Wait for the Glory Things

 Luke 13:10-17

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My first summer in seminary I did a field placement in a United Methodist Church retirement community.  One of the residents, Annie, suffered the condition that this woman in our reading suffered.  It’s more than just being hunched over.  It’s completely bent over at the waist and unable to stand up.  My first encounter with Annie was interesting.  She had a reputation for being abrasive and grumpy which she lived up to.  It was nearing a mealtime and so the residents were making their way to the dining hall. I could hear Annie coming up behind me from down the hall.  She used a simple old style, inexpensive, rattle-tattle, metal walker that she was quite rough on.  Sometimes she rolled it, and sometimes she picked it up and slammed it down.  She came up beside me.  She was thin and quite wiry with long, white hair.  She turned her head to the side and looked up at me with what seemed to be a permanent scowl and quite abruptly said, “Who are you?”  I answered, “I’m Randy.  I’m a chaplain intern here for the summer.”  She abruptly replied, “Oh.” Then, she looked at me again and grunted, “Hmph”, and down the hall she went to the dining room.  I asked the fulltime chaplains about her later that day and they said “That’s Annie.  She’s a bit...”  

I always think of Annie when I come across this passage and why she was so, for lack of a better word, grumpy.  Think about it.  Try to imagine being in her place, in her situation of never being able to stand up straight.  You can never stand eye-to-eye with someone.  Hugs are very “quite awkward”.  If you have to walk in the midst of a crowd of people as we were, there’s no seeing where you’re going.  Most of what you see are backsides.  Then to look at someone, you have to torque your head to the side and look up.  To see where you’re going you have to crank your head back.  Being bent over like that puts a person in a posture where people are always looking down on you seemingly with a bit of pity.  I don’t know if she was in pain, but I can’t imagine her not being in considerable pain, especially her neck.  Pain messes with you…especially chronic pain.  Her perspective would have already been a bit damaged by the angle of lowered status from which she had to view life but then the depression that accompanies chronic pain would have put all that on over the edge.  It would take a very resilient person to not be grumpy.  And who knows what else she had been through in life.  What loses she may have suffered and the grief she bore.  That Annie hurt was so obvious and so it’s not fair just to write her off as grumpy.  She needed to be uplifted, strengthened in spirit so she could straighten and stand in wholeness. I always tried to be especially kind to her when I saw her, though my greetings were usually met by a grunt.  Eventually, I did get a smile one day. One can only keep trying.

Looking here in Luke, we find a woman bent over like Annie whose situation was dramatically changed by Jesus.  She got to stand up straight again and praise God for Jesus healed her.  She had what Luke calls “a spirit of weakness” from whom Jesus set her free.  It was a spirit, some sort of entity, that had her bent over so that she couldn’t stand up straight.  Like Annie she wasn’t able to look up.  People were always looking down at her.  They probably also considered her cursed and would have been unwilling to have any kind of contact with her.  Considerable pain likely affected her outlook.  Chronic pain is debilitating in every way – emotionally, psychologically, even spiritually.  It takes your joy away.  It can even turn you from God.  

I imagine this woman’s story as being a bit like the story of Job.  She was faithful, so Satan decided to send a crippling spirit to cripple her in spirit to try her faith.  But it didn’t work.  Indeed, she suffered greatly for eighteen years.  But still, after eighteen long years of that twisted affliction, she was still coming to synagogue on the Sabbath.  Well, on that particular Sabbath, Luke doesn’t tell us that she came to synagogue because she knew Jesus was there and she believed he could heal her.  It seems she was there because her faith in God was a core component to how she lived with that senseless affliction.  She didn’t come looking for Jesus.  Rather, it was Jesus who saw her and the initiative to heal her.  As the prophet Isaiah said, “He gives strength to the faint and strengthens the powerless…Those who trust in the Lord will renew their strength.  They will soar on wings like eagles.  They will run and not become weary.  They will walk and not faint” (Is 30:29,31).  Jesus said to her, “Woman, you are set free from your weakness.”  And, he touched her.  He laid his hands on her.  She took strength and stood up straight.  For the first time in eighteen years, she could look people in the eye, face-to-face.  For the first time in eighteen years, she could give a hug that wasn’t “quite awkward”.  For the first time in eighteen years…no pain.  You bet she began to praise God and she did it so exuberantly that it became a disturbance.  For eighteen painful years afflicted by a spirit of weakness she did not give up on God but kept coming, seeking her God, and finding comfort at the synagogue…then finally, a joy unspeakable. “The joy of the Lord is your strength” (Neh. 8:10).

