Sabbath Freedom (sermon, August 22, 2010)

Deuteronomy 5:1-15
Luke 13:10-17

What does Sunday mean to you? Maybe it’s your day to catch up on housework, yard work, homework, sleep. Maybe it’s a day for lazy afternoons spent watching the game. But since you are in church, at least today, let’s assume for a moment that Sunday is the day you set aside to worship God. Why? Do you wake up on Sunday morning longing to encounter the God who created you and saved you, to confess your sin, to hear readings from the Bible, to pray? Or do you come to church because someone else in your life, maybe a parent or spouse, encouraged--or, let’s be frank, demanded--that you join them? Maybe you come simply out of habit, because it’s what you’ve always done on Sundays, church on Sunday is where you see your friends, hear music that you don’t hear anywhere else, and get filled up with a satisfied feeling that hopefully lasts at least until Monday morning. What does Sunday mean to you? (1)

For Laura Ingalls Wilder, who grew up on the midwestern frontier in the 1870’s and 1880’s, Sundays meant tortuous boredom. On Sundays, she and her sisters were not allowed to shout or run. They could not quilt, sew, or knit. They could look quietly at their paper dolls, but they couldn’t make anything new for them. They could look at the pictures in their family Bible or in the one other book in the house, The Wonders of the Animal World. For an energetic five year-old, Sundays were miserable.

But Laura’s father assured her that her grandfather and his two brothers had it even worse. When Laura’s grandfather was a boy, Sunday, or, more accurately, the Sabbath, began at sundown on Saturday night, when all work or play must stop. On Sunday morning, they ate a cold breakfast, since nothing could be cooked, and then they slowly and solemnly walked to church, since hitching the horses to the wagon was considered work. The boys had to sit straight and still and perfectly quiet through a two-hour church service and then walk slowly home, where they ate another cold meal. For the rest of the afternoon they sat on a hard bench and studied their catechism until the sun went down and the Sabbath was over. (2)

Although we may not take it quite so seriously as they did back then, most of us probably still associate Sunday with a day of rest from our labors. After all, wasn’t that the whole reason behind the Sabbath commandment? In Exodus 20, the first place in the Old Testament where the Ten Commandments occur, the Sabbath commandment goes like this: “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; you shall not do any work...For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day...” (Exodus 20:8-11)

In this version of the Ten Commandments, observing the sabbath is about creation and work. God created the world in six days but on the seventh God rested. The idea behind the sabbath seems to be that if God can create a universe out of nothing and still have a day left over to rest, then there is no reason we shouldn’t be able to get our work done in six days either.

The problem is, once the Israelites received that commandment they got confused about what exactly God meant by “work.” In an attempt to clarify this, Jewish scholars and religious leaders came up with 613 additional laws that laid out exactly what people could and could not do on the Sabbath. That made the Sabbath a day during which people constantly worried they might unintentionally do some work and break the commandment.

The story we heard today from the gospel of Luke wasn’t the first time Jesus messed with people’s understanding of the Sabbath, and it wouldn’t be the last. The work Jesus came to do was the work of teaching and healing and loving all people, and he did his work just as freely on the Sabbath as on any other day of the week, and it always, always provoked anger in the religious leaders. Rules are there for a reason, after all, and the leaders were there to make sure the rules were kept. It was their job to keep things at the synagogue running smoothly. Their frustration at Jesus’ habit of disrupting and, in their eyes, dishonoring, the Sabbath was understandable.

In today’s story, Jesus doesn’t even wait for someone to ask for healing. He’s up in front, teaching when suddenly he sees her...a woman, bent nearly double by what in those days was called a spirit. For eighteen years, this woman had to look at the world from an awkward, painful angle. She was an outcast, an object of sympathy. Jesus doesn’t wait for her to maneuver herself into a position from which she could see him. Instead he interrupts his own teaching to call out to her, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment!” And he goes to her and he touches her, this woman everyone else considered untouchable...and her pain disappears and her disease leaves her and she stands as straight as a young woman, lifting her arms and praising the Lord.

But before the first full Alleluia is out of her mouth, the leader of the synagogue is running over, ready to put a stop to it all. “Come on!” he says to Jesus. “You have six days a week to do your work, why do you have to do it today?” He does have a point. I mean, that woman had lived with a bent back for eighteen years. Was one more day really going to make a difference? Why did she have to be healed today of all days, the day on which God commanded us to do no work?

