he found no freedom that day.  He found only anger and frustration.

Perhaps in this story, the Lord of the Sabbath is still trying to teach us religious folk what this Sabbath thing is all about.  Teaching us that if we expect Sabbath to mean encountering God for one hour a week only, then that is all we will see of God, though God is woven through our most hectic days, too.  That if we expect Sabbath to be predictable and ordinary, with God never teaching us something new or freeing us in this community, then that is all Sabbath will ever be for us.

But what if we embrace the full meaning of Sabbath as Jesus did?  What if we say it is for rest but also for remembering how God has carried us through difficult times when we lacked the energy to see a new day? 

What if we believe that Sabbath is a time for all to be renewed, even the earth itself, and then play our part in that renewal?  What if we trusted that freedom on the Sabbath was possible, not just for us, but for those whose backs are bent with the weight of worry or injustice?

Sabbath can be incredibly tame and predictable, as the synagogue leader worked so hard to make it.  Or Sabbath can be the space where we open our schedules, our hearts, this world, to the God who as far as we know took only that one Sabbath rest after creating us, and has tirelessly worked for our freedom ever since. 

So what will it be for us?  A Sabbath of comfortable bondage to the way we’ve always done it, or a Sabbath of being set free by Christ so we can in turn set others free?  The former will keep us finding God in the old, familiar ways, and thus staying exactly as we have ever been.  But the latter, if we have the wild courage to follow it, will lead us to discovering God in all the wrong places: in the poor, the weighed down, the forgotten, the broken in body or spirit (or both). 

Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.  But remember, also, that it’s not about you (or me).  It’s about the Lord of the Sabbath, and he is still, and always will be, about the work of setting people free, calling us to join him.  Will we?  Amen.