Her praising eventually infected the whole congregation.  Luke said they were rejoicing because of “all the wonderful things that Jesus was doing”.  Our English translations just do not do that phrase justice. In the Greek it says that they were expressing joy because of “all the glory-things that Jesus was bringing into being.”  Here was Jesus, the Lord God become human, doing things through which God’s glory shone.  He was putting to right those things that are inexplicably hurtfully contorted by evil in the Creation God called “very good” when he completed it and then rested on the Sabbath.  These “glory-things” that Jesus was doing brought joy that was uncharacteristic of the typical, humdrum that characterized the typical, dutiful worship/teaching at the synagogue on the Sabbath.  At that synagogue on that Sabbath the glory of God was shining forth.  God was with his people.  They were being visited by God who was actually, in real life giving them reason to have joy.  It became as the Psalmist says: “Those who sow in tears will reap with shouts of joy” (Ps. 126:5).

I’ve been reading the Psalms a lot lately.  They are good to read in difficult times as they give us the authentic voice of people struggling with very painful difficulties in a faithful way and they also show us that God indeed responds in loving-kindness out of loyalty to us.  There’s a verse that got my attention one night: “But as for me, God’s presence is my good.  I have made the Lord God my refuge, so I can tell about all you do” (Ps. 73:26).  God's Presence with us is the "good" that we all seek.  But “Good”, what is “good”? Looking back at the Creation Story in Genesis 1, when God saw all that he created and called it good and then very good on the sixth day after he created humanity.  This goodness of his creation delighted God.  So, at heart the Creation is fundamentally “Good”.  In fact, Psalm 33:5 says, “the earth is full of the Lord’s faithful love.”  God’s loving kindness is foundational to God’s very good creation.  We can get a sense of this foundational "goodness" when we find ourselves in God's presence as we look around and breathe and see and feel the beauty and joy and love of the moment of just being where we're at and we somehow sense that God is present to us there.  A beautiful sunset isn’t God, but God is certainly there reposing with us and appreciating it.

I also think “good” is profoundly relational.  In fact, I believe the “very good” that God pronounced is found in relationship.   It is “very good” when we feel at home, secure, beloved with family and friends and even strangers sometimes, but yet there's even more.  It is very good when there's an inexplicable and inexpressible sense of a bond of love with another and we know that it is God we have to thank for bringing this bond into existence.  This “very good” points us to God.  It is “very good” when the loving kindness of God is embodied in our relationships, in marriage, in family, in friendship. 

It is also “very good” when healing froths up in whatever its form be it emotional, physical, or relational.  There is indeed brokenness in God’s very good creation.  On the other side of this goodness, is the twisted stuff that leads us to ask why God permits the un-good, the evil.  Why did God allow Satan to afflict this woman with a spirit of weakness?  Why did God allow Satan to wreak havoc on Job in a way that just seemed like an unholy bet?  Why does God allow our faithfulness to be tested by means of just plain horrible and unfair things that happen?  Why does God let the good in our lives suddenly and with great hurt just go to pots?  I don't know the answers to questions like those and you have no idea how much I wish I did.  But I have learned to seek refuge in the presence of God and there find the strength of hope and the glimmers of joy to hold me while I wait for the healing to come, for God's joy-filled restoration of the good.  While I wait for the “Glory-thing” to come about. While we wait God avails us to his presence that we may find our “good” in God alone, in God’s healing presence, that God who assures us that we are God’s beloved.

