Fourteenth Sunday After Pentecost 21(C) – Isaiah 58:9b-14, Luke 13:10-17
My mother once told me that when she was a child, growing up in a church near Detroit, she was taught that one should not chew the bread when receiving communion. This was the real Body of Christ you were putting in your mouth. It had been transubstantiated into Jesus’ own flesh, whatever the appearance of it was on the outside. You couldn’t bite into it, because if you did, it would—well, do what flesh did. It would bleed. Inside your mouth. Which, can I be honest? Is about one of the most disgusting things I can think of.
To be fair, it’s also one of the silliest things I can think of. I mean, even if the bread really does turn into Jesus’ flesh—which is something we Lutherans have mixed feelings about—to think that it might bleed in your mouth is pretty ridiculous. After all, we know there’s no blood in it, because Jesus’ blood is all in the chalice, right? Right? Well, anyway, that’s what they’d been taught, and blood or no, it was a sign of respect to take that cardboard-flavored wafer and put it into your mouth, and just let it sit in there, stuck to the roof of your mouth, until it dissolved, which, if you’ve ever tried to do that, you know it takes a few days. I know this, frankly, because I’ve done it myself, many times. Long before my mother told me her story, I somehow got the notion in my head that letting it dissolve was a more pious and respectful thing, and decided that’s what you should do. It’s funny; I hadn’t ever been taught that, but I still got the idea for it, and that became my practice for the first few years that I was receiving Communion.
What other silly things do we do, simply because we think it’s the “right” thing to do? Do we still teach our acolytes to light the candles in a certain order? One of my worship professors at seminary said that was the weirdest thing he’d ever heard. And yet many congregations do it—we aren’t alone. Or have you ever wondered why we commune the left side of the assembly before the right? There’s no reason, but people were very confused one Sunday when I had you do it the other way! And I’ve heard there was a day in the life of this congregation when Pastor—I think it was Davidson—would show up at your door on Monday if you were missing from church on Sunday, demanding to know your excuse. Can you imagine? Well, I guess many of you CAN imagine. Can you imagine ME doing that, though? Knocking on your door: “So, we missed you on Sunday. I’m very disappointed in you, shirking your religious duty like that. I hope you’ve got a good reason, that you’re of course going to tell me, since I’m privy to ALL the inner workings of your family life?”
And yet, there are some things that we’re supposed to do, in order to do our religious duty, right? I mean, no, God doesn’t really care whether we chew the Communion bread or not. But God does give us a list of things he wants us to attend to, if nowhere else then at least in the Ten Commandments, and pretty high on THAT list is “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.” That IS the reason we do this on Sunday mornings, right? Because God commands that we should stop once in a while and attend to our religious duty of worship.
We get some reinforcement of that in today’s Old Testament lesson. There’s nothing that describes God’s law so clearly as an if-then clause. We get a few of these in our reading from Isaiah. Here’s the one that starts in verse 13. “IF you refrain from trampling the Sabbath; if you refrain from pursuing your own interests on my holy day; if you call the Sabbath a delight; if you call the holy day of the Lord honorable; if you honor it, if you don’t go your own ways; if you don’t serve your own interests; if you don’t pursue your affairs…” He basically says the same thing, but says it eight times over, so you know he means business. If you keep the Sabbath, then God will bless you. And if you don’t…
Well, actually, we don’t get the opposite side of things in this passage. I mean, it’s implied, right? That if you don’t keep the Sabbath, God will curse you. Or maybe we don’t have to be quite so strong: If you don’t keep the Sabbath, God won’t bless you. It doesn’t need to be explicitly laid out. Does it? We know what our job is, our religious duty as Christians. To come and worship. That’s why we’re here…
Except Jesus doesn’t seem to think so. In Luke’s Gospel today, we have one of many stories where Jesus performs a healing miracle. A woman with a severe back problem who is unable to stand up straight is healed from her ailment and stands up for the first time in eighteen years. This is the sort of thing that Jesus does all the time, and it is a glorious enough miracle on its own. But what makes this story unique is where and when it takes place. Jesus is in a synagogue, teaching. In any case, he’s there, and there’s a crowd gathered around listening to him, because they’re all there on the Sabbath day. Because that’s what they do. That’s their religious duty. It’s the Sabbath, and this is a house of worship, and if there’s one place you should really attend to actually keeping the Sabbath and not doing any work it’s in a synagogue.
So when Jesus exercises his vocation as a healer, when he does work, the synagogue leader is outraged. Rabbi Davidson shows up and says, “I’m very disappointed in you, shirking your religious duty like that. I hope you’ve got a good reason…” Actually, it’s funny: The synagogue leader doesn’t yell at Jesus. He yells at the woman, and the crowd: “You! Come on the other six days of the week to be cured, but not on the Sabbath.” You mean there’s really something wrong with her because she’s in pain and bent over and she can’t wait another twenty-four hours when her hope of healing is right there in front of her, and who knows where Jesus will be tomorrow?
