Readings: Isaiah 58:9b-14 Luke 13:10-17
We pray: Holy God,
as we listen to your word for us today, may we know your presence, hear your
voice and respond to your call on our lives we pray. Amen.
As many of you
know, I was brought up in the Methodist Church – my father’s family church in
Balclutha. It was a good place to be –
good friends were made, social events were fun and safe, and the worship and teaching
sunk in to the soul. I know that, as children
and then as teenagers, we can be relatively picky about what we remember but it
was instrumental in who I am today. I do remember having Sundays as family days
– Dad was off work, we were off school and, after church, we would pop into the
local dairy, get a block of icecream, go home for a roast meal and pudding,
then off down to visit more family at Hinahina more often than not. We would play and climb vines and paddle and
go home rested and exhausted for the next day.
I remember also being very surprised at finding out that according to one
of the Methodist churches on the West Coast, we were sinners. We had shopped, we had travelled other than
to church, we had laughed and played and talked.
The western isles
of Scotland are another place where the Sabbath is a very different day to the
rest of the week. No dairies open there,
nor anything else. Definitely a day of Sabbath
rest. And if any of you are familiar
with the movie Whisky Galore you will know that in the tug of war between
ending the whisky drought and observing the Sabbath, the Sabbath won out.
How do we approach
the Sabbath day? In a 24/7 world of
work, retail, sport, with no widely observed time of family or faith, how are
we to interpret the commandment to keep the Sabbath day holy?
To try and answer
that question, it might be helpful if we unpack the conundrum that is the
reading for today from the Gospel of Luke, which is, among other things, about
how we observe the Sabbath and honour God.
For there is a
difference of opinion! Jesus has healed
a woman crippled for eighteen years. He
is accused of breaking the law of the Sabbath.
He responds by saying that you take care of your animals by untying them
and leading them to water, why would you not also take care of your people and
set them free? And the crowd was
definitely on Jesus side!
If we look back to
the scripture that Jesus would have been familiar with, we find two kind of
directives as to what the Sabbath is to be for.
In Genesis, God crowns creation with a holy day of rest – a day blessed
and consecrated as a turning away from work and facing the holiness of God. And
this directive is no less for us – to put aside the things of the world and to
spend time with God.
The other (and
complementary) directive comes from after the delivery of the people from their
slavery in Egypt and is found in Deuteronomy.
Equally the people are to observe the day and keep it holy but the
emphasis is rather more on the active practice of holiness in some way.
And you can see
that the leadership of the synagogues in Jesus time embraced the first approach
of holiness, defining keeping God’s law as refraining from work and resting in
the sanctity of the day. The trouble is that they ended up creating elaborate
and complicated rules about what is and what is not work - for it was their
responsibility to make sure souls were not put in jeopardy by their ignorance
of what would please God. In fact the
cumbersome requirements ended up being a yoke of oppression and control that
had moved far away from the heart of what it meant to keep the Sabbath holy. The law was strong enough to deny a woman the
chance to become whole again.
Jesus comes and,
in their eyes and according to their rules, his healing of this long time
crippled women is to be confined to the other six days of the week.
And Jesus pushes
back, requires them to revisit their interpretation – which they seem most
unwilling to do. For, as many of us
would find, it is easier by far to insist on adherence to the rule rather than
accept that their interpretation is flawed, out of touch with its reason for
being.
So Jesus pulls
them, and us, back to the reason for being.
We are to honour
the Sabbath and keep it holy, we are to turn our face toward God – have time
with God where the expectations of the world are not our primary
consideration. Those words from the hymn
by Helen Lemmel – in response to being weary and troubled, the answer is to
‘Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in his wonderful face, and the things of
earth will grow strangely dim, in the light of his glory and grace.’
Evocative words of
healing that come from time focussed on the holiness of God. We need that in our lives – time to be still,
time to praise God, time to reflect and be encouraged, to reclaim whose we are
and recommit ourselves to the way. Time
to stop being hunched over, seeing only the dust and dirt below our feet,
twisting ourselves every which way trying to catch a glimpse of the sun
above. Time to stand straight, cast off
the burdens we carry and praise God. Whether
as individual or community, we are too often bowed down under the load of fear,
anxiousness, dismay when in fact Sabbath living allows us to find time to stand
tall and straight and whole.
And might we also explore
what Sabbath living might mean when it is not confined to a day once a week but
when it permeates our daily living – Sabbath moments as important to us as our
breathing.
The thing is, for
Jesus, the Sabbath is also about rendering healing and justice – bringing
freedom and rejoicing to those who have been enslaved – much as those who were
led out of exile from Egypt. Jesus
healing touch brings freedom to the crippled woman – on the Sabbath. He brings her out of the wilderness and back
into community. He touches her, you
might notice – violating even more of the religious rules about the unclean and
the marginal.
He is being, (they
say deliberately) disruptive to the act of worship as laid out by the religious
authorities, undermining their authority, challenging their institutionalised
ritual that gives them control of people’s lives and withholds care from those
in need.
He echoes the
words of Isaiah who was also calling out the religious authorities of his day
with the same message of misplacing and dishonouring God on the day of fasting:
If you remove the yoke from
among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your
food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light
shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.
…If you refrain from trampling the sabbath, from pursuing your own interests on my holy day; if you call the sabbath a delight and the holy day of the LORD honourable; if you honour it, not going your own ways, serving your own interests, or pursuing your own affairs;
then you shall take delight in the LORD…[1]
…If you refrain from trampling the sabbath, from pursuing your own interests on my holy day; if you call the sabbath a delight and the holy day of the LORD honourable; if you honour it, not going your own ways, serving your own interests, or pursuing your own affairs;
then you shall take delight in the LORD…[1]
What might we then
take away with us today? One, perhaps,
is that of understanding the importance in our lives of the weekly or daily Sabbath
both as a community here on Sunday and in our personal lives. And we need to not let the habit or the
ritual become the satisfaction alone but also recognise the need to open
ourselves to the presence of God, to respond to the teachings of Jesus for us
and through us. To face the holy and be
still before the glory of God.
And secondly I
don’t believe we can do that by blindly following a set of rules about what we
should or shouldn’t do on a Sunday. I don’t
believe that passivity and inaction is what Christ asks of us.
For as we hear
from Isaiah:
Is not this
the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to
undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the
hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when
you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own
kin? Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and
your healing shall spring up quickly;[2]
I do believe that
in honouring the Sabbath, being present with the holy, we will be stirred into active
holy practice as Jesus was – lifting the burden not just from ourselves but
from others we encounter who are in need of healing and hope. And for this we say thanks be to God. Amen.
Margaret Garland
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