I’ll end just by saying that Job didn’t get his answers.  In fact, God shut him up with the Goodness of his presence.  Satan afflicted Job because of Job’s faithfulness and God let him do it.  We don’t know why and it doesn’t seem like one of God’s better moments.  Satan murdered all of Job’s children and took everything Job had and then afflicted him with a horribly gross and painful skin condition.  The only comfort Job received was in the form of hypocritical friends relentlessly accusing him of some hidden sin for which he was being punished.  But Job was innocent.  Finally, God came to Job in the form of a life-threatening storm.  As animals of all sorts were fleeing the storm and passing by Job as he sat on the heap of ashes that he had become accustomed to, God bluntly asked Job who he was to question the God who made everything; that jackal, that lion, that hippo, and even the sea monsters.  That sounds harsh, but…Job suddenly realized he was in the “very good” presence of God and that changed everything.  There in the midst of a life-threatening storm that Job probably wished would kill him he simply says, “I had heard reports about you, but now my eyes have seen you.  Therefore, I reject my words and am sorry for them.”  The presence of the Lord was his “good”.  The injustice of all Job went through paled in comparison to the goodness of the presence of God with him.  Too often we get caught up in the hurt of our own situations and forget God is with us and we can find rest and strength in God.  Even so, God still hears us, still sees us, is still with us.  He is still inclined towards us with loving-kindness and fierce loyalty.  Sit in Good’s presence and wait on him.  There is the “good” in which God strengthens, heals, and restores us.  Amen.

 

 

 

Stand up Straight and Praise God

Luke13:10-17

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I have sketchy memories of being a child of about four or five and going to church.  I had to dress up in a nice button-up shirt, nice socks, shiny black shoes, and a clip-on tie.  Sometimes, I got my hair slicked back.  I can remember being outside the church and mom spit-shining me.  Y’all know how that works.  Mom looks.  Mom frowns.  Mom digs Kleenex out of Juicy-Fruit smelling purse.  She moistens that Juicy-Fruit smelling Kleenex by dabbing it to her tongue.  Then, she rather aggressively scrubbed away whatever residual food or dirt was on my face.  After the spit-shining, Mom dropped me at my Sunday School class with a nickel or dime to put in the little white church bank.  There I would hear a story about Jesus or King David or Samson or Jonah, cut and paste and colour a picture, and it was time to wait to get picked up to go up to the worship service.  Time flies when your having fun.

The worship service sometimes involved getting spit-shined again.  We had to sit-up straight and be still on those hard pews, feet dangling.  We had to stand up straight during the hymns.  We had to endure squirminess during the sermon.  If my brother was there, we were likely to do something you weren’t supposed to do in church like make faces at each other and try not to get caught.  If it was a hot day, the blessed gift of nodding off was inevitable. 

Well, that was going to church nearly fifty years ago.  It was something everybody had to do.  It was a duty, a duty of gratitude maybe, to God who provides for us and keep us safe.  It was something you had to do to be a good person or at least be seen as one.  As I child I can’t say I understood all that or anything other than at church you had to be on your best and hopefully that would spill over into the rest of life…oh, and Jesus loves me—but his dad will get me, if I’m not good.

The title of this pontification is “Stand up Straight and Praise God”.  It is an intentionally misleading title about what I would like to think that coming to church is about.  At first glance “Stand up Straight and Praise God” sounds like a command.  As child I would have heard it as “Stand up straight and show respect to God.”  I wouldn’t have understood what “Praising God” was about other than it was the rote act of the things we did at church.  We stood up straight and sang hymns and we sat up straight as the minister said prayers, read from the Bible, and preached.  Participating in the praise of God required being “upright”. 