There are at least three different instances in the Gospel of Luke where Jesus deliberately ignores the law prohibiting work on the Sabbath—in chapters six and fourteen as well as here. They’re all a little different: A withered hand, a bent-over woman, and a man with dropsy. In the other two, the problem is presented as disagreement about whether or not healing counts as work on the Sabbath. This time, though, Jesus ignores the question of work, and asks if the woman should not “be sent free from bondage on the Sabbath day.” The Sabbath is for freedom, he says, from everything that binds us up.
And this should remind us of something Isaiah said, not in today’s lesson, but in another place, something Jesus himself quotes. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, for he has anointed me to bring good news to the afflicted; he has sent me to proclaim freedom to captives, sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” In the Gospel of Luke, this is the heart of what Jesus is all about. It’s his mission statement, if you will. Life in Jesus Christ means freedom from the things that bind us.
So why do we come here out of a sense of duty? Why do we bind ourselves up with religious things, if our religion is supposed to set us free? We secretly have this idea that if we don’t do things the right way, God is going to be angry at us. We have to have the right colors on the altar, and use the right kind of wine, and put things in our worship in the right order. And it’s okay to use the piano sometimes, as long as we all know that God prefers the organ. I remember endless meetings when I worked at the seminary as assistant to the dean of the chapel in charge of worship. We’d have to bend over backwards to make sure that conflicting needs of different people were met. Did we have enough politically correct language in the worship service? Were there even numbers of male and female communion servers? Should we use the brass candlesticks or the wooden ones during Lent, and who would be offended with each option? I once forgot to light the candles on the altar at the beginning of the service, so I snuck into the sacristy during the offering, and grabbed a candlelighter so they’d be done in time for communion. After worship, one of our professors—a man who is blind—pulled me aside and asked me exactly what theological message I was trying to convey by doing it at that point in the service. I still wonder exactly how he saw that I’d done it.
But that, I think, is the wrong spirit about the Sabbath. An if-then clause in the Bible doesn’t always mean, “If you don’t do this, then God will punish you.” Sometimes, God is just letting us know how things turn out. If I eat breakfast every day, then I won’t be so hungry in the afternoon. That’s not a blessing from on high, just a natural consequence of my actions. If I spend all my money on video games, then I won’t have enough money to buy groceries. God is not angry with me; that’s just the results. And that’s true here, and plenty of other places in scripture. God does not threaten us. God simply says, “Well, if you care for the hungry and the afflicted, you’ll find that your life will be rich and fruitful, like a watered garden. If you honor the Sabbath, if at least on that one day you turn away from your own interests and love other people instead, you’ll find joy and delight in the Lord.”
The Sabbath isn’t an obligation. It’s a gift. When God created the universe, he didn’t rest on the seventh day because he was tired. He rested so that rest would be part of the cosmic order of creation. The whole universe stops to worship God. Sabbath is woven into the gravitational interactions between galaxies, in the lazy drifting of clouds across the sky, in the twisted strands of our DNA. The trees clap their hands, the mountains leap for joy, and every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea and all that is in them sing, “To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever and ever!” Sabbath may be indeed our right and our duty, but it is most of all our joy.
Whether it’s pita or wafers or a big loaf of sourdough, I usually chew my bread these days when I’m at the altar. But I’ll admit, I still don’t have breakfast most Sunday mornings, so that the bread and wine are the first food I eat. And I cross myself like a Catholic at parts of the service. And I bow when the bread and wine are raised, and so on, and so on. I do these things because they bring me joy. I do them because they are reminders of all that God has done for us, of the freedom we have in Christ Jesus, of the joy of living in the Spirit. That’s what this is ultimately all about. We don’t keep the Sabbath for God’s sake. God gives us the gift of the Sabbath for our sake. Jesus didn’t come to save himself. He came to save us, to free us from our bondage, to help us live in the joy of God’s Kingdom.
And so I invite you this week to keep Sabbath in a new way. Do things differently than you usually do. Use your lunch as a time for prayer while you eat. Spend some time in nature, walking the Rail Trail, admiring God’s creativity. Do something nice for someone you don’t usually like all that much, or for a total stranger. Come back next week and sit on the other side of the church. (Okay, that’s maybe asking a lot.) Anything to break with your routine, traditional way of doing things, the duty that you’ve set up to yourself. Or if you’re like me and don’t have much of a routine, find something to do every single day at the same time this week. Don’t keep after your religious duty. Dwell in your religious joy.