Freed

Sermon

What does it mean to be free?

Several years ago, our beloved Clayton Rice, a retired Presbyterian minister and an unretiring character, said something to me about the Assurance of Pardon. He said he wished the language included a word or two about forgiveness freeing us to be the people of God. And so I changed the wording we use; you might have noticed we now say that through Christ’s forgiveness, we are freed to love and serve.

What does it mean to be free?

In the Jewish tradition, that question goes all the way back to the foundational story of the Exodus. The chosen people of God were enslaved to Pharaoh in Egypt until God began the process of their liberation. God’s appointed leader, Moses, led the people through the waters of the Red Sea and into the desert near Mt. Sinai. In the wilderness, the once-enslaved people began to form a new identity, not as foreigners in bondage to a tyrant, but as a free people following their God out of wilderness into a promised land.

In order to form their new identity, they needed some parameters which came to them in the form of what we now call the Ten Commandments. You shall have no other God before me, God told them. You shall honor the Sabbath and keep it holy.

Because here’s the thing: enslaved people don’t get a Sabbath. They don’t get a day off. They are beholden to the whims of their master. For those Israelites making their way through the Sinai desert for forty years, stopping once a week, observing the Sabbath, was a deliberate act that reminded them that they were now free.

What does it mean to be free?

It’s a question we might pose to the leader of the synagogue, the enforcer of the Sabbath law. He is a faithful Jew in a position to make sure the folks in the synagogue remember the laws, the parameters, of their faith. Sabbath observance is a big one. Maintaining the Sabbath separated the Jews from their Greek neighbors and their Roman occupiers. So maybe the leader of the synagogue has every right to challenge Jesus, who breaks the Sabbath law by healing this woman.

Or does he? Does Jesus really break the Sabbath law? Maybe in act, but not in intent. I think, given the difference of opinion about the Sabbath, we’re supposed to side with Jesus.

Jesus argues, here and elsewhere in the gospels, that the Sabbath is more than just not doing any work. The Sabbath is a reminder that the people of God are no longer enslaved to Pharaoh or anyone else; they have been freed. So what could be more appropriate than bringing freedom to something on the Sabbath?

What does it mean to be free?

For this woman, it means new life. We have all known people who are cruelly bent over by osteoporosis or scoliosis or some other horrible bone disease. They cannot stand up straight. They cannot look anyone in the eye. The pain they feel must be unbearable.

So here is this woman, bent over for what was likely half her life; here is this woman, who as a woman is already a second-class citizen; here is this woman, denied the joy of a body that works well, denied the joy of being a full part of a community; here is this woman who, despite all of this, makes her way to the synagogue on the Sabbath.

I like to imagine that this woman came to the synagogue every week, because worshipping her God was still within her ability. Maybe worshipping God gave her hope or peace or just the encouragement to go on. Given that she is not named as anyone’s widow or wife or mother or daughter, we can assume she is alone in the world, with no one to look out for her. And still she goes to the synagogue, for no other reason than to live out her faith and its commandments.

I don’t think she was expecting to meet Jesus that day. He was in traveling mode, making his way through Samaria and Galilee toward Jerusalem; who knows where he would be on any given Sabbath? He ends up in a synagogue in an unnamed village with an unnamed woman and an unnamed leader. Jesus is free to do whatever he chooses, and on this day, he chooses to heal this woman.

He frees her from a life of pain and isolation. He frees her and she can stand up straight, look people in the eye, look upward to heaven to thank her God. He frees her to be a fully engaged part of the community once again.

What does it mean to be free?

As the U.S. continues to bear the evil fruit of slavery, as we continue to live with the trauma passed through generations of those whose ancestors lived as enslaved people, it is good to remember the long road some must travel to freedom.

Many of those enslaved people took up the religions of the master; they followed Jesus and found hope in the story of the Exodus. They worked to follow the Ten Commandments, and yet….

Looking back at the religious life in the South, Frederick Douglass wrote, “It was necessary to keep our religious masters at [the church] unacquainted with the fact that, instead of spending the Sabbath in wrestling, boxing, and drinking whisky, we were trying to learn how to read the will of God; for they had much rather to see us engaged in those degrading sports, than to see us behaving like intellectual, moral, and accountable beings.” (Douglass, “Slaveholding Religion and the Christianity of Christ,” in African American Religious History: A Documentary Witness, quoted in Feasting on the Word.)

What does it mean to be free?

It means having agency, the ability to do what one wants. It means being beholden to no one but God. It means having the luxury and the choice to observe the Sabbath.

Now the Sabbath is more than just a day off, although having a day off is a good thing. The Sabbath is an invitation to reset, to remember that God is God and we are not God. It is a time carved out to notice the gifts of God—the gift of creation, the gift of people in our lives, the gift of talents given to artists and poets and thinkers. It is an opportunity to remember that all our labors do not make us who we are; we are more than nurses or teachers or plant managers or sales people. God makes us who we are; Sabbath invites us to reflect on that.

In the Hebrew root, the word “Sabbath” means rest. Free people get to rest. They get to have a day off, or a nap, or a paid vacation. Being free allows for a fullness of life; being free allows us to live into shalom, another wonderful Hebrew word that means all-encompassing peace and wholeness.

And that leads to a different sort of question. Who needs to be free?

When I go around town, I see people who are in bondage to addiction and mental illness. We see them asleep in doorways, camped out on sidewalks, asking for change or simply staring out into the world. I wish I knew how to give them freedom from their addiction, but honestly, so much happens to the body and especially the brain that it takes a lifetime of a team committed to working with that person.

And the mental illness issue is huge. I’m not talking about the depression or anxiety or bipolar disorder that many of us here live with and manage, more or less. I’m talking about the woman standing on a neighbor’s lawn, shrieking as she tears off her clothes. I’m talking about the guy walking up the middle of Broadway during rush hour traffic. I’m talking about people who live in such psychic pain they no longer know who they are.

Who needs to be free?

Victims of human trafficking; those stuck in poverty; those in bondage to an identity given to them that is a false one—believing that they worthless, stupid, just taking up space.

Who needs to be free?

Maybe you do. Maybe something is weighing you down, preventing your full life. Maybe you carry an inordinate amount of pain—physical, mental, psychic pain. Maybe you bear the burden of guilt. Or maybe you’re just plain exhausted and need a rest.

The whole world is exhausted, I think. We’ve lived with this danged pandemic for so long, and we are bent over with statistics and vaccinations and masks and physical distancing and making up for lost time and everything. We need to be freed from the clutches of COVID-19, I think. But I also think that our exhausted response to COVID is really just a symptom for something else.

I’m not sure the human heart has caught up yet with things like social media, and television, and the ugly picture we sometimes see in history’s mirror. I’m not sure the human heart has caught up with the speed of the division caused by mistrust and by hate and differing definitions of the word “truth.” I’m not sure our hearts ever really caught up with all the things Jesus was teaching us about love and forgiveness and healing and God and generosity.

But then I remember that Jesus is all about freedom; when he gave his inaugural address in Luke 4, he told everyone what he was going to do, quoting the prophet Isaiah. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,” Jesus said on a different day in a different synagogue. “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.”

I remember that Jesus said, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”

So let us make Jesus our Sabbath. To the glory of God.