But, I don’t mean for “Stand up Straight and Praise God” to be heard as a commandment.  I’ll admit that fifty years ago it would have been entirely likely that message of this sermon would have been that we are commanded by God to live upright lives that bring him glory so that we can enjoy his blessing…or else!  Consequently, we have all noticed that such a sermon doesn’t go over very well and the judgemental attitude and bad theology behind it is one of the major contributing reasons as to why hardly anybody comes to church any more.  As a nation we are starting on a third generation now of children who have no idea at all what a church is or even who Jesus is or even that there is a God.  “Stand up straight and praise God because you’re supposed to or else” hasn’t panned out over time.  So, please don’t hear “Stand up Straight and Praise God” as a commandment but yet still think of it as holding the reason for why church and congregational worship is a good place to come. 

The title comes from our reading here in Luke in which a woman actually did stand up straight and praise God because Jesus healed her.  She had what Luke call’s “a spirit of weakness” from whom which Jesus set her free.  This spirit had her bent over so that she couldn’t stand up straight.  This woman was bent over.  Imagine never being able to look up or people always looking down at you. She must have been in considerable pain and that pain affects your outlook.  Chronic pain is debilitating in every way – emotionally, psychologically, even spiritually.  It takes your joy away.  It can even turn you from God. 

I imagine this woman’s story as being a bit like the story of Job.  She was faithful, so Satan decided to send a crippling spirit to cripple her in spirit.  But, it didn’t work.  After eighteen long years she was still coming to synagogue on the Sabbath.  That particular Sabbath she didn’t come to synagogue because she knew Jesus was there and she believed he could heal her.  Rather, I believe she was there because faith in God was a core component to how she lived with the pain.  That particular Sabbath she didn’t come looking for Jesus to heal her.  Rather, it’s Jesus who saw her and took the initiative and healed her.  She stood up straight for the first time in eighteen years, pain free for the first time in eighteen years.  She began to praise God so exuberantly that it was a disturbance. 

Eventually, her praising infected the whole congregation.  Luke said they were rejoicing because of “all the wonderful things that Jesus was doing”.  Our English translations just do not do that phrase justice. In the Greek it says that they were praising because of “all the glory-things that Jesus was birthing.”  Here was Jesus, the Lord God incarnate, doing glorious New Creation-things on the Sabbath the day of the week on which the Lord God was supposed to be resting, reposing and enjoying the beauty of the works of his hands and praise from his people.  To the Synagogue leader it probably seemed that by this healing Jesus had made God work on the Sabbath and that troubled him greatly.

Jesus redefined Sabbath with this healing.  Sabbath isn’t simply to be a day where God and everybody lazes about and eats leftovers…or else.  Sabbath is the day we enjoy the works of God’s hands and praise God.  Yet, for many, to most, to all of us we are burdened, worried, and even suffering.  We are weak in spirit and unable to stand up straight and praise God.  We need to come to the gathering of God’s people and experience God’s uplifting presence so that we can stand upright and from deep within ourselves praise God.  God can’t and won’t rest when things are such that his people have reason not to worship him.

We come to worship God on Sunday not because it’s a duty, but because God is with us and faithfully helps us deal with everything life throws at us.  It is here in worship on Sunday morning that we grab a sense of the glory-thing of new birth in Jesus that God is doing by the presence and work of the Holy Spirit.  It is when people are gathered in Jesus name for worship that Jesus calls us to himself and sets us free from the things that bind us so that can’t help but stand up straight and from deep within ourselves praise God.  God doesn’t rest until we are healed and whole and can sing his praise.

Congregational worship—no matter when it happens, whether it’s a Sunday morning, Friday night, or Wednesday lunch—is time for Jesus to birth glory things in our midst that cause us to praise God.  Spiritual and physical healing is why we are gathered here.  If we are of the mindset that worship is the duty of upright people, then we run the risk of the hypocrisy of that congregational leader in this story.  Worship is when God births the glory things of new life in Christ.  He is a loving God who will not rest while his people are suffering.  Amen.

Cleaning the Fishbowl

Luke 13:10-17

A few years ago when I was at my last church while on vacation I went to church and then to a place called the Shwarma Queen for lunch.  That's Middle Eastern food.  When I got there to my surprise it was closed on Sunday.  I had to settle for Subway.  How dare they ruin my Sunday after-church eating plans?  Hopefully you know I'm joking.  Actually, I suspected they were Christian and likely from Lebanon.  Instead of cursing them I asked God to bless them for having the devotion to close on Sunday. 

