11th Sunday after Pentecost (Year C) - August 25, 2019

11th Sunday after Pentecost
Year C
August 25, 2019
Luke 13:10-17, Isaiah 58:9b-14

Running through the first reading from Isaiah and our Gospel reading from Luke this morning, is Sabbath and what it means to keep the Sabbath and keep it holy. In the tradition of Martin Luther, this week, I found myself asking, “What is this?” or “What does this mean?” For Luther, when talking about Sabbath in the Small Catechism, he writes “We are to fear and love God, so that we do not despise God’s Word of preaching, but instead keep that Word holy and gladly hear and learn it.” As much as I love Luther, and have gained so much from the Small Catechism over the years, I find that his answer to “What is this?” falls a bit short - at least in in so far as we’re digging into today’s passage. There’s nothing “wrong” with Luther’s definition of Sabbath. It fits well when we think about church or bible study, but I think that today’s passages are dealing with a different aspect of what it means to observe the sabbath. In other words, Luther’s definition in the Small Catechism gives us a piece of what it means to observe Sabbath, but we’re dealing with something else today. Afterall, Jesus was in the synagogue teaching and people were there to encounter God’s Word (perhaps not quite in the way they would expect). Yet this question of observing sabbath remains. So again, I ask, “what is this?” “What does this mean?”

As most of you all know by now, my background is in Biblical studies, so that’s the logical place for me to start. In the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, we get not one - but two - different listings of the Ten Commandments. One in Exodus. One in Deuteronomy. And they’re slightly different.

Exodus 20, when talking about the Sabbath says this:

“Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.” (Exodus 20:8-11)

My guess is that this is what most of us were taught when we were taught the Ten Commandments. At least this is the version I learned. And it fits really well with Luther’s answer to “what is this?” when talking about Sabbath. It connects Sabbath rest to the first creation story: We rest on the Seventh Day because God rested. It is a day to dwell in relationship with our God, the one who created us. It is a day to the Lord your God.

But this is only half of the story of Sabbath. When Deuteronomy talks about Sabbath, it says this:

“Observe the sabbath day and keep it holy, as the LORD your God commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God; you shall not do any work—you, or your son or your daughter, or your male or female slave, or your ox or your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the LORD your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day.” (Deuteronomy 5:12-15)

Out of the two “versions” recording the Ten Commandments, this one, scholars believe is the more ancient of the two. Here, remembering the Sabbath is about Liberation; it is grounded in God’s liberating work, bringing the Hebrew people out of the land of Egypt, claiming them as God’s people. This mode of keeping the sabbath connects us intimately with our neighbor. Because God brought you out of slavery, because God brought you liberation, you give others rest and freedom. It is a weekly reminder of their independence and their freedom, a weekly reminder of God’s work of liberation for them and for others.

Looking at Deuteronomy and Exodus together, the Sabbath commandment orients us both to God and to neighbor. These two views of Sabbath are intimately connected. “If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday… If you refrain from trampling the sabbath, from pursuing your own interests on my holy day; if you call the sabbath a delight and the holy day of the Lord honorable… then you shall take delight in the Lord.” These two go hand in hand. We don’t live in the light of God without offering food to the hungry and satisfying the needs of the afflicted. We don’t honor God without honoring the neighbor, made in the image of that God. We don’t love God without loving the alien and the stranger, made in the image of that God. This morning, Isaiah connects these two parts of Sabbath so beautifully.

In an article for the Christian Century this week, Shai Held puts it this way, “Both of Isaiah’s requirements—social reform and sabbath observance—thus share a common religious and ethical vision: a society worthy of receiving God’s light is one that recognizes the inestimable worth of every human being, even and especially the vulnerable and downtrodden. It is a tall order, and one shudders to think how far we fall from it. But we are not free to desist from the spiritual and political work God places before us: to serve God and to embrace human beings are two tasks that are eternally and inextricably intertwined.” This is what it means to keep the sabbath and make it holy: to serve God, to worship God, and to embrace and liberate our fellow human being. These go together.
(Shai Held, https://www.christiancentury.org/blog-post/sundays-coming/dignity-and-rest-isaiah-589b-14).

