Sunday Sermon - Playing Christians

Luke 13:10-17

Playing Christians

James Sledge               --              August 22, 2010

We Presbyterians, like other Protestants, are products of a 500 year old reform movement that said individual Christians should read the Bible for themselves, that God is available to each of us directly through Scripture.  But we live in a day when many Protestants rarely read their Bibles, and so polls show that most of us cannot name the 10 Commandments.  Still, I imagine that this one will sound familiar to many of you.  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.

Sabbath is a pretty big deal in the Bible.  It’s there at the very start.
 In the first creation account, God makes everything in six days and rests on the seventh.  But apparently, Sabbath keeping didn’t become a really big deal for the Hebrews until they were carried off into exile in Babylon around 600 BC.  In a foreign land, the Temple and Jerusalem destroyed, Sabbath keeping became the primary way Jews maintained a distinct identity.  In Babylon, synagogue and Sabbath became the way that Israel preserved their faith and stayed close to God.

By Jesus’ time, there was a rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem.  People could go there for religious festivals and to make offerings.  But synagogue and Sabbath remained important.  Especially for those Jews who thought Temple worship sometimes focused too much on ritual and not enough on living as God intended, Sabbath keeping, along with the commandments in general, was emphasized. 

Protestant reformers such as John Calvin shared a lot in common with these folks.  They thought that much of medieval Catholicism had become too focused on ritual and not enough on living as followers of Jesus.  And so Protestants tended to forego much of the ritual of Roman Catholic worship.  They also emphasized Sabbath keeping, now relocated from Saturday to Sunday, the day of the Lord’s resurrection.

I grew up in a thoroughly Protestant South where Catholics were something of a rarity.  And our world shut down on Sunday.  I almost never heard the sound of a lawn mower on a Sunday afternoon.  And I still find it difficult to crank up my lawn mower on a Sunday.

The Sabbath keeping I knew as a child has largely faded from the American landscape, but it is enjoying a resurgence as a personal spiritual practice.  Many who are seeking to grow deeper spiritually, including some who are neither Jewish nor Christian, have discovered observing a regular day where the work and busyness of our world is set aside, where the focus is on God, on worship, on meditation and reflection, is a powerfully renewing, enlightening, and energizing thing to do.

Jesus himself observed the Sabbath.  He could regularly be found at the synagogue on the Sabbath, teaching as a traveling rabbi.  But Jesus also regularly found himself embroiled in conflict on the Sabbath, just as he does in our reading today when he heals a crippled woman.

Jesus ran afoul of the Sabbath rules, guidelines that had been formulated to help people properly keep Sabbath.  We sometimes misunderstand these rules, seeing them as petty legalism that valued rules over all else, but that really wasn’t the case.  These rules had all sorts of exceptions.  You could do work on the Sabbath to rescue a person or animal in danger.  But if the situation was something that could wait until sundown when the Sabbath ended, you were supposed to wait, the intent being to help people keep their focus on God.

But as well intended as the Sabbath rules were, they shared a problem inherent in just about every form of religious practice.  Practices originally designed to draw people close to God almost inevitably become the focus of the religion.  Even if they no longer serve their original purpose, people will persist in these practices, insisting that they are essential to the faith.  And that’s as true for us as it was for the leader of the synagogue who confronts Jesus.

That synagogue leader saw Jesus violating rules that had served the faith well, that were time honored methods for helping people keep God at the center of their lives.  And so he could not see God at work right before his eyes.  The very thing he trusted to keep him focused on God had, in fact, hidden God from him.

It can happen just as easily to us.  If you grew up in the church, you grew up with some sort of worship style.  You heard certain sorts of hymns and prayers.  Whatever sorts they were, they were originally meant to draw you into God’s presence.  And they have done and continue to do just that for many people.  But a style from a certain time can become a barrier to folks from another time unfamiliar with that style.  It can actually obscure God for them.  And when we decide that a particular worship style, a particular sort of music, a particular way of praying is the right way, we have begun the process of enshrining our way as an idol, forgetting that worship is about drawing near to God, encountering God, not about our tastes.  And this is not a matter of old versus new.  New styles of worship are as prone to this as old.

I think that a great deal of younger generations’ current apathy about the Church is because they see much about us that looks like that synagogue leader’s insistence on a time honored form or Sabbath keeping.  We seem more focused on what we’ve always done than on God. Often, that is a valid criticism of we churchy types. 

Those who have had it with churchy types whom they see as more concerned with going to church than being the church, will sometimes throw Jesus’ Sabbath fights back in our faces, telling us that we’ve perverted Church.  They say, “You should call off your worship services and go out and help the poor and needy.”  Perhaps they’re right.  Jesus does say that those who help the poor and needy, who visit the sick and the prisoner, who welcome the stranger, have done the same to him.

But in truth, Jesus never makes either/or distinctions between worship and serving others.  For Jesus, all of life is about drawing near to God.  Jesus regular spends time in worship and prayer, and it is his intimacy with God that impels him to demonstrate God’s love by curing the sick and embracing the sinner and the outcast. 

When Jesus responds to the synagogue leader who protests a Sabbath healing he says, “You hypocrites!”  Our word hypocrite comes to us directly from the Greek word in our gospel, hupokritai.  But the original meaning of this word is an “actor,” someone who plays a role.  And whenever our practices and traditions let us be religious without actually opening us to God and what God is up to, that’s what we are doing.  We’re playing Christians.

When you come to worship here, or any other church, do you encounter God?  Do you touch and feel the transforming, mysterious presence of the holy?  When you come to the Lord’s table, does God’s grace fill you and nourish you so that you long to share God’s love with others?  And if your answer is “No,” why do you think that is?

God is here!  The Spirit is moving in this place.  In Jesus, God seeks to connect with us, longs to connect with us.   Jesus is here, calling us to become his living body in the world.  The Spirit is here, helping us to hear Jesus’ call, and equipping us to do all that he asks.

Thanks be to God!