8-25-19 Readings & Sermon

A reading from Isaiah.

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 shall be like the noonday.

The Lord will guide you continually and satisfy your needs in parched places, and make your bones strong, and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail.

Your ancient ruin shall be rebuilt, you shall raise up the foundations of many generations, you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of the streets to live in.

If you refrain from trampling the Sabbath, from pursuing your own interest on my holy day, if you call the Sabbath a delight, and the holy day of the Lord honorable, if you honor it, not going your own ways, serving your own interests, or pursuing your own affairs, then you shall take delight in the Lord, and I will make you right upon the heights of the earth.

I will feed you with the heritage of your ancestor Jacob, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

The word of the Lord.

Reading from Hebrews, you have not come to something that you can that can be touched, a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom, and a tempest, and the sound of a trumpet, and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that not another word be spoken to them.

For they come not to endure the order that was given.

If even an animal touches the mountain, it should be stoned to death.

Indeed, so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, I tremble with fear.

But you have come to Mount Zion, and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to the innumerable angels and festive gathering, and to all the assembly of the firstborn who were enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous make perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood, sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.

See that you do not refuse the one who is speaking.

For if they do not escape when they refuse the one who warned them on earth, how much less will we escape if we reject the one who warns us from heaven?

At this time his voice shook the earth, but now he has promised, yet once more I will shake not only the earth, but also heaven.

This phrase yet once more indicates the removal of what is shaken and what is created, so that what cannot be shaken may remain.

Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us give thanks, by which we offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe.

For indeed our God is a consuming fire.

The word of the Lord.

The holy gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, according to Luke.

Now Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath, and 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.

When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, Woman, you are set free from your ailment.

When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God.

But 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.

But the Lord answered him and said, You hypocrites, does not each of you on the Sabbath untie their ox or their donkey from the manger and lead it away to give it water?

And 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?

When Jesus said this, all his opponents were put to shame, and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that Jesus was doing.

The gospel of the Lord.

As a teenager, I grew up with that as this image of God to be feared, because God is a consuming fire.

We often miss, frankly, that the author is telling us the opposite.

Did you notice in the passage today that we read from Hebrews, the people at Mount Sinai or Mount Horeb were terrified of God and that they missed the point.

The author today is saying, God is not this visible heat source that will burn you.

Instead, the author is saying that God offers to burn up things temporal so that things eternal can be seen and not veiled.

That might be uncomfortable for us.

Jenny preached on this last week, this image of God, the refiner's fire, the fire that burns hot enough to remove the dross from the pure metal, or the fire that is warm enough to release the resin so that seeds can grow.

We get it again.

What God would consume is not all things, but the temporal things that mask things that are eternal.

It's really important to think through this, I think.

It goes throughout the church calendar.

We get to days like all saints.

The saints of God are the people, you and I, who point other people to God.

Even just in moments, we point other people to God with what we do and what we say.

Yes, we're all regular people.

We do this good pointing sometimes, and other times we don't.

So what God would do for us in Hebrews is remove those don'ts so that increasingly we just point to God.

That's for our good and for the good of the world.

God is not looking to burn you up, God is looking to release you from the things that hold you back.

That's what the author of Hebrews offers to us.

And that's what Jesus offers us today as well.

You know, um, I've spent so much time thinking about what this woman is suffering from and whether or not God heals scoliosis in a moment or not.

But sometimes I think I've missed really what the story is inviting me to consider.

So consider.

The people are gathered in the synagogue, and synagogues really aren't like churches.

At the time of Jesus, you went to the temple to pray and sing hymns and offer sacrifices and worship.

You went to the synagogue to study.

In the synagogue, somebody would get up and they would read part of the Torah, and then they would say, Rabbi Gameliel said so and so about what this means, but Rabbi Akiva said so-and-so about what this means, and this other rabbi disagreed with both of them, and the fourth rabbi disagreed with everybody.

That was a good Sabbath.

This is sort of how the synagogue works.

So they're there to study and learn.

And this woman comes in, and listen, if you're wondering what she's suffering from in her body, I think you might be missing the point.

