Today's Sermon

 

"Following the Rules"

 

Deuteronomy 5:12-15    
Observe the sabbath day and keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you. For 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.

Luke 13:10-17
Now Jesus 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.

It will likely come as no surprise to most of you that I am a rule follower.  I always have been.  I rarely got in trouble as a child because I loved to follow the rules. (Much to my younger sister’s dismay, who says I did not adequately prepare my parents for her rule-breaking tendencies.)

My spouse is not nearly as much of a rule follower, which has led to many moments of anxiety for me, when she breaks a rule that I think should be followed.  One that we have often disagreed about is how much our dogs need to be on a leash.  Our current dog is crazy – he definitely needs to be leashed.  But when I met Camie, she had two very well-behaved dogs that she liked to leave unleashed when we went hiking in open space areas. I remember one specific day when we brought them to the beach up in Bodega Bay.  Dogs were allowed on the beach, but the rules specifically stated that they needed to remain leashed.  However, the beach was relatively empty, and we weren’t worried about them causing trouble, so Camie convinced me to let them off the leash.

All was going well until I happened to look up to the parking area that was on top of a bluff and saw a ranger pulling up.  Panic! I was going to get caught breaking a rule!  I didn’t know what to do, so the first thing out of my mouth was, “Ranger!  Run!”  Yes, my first instinct, when caught, was to run from the law.  Not my finest moment.  Also, we were on a wide-open beach … where did I think I was going to go? Thankfully, the ranger was only there to take care of something in the parking lot … they didn’t even come down to the beach area.  But it sure took a while for my heart rate to settle after that.  Being a rule breaker is just not for me.

Because I am a rule follower, I definitely read this story from Luke’s Gospel through a certain lens. Specifically, I feel some kinship with the leader of the synagogue.  I realize that he can very easily be cast as the villain in this story, daring to speak out against what Jesus has done.  Truly, Jesus has done an amazing and miraculous thing.  He has healed a woman who has been crippled for 18 years.  18 years moving through life bent over at the waste.  18 years of seeing very little except the ground in front of her.  One touch from Jesus and she is able to stand up straight. What an amazing miracle!  That certainly calls for rejoicing.

However, the synagogue leader does not rejoice.  In fact, the story says that he is indignant.  A wonderful, life-giving moment has just occurred … how could he possibly be upset?  He is upset because this miraculous healing happened on the sabbath – the day that no work is supposed to be done.  He likely would have been totally fine with the healing happening on any other day – in fact, he probably would have been rejoicing along with the others – but, in his mind, healing on the Sabbath breaks a rule and that is no good.

It's easy to understand why he is often seen as the villain.  Come on, man, this woman has been healed after 18 years!  Have some compassion.  Don’t be such a nay-sayer.  But, he is not necessarily in the wrong here.  He is following the rules.  I, as a fellow rule follower, can absolutely understand where he is coming from.  Even if he wants to rejoice in this woman’s healing, even if he is overjoyed on her behalf, breaking this sabbath law could be the beginning of a very slippery slope.  If he is OK with Jesus breaking this rule, what other rules will be broken? We have rules and laws in order to be able to function together as a society.  How quickly will we descend into chaos if we start breaking laws right and left?

That being said, Jesus didn’t necessarily break the law.  This sabbath law, as described in Deuteronomy, is rather vague – “Observe the sabbath day and keep it holy, as the Lord you God commanded you.  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 …”  However, what, exactly, is work?  As time went by, this law – as with many of the laws of the time – got stricter and stricter and stricter.  The religious leaders got so focused on legalism and a narrow interpretation of the ancient laws, that there became very little room for grace or for love. 

Then, Jesus appeared on the scene. Jesus, who was motivated by love, not legalism.  Jesus, began to challenge many of the legal interpretations of the time.  He did make it very clear that he came not to abolish the law, but to fulfill the law. Not to get rid of the rules, but to help people reconsider how the rules were followed.  Time after time in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus says, “You have heard it said” – and then he mentions one of the restrictive religious laws. Then he says, “But I say to you” – and he reinterprets the law in a way that allows it to breathe, offering more grace, more hope, more healing.

This is what he does with the sabbath law in this story.  He reminds the people that the very reason the sabbath was created (in the Deuteronomy version) was to remind the people that they were once slaves in Egypt. Slaves who never got a day off. Slaves who always had to work. And then God freed them. Sabbath is a time to remember that freedom. Sabbath is not meant to bind us with a strict adherence to rules or to cause anxiety about what we can and cannot do.  Instead, it is meant to release us from what binds us in order to focus more clearly on God. 

