11th Sunday after Pentecost, 08/25/2019

Sermon on Luke 13:10-17, by David Zersen

Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. 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. 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. 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.” But the Lord answered him and said, “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? 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?” When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame; and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing.

HAVE YOU DONE ANYTHING WONDERFUL TODAY?

As preachers know all too well, there are many angles that can be taken with a text. Homileticians, the men and women who teach preaching, like to insist that any text, a pericope, the section of Scripture “carved out” to be used as a lesson, has essentially one point. A preacher should try to determine that point and use the other parts of the text as well as the other lessons appointed for a day to support or establish that point. Notwithstanding, many a preacher practices what the homileticians call eisegesis, in other words, they read their own interests into a text. If I’ve been thinking about older people, for example, this would provide a good text to do eisegesis about the elderly. If I’ve been troubled by hypocrisy in the media recently, this text might give me the spring board to show how even Jesus had to deal with hypocrites. If I’ve been struggling with a long-standing illness, for example, this text could allow me to show how Jesus did instantaneous cures. Recently I heard Joel Osteen, the popular TV preacher from the Lakewood Church in Houston, say that very thing. On the one hand, I think that Joel Osteen is a remarkable communicator who has an ability to address human concerns in a popular and powerful way. However, his theological orientation, sometimes known as the “prosperity gospel”, seeks to demonstrate, no matter the text, that God wants you whole, healthy, happy and wealthy. Using such theology, if you are ill, then you simply need to claim the health that God wants for you, here and now. Just as Jesus healed the crippled women in the text, so euthus, straightway or immediately, in English, the woman was cured. I was moved by Osteen’s use of many biblical texts to make his point, but to assume that the same healing could have taken place for everyone and anyone is to me to foist a personal theology on biblical texts that can’t be justified. I’ve said more about this than I perhaps need to, or more than the text is calling me to say, in order to make the point that the homileticians, the teachers of preaching, have a point when they say that the preacher is to seek the message that the text wants to bring us, not one that we want to impose on the text.

Often we readers of biblical texts are fortunate to have one in which a concluding sentence brings out the impact with clarity. This is certainly true in the case of this pericope. The writer of Luke’s Gospel tells us that the opponents were shamed by Jesus’ words and the crowds were rejoicing because of the wonderful things that he was doing. It is in that concluding thought that we have to find our text’s meaning and to consider if there is anything wonderful that we, in the spirit of Jesus, could be doing today.

When rules constrict our lives inappropriately

None of us wants to live in a lawless society where anyone can do whatever he or she chooses. I’ve been reading a book entitled as we forgive by Catherine Claire Larson that recounts the terrible atrocities experienced by the victims of the Rwandan genocide of the 1990s. There had been a long history of tension between the Tutsi’s and the Hutus, two majority ethnic tribes, but as the tensions were exacerbated by radio broadcasts, political manifestos and even statements by clergy, hatred and anger grew to such a point than no laws, no self-restraint, could any longer subdue the desire to attack, to maim, to kill. Within months people were hacked to pieces by machete knives in fields, in stadiums and in churches. 800,000 people, perhaps even more, were finally annihilated until the United Nations and individual countries agreed that this was, in fact, genocide and had to be stopped. My point is simply that no one wants live in such a lawless society. A society without laws is no longer a society—no longer a human enterprise.

In the context of today’s text, there were those who felt that the constraints that had been provided by commandments and rules were being ignored and such lawless behavior could not be tolerated. At some level, such sensitivity should be respected. “All power to the Pharisees,” we might say in an appropriate context. On the other hand, many rules seem to provide controls that not all feel are necessary. And there are many modern counterparts to rules that Pharisees felt it important to enforce. “Healing on the Sabbath” was equivalent to “not keeping the Sabbath holy” (3rd Commandment) for the religiously serious. And saying raca (Aramaic for “empty headed”) was even considered by Jesus to be so disrespectful that it is was equivalent to denigrating/disregarding/even killing another and, therefore, a disobedience of the 5th Commandment.

