Stand up

Luke 13:10-17

Twice this week I found myself in conversation about Sunday mornings: "Why don’t people go to church?"
One of those conversations happened in our Wednesday morning Bible Study, the other at one of our summer dessert events.
In both conversations, we talked about all these other things on Sundays – football practice, and golf and school events and more. Or a busy seven day week that means that for many people “Sunday morning is the only time I get to spend time with my family.”

And someone asked me,
Isn’t that a violation of the Ten Commandments?

How does that one go?
Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God…

The word “sabbath” derives from the Hebrew root for rest. Rest in the sense of stopping, cease and desist from action or work, to sit still.
It’s something God did in creation. It’s something many of us need. And it’s a commandment: to stop what we’re doing, and be still.

And on a Sabbath day, Jesus is sitting in the synagogue, teaching, and in that congregation we notice a crippled woman, bent and twisted, visibly tied in knots.
Jesus reaches out his hands, heals her, and she stands up - every knot in her body undone and straight – and praises God.

A miracle.
But does it break the Ten Commandments?

It’s the first question that leaps to mind for the leader of that congregation.
It might seem odd to some of us that channeling the healing power of God is the sort of work prohibited by Sabbath, but the people of Israel had had more than a thousand years by that time to debate and consider what’s allowed, what’s rest, and what isn’t. And that community had come to the conclusion that God’s healing was the ordinary work of the community, and should be done on the six work days of the week (short of life or death cases).

So what Jesus does is work – as recognizable in that community as heavy lifting, operating machinery, or responding to the boss’s email on your BlackBerry is to our community.

It’s not the first time, either.
It’s the third time he’s healed someone in the synagogue on the Sabbath, according to Luke.
And, as usual, it gets him in trouble.

Jesus responds that we’ve missed the point.
Don’t all of you untie your livestock to care for them, even on Sabbath? and should not a daughter of Abraham, embraced in God’s covenant, be set free from bondage on Sabbath?

If – two thousand years later – we hear Jesus saying that the law does not apply to God, or to followers of Christ – then we’ve also missed the point.
Because what Jesus is saying makes sense only if you are listening to the whole covenant, the whole commandment.

Observe the sabbath day and keep it holy….
Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, or your son or your daughter, or your male or female slave, or your ox or your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day.

Sabbath is not leisure time, in which others work for us. Labor by livestock, servants, or anyone else is explicitly forbidden.
Because Sabbath is when God sets every one of God’s creation – donkey, slave, daughter, head of household – each one free from bondage.

Sabbath – stopping – is about being set free from the things that bind us to all of our busyness.

You and I owe the Saturday-Sunday weekend to the Labor movement and Henry Ford – and it wasn’t standard in the US until after 1938.
We owe Sunday morning sports, the working weekend, Sunday shopping and all the things that compete with church, to the cultural diversity and economic boom (yes, and the effort to dig out from recessions) of the late 20th century
(and also to Henry Ford, who thought that giving his workers a day off to spend would help the economy, and car sales).

So, if folks are shopping, working, and getting the kids to practice on Sunday instead of going to church, is that a violation of the Sabbath commandment?

No.
Because technically, it’s Saturday – the seventh day, on which God rested – not Sunday – the first day, day of light and resurrection – that we’re supposed to stop working.

And yes,
because as Jesus points out, when we ask about breaking the rules, it usually means we’ve already missed the point.

Stopping work – even God’s work, short of life or death – is a holy practice, shaped by the community to bring us closer to God.
And yet more important is to remember, by being close to God, that Sabbath is about being un-bound. And Sunday is about resurrection.

So if –in church or out – we spend a week wrapped in the busy-ness of life, forgetting resurrection, forgetting how God sets free the pain, and expectations, and fear that bind us, then we have missed the point.

We can miss that point as easily at church as at the football field.

And if we come to church because we are supposed to, even because we know it’s holy, but we don’t remember why we come, we have no business expecting the folks at brunch, or the mall, or at work today to join us at church.

Our prayers, our hymns, our Eucharist are all supposed to remind us – just like the woman healed in the synagogue – that the practice of Sabbath is to know ourselves set free – and that our natural response is to stand up straight, praising God.

So: If God has set you free
from fear or anxiety or the despair of sin, stand up.
(I mean it, stand up - but if God has set you free and you still don’t stand well, raise your head)
Free from prejudgments, unjust laws, or slavery to the expectations of culture, stand up.
From illness, or pain, stand up.
From believing that it all depends on your own success or failure, stand up.
Free to do what you love, or to love with your whole heart, stand up.
If God has set you free, and I haven’t mentioned from what, stand up.

And when we do that,
when every person in this building knows in her body and mind, in his work and rest,
that God’s covenant with us is to set us free from pain and fear and oppression – when we live the Sabbath like that,
then neither football, nor the boss, nor the busy-ness of our culture, nor anything else will separate us from the love of God.

God’s freedom and Sabbath joy will shine through us to the world.

And yes, in fact, we will be the place to be on Sunday morning. Amen.
Hallelujah!

August 22, 2010