Presbyterian pastor MaryAnn McKibben Dana struggled with this when her family decided to intentionally add sabbath time into their weekly routine.  In her book, “Sabbath in the Suburbs,” she writes that one of the first questions she asked herself was, “What is work?”  She explains, “We have a child who’s barely out of diapers.  Our daughters are only self-entertaining for periodic bursts.  There’s a basic level of upkeep involved in everyday living.  Another gray area: I am a hopeless ‘Cleaner-as-I-Go.’ If I’m walking upstairs and I see a pair of shoes that need to be taken up, what do I do? What if it’s a ten-pound laundry basket instead of a pair of shoes?  Does it matter?  And what about food?  Cooking is work, and mealtimes are a big chore around here right now.  All these decisions have my mind spinning.”[i]

Do you feel her anxiety building?  We can so easily end up being bound by the rules that are supposed to release us.

According to Jesus, what better way to celebrate and honor a release from bondage than to release a woman from that which has bound her for 18 years?  For Jesus, this is not breaking a sabbath law, but fulfilling it. So in this story we end up with Jesus and the synagogue leader holding two very different opinions about how to follow the rules … neither of whom is wrong.  I have to say, this starts to get very complicated for me, the rule follower. Jesus, however, is trying to tell us that it really is not that complicated.  Jesus teaches us to always choose love.  To always choose grace.  If a rule or a law or a tradition is keeping someone from flourishing, we need to give it another look.

You can imagine that this particular story is super fun to teach in Sunday School.  Hey kids, let’s hear about when Jesus challenged the rules of his time and then let’s talk about how we can be like Jesus!  You may guess that we don’t go about teaching this story in quite that way.  Instead, we focus on how Jesus always found ways to be as loving, as welcoming, as inclusive as he could be … even if he ruffled some feathers along the way.  Not abolishing the law, but fulfilling it in the most loving way he could.

This is a tough concept not just for kids, but for adults as well.  How do we find the balance between following the rules that hold us together as a society and living with the love and grace of God that also holds us together as a society?  Theologian David Lose explains this in article he wrote titled, “The Law of Love.”

Lose writes, “The law matters because it helps us order our lives and keep the peace. The law matters because it sets needed boundaries that create room in which we can flourish. The law matters because it encourages us — sometimes even goads us — to look beyond ourselves so that we might love and care for our neighbor.  But as important as law is, it must always bow to mercy, to life, to freedom. Law helps us live our lives better, but grace creates life itself. Law helps order our world, but grace is what holds the world together. For above and beyond all the laws ever received or conceived, the absolute law is love.”[ii]

I think about this when I listen to all of the current debates about how to interpret various laws in our day and age.  What do we do about the 2^ndAmendment and the right to bear arms … a law that was written before machine guns were invented?  How do we interpret the law when it comes to the right to have an abortion?  Or to marry someone of any gender?  The list goes on and on. 

And, as Jesus and the synagogue leader show us, people can technically be “right” on various sides of any given issue.  Just as Jesus calls us to show grace in how we follow the rules, he also calls us to show grace to one another.  In the same article I mentioned earlier, David Lose offers the following challenge, “let us look at those around us as children of the same God, resist the urge to assume we know the law better than others, and know that others are living with very different realities than we are.”

It makes me wonder how we, as a church community, can help to offer the reality of love and grace. How might we offer an environment that promotes flourishing and freedom?  Ann Morisy is a British author and theologian who has done a lot of work around inclusion in religion.  She offers three hallmarks of what she calls, “healthy religion.”

1. Healthy religion does not indoctrinate, but helps people think for themselves.
2. Healthy religion invites humility about what we think we know.
3. Healthy religion invests in what it is for and not what it is against.[iii]

I hope that we, as a Westminster community, are doing all three.  I hope that we are not dictating how people should follow the rules, but instead inviting people into a place of choosing God’s love and grace for themselves.  I hope we are always looking to learn and grow together, with a willingness to change when necessary.  I hope we are not setting ourselves up in opposition to people or structures or ideas, but instead looking for ways to build bridges and community even when we disagree about how to follow the rules. 

Which leads me to David Lose’s final point.  “How is Jesus inviting us even now to release others from bondage and set them free, even if it means suspending or revising our sense of the law?  I know this is scary. Will things fall apart if we get it wrong? That’s the way it is with love: no guarantees, no assurance of having it turn out the way you thought it was supposed to, no absolutes. Except this: the God who gave the law out of love continues to love us and all the world, no matter what.”  Amen.

 

[i]Sabbath in the Suburbs, by MaryAnn McKibben Dana, pg. 13.

[ii]https://www.workingpreacher.org/dear-working-preacher/the-law-of-love-2

[iii]https://www.mi-di.de/media/pages/materialien/ann-morisy-inklusive-mission/e9341f1b4d-1598447777/arbeitsmaterial-ann-morisy-inklusive-mission.pdf