I don't think I would be too far afield to say that we all are a bit amazed anymore when we discover businesses that are closed on Sunday especially restaurants.  Sunday after church is usually the third busiest meal in the restaurant business.  Even though the church crowd is known for being the worst complainers and stingiest tippers restaurants tolerate us for our business.  When I was a child only the odd restaurant and gas station/convenience store were open.  Now, it’s the odd business that’s closed (and yes we view them as odd) and worse, Sunday mornings are now fair game for children’s sporting events which only pits church in a losing bout. 

Over the past fifty years this cultural change has come upon us and it’s not that it wasn't protested.  Sadly, those who did protest were usually vilified as religious extremists – Pharisees, like the man in our passage, or legalists and fundamentalists.  In the big picture, the loss of a national Sunday Sabbath is simply part of the fall of cultural Christianity in the Western world signalling that Christianity is no longer the default religion of North America. 

This has been a source of great anxiety for the North American Church particularly the mainline denominations.  But it has not made us anxious enough to really change our ways.  An interesting fact about human beings is that when we are told that our lifestyle, our daily habits, are killing us and that death will be imminent within a few years if we do not change our ways only 20% of us will make the necessary changes.  80% either will not or cannot change.  The statistics get grossly worse when it’s a group of people.  Statistically speaking, in a group of forty people 20% means only eight people who are actually capable of making changes.  If the key leaders of the group are not among the eight, the likelihood of change is nil.

I have been in ordained ministry for 19 years now and I have had exposure to many different congregations either as their minister or as a representative of Presbytery.  I have noticed in nearly every church I have worked with that though they realized the need to change or face grave financial challenges and/or death they did little more than try to find creative ways to continue on as they always had. 

It makes me think of this woman here in Luke’s Gospel who was bent over for 18 years.  In the Greek Luke says that she had a “spirit of sickness” or “spirit of weakness” that was bending her over and making her unable to stand upright.  I don’t think he meant a demon was doing this to her.  I think he meant she was sick in her disposition, in her mental and emotional state, and this sickness was symptomatic in her body, causing her to bend over further and further and not be able to straighten up.  More over, what was going on with her body was affecting her thinking.  Ask any doctor, there’s a huge connection between mental health and physical health.  A sick spirit can make for a sick body and sick body for sick spirit.  And in the end, this sickness has drastic consequences for our relationships.

Bent over as she was, how do you think this women felt?  What do you think her thoughts were?  She would have to be one rare blossom in the Royal Botanical Gardens not to be depressed, bitter, and hopeless.  Imagine not being able to see any more than the patch of ground right at your feet.  The pain must have been unreal.  No self-worth.  Imagine not being able to look someone in the face and it be painful even just to turn your head so you can look up at somebody who is only looking down at you and seeing first and foremost what’s wrong with you.  Imagine people thinking you’re cursed for having done some horrible hidden sin that you won’t confess.

As I said a moment ago, I’ve been ministering for just over 18 years now and most of the churches I have worked with have been bent over with a spirit of weakness.  We are stuck in seeing our declining situation and have grown sadder and weaker and more hopeless and we’ve resigned ourselves to the fact that we will die and there’s nothing we can do about.  We try things but in all honesty these things are only meant to keep us doing what we’ve always done.  We are stuck in seeing ourselves and our world and the role the church and Christians play in it in a particular way that is skewed by Christianity having been the default religion in this culture and now that we are not we are bent over with a spirit of weakness.

Tripp Fuller who hosts a podcast called Homebrewed Christianity said the other day: “We are like fish swimming around in a dirty fishbowl.  Everything we see is skewed by the fact that we are swimming around in our own poop and pee.  And, it’s not that our scales are dirty.  It’s that the water needs to be changed so that we can see clearly.”[1]  Sorry for the crude example, but my seven-year-old daughter has a fish and I know exactly what he means.  Apart from some pretty hefty parental intervention that fish would have died a long time ago.