This intermingling of serving God and embracing human beings is what Jesus draws on today. It was a seemingly normal Sabbath day, which had begun Friday at sundown. Jesus is in the middle of teaching. He is interrupted by the sight of this woman that was bent over. He stops preaching. He interrupts the flow of the service. He sees her in ways that likely no one has in many years. He sees her worth; he sees her as a beloved daughter of Abraham. He calls to the woman. “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” And when Jesus is confronted by the leader of the synagogue, he doubles down, “And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?” The call to observe Sabbath is deeply intertwined with setting this woman free from that which has held her captive for so long.

From the beginning of the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells us that this is his mission. Describing his own mission, Jesus says, “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 favor” (Luke 4:18-19). And for this woman, Jesus liberates on the Sabbath - the day in which they gather in remembrance of God’s liberation. Jesus doesn’t abolish Sabbath law, but Jesus acts faithfully on the Sabbath, enacting God’s liberation that they gather to commemorate. In other words, Jesus lives out the Sabbath command, as he tells this woman that she is set free.

In Jesus’ death and resurrection, Jesus sets us free. As we gather for worship each Sunday - the commemoration of Jesus’ resurrection, as we gather around font and table, Jesus sees each one of us - really sees us fully as we are -, Jesus calls us worthy, and Jesus says to each one of us “you are set free.” Wherever we are, wherever we’ve come from, whoever we are, “you are set free.” Free from sin. Free from our turned-in-on-self selves. Free from death. Free from the powers of this world that may try to keep us down. Free from the need to make ourselves worthy before God. We are free. That is the good news today. Jesus came to liberate us, and that liberation belongs to us. It cannot be taken away.

As people set free by the grace and love of God through Jesus Christ, we get to free others. We don't

have to, we get to. Who among us still needs to be set free? Who in our society and in our world still needs to be set free? Where do we see oppression still keeping our neighbor from living in freedom? Where do we see the weight of racism, of sexism, of homophobia, of xenophobia (or any other phobia or ism) weighing down our siblings, others made in the image of God? Today, we hear a call to live out that sabbath command that links serving God with liberating those around us. With the help of God, we get to loose the bonds of injustice and set the neighbor free. In freeing others, we live out the liberation that we’ve already found and experienced. Because Christ has freed us, we can imagine and live into a new kind of world - that Kingdom of God that is continually breaking in - a world where everyone finds liberation, freedom, and healing.

Amen.

8th Sunday after Pentecost (Year C) - August 4, 2019

8th Sunday after Pentecost
Year C
August 4th, 2019
Luke 12:13-21

The New Revised Standard Version of the Bible labels today’s parable as the “Parable of the Rich
Fool.” As I read the parable again and again this week, it struck me as an odd title for the parable. What the rich man does makes - at least to some extent - makes good sense. One might call it “saving for the future.” I have a retirement account. I have a savings account. Life insurance. These things that are supposed to create security and well being into the future. Arguably the rich man does both the responsible thing and the wise thing - at least for himself. Save for a rainy day, you never know what tomorrow will bring.

Beyond saving for our future, a common push in our culture is to have the latest and the greatest and to accumulate stuff and money. Think about how advertising so often works: they work to convince us that what we currently have isn’t enough so we need this other thing in our lives. I recently saw a commercial for a washing machine. It was better than all the other washing machines out there. Why? Because it held enough laundry soap for 40 loads and automatically dispensed it - so you wouldn’t have to. Something that I never even saw as a problem (putting soap into a washing machine) is lifted up as a problem that only this machine can solve. To be clear, there are good reasons for this kind of technology: there are folks for whom putting soap in a washer is a actually a difficult thing. For instance, my Gram, if the top is screwed too tightly on a bottle of detergent can’t get it open again. But that commercial wasn’t directed toward my Gram, it was directed at me. The actor was someone about my own age with seemingly no issues that would make the process of putting soap in a machine a difficult one. The message is: what you already have isn’t good enough - you need this other thing to make your life better. There’s something better out there. Keep up with the Joneses.

I fear that sometimes the parables are over sanitized. This parable is often boiled down to - in the words of Matthew Skinner - “you never see U-Haul trailers behind hearses.”(Skinner, “Poor Fool,” https://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=5368). In other words, that shiny new phone or the latest greatest washer and dryer set won’t follow you into heaven. Or it gets turned into a lesson about spending our time and energy differently. A lesson about spending time with family because life could get cut tragically short. Those both are good lessons to learn, and I do, for instance, value spending time with my loved ones over buying “stuff,” but I think those interpretations of today’s parable aim to keep today’s parable a little too close to our comfort zones. But I think this text today pushes us to wrestle with something… deeper.