This woman is bent over and cannot, she is quite unable to stand up straight.

I think it probably matters literally, but I think it might matter even more figuratively.

She's coming together with a group of people, and she is bent over and unable to stand up straight.

It might matter to know that our Jewish ancestors did not pray kneeling, they prayed standing up.

This woman cannot even have the proper posture of prayer because her back is bent.

What is she bent over with?

It could be scoliosis, but it could also be mental illness or taking care of a parent or a loved one who's got Alzheimer's.

It could be all kinds of things.

It could be her spouse is an alcoholic.

It could be fill in the blank.

The truth is, if you've been one of those people, I suspect you know what it's like to go out in public and feel yourself being bent over, quite unable to stand up straight.

What's interesting is she's been doing it so long, she's become accustomed to it.

And everybody else has become accustomed to this lady being unable to stand up straight.

And here in the middle of study day, Jesus says, stand up.

And she does.

Thankfully, the people praise God for it, except for the head of the synagogue who says, and this is really interesting, anytime you hear the head of the synagogue think the priest, right?

This is a criticism of the clergy.

The clergy say, you're disrupting worship and study.

Do that a different day.

You come up to St.

Thomas on Monday and we'll stand you up straight, but don't do it on Sunday morning.

And what do you think the piece is for?

Actually, reconciling?

No, no, no.

You're supposed to say good morning and go back to your pew.

I mean, this would be sort of like somebody comes to church on Sunday morning really mad at somebody else, and in the middle of the service, they talk it out and forgive each other.

Do that on Monday.

The clergy says, don't bother the worship service with your reconciliation.

You've got six other days to do it.

Of course, we get it.

Oh, look, church could wait for that.

We have room in our head that the worship service could wait if something really important happened.

But oddly enough, if during the peace two people had an argument that led to reconciliation, we might think it was really weird and they should take that out to the lobby.

I mean, this is, I think, what the story is really about.

The story is trying to say, I think, what do we prioritize when we get together corporately?

And the leader of the synagogue has got something really interesting to say.

I think maybe in reverse to us as well.

See, at the time of Jesus, not only were there these ten words, these ten commands, if you will, that were supposed to order life, including honor the Sabbath day and keep it holy, but there were another 613 rules that every Jewish boy had to know by the time he was 13 in order to have a bar mitzvah.

200 and 365 do's and then 248 don'ts.

And then there were a little more rules than that, because the truth is, if you're walking really close to the line of a rule, well, you know, anybody could stumble and fall over.

So if you knew a few more rules that would keep you further from the line, then even if you stumbled in one of those rules, you still hadn't crossed the line.

You see how that goes?

That's why there's a limit to how many steps you can take on a Sabbath so that you don't break the commandment.

That limit of steps is nowhere in the Bible, of course.

It's meant to keep you from getting too close to breaking what is in the Bible.

Turkey isn't meat, it's a bird.

Meat, if you're Jewish, those are things like cattle and goats and lambs.

You can't mix cattle and goat and lamb with dairy.

You can't.

It's not kosher.

You could mix a bird with dairy, because birds aren't meat.

But if you start mixing birds with dairy, you might think you could mix meat with dairy.

So even though you can, you can't.

If what I just said is nonsense, that's well and good.

But understand, there's rules about rules about rules to make sure you never get close to the edge.

The ruler of the synagogue says, what you're doing is really close to work.

Don't come and do work and break the commandment.

Do that another day when it's absolutely free.

To that society, Jesus says, let's redefine what work is and what it isn't.

Because on the Sabbath day, you'll walk your animals, you'll feed your animals.

On the Sabbath day, you will do actions that support life.

If I'm healing somebody, whether it's in their body or their spirit, especially if we're doing it publicly together, it isn't work, it's life-giving.

This is what Jesus is saying.

Good to remember.

I think for us, there's something, there's sort of a counterpoint to that, which is that few of us have Sabbath time.

Very few of us do.

We've decided work is good.

All work is good.