We are stuck in a fishbowl where the only way we can really imagine doing church is the way we’ve always done it.  From our “fishbowl” we look out onto a world in which we seem to believe that everybody out there is thinking about God and wants to please God.  We seem to believe that they believe Sunday’s are sacred and that they feel that participating in church is integral to a meaning-filled, God-filled life.  We seem to believe that they are going to show at church and swim in the comfort-filled fishbowl of our dirty water that needs to be changed.  Though we think about God and value church, the majority of people out there do not.  Quite frankly, they are anti-God – at least, anti the God we’ve been presenting.  If Sunday is sacred to them it is because it is their only day off.  These folks just aren’t going to up and decide to come back to church because they know church participation is integral to a meaning-filled, God-filled life.

I don’t think we need to get out of the fishbowl, but we do need to get our water changed so that we can see what’s going on out there more clearly.  Unfortunately for us, what is needed in the church today is that we do the hard work of changing the way we imagine the world around us.  It’s not simply for the survival of our congregations that we need to be concerned.  More so, we need to be concerned that the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the love of God is not being proclaimed out there in our communities now that people don’t and won’t come to church and frankly couldn’t care less.

Instead of trying to imagine what it was like for this lady to see the world from her bent over position lets try to imagine what it was like for her to see standing straight up.  That would be seeing the world of faith.  Chesley and Southampton haven’t had the pleasure of tolerating me the last two Sunday’s, but here in Dornoch and up in Chatsworth I have been talking about what faith is.  Faith is the sphere of reality in which God is making his plans and purposes for his creation actualize.  God promises and it happens.  By his Word, Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit God causes us to become participants in this sphere of reality that will ultimately become all of reality.  
Faith is like a fishbowl that is growing ever bigger.  When at the word of Jesus that spirit left the woman, she stood up straight, she stood up into the sphere of reality called faith.   To speak of faith from our end is not to speak of things like subjective beliefs about God, about what I chose to trust and believe.  Rather, it is to talk about faithfulness and living in the way that is proper to Jesus and the way of the cross; the way of the one who danced on the Sabbath and cured lame.  In this woman’s case, she simply stood up straight and learned to live from that perspective.

In all our churches since this Cooperative was formed we have had a sense of renewal, of Jesus saying "Stand up!  You're weakness has left you." But, there's still some standing up that we need to do to see the world differently and actually change.  We cannot let Jesus words fall on deaf ears.  Jesus has freshens the water lets stand up and see what's different.  We cannot let this just be a cheaper way of being and dong the things that we have always been and done. 
How do we change the water?  Well, the way we see the world is shaped by the questions we carry within us.  We shape our lives around how we answer those questions.  Think of a child.  If a child spends her days wondering things like “where do bugs come from”, “what makes grass grow”, or “how do rockets work”, that child is going to go in a profoundly different direction than the child who is preoccupied by “what’s wrong with me that other kids won’t play with me” or “why do people make fun of me?”

Looking at the women in our story here from Luke, it is easier for us to imagine how she saw the world in her bent over condition than it is for us to imagine what it was like for her to see the world from the perspective of being healed by Jesus and standing straight-up.  Healed and straightened doesn’t look as much like "our fishbowl" filled with dirty water as bent over does. 

As congregations we need to begin to imagine ourselves as “the church sent into the world” rather than “the church to which world the world must come if it wants to get sorted out”.  The questions we need to stop preoccupying ourselves with are ones like “how can we make our churches more friendly and welcoming and hospitable to our guests when they come?”  “What can we do to make church more attractive?”  Those questions are the church version of “What’s wrong with me that nobody wants to play with me?”  They inadvertently lead us not to change but simply to finding ways to continue to do the things we’ve always done.

