Sermons for the Month
The Sabbath: God's Gift Of Healing
DATE: August 22nd, 2004
SERVICE: 12th Sunday After Pentecost
TEXT: Luke 13:10-17To all of you Saints here this morning, grace and peace to you from God our Father, from His Son, Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit. AMEN I take a nap every Sunday afternoon. I know you may not care that this is the case. The fact is, though, that unless there is an emergency situation or a meeting that just cannot be held any other time or a special event, my agenda after worship on Sunday is to arrive home by 1 p.m., throw on comfortable clothes, grab the newspaper and fall asleep within 30 minutes while attempting to read it. Then, for at least two hours, I sleep better than I do any other time during the week. I used to feel guilty about this, after all, there is never a lack of tasks to be accomplished at home or at church, but I have come to the conclusion that my napping on Sunday afternoon is good stewardship. It's a holy nap because it is among the things that enable me to do ministry. To tell you the truth I think this is, in part, what God had in mind for us when a Sabbath day was created and commended to us.
For Christians that day is Sunday, the day that Jesus was raised from the dead. We gather once a week to remember that life-changing event, to worship God and to grow in faith as well as to have a day for rest and for rejuvenation. Both things are important and are good for us, which is why one of the 10 commandments is, "Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy."
We need a Sabbath day. One way to think about it is to consider the Sabbath as a day of healing for us broken human beings. It's not what God needs, it's what we need.
That's what today's Gospel lesson is all about. At first it seems as if Jesus is ignoring, or even trampling on, the Sabbath by healing this woman. In fact, that's why the leader of the synagogue is upset. He keeps saying, "There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days to be cure, and not on the Sabbath."
Remember that the Jewish tradition was that no work was done from sundown on Friday until sundown on Saturday. That was the Sabbath and there were laws restricting basic day-to-day activity. Of course, practicing one's profession on the Sabbath was prohibited. The religious leader is lashing out at people for coming to be cured on the Sabbath and in doing so criticized Jesus.
He, and those around him, have lost track of God's original intention for the Sabbath. They have overwhelmed the day with rules, and have forgotten that the day was created for us, to enhance our spiritual and physical well-being. The religious leader had forgotten that the Sabbath is a day for healing, which is why it is so appropriate that Jesus heals this woman on that day. The words of the story are beautiful. She had been crippled with a spirit for 18 years. She was bent over, and quite unable to stand up straight. And Jesus set her free. She immediately stood up and began praising God. Now I ask you, what better use could there have been of the Sabbath than that?
We may not be physically crippled, as she was, but all of us are bent over, weighed down, by various loads. We struggle with broken spirits, broken bodies and broken relationships. We need healing, and this is the place to come to receive it. Yet, part of the brokenness of our world is that we fail to acknowledge that fact.
Perhaps some of you, like me, long for the "good old days" when Sunday was indeed different from the rest of the week, even outside of the church. I'm not that old, at least I do not think I am, but when I was a child no stores and no movie theaters were open on Sundays and no youth sporting activities were held. Some restaurants were open, but people felt just a bit guilty frequenting them because doing so required others to work on that day.
In my family, Sunday was for worship and for family. We were not allowed to see friends on Sunday, but neither were we expected to do chores. It was a day for church activities, for big meals, for reading and for playing.
Late in my teenage years all that began to change. It probably had changed here in Ohio before it did in western Nebraska. In any case, I remember when Sunday started to be like any other day. It was convenient to go to the grocery store or to K-Mart on Sunday, but with that convenience came a change in mentality about the day that is now full-blown, forcing people to make choices they never had to make before and forcing the church to compete with many options. Before long, merchants and restaurants saw being open on Sunday as an economic necessity, and the hours between 8 a.m. and 1 p.m., which had once been sacred, became fair game for sporting events.
There's no doubt that it is a busier age and people's schedules are so full that Sunday often is just another day to catch up with what did not get done the rest of the week. Keeping up is challenging and making choices among activities that are important in the lives of children and youth is hard.
Still and this may be an unpopular thing to say it often is a matter of setting priorities and asking the hard question, "How important is our spiritual well-being - and that of our children - in the whole scheme of things?"
In all this the commandment, "Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy", may be filed in our memory banks along with not murdering, stealing or committing adultery, but somehow it is in another location, having been relegated to the "good idea, but " section. What we forget is that the Sabbath was created for us because God loves us and wants what is best for us. If there is any time in history that people needed a day of healing, this is it! God knows we need a Sabbath; God is well aware that we need to be rejuvenated spiritually and physically, so why not act as if God knows what is best for us?
I'll never forget the story my Grandpa Bunting told about working on a Sunday. This was early in the last century when labor on Sunday was unheard of. But, he was a farmer, so he did minimal tasks on Sunday to care for the livestock. However, fieldwork was left for the other six days. However, one year, the wheat was ready to be harvested and he decided to go to the fields on the Sabbath. Well, the threshing machine broke down, creating a multitude of problem. My grandpa swore he would never again work on the Lord's Day. Did he think he was jinxed? No but because the machine failed he was angry and frustrated, which was unusual on any day, but was particularly not how he wanted to feel on the Sunday. In other words, the day of rest had become a day of stress, and that's not what God had in mind.
That's easy to remember, isn't it? Do not turn the day of rest into a day of stress. That's not what God had in mind for the Sabbath. As Jesus showed us in today's Gospel lesson it's a day for healing, a gift to us, a day when we can be set free from all that weighs us down and through worship and rest be able to stand up straight and face another week of living out our faith.
How lucky we are to be told, "Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy!" AMEN