August 21, 2022
Holy Spirit Vashon
Jeremiah 1.4-10
Ps 71.1-6
Hebrews 12.18-29
Luke 13.10-17
As I was beginning to think about a sermon for today and reading the lessons, I also read the Collect which you heard just a few minutes ago. “Grant, O merciful God, that your Church, being gathered together in unity by your Holy Spirit…” Church unity isn’t always our best thing, whether it’s Christians as a whole, Anglicans or Episcopalians. Ever since St. Peter was given the keys to the kingdom we’ve been busily disagreeing on large and small points so that now there are something like 20,000 “denominations” calling themselves Christians around the world.
The Episcopal Church is one of the “schismatic” churches as we famously separated from the Roman Catholic Church during the Reformation. At that point it was the Church of England. In the ensuing years, it has spread around the globe, due in large part to British colonialism, including to America. 1867 was the first gathering of 76 Anglican bishops from around the world at Lambeth, England, for the first Lambeth Conference of the loosely federated Anglican Communion. For the most part, it has met every 10 years since, the last was 2008. Just this month concluded the 15th Lambeth Conference held at Canterbury, under the auspices of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Archbishop Justin Welby. It is the Anglican Communion’s efforts toward unity of its 42 member provinces from the US to Korea to West Africa to Australia.
It hasn’t always worked smoothly and was cancelled in 2018 because the Communion had become so fractious, primarily over sexuality and gender differences between member churches, that the Archbishop thought it better to cool off for a couple years. Then COVID came and cancelled 2020. So here we are. If you tuned in to the Episcopal News Service or read the letter Bishop Rickel wrote before Lambeth began, you heard that it didn’t get off to a great start and there was significant “trepidation” (+Rickel’s word) as the bishops began to gather; once again around LGBTQ+ “issues” and it sounded like it could be a mess.
But the Holy Spirit was at work, as you here at Holy Spirit well know how that can happen, and the reports that the unity, the bonds of affection which bind these disparate global churches together, was going to hold and be strengthened. You can Google Lambeth Conference and spend the next week reviewing what they did and how.
One of the primary actions has to do with climate change or climate justice, which is an area I know is near and dear to the heart and soul of this congregation. Communion members may disagree on who can be ordained and married. They may disagree on how the bible is read and interpreted. But there was global agreement on necessity of climate action, particularly something they are calling Communion Forests; restoration work locally which may be planting trees, but also preserving prairie or wetlands, depending on your context.
In so doing, it became holy work, clearly commanded by God to care for creation, that helped ease the differences we experience theologically. Bishop Rickel’s letter toward the end of Lambeth speaks movingly about the ability of Anglican theology to loosely but intentionally hold the differences we experience with the desire to follow Jesus and the command to love. We will never “arrive” at some kind of perfect unity, as the Collect might hope; we are human, after all. But that we can make room for one another through our common bonds is the answer to prayer.
Somehow, in the circuitous workings of my brain, that brought me also to this reading from Luke about what is commonly called “the bent over woman.” [Clever title, eh?] This story wasn’t in our lectionary until the Episcopal Church adopted the Revised Common Lectionary in 2006; it took some churches several years to cycle into it to hear this reading from the pulpit for the first time.
Her story of 18 years of misery is found only in Luke. That’s not really a surprise because Luke particularly includes stories which apply to the least or the outcasts or the rejected. There are plenty of other readings in the gospels about Jesus healing or eating grain on the Sabbath but the “bent over woman” is unique.
There seem to be a couple ways we might respond to this healing on the Sabbath. The first: What’s wrong with the leader of the synagogue for crying out loud? Doesn’t he have any compassion? What if it had been his daughter? Isn’t Jesus right about untying their animals so they could be led to water? That was defined as “work” and forbidden on the Sabbath.
The second possibility: Why DID Jesus have to break the Sabbath, anyway? The woman had been bent over for 18 years. It wasn’t like she was asleep in a burning building. Couldn’t Jesus have just waited until sunset? Lane Denson wrote that Jesus could have sat with her and used that time to center her mind on the graciousness of God, searched the scriptures together and prepared rightly for a healing which wouldn’t fly in the face of Torah.
Keeping the Sabbath holy by resting from our labors is one of the Ten Commandments, given to Moses, carried around the wilderness for 40 years, protected in the Holy of Holies in the Temple in Jerusalem. It’s not like the old “blue laws” that those of us of a certain age remember, which prohibited commerce of any sort on Sundays. It’s not like dumb laws which are still on the books in every state, including Washington. I tried but could not verify, that you are forbidden from selling meat or mattresses on Sunday. [Booze is okay, though! Ha.]
