PENTECOST 11 (Year C, Proper 16) - August 21, 2022 - Rev. Frank Senn

Texts: Isaiah 58:9b—14; Luke 13:10—17

You sometimes hear people say, “nothing is sacred anymore.” They mean that respect is not paid to institutions and things that were once venerated. Probably the biggest recent violation of a sacred institution was the attempt by a mob incited by the former president to disrupt the constitutional orderly transfer of the office of president, a mob which also ransacked the U.S. Capital Building that is called “the people’s house” and “the citadel of democracy.”

Documents like the U.S. Constitution and the Bible are regarded as sacred or holy. Places like the Capitol or houses of worship are regarded as sacred or holy. Times like anniversaries of historical events or weekly occurrences like the Sabbath Day can be regarded as sacred or holy. People such as heroes and saints can be regarded as sacred or holy. We speak of sacred music and sacred art.  But what do we mean when we say that something is sacred or holy?

Basically, we mean that something bears the marks of God. That it has a quality about it that somehow enables us to sense the presence of God or that connects us to God. That somehow in this place or at that time or in these people earth and heaven seem to kiss; reality becomes transparent, and you can see right through to things far deeper and more mysterious than what we encounter in ordinary life. The sacred may also include aspects of ordinary life, like childbirth or marriage or a vocational calling or death.

Some sacred things we just encounter by surprise (like when Moses encountered the burning bush) or by common consent (like a burial place). But other things are sacred because God says so. “Remember the Sabbath Day, to keep it holy.” That means to keep it set apart for God.

But it’s not just a commandment. The Isaiah writer after the Babylonian exile (sometimes called the Third Isaiah) says to the Jews who are reconstructing their common life after seventy years in Babylon that if they refrain from attending to their own business on the Sabbath Day, it will become a day of genuine joy. They will rejoice in Yahweh, and ride upon the heights of the earth. Worshiping the Lord will be an ecstatic experience that they will find uplifting.

Gathering on the Sabbath, the sacred day, in the local synagogue, the sacred place, with your fellow people of the covenant, the sacred people of Abraham, became the hallmark of post-exilic Judaism. The Sabbath rest is a gift from God. The new institution of the synagogue that emerged during the Babylonian exile when access to the Temple was cut off is a gift of God. The community of the covenant is a gift of God to God’s chosen people.

But what happens when somebody tries to control the sacred? That’s the issue in the Gospel reading we heard today. In the story from Luke’s gospel, we saw what happens when somebody tries to control the sacred. Tries to regulate it, to guard it, to restrict access to it. The leader of the synagogue, a man to whom the handling of sacred things has been entrusted, has so lost his ability to see beyond the rules that were intended to protect the holy that he couldn’t see a holy action taking place on that particular holy day. It’s not that God breaks his own commandment, but rather than God shows how the promise of Sabbath wholeness can be fulfilled.

A woman comes into the synagogue, a woman who has been crippled for eighteen years and is bent over, unable to stand up straight. What does the synagogue leader see? An outcast. Something grotesque and distorted. Hardly human.

But what does Jesus see? He sees a woman, a person of dignity and worth, a beloved child of God, a daughter of Abraham. In short, he sees a sacred being – someone who bears in her very being the image of God. He sees her disability too, but only as secondary. He sees her as a sacred bearer of the image of God who just happens to have a disability. He can, however, see that the disability has marginalized this member of the covenant community. Her disability has caused her to be shunned, her sacredness denied.

And so, Jesus commits a sacred act. A sacramental act of healing – one of those acts that pulls the veil back and allows us to see for a moment the reality of God that permeates the world. He heals her. He said “Woman, you are free,” and laid his hands on her back (probably because her face was toward the ground), and up she came, as strong and straight as a mountain ash.

But the synagogue leader, not able to see the holiness of the woman and not able to see the holiness of healing, is indignant. This breaks the rules. This is not allowed. There are times and places for these things to be done, and this is not it. This is the Sabbath, a holy day, and this is a holy place where the Torah is studied. You can’t do that sort of thing here today.

Talk about missing the boat! What could be more appropriate than a holy act for a holy person on a holy day. Those who try to regulate and control the holy rapidly lose their ability to even recognize the holy. They blind themselves to the presence of God even in the times and places and among the people that God himself has declared holy.

What is the Sabbath? It’s the day on which God rested from all his work of creation that he had pronounced “good” and “very good.” It was a day to celebrate completeness, wholeness. We Christians don’t celebrate the Sabbath in the same way as the Jews. But we must still remember it, because without the seventh day of rest we would not be celebrating the eighth day, the day of resurrection, the Lord’s Day. This is a day on which we rejoice in a new creation. The One who, by his resurrection, is making all things new, made this woman, this daughter of Abraham, whole and new, completing the wholeness of the God’s creation and anticipating the new life of the resurrected body.

Central to our faith is Jesus’ suffering and death and resurrection on the third day. Our hope is the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. We confess this in our baptismal creed, and we affirm it as the mystery of faith in our Eucharist.

Unfortunately, we are not without Christian leaders today who would withhold the sacrament of Christ body and blood from Christ’s baptized people because of decisions they must make and actions they must take because of their responsibility in the world. I think of our very Catholic president being threatened by some Catholic bishops with excommunication – being barred from receiving Holy Communion – because of his support of abortion rights. What about “the gifts of God for the people of God?” Or, in the Eastern liturgies on which this Prayer Book formula is based, “Holy things for the holy people.” (Of course, these statements are not in the Roman Mass, so the bishops are not reminded that the things God made holy by the holy words of Christ---sacramental elements---are intended for the people God made holy in Baptism.)

In our fallen world all of us have had to make decisions that we wish we didn’t have to make. You’re faced with this in your own life and work and family. Pastors have to give counsel they wish they didn’t have to give. I know I have. I once had to absolve a woman who wanted a child of aborting a child that would not survive birth.

No matter who you are, no matter how bent and twisted you may have become, no matter how low you’ve gone, that image of God is implanted in you. You are still a sacred being. We all have, by virtue of being people baptized into the death and resurrection of Christ and equipped with the Holy Spirit, a calling to minister to bent and twisted people. We have words and gestures by which to set them free.  Sometimes the gesture is no more than holding a hand.

The sacred is all around us, in every place, in every moment, potentially in every person. And the sacred is always within us, calling us to embrace our God-given destiny as sacred bearers of God’s grace in a sacred world, a world God pronounced “good” and “very good.” Amen.

Pastor Frank C. Senn