Looking for the Law

a Sermon for Proper 16C
Text: Luke 13:10-17

[This is a written-out version of what I preached without notes. It is a pretty accurate recreation of the flow and wording.]


GOD of Hope and Wonder, you give us your Law and we feel the need to blind ourselves with rules. Help us to see the Law and what it truly means for us. Amen.

The story begins back in seminary. I had this professor named Jay that told us a story. It was a story about a new rector taking over in an Anglican church in Ontario, Canada. The names of the people were withheld, so I’m going to give some names to these characters. The previous rector we’ll call Fr. James. We’ll call the new rector Fr. Dan. Neither of these names has any theological meaning or deep importance for this story, they are simply names that came to me, except for Dan. This story isn’t the story of one my classmates (Dan), but I wanted to put him into this story in homage to him.

So, the story begins on Fr. Dan’s first Sunday. He does the service in the normal way. After Communion, he clears the table, comes out in front of the altar, blesses the people, dismisses them, and then processes out into the world. The second Sunday, he does the same thing. The third Sunday goes the same way. Only this time, as he is standing out in the narthex, shaking hands, a kind, older gentleman pats him on the shoulder and says:

“I hate to tell you this…[words which actually mean something else to us] but you are doing it wrong.”
“What do you mean?” Fr. Dan is confused.
“You are forgetting the special bow,” the man says. “C’mere. I’ll show you.” And the two walk back to the sanctuary so that the gentleman could demonstrate. “It goes like this. You do what you do from behind the altar, see? Then you turn to the back wall, and you bow.”

Dan, being a smart priest, tries to make sense of this. There is no cross on the wall, but the consecrated elements are kept off to the side so he asks if the bow is to the elements. “No—the middle of the wall,” the man says.

So Dan goes into the Parish Hall to ask the people at coffee hour about this “special bow” and person after person says “Oh yeah! The bow! You have to do it—I love the bow!” Dan, still completely clueless, decides to call Fr. James first thing, Monday morning to ask him what was going on.

“Fr. James. This is Dan from St. Paul’s. I know we have a lot to talk about, and we’ll do that soon, but I have to ask you about one thing: what is with the special bow?”
“What bow?”
“The special bow,” Dan says. “You would bless the people, turn to the back wall, and bow, and then process out.”
There is silence on the other end for a moment until Dan hears a deep laugh. “Dan, I wasn’t bowing. I was turning off the radiator.”

This old church used steam heat, of course, and there was a radiator right behind the altar. Fr. James would bend over, turn the cap, and turn off the heat to the nave.

Our professor told us this story for two reasons:

1. How quickly actions become liturgy. You do it a couple of times and it becomes “what we do here” and then do it a couple more times and it becomes “what we’ve always done”.
2. How we give importance to actions, regardless of their purpose. There were probably only a couple of people in the church that new what Fr. James was doing, but the rest of the congregation believed that he was doing something important and symbolic. They decided that it was important and each person concocted some deep, theological reason behind this bow. The truth was that Fr. James was just being lazy.

This is what our gospel is about today. But first, let me introduce you to the characters.

Again, these characters don’t have names and I just came up with them because I wanted them to have names.

The first character is Lucy. She is a beautiful, happy woman, who 18 years ago had a spirit come into her body and bend her over. She can’t look up; she can’t look into other people’s eyes. She can look at the floor and the ground. This is her life today.

The second character is Sam. Ignore for a minute what Jesus says about him. Sam is a good guy. He is pious; a rule follower. We would like him. He would no doubt be the president of Rotary and a well-liked member of the community. A good man. But he has one problem: he loves Lucy, but he sees her and thinks that there is nothing he can do. It is what it is.

The third character is a wandering preacher. Let’s call him…Jesus. And he is preaching away, and Lucy catches his eye. He sees her and stops mid-sentence. “This won’t do,” he says to himself and in moments, he puts his hands on her and tells her that today is a new day. All she needs to do is stand up.

And Lucy listens to him…and she stands up…and she praises GOD.

Now Sam sees this and he is irate. He is mad because 1) Jesus broke the rules and 2) he’ll catch the blowback for this. So he yells at Jesus, telling him to “Stop! You’ve broken the rules!” And, we know that if he were a good Episcopalian, there would be a second condemnation: “Lucy! What are you doing shouting in the middle of the service? Who said you could praise GOD in a church?”

And Jesus responds, not with the semantic argument that we think he does: but instead with a simple chastisement of his own: “you are breaking the law by following the rules.”

If we look at what GOD says about the Sabbath, we go back to Exodus and Deuteronomy: the two places Sabbath is described in the Ten Commandments. In Exodus it tells us that we are to keep the Sabbath day (sundown Friday to sundown Saturday) holy and we are not to work because GOD created the world in 6 days and on the 7th he rested.

So Sabbath is about rest.

Then in Deuteronomy 5, it says that we are to keep the Sabbath day holy and we are not to work because GOD liberated his people from Egypt and redeemed them.

So Sabbath is about redemption.

Rest and Redemption.

So, in the couple thousand years between Moses’s arrival with the Ten Commandments and the day Jesus walked into that synagogue, good, well intentioned people tried to figure out what GOD meant by having us not work. So they started with the farmers, the slaves, and the livestock (since they were specifically mentioned in the commandment). Then they added the housekeepers and the cooks and the shopkeepers and everybody else until they had created rules making it so everybody had to rest on the Sabbath. Whew! And they felt good about this until some smart aleck in the back asks the room “what about ______?” For us, that would be “what about doctors? Or police? Or firefighters? We have to work on our Sabbath day. So they started adding page after page of exemptions to the hundreds of rules. And Jesus knows these rules and picks out of the myriad choices—a really juicy one—and he throws it out into the middle of the room for everybody to see. It deals with livestock. Now, they aren’t talking about cute, cuddly sheep in the field necessarily. They’re talking about oxen that pull the plow or carts and goats that produce milk.

Now does anyone know the first two changes to your body when you fast? You lose water and muscle mass.

They knew that the livestock wouldn’t die with a fasting day, so this isn’t a life-or-death decision. But they wanted their livestock to be in tip-top shape for Sunday morning. They didn’t want their oxen weak or their goats to be dry and not producing milk. Jesus, mindful of the Law which says that the Sabbath is about rest and redemption looks at this rule and he says to himself “this exemption is about money.”

So he compares this exemption to the state of this woman. The livestock exemption isn’t life-or-death, but about health and vitality. There is no such exemption for the health and vitality of a woman. It is important for us to recognize that this is a woman—that she is imprisoned and in need of redemption. That she is symbolic of all of those people that are locked up, not by GOD’s Law, but by human rules based in prejudice and hatred. That Sam, in supporting the status quo, even telling her to come back tomorrow, is trying to refuse her rest and redemption on the Sabbath. But Jesus won’t wait—he does it the moment he sees her. He says “what better day than the Sabbath to give this woman rest and redemption? You have it, Sam. The people in this room have it. And now she has it.”

We’re given this wonderful example today to show us how we, by trying to be good people, condemn them instead. That we have a whole bunch of rules that we bring into this space with us: the special bows, the types of music we like, the times we stand and the times we kneel. These are all our rules, not GOD’s Law. It isn’t Jesus’s teaching. It isn’t the Kingdom of GOD. It’s our stuff.

Today, we can be mindful of all of our rules that blind us from GOD’s dreams for us. That our Sabbath might be truly about rest and redemption. And that we make time to ask ourselves and one another “who needs rest today? And who needs to be redeemed?”