Sermon August 26, 2007

Proper 16, Year C

Jeremiah 1:4-10, Psalm 71: 1-6; Hebrews 12:18-29; Luke 13:10-17

There's an order to all the readings for today, a consistency and a progression that is timely and important for any person who calls themselves a Christian.

The Old Testament reading from Jeremiah is a recounting of his call to ministry - obviously the ministry of a prophet - and it makes it clear that one of the things involved in a calling is the important recognition that there is an order to things: to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant." Sometimes, Jeremiah is telling us, it is necessary to 'clear the decks" or to have them cleared for us so that new things can come into being.

The Psalmist understood that, and its necessity. "If I am to make this journey", he said, please give me the strength to accomplish whatever you wish.

The passage from Hebrews echoes the transition Jeremiah speaks of, and makes it clear that this transition began in earnest with Jesus. We no longer live under the sanction of a fearful law that would destroy but under Jesus' new Covenant, which is about rebuilding, about a new understanding of God's grace and love.

That new understanding we see spelled out in the Gospel passage, which is all about one of the Ten Commandments - meaning that this is no casual exchange about some minor point of law but The Law.

The story is a vehicle for Jesus to proclaim, not the end of the Law, but a deeper interpretation of it. "If you push the Religious Leadership's interpretation of Law", he says, "it shows itself to be a human construction that is destructive of human identity and personhood - it cannot possibly be from God, therefore!"

Everything in the story turns on healing. If we were allowed to mention only one thing about Jesus I suspect most people would mention that his ministry was characterized by healing - more than anything else, Jesus was a healer. It is from this ministry of healing that we as Christians have come to understand our own central ministry as that of reconciliation - of bringing back together that which is broken, of binding up wounds, of seeing the bigger picture of our common humanity.

In the First Century the Jews believed that if you were physically sick it was because you were morally sick - contaminated in such a way, therefore, that made you impure. The logic worked like this: God created all things and God would not create a physically imperfect human being. Only by some intentional personal act, therefore, could someone fall from that perfection.

We see this logic elsewhere in the Gospels - the clearest example is in the story of the Man Born Blind in chapter 9 of John's Gospel, where the community asks the question: "Who sinned that this man was born blind?" (9:2)." Sickness = sin.

So this was a huge deal - if you were sick you were a sinner, and if you were a sinner you couldn't be pure, and if you couldn't be pure you couldn't be Jewish.

Now we have a name for this sort of behavior: "blaming the victim". They must have done something to deserve it! And we still do it today. A common defense against a charge of rape is that the woman was wearing suggestive clothing - she deserved it. Or the battered spouse must have said something to set the perpetrator off.

In the First Century there was another thing that the Community did: they excluded the sick person. They made them a non-person, outside of the grace of God.

In this story, though, the sick person is healed. Logically they should be welcomed back into the community, but look at what actually happens: the Institutional religious leadership immediately introduce yet another standard by which to judge if the cure came from God or not - the Law regarding the Sabbath. The cure was carried out on a Sabbath, so it could not possibly come from God.....She is still excluded! And Jesus is condemned for violating the Law!

But look at her response - she could care less about the Law! Luke tells us that "She stood up straight and began praising God"! She refused to cloak herself with the interpretation demanded by the religious authorities.

And here we enter touchy territory. Why do the Religious Leaders do this? They do so because their house of cards is threatened. They are supposed to be the ones in control, and by quoting the Law they seek to reclaim that control, to take back the authority that Jesus has claimed from them. This story has, in other words, a great deal to do with power and control - who has it, who doesn't, who wants it, who's afraid to lose it. For the religious leaders, however, it's too late - the wall of power and control has been breached by God's healing grace.

In healing the woman in sacred space (a synagogue) and within sacred time, namely on a Sabbath Jesus is insisting that the synagogue and the Sabbath are not the only things that are holy.....human beings are holy too, including, and - Jesus would certainly say - especially those whom the mainstream culture rejects, including the sick, and women.

The decks have been cleared of the old way of understanding. God is "not to be modeled on the aloof king and powerful father, but on the mother looking for a lost coin and the dad running down the road to meet a lost son. The facades of dignity are dropped in favor of affection and caring. It is a very different model of God and produces a very different way of handling human life and biblical tradition." (William Loader)

There's an invitation here for us.

• We're being invited to see affection and caring as the central moral principle of our faith, rather than a slavish adherence to any moral code that lacks these principles.
• We're being invited to see with new eyes the coming kingdom. Some things that we treasure may have to be cleared away.
• We're being invited to see the future as something to be embraced with joy rather than something to be feared as alien to us.

I believe we are already doing that. We have faced a number of challenges over the past few years and we've risen to them. We're in a great place right now, We have much to celebrate. We have four new staff members who all bring remarkable talents to our common life. We're about to get a new bishop who is a truly remarkable man. We're planning to build for the future. There's so much going on right now it's difficult to know where to turn!

We are standing up straight! Now let's praise God! Amen.