In our religious communities, we can appreciate that some are concerned that laws are being disobeyed while others feel that certain constrictions are no longer necessary. I well remember a colleague who knelt with me at the communion rail and said “blasphemy” when a young woman carried the tray of chalices to him. And when some young girls wear short shorts to church or adults dress as casually as they might for a back-yard picnic, others present, even today, might feel that God is not being honored or respected with such dress. The concern for all of us if we feel challenged by another’s words, lifestyle, or actions is to ask whether practices that seem to offend us are actually enforced by biblically mandated ethics. So many practices in the church or in society have changed in adult lifetimes that it is difficult for many to cope. We may not like the music or a liturgy-free worship experience or the openness to worship leadership that no longer respects gender or sexual orientation restrictions employed in earlier years. And in each case, we need to decide whether the control mechanisms which have been relaxed are freedoms that we could find uplifting or whether they are challenges to truths that honor God. Most important is that we talk with one another and pray with another about the issues that concern us because our mutual ministry to one another is always important. If we don’t console and support one another in our deliberations, then like the Pharisees in the text we may feel shamed and hurt that rules by which we live are being flaunted.

When freedoms emancipate us to greater worship

The question which remains for us is how we can be set free from unnecessary legalisms to be able to regard our new-found freedom as “wonderful”? Even more profoundly, the question to be asked is how we can be seen as supportive of another’s freedom to the degree that our own now emancipated support is considered “wonderful”?

I remember a high-school teenager in a suburban community who insisted on coming to church dressed in “Oshkosh-By-Gosh” overalls with the straps over her shoulders. Her parents were mortified and others perhaps thought that she wasn’t showing proper respect. I remember a charismatic woman who periodically announced in meetings that she had the gift of discernment and that she knew that people were speaking dishonestly and hypocritically. I remember a man who insisted we not allow women to usher because everybody knew that in a disagreement, a woman could not apologize like a man could! There are so many incidents in hindsight that now seem humorous, even ridiculous, although they were

troublesome at their time. When Jesus calls his audience to see that not all practices have to be followed, that not all rules are intended for all time, he’s not encouraging lawlessness. He’s inviting us to let go of attitudes and practices that no longer have the force of truth that they once did. He’s encouraging us to see that freedom from some rules and practices can lead us all to a greater reverence and worship than once was possible.

I spoke earlier about new insights that were being provided to people who had done immoral, illegal, inhumane things by savagely killing their relatives, their friends and neighbors because they had been tempted to believe that being members of a different ethnic group was wrong, evil, contemptuous. The genocide in Rwanda was horrific. “You shall not kill” as a basic commandment instilled in many of these Christian people among the Hutus and Tutsi did not work any longer, did control the hatred. Now what after 800, 000 people were slaughtered? Could a man look a woman in the eye after he’d killed her children? Could a group of teens incited by the hatred of adults who should have known better dare to walk back into a village in which they had slaughtered people? Could one live again after all laws were broken?

It took weeks, months, and years. For some it will never happen, the ability to accept forgiveness or even to forgive oneself. But for many thousands, an entire country is now pursuing a policy of sitting down, looking one another in the eyes, speaking about evil as a reality and then about forgiveness as an emancipating freedom. Personally, I get all choked up when I try to think about this process. I can’t even imagine how it works. But I listen carefully as I read about the voices who are telling that there can be no future unless the past is set aside and new beginnings are forged in respect and hope.

In each of our lives there are much milder forms of tension, disruption, or severance that occurs when relationships are broken, marriages are dissolved and agreements are overturned. When such things happen, the anger is at times so overpowering that we have no hope for a future with those from whom we have become estranged. But time heals. Sure it does. More powerful than time, however, is the disruptive lesson in today’s text. There were rules about breaking the Sabbath. Ok. But Jesus was compelled in that moment to live by a greater rule, the rule of compassion and love for a woman in trouble. In Rwanda, as in every country, there are rules—rules of justice that should be applied when people have been wronged. However, the greater rule—the greater love—is to learn how one can move into a new environment in which freedom from the past makes entrance into the future possible.

Today there are opportunities for us to move from our pasts into an emancipating future. When we take the responsibility and the faith to pursue what may come through soft words or hard work, others can rejoice and call it wonderful. It is the one most important point in today’s text-- that we demonstrate to others how in some circumstances we are freed from those traditions and laws that lack compelling authority. We are free even to express a love and forgiveness which others may have thought impossible for us.

Today we are enabled to express it because in Jesus’s own love we have experienced something wonderful-- something we want family members, friends and colleagues, even strangers to experience through us.

The Rev. David Zersen

E-Mail: djzersen@gmail.com

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