It’s not even like biblical laws which generally are no longer kept: prohibitions against trimming the beard, eating pigs, rules for animal sacrifices, stoning of prostitutes and death to adulterers, or making clothes out of two kinds of fabric. This is a “Big Deal.” It’s at the core of Torah and is being defended by the leader in the synagogue. He bore the responsibility for understanding the laws in depth and interpreting them as persuasively as possible, writes Ronald Byars.
If exceptions are made, the force of the law is lost, so the safest way is to insist on the rule. We all have experiences of frustration when laws and rules are bent to the point of breaking and then have no effect whatsoever; like teenage curfews or speed limits.
So here we have in front of us two authorities; the synagogue leader and that rabble-rouser Jesus. We cannot blithely think badly of the synagogue leader; he was being as faithful as he could be, speaking out against what appeared to be a clear infraction of Torah. You cannot work on the Sabbath – see, it’s written right here…. Two people interpreting scripture from faithful perspectives and coming to two different conclusions. Sounds like the Anglican Communion and views on marriage. Man and woman? Or two people? Each view believing theirs is the most faithful interpretation of scripture and Jesus’ command to love.
And let’s not get started on the current Supreme Court which is filled with judges who view and interpret the law in completely different ways. Equally faithful people (we hope), thinking the other misguided, can come to differing conclusions, pointing out that “it says so right here…” Barbara Crafton wrote that laws and orthodoxy have many good qualities. They hold us together, connect us with the communion of saints, remind us that God endures when nothing else does. They teach us to love and learn and learn from the past. But being bound by “orthodoxy” has its negative side: It can encourage in us the belief that God is not free. That God cannot do a new thing. That we have understood God when we have mastered the rules. And we have not.
We can master the rules. We can understand them fully just like the synagogue leader. But we can never master God. By attempting to protect what was holy, he missed God doing something new. God was being restricted from transforming a life. So what’s going on here with Jesus and the bent over woman?
It would seem that Jesus is telling the synagogue leaders that keeping the Sabbath is more than strict interpretation of the law, and can include actually doing holy things; things which give life, things which deepen our relationship with God through Jesus, things which bring about the Reign of God – even on the Sabbath. Denson continues that Jesus constantly announces the coming kingdom in words and deeds that run counter to the people’s expectations. He doesn’t give them anything to confirm their present view of the kingdom and then gives them a solidly unacceptable thing which will make their minds choke.
It’s easier to stick by the rules, or as we sometimes call it in church, the “tradition.” Yet families and businesses and governments and Anglican Communion members can get stuck in the rules, and “the way we do things” like cutting off the end of the ham, just like grandma did when she baked her perfect Christmas dinners. Turns out it was only because it didn’t otherwise fit in the pan….
Being pushed out of our comfort zones raises our anxiety levels and that provokes anger which provokes fear. But in church and society our world has seen numerous and thoughtful moments when people of faith have expressed their opposition to unjust laws by doing just what Jesus did: publicly breaking them. The Lord said to Jeremiah that he was appointed not only to build and to plant, but to pull down, destroy and overthrow when that action is needed. Logic and reasoning don’t always work. Jesus is Lord of the Sabbath and he has come to give life, and give it abundantly. He set this woman free; he loosed her from the powers that bound her. The time was now.
We all come to the Lord bent over. We are weighed down by the burden of our selfishness, our egos, our demands for binding instead of loosing, our insistence on staying comfortable, our fears of something new.
This planet, our island home, is bent over. We have broken her back with our excesses, our insatiable demands for her resources, our unwillingness to change our ways, our blindness to all the data Creation is giving us. The Lambeth Communion Forest won’t solve every problem and it’s not insisting on concrete measurements like decreasing atmospheric carbon levels. But whatever we do to care for God’s creation is an act of love for this bent over woman. The time is now. Every hand up we give, every back which is straightened, every act of kindness, every actual and metaphoric tree which is planted, brings heaven to earth. They are acts of Sabbath healing. They are acts of unity.
Let’s go back and read the psalm again – together. Hear the bent over woman’s voice, hear your own voice, hear the voice of Mother Earth:
In you, O Lord, have I taken refuge;
let me never be ashamed.
In your righteousness, deliver me and set me free;
incline your ear to me and save me.
Be my strong rock, a castle to keep me safe;
you are my crag and my stronghold.
Deliver me, my God, from the hand of the wicked,
from the clutches of the evildoer and the oppressor.
For you are my hope, O Lord God,
my confidence since I was young.
I have been sustained by you ever since I was born;
from my mother’s womb you have been my strength;
my praise shall be always of you.
Amen.
Gail Wheatley+
A Franciscan Benediction
May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half truths, and superficial relationships, so that you may live deep within your heart.
May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.
May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation and war, so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and to turn their pain into joy.
And may God, Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier, bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done. Amen.