This text pushes us to think not just about our stuff, but to think about our deepest fears and insecurities. It is important to note: in this story, the rich man is already rich. This is not a parable aimed at people who don’t have enough, who experience real poverty. This man already has, not only everything he needs, but he has an abundance already. He then produces this crop that is so abundant that it can’t fit into his barns. So what does he do? He builds new barns. While that may seem, at least to me, a bit impractical to build a new barn from the ground up in time to store the harvest - that isn’t too far from what we do. Think about it: when folks accumulate “stuff” that no longer fits in their spaces, we tend to rent storage units or purchase bigger homes and apartments. I know, at times, I’m guilty of this. But what, for the rich man (and perhaps for us too) underlies this?

Pastor Mary Anderson suggests this: “we’re more afraid of scarcity than we are of the devil. The advertising world counts on this fear and constantly plays on it. Before there’s greed, before there’s hoarding of stuff, there’s fear and anxiety about our future. This needs to be named out loud” (Anderson, Sundays and Seasons: Preaching Year C 2016, 215). In other words, the rich man kept the harvest for himself because he was afraid that there’s not enough to go around - and that one day, he’ll find himself without enough. And with that anxiety, he turns inward. Did you catch all the first person pronouns in the passage? “And he thought to himself, ‘what should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ then he said, ‘I will do this. I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, and be merry.” Anxiety about not having ample goods laid up for many years turns him to think only about himself. It is fear that turns into self-preservation.

If we think about it, fear of insecurity, in general, has this tendency to turn us inward. Greed, as a friend Pastor Marissa Sotos said so well last night, is “the drive to have whatever we believe we can possess that makes us not need God or other people.” Greed can be about hoarding money and resources. Greed can be about accumulating power and privilege. Greed can be about collecting “things” in order to make us feel safe and secure.

So the problem today is not wealth in and of itself, but it is how anxiety about not having enough leads to self-centeredness - and how wealth or greed in particular can push us into buying into the idea that we don’t need God or other people, feeding the myth of the self-made person. It turns us in on ourselves, seeking to put a bubble around ourselves. This rich man misses a really awesome opportunity to serve the neighbor in need. But instead, he hoards crops (which are likely perishable) for himself. Not because he’s evil. Not because he’s a terrible person. But his anxiety and worry about the future has turned him inward, giving him tunnel vision, so he only sees the possibility of not having enough and it puts him into self-preservation mode. And his greed - his hoarding of food for himself - keeps others from having enough. Poverty is real. There are people in his community that don’t have enough, and if he shared the abundant crop, the community could have enough.
Sadly, the Revised Common Lectionary stops a bit short. So all we hear from the Gospel reading is this heavy, law-driven passage. So to get at the “grace” or Good news for today, I’m going to do something I normally don’t do: I’m going to read the next part of the Gospel of Luke, which serves as a sort of commentary on the parable:

“22 He said to his disciples, “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. 23 For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. 24 Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds! 25 And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? 26 If then you are not able to do so small a thing as that, why do you worry about the rest? 27 Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. 28 But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you—you of little faith! 29 And do not keep striving for what you are to eat and what you are to drink, and do not keep worrying. 30 For it is the nations of the world that strive after all these things, and your Father knows that you need them. 31 Instead, strive for his kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well.” (Luke 12:22-31, NRSV).

The Good News today is that this kind of fear is not what God intends for God’s people. This kind of greed is not what God intends for God’s kingdom. We are stewards of what God has created. It isn’t ours; it is all God’s. God intends for there to be enough for everyone. It frees us from the cycle of keeping up with the Joneses and the fear of not having enough. It frees us from the fear of scarcity and insecurity. We’re freed from our turned-in-on-self selves so that we can turn outward - sharing the resources that God has entrusted to our care.

“Instead, strive for his Kingdom, and things will be given to you as well.” Living in this world as it currently is, I’m not giving up my retirement account (and I’m not encouraging that either), but we can strive for the Kingdom. We can look around us and see that as a society, we have enough. We pay athletes millions of dollars to play a game. Americans waste 150,000 tons of food per day. There is enough to go around, if the abundance of resources are shared. No one should, in this country, go hungry. So the parable today encourages us to shift how we think about what we have. It is a shift from thinking in terms of scarcity to seeing the abundance of God’s gifts, sharing the resources entrusted to our care, striving for that Kingdom, so that all have enough.

Amen.