And maybe it's helpful to think that there is something really peculiar that might actually really change the quality of our life, about backing off from just regular errand running or preparations once a week.

Focusing on something that's life-giving instead.

I don't know which one you need to hear to slow down or speed up on your Sabbath time.

It's something that we struggle with so much, honestly, that we often find ourselves when we gather as clergy talking about these things like, how do you keep the Sabbath, you know?

And it's it's a really interesting thing.

Some of my colleagues they turn their phone off for like two days.

And I always wonder how do people get a hold of you if they need last rites or they're dying.

Well, my Sabbath time's my Sabbath time.

We we struggle with this, right?

Because when your phone's on, I get calls from Atlanta, Georgia that are completely in Chinese.

And I take them because you never know who's calling, right?

When the Chinese voice comes on, I turn it off.

I get calls from the Social Security Administration telling me my number's been used at the border of Texas.

I never know that number.

I take the call because it could be anybody.

Sometimes we have to take these risks because we don't know who's on the other line.

Sometimes we send it to voicemail and we can check it.

This is hard business negotiating work and giving life, being present for somebody on the other line and being really mad that nobody's there except someone trying to steal your social security number.

These are things we continue to have to navigate, and I think our gospel invites us to really think about as we do it what's work and what's life-giving.

Not that work is bad, but I think that the gospel asks us to consider at least once a week how we can really be invested in life-giving.

I I don't want to push this too hard about this woman being bent over not just by the weight she's carrying, but honestly, it's really interesting to think everybody else, it's not maybe happy, but is willing for her to be bent over that way.

The reason I say this is that Isaiah says, You really want to have a Sabbath?

Stop pointing the finger and saying accusations.

I know this is a theme in what I say, but boy, when I read the newspaper, when I listen to the news, really all I hear is pointing the finger and words of accusation.

I'm not even talking about just politics.

Pointing the finger, words of accusation.

Isaiah says, You really want a Sabbath?

Quit it.

I'm so good at pointing the finger sometimes I don't even know how to stop it.

Boy, it would take work for me to quit doing that.

And it would be life-giving.

So maybe that's how we keep the Sabbath.

We work to change our habits.

Or maybe we point the finger a little differently.

Yesterday we had the largest funeral in the last four years here.

Uh there was a lot of finger pointing at this lady, and the finger pointing we gave was she worked hard to make peace.

And she did.

She did.

She arguably had one of the most peaceful spirits if you met her among anybody you've ever met.

And sometimes she was a hot mess.

And that's really important to hear that the saints aren't perfect people, they're people who point us to God.

And I will tell you, there was almost an aura around her because of how she practiced peacemaking.

And it occurred to me yesterday because every time I walked by her, she was often at the desk.

She wanted to talk to me.

And I thought, boy, I don't always have time to do that.

And I realized yesterday she didn't have time for anybody either.

She didn't have time.

You have time for anyone?

She made time for everybody.

She made the time.

She worked to make the time, but her work was life-giving.

And particularly this lady, the amazing thing about her was that she was almost attracted to people with broken wings because she cared for them, and those wings started to work again.

It's like she looked for people who were quite unable to stand up straight.

And she pushed them up.

I think that's the whole point of the reading today.

There's this greater opportunity, a greater opportunity for us to gather together corporately and say, this is the work of worship, of giving life.

I read a book about four years ago called Never Pray Again.

It was a little bit of a uh meant to be a jarring title.

And what the authors say in the book is really quite interesting, which is instead of saying, God, my friend's lonely, help them have friends, God, people are hungry, give them food.

Instead of just doing that, perhaps we could think about as a way of prayer, ways that we could actually do stuff, ways that we could actually feed hungry people and be present with the lonely, ways that we could actually expand our mind to people who are hurting, not so we can point the finger at them, but so that we can help them stand up straight.

Of course, they really didn't want us to stop praying.

What they wanted us to do was change prayer to a conversation in which we were nourished at the Lord's table to go out and take part in helping people stand up straight.

I hope you continue to pray.

But I hope our prayer is that we will notice people who are quite unable to stand up straight.

And that will do the work today.