Rather, being “the church sent” means we are not expecting people to come in our doors to meet us and maybe Jesus but are rather focused on joining with Jesus and working in his ministry of being sent into the world to save and heal it.  We need to begin to ask not “how hospitable am I when people show up at my house”, but rather “how good of a guest am I when I show up at other peoples’ houses?”   We need to be walking around our neighbourhoods and communities prayerfully asking, “Jesus, what are you doing in the life of that family that I can give voice to and participate in?”  He will give us a sense of it.  Stand up straight and get in the game.

Seeing from the perspective of being healed and straightened means I’m not so focused on me, but on others.  It means that when we are in conversations with others we are going to intentionally focus on listening to them as they share what’s going on in their lives.  It means praying for our neighbours and letting them know that we have been praying about the concerns they have shared with us.

Changing the questions we ask will change the way we see our place in the world.  The way we do life inside the fishbowl of church will clarify and look more like the fishbowl of faith.  If we ask the questions we need to ask as “the church sent into the world” we will begin to be the church sent into the world and we will thrive.  Amen.

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[1] Paraphrase from “God Has Left the Building: Alan Roxbourgh Gets (Post) Missional”; https://homebrewedchristianity.com

Loosed to Praise

Text: Luke 13:10-17

A few years ago while I was on vacation I decided to go to church and afterwards to a place called the Shawarma Queen for lunch. That's Middle Eastern food. When I got there to my surprise it was closed on Sunday. I had to settle for Subway. How dare they be closed on Sunday. How dare they ruin my shawarma craving on a Sunday of my vacation? Hopefully you know I'm joking. Actually, I said to myself I knew those people were Christian and I asked God to bless them for having the courage to close their restaurant on Sunday.

Well, I don't think I would be too far afield to say that we all are a bit amazed anymore when we discover businesses closed on Sunday. When I was a child only the odd restaurant and gas station/convenience stores that were open. Now, it’s the odd business that’s closed (and yes we view them as odd) and worse Sunday mornings are now fair game for children’s sporting events which only pits church in a losing bout...Sunday School vs. hockey. Over the past forty years this cultural change has come upon us and its not that it wasn't protested. Sadly, those who did protest were usually vilified as religious extremists. Yet in the big picture, the loss of a national Sunday Sabbath is simply part of the fall of cultural Christianity in the Western world. For some this produces great anxiety but in my opinion it is best we see it as an opportunity, an opportunity for Christians to truly be the church of Jesus Christ rather than just being a religion that's all bound up in a culture.

If I had to give an explanation for why this change has happened, broadly speaking, it is due a fundamental misunderstanding of what Sabbath is that has plagued the people of God from the days of Moses – a legalistic understanding of it as opposed to a restorative understanding. In our lifetimes the drop-off in observing Sunday as the Christian day of rest and worship has come about largely as a reaction by the Baby Boomer generation (those born between 1945 and 1965) against their parent’s and grandparent’s generations being so restrictive about Sundays. The Baby Boomers reacted to and rejected all that legalism but unfortunately threw the baby out with the bath water. Instead of trying to determine why Sabbath is so important they just left the church altogether dismissing it as an authoritarian institution we do well to be sceptical of. Their scepticism of institutions and particularly those that make truth claims persists now to their grandchildren whom are today's 20-somethings who view the church quite negatively as a recent Barna Study has shown.

That brings us to today, we Christians now ourselves need to hear the prophet's call to return to observing a Sabbath and the risks that it entails. I say that as one who is as guilty as anybody when it comes to not keeping Sabbath. I work on Sunday and my lifestyle is such that I need people to work on Sunday and that's simply for convenience' sake. Keeping Sabbath is not easy but we need to keep a day on which we do not work and on which we see to it that no one works for us, a full day of rest, of worshipful rest; a day for the people of God to share in God’s own rest. We need to learn to set that boundary for ourselves and our families and be particularly careful not to be legalistic about.

