The Rev. Austin K. Rios
21st August 2022: Proper 16
For the last five Sundays, we’ve explored different aspects of personal discipleship and how giving our allegiance to God alone and committing ourselves to Christ’s pattern of life and action produces the mature fruits of the new creation.
I’ve encouraged all of you to spend time reviewing your baptismal covenant and how that call expresses itself in acts of service and connection.
Has this renewed focus on the heart of your calling in God changed the way you live each day?
Have you been more readily able to identify the subtle idols that vie for your loyalty, and leave their lures for a deeper engagement with God and your neighbors?
I hope so!
This kind of work is less a sprint, but more a life-long pilgrimage—so be encouraged by the small steps you make and stay committed to keep walking forward with your faithful companions.
Today, we encounter Jesus and his disciples toward the end of their chapters long journey from Galilee to Jerusalem in the Gospel of Luke.
The episode before us is unique to Luke’s Gospel, and the central figure is a woman who has suffered for 18 years with a spinal condition that causes her to be bent forward and unable to stand up straight.
If any of you have experienced even the smallest taste of back pain before, you know just how debilitating it can be.
But this poor woman’s condition is beyond back pain—her whole life perspective is altered because of being unable to stand straight.
Imagine for a moment that your everyday view was of the dust and people’s feet instead of their faces?
Imagine how your condition would isolate you from the rest of the community, and how being unable to work as others do would vastly reduce your options for survival?
This condition would rule your life, and after 18 years, you’d most likely have given up hope of any other way of existing in this world.
But on this particular sabbath, the prophet that raised the widow of Nain’s son from the dead, who cast out demons in Gentile country, and who fed thousands in Galilee is suddenly outside your synagogue near Jerusalem.
You don’t see his face, but you can hear his voice.
And when he says, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment,” and lays his hands on you, more than a chill runs up your spine.
Suddenly you are no longer bowed low, a slave to the condition, but you are looking into the loving eyes of the Holy One who has just set you free.
What would be your response from such a dramatic liberation?
Who could stop you from praising God for the new life that is now open to you?
You didn’t beg for the healing—even if you had longed for it each day of those 18 years—but the grace of God present in this prophet has given it to you anyway.
The woman in today’s Gospel immediately began praising God, the kind of praise that spontaneously arises in response to a soul’s freedom—the kind of praise that cannot be stifled because it flows from the springing up of living water in the heart.
For a community that spent its sabbaths remembering the mighty works of God, and especially remembering the way God rescued us from slavery, provided for us in the wilderness, and then blessed us to be a blessing to the nations—you’d think today’s miracle would be cause for celebration.
For affirmation of God’s continued presence and power—for God’s ability to continue the Exodus work on deeper and even more personal levels.
And yet, while the woman cannot stop praising God, the leader of the synagogue sees in this miracle a threat to his power.
The indignant leader doesn’t even take his concerns about this miracle occurring on the Sabbath to Jesus first, but instead seeks to control the crowd and make this miracle not about God’s glory and liberation but about laws concerning the Sabbath.
Never mind that the prohibitions about doing work on the sabbath are about the whole community participating in God’s liberating nature—animals, foreigners, and all those who were once slaves in Egypt.
Never mind that the laws of the Sabbath exist so that the people will remember the creative goodness of God and seek to channel that into everyday living.
Never mind that the whole point of the Sabbath is to reconnect us to God and to the whole community just as this suffering woman has been reconnected.
For this leader—who sadly represents way too many church leaders of our day and age—holding to a narrow version of Sabbath law has become more important than the liberating reality to which it points.
Of course, Jesus can debate him on this lesser battlefield—after all, he is struggling against the powers and principalities and with underlying forces that infect this leader and so many others.
But instead of a time for celebration and a time for coming together, this particular sabbath turns into a political struggle.
Jesus wins the crowd at the end of the day, but the leader’s inability to embrace the exodus of this woman and the liberation that portends for the people, soon turns into the assassination plot that will end in Jesus’ crucifixion.
And is there any clearer example of what can happen when we value the letter of the law more than its Spirit?
What is the Spirit of God saying to us today through the details of this gospel?
Who among us needs Jesus to set us free from a burden that has kept us bowed low and separated from community life for too long?
Are we, as members of the Church, at times so concerned with maintaining the laws and rituals that have been passed down to us that we miss the expressions of their power among us?
How might we find opportunities to celebrate the way God’s grace abounds among us and allow God to work through us to raise up those who are bowed low in our world with God’s help?
Is there a path to both hold fast to the life-giving traditions that shape us and connect us to God and one another, without limiting the time, place, or recipients of the Spirit’s inbreaking?
Consider these questions well this week dear people of God.
The Church’s mission is to participate in the loving and liberating work of God that found expression in the Exodus, and full flower in the life and ministry of Jesus Christ.
We are to remember the Sabbath and keep it holy so that we can better love God by resting and becoming receptive to God’s will.
We are to remember the Sabbath and keep it holy so that we might better love and connect with the people God longs to free from systems of oppression and all sorts of conditions.
Spend time opening your eyes and ears and heart to ways in which God is working both within and outside your comfort zones.
Keep on the pilgrimage path we’ve been exploring these past weeks, and for God’s sake—
Let every Sabbath day, and every instance of God’s saving power be not a reason to fear, but a cause for unstoppable praise, reconnection, and celebration.