I am going to speculate that since we are all here we have some sense of Sabbath. Sabbath is a time, a place, where we intentionally rest in God. We enter into the heart/mind of God for a period. We do it by the opening of scripture, the flow of music, by prayer, the opening of our minds and hearts to wonder about God’s purpose and to wander about our heart/mind to see where we might invite God more intentionally into our life. This is our grounding in things eternal.
The theme is woven into our psalm today. (Psalm 71:1-2, 5-6)
In you, O LORD, have I taken refuge; let me never be ashamed.
In your righteousness, deliver me and set me free; incline your ear to me and save me.
For you are my hope, O Lord GOD, *my confidence since I was young.
I have been sustained by you ever since I was born; from my mother's womb you have been my strength; my praise shall be always of you.
Praise: this is Sabbath.
The Sabbath is a day for taking refuge or rest, a day to incline toward God that God may incline back toward us. It is a day of focused praise where we lift our life God-ward. This observance of sacred time with God is at the heart of Judaism and Christianity even if we have moved it from the last day of the week to the first day, the day of resurrection.
So it is not surprising that Jesus would go to the synagogue on the Sabbath. There is a rhythm of his Sabbath worship throughout the Gospel of Luke. His humanity is thus nourished and he connects to the community as well as to the divine Other who flows through his life.
And so it is that while teaching on a Sabbath he grows deeply observant. He notices a woman.
“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.”
She has crippling arthritis or scoliosis perhaps. It is perceived a spirit has done this to her. Yet here she faithfully is.
This story takes me back to Kurt. Years ago I had a marginal parishioner with a form of crippling arthritis which should have been caught in his childhood. But it wasn’t and he had a horrible bend in his body. He struggled to look up and see ahead.
I got to know him when Kurt and Susan came for premarital counseling.
Susan was an active Roman Catholic who sang in her church choir and was once married before to a handsome Italian man. His good looks were the undoing of their marriage. But the church she loved would not remarry her because she would not seek an annulment as she had a son, Matthew. He was living proof of her marriage. So she was cautiously willing to try Kurt’s church.
In those months of counseling and in the ensuing years I saw an amazing thing. She really saw Kurt beyond his bend as no one he had known before.
And he saw her beyond the failed marriage and was willing to learn to be the step-father to her son, far more complicated than being a father, the father he had never really had. I watched as the angry edge of a man whose body was bent by arthritis by parental neglect, who had been overlooked by many because of his bend and gate and was now so deeply seen and loved, as that anger began to melt away.
This was a new beginning for a man who in two years would help lead our parish’s homeless ministry team because as he would say, “Every time I am with them I remember how blessed I am, how rich my life is right now.”
Having been seen in love he could now deeply see. Love can be very Sabbath like, a place where we are more whole. Thus Jesus was a walking Sabbath, a place where one is loved, can rest, grow insight and hope.
And I could see more deeply. When I see someone with what we call a malformation, I am grateful Kurt entered my life to teach me to look more deeply at another. Not to look away, but expectantly inward.
So too Jesus sees who is before him in this woman.
“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.”
Can you image that; 18 years and now whole, straight of spine? You see dead ahead and you are seen face on. And it is the Sabbath perhaps experienced in away it has never been the Sabbath before in your heart.
She surges with possibility and faith and hope and life. This breaks into praise. The miracle has to do with much more than her body. It is her whole outlook and presentation to the world. It has to do with how this woman was once marginalized by what? Pity, the discomfort she caused in others by her appearance, the limits of what she could do and be.
So here she is in her joy and what does she hear?
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."
Maybe he does care deeply about the Sabbath and its keeping. That would be one of his responsibilities as leader. Perhaps he cannot see the ease with which Jesus intervenes for the woman. Can you see the hump in his heart? Wanting to love God perfectly, he is kept from seeing what is before him…a woman uplifted…a way of looking out made well…an intervention of the Holy in her life and their midst. He seems to see only the law disturbed … but by what? The holy, the hope in God new born. Yet when you keep Sabbath you never know when the Holy will intervene in your life.
That is why we step into Sabbath time. Not so much to be right, to obey a rule, but to be softened, to be instructed by God’s care and love, by grace. We do so to in fact be healed of the rough edges of the world where we are always weighed and measured. Sometimes we do just fine in the dailiness of life. Sometimes we do not.
How often does a rule stand in our way of seeing what God is doing before us? Rules are important. They help shape reality and how we interact with it. They also have the possibility of blocking our compassion. They can lower our outlook and cripple our compassion. We need the softening stock of God.
Jesus does wear thin here, impatient.
"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?”
There are two conflicting laws about this care for cattle in the Law. In one you do no work including caring for livestock. In another you show this care. In such cases there is a tendency to follow what preserves property. Jesus goes on.
“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?”
We can hear this Gospel in many ways. There are two I would suggest are worth our noting.
One is in Church. We may do Sabbath variously. Different things feed and nourish us. Some need silence, some need conversation. Some like loud clashing music, some like gentle soothing tunes. Or we may like each as they modulate through the texture of liturgy, helping us look outward and then quietly inward. Some are managing children who find quiet difficult, some never need to carry this concern. Some come to escape the press of life, to disconnect; while others come to connect and find close community. God is in all these needs. Wherever we are on any scale, allow ourselves to be fed and create the appreciation that others may be seeking something different. Sabbath asks us...instructs us...to be patient with each other always as we learn each other. This is the work of the Holy among us.
Another way to hear this Gospel is to look out for those who live outside the easy rules or recognitions or success of society. Society can cripple and bend us so it is hard to look straight on, to feel seen for our true selves. The glaring examples just now are undocumented people, illegal we call them. Some are afraid to go to church as from time to time federal agents wait outside them to check papers and deport.
There are those who live what appears a marginal life by virtue of poor education, poor birth, mental illness, perhaps addiction, childhood neglect or abuse, or by virtue of growing old with too little.
When we look at them, when they cross our paths either physically or as images on in media, when we form political opinions about them, we do well to ask, how can we work together for healing and wholeness? How can we breathe Sabbath into society? Do my actions and my opinions reflect Jesus’ Sabbath words; “you are set free from your ailment.” Do we take Sabbath time to hold the lives of others as sacred to the God who creates us all and as the psalmist teaches, “has sustained us ever since we were born.”
Sabbath is not a rule, it is a relationship treasured. It is an arena of our remaking, to be made more whole. May your Sabbath be deep.
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