Sermon August 26, 2013 Good morning church and good morning God. First of all, I find the parables that are on either side of our gospel story for today worth noting. A parable of mercy the spared fig tree and a parable about how God s kingdom is grown by the small stuff. A mustard seed; some yeast. So, mercy, forgiveness, faith the size of a mustard seed. These are the images Jesus offers his listeners as he travels towards the cross. The woman in this story has been unable to stand up straight for eighteen years. She has a world vision of dust and feet and her kneecaps. It is through Jesus that she is set free. There are times in our lives when we are so burdened by our troubles that we are unable to stand up straight. Unable to look up. Unable to see the road ahead of us; unable to know where we are going. When we are crippled by sin we must turn to God in order to be set free.
Sometimes when we become bound we accept it as the way it is; our perceived destiny.. We can t imagine what it would be like to stand tall and be free. Rather that looking at the things that weigh us down as something that can be cast aside so that we can be free in Christ, we live into our enslavement. Will we be bound for the sake of bondage or for the sake of freedom? Luke 13:10-17 Now Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. This is an interesting point to make that the reason for her crippling condition does not seem to be medical but spiritual. Granted there are often physical manifestations of emotional or spiritual distress but the fact that Jesus tells her she is set free could be an indication that there is more going on here than some type of arthritic condition. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, "Woman, you are set free from your ailment." Set
free not you are made well or you are healed but you are set free. When he laid his hands on her, immediately IMMEDIATELY she stood up straight and began praising God. It is through Jesus that she is set free. When Jesus sets us free do we immediately praise him? Do we praise him at all? But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, "There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day." But the Lord answered him and said, "You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? 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?" When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame; and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing. The synagogue leader was focused on what? He was focused on the opportunity to catch Jesus in a grievous act that would demonstrate that Jesus was defiant of the law of God. His concern
was for his own agenda, missing the opportunity to witness God at work. The action that Jesus took on the Sabbath was not a violation of Sabbath law, it was a fulfillment of Sabbath. The Sabbath is a time of rest as told in Genesis but it is also a response to being set free from slavery. In Deuteronomy the commandments are prefaced with the statement: 6 I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; 7 you shall have no other gods before me. What weighs us down to the point that we are bent over? At what point do we become tired of being enslaved by our misery and to stand up straight so that we can look up to God and know freedom. It is quite possible that we become accustomed to looking down. That our state of bindedness becomes normal. It is possible that we become so used to the constraints of our limited vision that we are bound in body, mind, and spirit to the point that we don t believe that there is any hope for freedom. We are lost. This is when Jesus reaches out to us and says you are set free. How can we attain the
freedom to stand up straight and LOOK UP to God? What does it mean to be set free? This weekend we commemorate the 50 year anniversary of the March on Washington. The idea of standing up against oppression is not a new concept in our country. Marches on Washington are a way that we as citizens often make a statement to the country and to the government of our country. In 1913 5,000 women marched down Pennsylvania Avenue, Inez Milholland Boissevain, dressed herself as Columbia the mythical goddess and feminine symbol of the United States. women marched for the right to vote. Then there was the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom in 1957. This was the first effort to organize a national march for the cause of civil rights of former slaves and children of slavery, to make the threeyear old Supreme Court landmark decision, Brown v. Board of Education not just words but action.
Marches for or against something are not unusual in our nations capital. But the march on Washington in 1963, is still known as the March on Washington. Martin Luther King stretched out his arms and said let freedom ring people who were there whether actually on the streets of DC or not who supported Dr. King remember the call 50 years ago to end the laws of segregation and the sin of racism that fueled the laws of oppression. The passing of tthe Civil Rights act of 1964 and the granting of voting rights in 1965 1965 y all would offer us the impression that racism would be legislated away. But do not doubt that the evil of racism runs through the heart of our country. People of color suffer higher rates of poverty, incarceration, and illiteracy. My friends racism cannot be legislated away. It can only be defeated by the love of Jesus as shown by each of us toward all people who look different than the image we see in the mirror when we wake up in the morning. Each of us no matter who we are or where we come from has something that needs to be turned over to Jesus to
experience freedom and to then become reflections not of our own image but of the image of God. The question of Jesus acting on the Sabbath asks the question: What do you value? At what point does our perception about how things should be interfere with the truth of how God intends things to be. We may ask this question not just in our church but in our homes and in our workplace. Is our living of the Gospel inclusive or exclusive? Is our life of mission woven into the fabric of our life of worship and our life day to day or do we compartmentalize? Do we just pray for the marginalized or do we work to equalize the differences that create the marginalization of people? Look up to God to know what it means to be free in him. Stand up for what you believe in. But first ask is it God s desire or your own? Stand up and be free. Jesus went to the cross for our freedom. Lay down your burdens at the foot of the cross and look up towards the promise of eternal life.