Well, if Exodus chapter 20 was the only place we find the Sabbath Commandment, that leader would have had a point. But as we heard earlier, the same commandments are repeated in the book of Deuteronomy. There, all of the commandments are the same as those in Exodus 20, except for the commandment about the Sabbath. The Israelites are commanded to do no work on the seventh day, not because God rested, but as a way of remembering that the Israelites were once slaves in the land of Egypt until the Lord set them free. In other words, Sabbath-keeping is a way of remembering our freedom. It is a day of redemption, of being saved, of being set free. In fact, the early Christians moved the observed day of the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday because it was the day Jesus was set free from his grave and the day we too were set free from bondage to death.

The religious leaders may have thought that the point of the Sabbath was to do no work, but Jesus knows there is more to Sabbath than that. If there are people bound by disease or addiction or any other kind of evil spirit that never takes the day off, then there is no better day than the Sabbath to unbind them. “Woman,” he says, “you are set free from your ailment.”

Too often our rules and perceptions about Sunday have been rooted in tradition rather than in freedom or creation. Jesus makes this clear to the leaders who criticize him for healing the woman. One of those 613 Sabbath rules was that you could untie -- in other words, set free -- your ox or donkey so that they could get a drink. So how could anyone argue that on this day of all days, a beloved child of God should not be set free from her physical bondage, free to praise God with all her body, heart, mind, and soul, free to proclaim to all who would listen the power of the living God?

Jesus simply refuses to be bound by the rules and regulations we create for God and for ourselves as Jesus’ followers. In Jesus, God comes to us, not to chastise us for the rules we have broken, but to set us free from the chains that have bound us.

When was the last time you got up on Sunday and came to church out of a delicious sense of freedom? Not out of obligation or because you thought it was what you should do, but because you wanted and needed to be reminded of the ways God has set you free? Free from the demands of our materialistic culture, free from the guilt that clings to us throughout the week, free from the fear of what others will think if we reach out to those on the margins, free from our fears about what the future holds and how death will come for us. Too often we don’t experience that longing for freedom on Sunday or any day, because, just as in Jesus’ time, our traditions and expectations around how we are supposed to look and act in church and as a church stifles the very freedom Jesus came to bring.

The good news of this story is that Jesus is not concerned about rules and regulations and what is considered the “right” way to behave in church or as a church. Jesus just wants to set people free, no matter how crippled you are, no matter what binds you, no matter how long you have been bound, no matter if Jesus just freed you a week ago and you’re back again all tangled up in the same old chains. Jesus came to set us free...and not just so that we can worship and serve God according to rules we’ve created. As Jesus tells the religious leaders, our freedom is not just for us, but also for others. We are set free to reach out to the least of these--the outcast, the sinner--with deepest love and compassion. We are set free to do what Jesus would do, no matter what day of the week it is.

In the projects of LA, there was a church that decided to open its doors to homeless immigrants during the week. Every night, homeless and undocumented workers would sleep in the church. On Sundays, the priest and some of the dedicated women of the church would come early and do everything they could to eliminate the smell the men left behind. They’d sprinkle “Love My Carpet” all over and then vacuum like crazy. They’d put scented candles and bowls of potpourri in strategic places. They’d burn incense. But the smell persisted and people grumbled.

Finally, in worship one day, the priest decided to face the problem head on. During the sermon, he asked the congregation a question: “What’s the church smell like?” People were mortified. Women began to search diligently in their purses, men looked anywhere but at the pulpit. “Come on,” the priest said, “What’s it smell like?”
Finally, an old man who never cared what people thought anyway, called out, “Smells like feet!”
“Exactly,” the priest replied. “And why does it smell like feet?”
“Because many homeless men slept here last night,” a woman answered.
“Why did we let that happen?” asked the priest.
“It’s what we committed to do,” said someone else.
“And why would we commit to that?” asked the priest.
“Because it’s what Jesus would do,” someone said.
“Well then...what does the church smell like now?” the priest said.
“It smells like commitment,” one man called out.
“It smells like roses!” another woman shouted, and the everyone there nodded and smiled. (3)

That church smelled like Sabbath freedom. And freedom doesn’t often smell so sweet. Let’s face it: rules are easier; it’s easier to try to control people than to set them free. But every time Jesus heals on the Sabbath he reminds us that he came to set us free, yes, so that we might now the wonder of the love and freedom he offers, but also so that we might share that freedom with others, family and friends, strangers and outcasts. Jesus sets us free and sends us out to proclaim the good news, so that all people, no matter what they look like, smell like, or act like, may stand up straight and freely praise the Lord, on any day of the week. Alleluia! Amen.

Endnotes:
1. Thanks to David Lose for his article “Sunday, Sunday” on Working Preacher for this approach.
2. Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House in the Big Woods. Harper Trophy, 2004, pp. 83-89.
3. Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart. Free Press, 2010.