Luke 13:10-17 • August 25, 2019
Brothers and sisters in Christ, grace and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord of all healing and savior of the world Jesus the Christ. Amen.
This week gives me an opportunity to remind everyone in worship that your pastors, in fact, do not select the scripture readings we receive each week in worship. And thanks be to God for that truth. You see, if your pastors were the ones who decided which scripture readings we would use, I firmly believe the list of those readings would be quite short and the readings before us today – especially the gospel reading – would probably not be on that list.
Good Shepherd, and the majority of congregations in our denomination of the ELCA and dozens of our sister Christian denominations around the world, follow something known as the Revised Common Lectionary. The Revised Common Lectionary was first developed in the late 1960’s.
It’s a 3-year sequence of readings that walk us through the bulk of the Bible as one Old Testament, Psalm, New Testament, and Gospel reading are assigned for each Sunday and festival day of the church year.
The gospel reading from Saint Luke that is before us today is a story of Jesus teaching in the synagogue. This particular story is only found in Luke’s gospel. Even though it is unique to Luke’s gospel, it is not unique to the overarching picture that all four gospels are trying to show us regarding who Jesus is and what Jesus has come into the world to do.
There are three prominent themes in this text – Sabbath and what the practice of Sabbath may or may not mean; healing or exorcism of a woman suffering from the bondage of none other than Satan himself; and, a conflict that breaks out between Jesus and the religious leaders of the synagogue.
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The Sabbath. I hope that most of us know that keeping Sabbath is one of the 10 Commandments. It’s the third commandment actually – “Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy.” And in our Catechism we learn the meaning of this commandment that “We are to fear and love God, so that we do not despise preaching or God’s word, but instead keep that word holy and gladly hear and learn it.”
The challenge with the Sabbath is that culture, over thousands of years of human arrogance and sin, has driven you and me away from what I believe God actually intended the Sabbath to be.
Now, If you didn’t know that insight about the third commandment and Sabbath, maybe you recall the origination of Sabbath as it’s found within the seven days of creation in Genesis, the second chapter of the first book of the Bible. In that chapter, we hear “Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude. And on the seventh day, God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day and hallowed it because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation.”
Now, for some faith traditions, the Sabbath is to be observed on Saturday, for others it’s Sunday. And for many of my pastoral colleagues, it’s a different day of the week entirely.
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First of all, it’s impossible for us to think about the seven days of creation as seven 24-hour days like we have today. Our seven 24-hour days in a week system of time has only existed for 4,000-5,000 years or so. And regardless of how old you think creation is, the way we have kept time over the past 5,000 or so years is far different than the way time was kept at the beginning of creation. Or even the way I think the time is kept today by God.
What I’m trying to get at is this, if Sabbath-keeping for you is only about a prescribed time of the week or a particular day or certain practices that you must follow using a prescribed set of rules, you might be getting caught up in things which actually have nothing to do with what Sabbath-keeping is all about. I think this is at the heart of what Jesus is showing us in today’s gospel reading. And I do think it’s the reason why the religious leader is so upset by Jesus healing on the Sabbath.
On my calendar, Mondays are blocked off as my Sabbath day. Of the 52 Mondays in 2019, I’m hoping for about 15 of them to be actual Sabbath days. When my phone rings or I get a late-night text message or email, I do my best to answer. And often those calls to serve God’s children just so happen to fall on what is scheduled to be my Sabbath day.
Just because I fail to keep Monday sacred and set aside from any form of work more often than not, does not mean that I’m ignoring the Sabbath. If I was in fact blatantly ignoring Sabbath, I couldn’t stand before you today as one of your pastors and a fellow child of God claiming to follow this Jesus. Very simply and directly put, I do not believe that one can be a follower of Jesus and intentionally ignore God’s command to remember the Sabbath.
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One theologian’s thoughts on Sabbath were helpful for me to hear again this week – “Maybe ‘Remember the Sabbath’ is being too polite about it.” He said. “There’s no ‘thou shalt’ or ‘thou shalt not.’ Perhaps a rewording is in order. Something like: (God saying to us…) ‘Hey, … ! What is wrong with you people? 168 hours in a week is not enough for you? I ask you to set aside just one day so that you can rest up long enough to be renewed for the coming week, and what do you do? Double overtime, 80-hour workweeks, and supercenters open 24/7! How are you ever going to slow down long enough so that you can gather together in Christian worship and sit still long enough to hear the Word that I have to share with you? Stop! Listen!” [Crazy Talk, Rolf Jacobson, pg. 150]
When God entered the seventh day of creation, he didn’t simply push it aside and ignore all he had created in order to make sure he had time to take a nap. God hallowed what had been created. Hallow – another one of those crazy church words. It means to make holy or to set apart.
In other words, the Sabbath is not about being lazy and making sure you can selfishly take a nap. The Sabbath is about time you intentionally set aside in order to see what is already holy before you. In order to be drawn closer to God.
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I gravitate quite freely and am getting better at openly admitting that I’m a bit of a workaholic. Having this tendency, and being called to serve in the vocation of pastor where the opportunity to work is always before me, there are more times than I care to admit when Sabbath-keeping is challenging. The reality is today’s gospel reading should be on my shortlist of scripture. It might help remind me of the many times hypocrisy enters into my speech, especially when I’m tired because I’ve been working too many hours; times when Satan cripples my ability to see God’s beauty in all of God’s good creation and all of God’s children; times when I need to let Jesus touch me, without even asking him to touch me, in order to be healed, so my heart can be opened and my spirit can be renewed in the regular rhythm of remembering the Sabbath and keeping it holy.
In our gospel reading today, in one sense Jesus is breaking the Sabbath in the present moment. Disregarding all of the rules that one is supposed to follow for proper Sabbath observation. In Jesus’ opinion, this woman’s suffering has gone on long enough and she simply cannot wait another day for healing to take place. Her future begins now. And it begins with great joy as healing happens on the Sabbath.
In another sense, Jesus is not breaking, but fulfilling the commandment of Sabbath. Fulfilling the commandment of the Sabbath in ways that the religious leaders in Jesus’ day didn’t understand because they were trying to hold on as tightly as they could to the rules and regulations of the past. Rules and regulations that Jesus, the savior of the world, came to fulfill. Imagine the relief that the woman in our gospel reading must have felt after 18 long agonizing years of being crippled by Satan.
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What does Sabbath look like for you today?
Where in your life is Satan overpowering you?
Where in your life is the chaos and noise of this world blocking your ability to hear Jesus say to you “you are set free from your ailment?”
Where in your life are the rules and regulations you’re hanging onto so tightly destroying your very soul and causing your heart to be closed to the new thing God is doing in your life, in our community, in our world?
Brothers and sisters in Christ, this “is what God has given us in the Sabbath – the gift of reconnecting with our soul, the gift of reconnecting with God, the gift of once again realizing what freedom of life means. It is the chance to once again stand up straight and praise God for all that we are and all that we will become. It is the freedom to be what God intended us to be.” [https://journeytopenuel.com/2016/08/14/proper-16c-the-sabbath-is-calling/]
Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy. Amen.
Bishop Craig Schweitzer 
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