A quick look at the Old Testament shows us how this misunderstanding came into play. In the very beginning of the Bible in Genesis chapter one it says that after he created everything God rested. Then in Exodus we are given the commandment to observe the Sabbath for as those who bear the image of the Trinity in creation we must rest as he rests and we do this that we might be blessed and be a blessing. Unfortunately, if we follow Sabbath observance among God's people as the Bible attests we find that the idea of the Sabbath being a gift of worship-filled rest got lost and Sabbath became a commandment accompanied by a list of do’s and don’t's that must be observed lest there be consequences. The result was that Sabbath became a means of national preservation and identity among the Jewish people in much the same way as it was in North America prior to the Baby Boomer generation.

In our passage from Luke, this misunderstanding of the nature of Sabbath is at the root of Jesus' conflict with the leader of a synagogue who has his list of things that can’t be done on the Sabbath. Jesus shames him saying, "you would untie your ox or donkey on the Sabbath to take it to water. What about this woman, this child of Abraham, who has been bound for…duh…eighteen long years, shouldn’t she be untied from this spirit of weakness that has her crippled?" Jesus reminds them that God gave us the Sabbath for our rest, renewal, and re-creation…indeed our healing, our being unbound from those things, those spirits, those lies that cripple us whether it be physically, mentally, emotionally, or socially. The Sabbath is not only a day of rest for us. It is also a day for the Lord to set us free from things that bind us so that when we like this woman are set loose from our binds we genuinely praise him. We are loosed to praise.

Going through Luke’s Gospel and noting what Jesus does on the Sabbath is a good way of seeing what Sabbath is. First thing to note is that in all but one instance Jesus went to synagogue on the Sabbath and shared the customary Sabbath meal. The only Sabbath that we don’t find Jesus in synagogue was the Sabbath he spent in the grave. Yet, even on that day his disciples still observed the Sabbath and refrained from anointing his body with perfume that day. This means that Sabbath rest is found in gathering together with God’s people in worship and fellowship and even in mourning. Therefore, I do not buy the idea that sitting on the dock or walking in the woods instead of gathering with God's people is observing Sabbath. It may well indeed be spending time with God but Sabbath rest is found among God’s people in worship.

The first time Luke mentions the Sabbath we find Jesus in the synagogue teaching where he reads a passage from Isaiah revealing who he is and then he picks a fight with the “religious” people saying their legalistic faith keeps them from knowing who he is as their Messiah, the Holy one of God, the Son of God, the bringer of the Kingdom of God. He reads a passage in Isaiah that says who he is and what he's come to do: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour.” Thus, Sabbath is when we gather together in public worship and fellowship with God’s people and Jesus being in our midst makes himself known to us as the one who delivers and heals us.

On another Sabbath we find Jesus walking through the grain fields and his disciples glean some wheat. Another conflict with legalists ensues. Jesus ended the argument by saying that he was the Lord of the Sabbath. Then he goes into the synagogue and continues the confrontation by asking if it is lawful to do harm or to do good on the Sabbath and he heals a man’s withered hand infuriating the legalists. Jesus had quite a reputation for healing people and casting out demons on the Sabbath and it is by those works that he is able to silence the legalists...until the join forces with the political powers and have him crucified.

Well, with all this talk of Sabbath I hope that you are beginning to see the time we share together on Sunday morning in a different light. This is Sabbath, time when we gather together as God's people and in this time together Jesus is here with us to untie us from all that binds us and loose us to praise God in wholeness. This is the time and space that Jesus Christ comes to us to bring us Sabbath rest, restoration, and recreation. How he comes I cannot say. All I can say is that he does and he changes us. When we come to church we should come expecting to meet the Lord of the Sabbath for he is here and his personal ministry to us is a free gift to us not because we are worthy of it but simply because he loves us.

You know, when I was young I was taught that we need to come to church because God deserved to be thanked and worshipped for all he's done for us. Worship was something that we came and did for God. But, as I read the Gospel's and see specifically the way Jesus, God the Son himself, understood the Sabbath and what he did on the Sabbath, we don't come to worship for God's sake we come for our own, to lift up our burdens and be healed of our brokenness. The Sabbath is the Trinity's wonderful gift of his own rest to which by which we are healed and loosed to praise. Let us keep it. Amen.