Sermon 8/26/07
Simple - Luke 13:10-17
(view lectionary notes for this text)
I was recently talking to someone who was helping to arrange employment for a person with disabilities. He was telling me about all the rules that have to be worked around just for this person to be able to work a part time job. This young man can’t work too many hours, or he won’t qualify for certain government benefits. He can’t work too few hours, or he won’t make enough money. He can’t make more than a certain amount per hour, or he won’t get his benefits. He can’t complete his work too quickly, because he’s required to be in a supervised setting for a certain number of hours a day. To help this man, all sorts of rules have to be followed, finagled, and finessed, just to enable him to do something so simple – work a part time job. The process, though, has been so complicated by so many rules, that everyone involved is frustrated – the employer, the man trying to work, and those trying to facilitate everything. The aim is simple – to let him work. How hard can it be? But to accomplish this simple task, a tangled web of complex rules must be followed.
In our gospel lesson today, we see an example of something very simple being made very complex. Jesus heals a woman who has been in pain for eighteen years. Simple, for Jesus. But it is the Sabbath, and so the simple exchange, the gift of healing, becomes a point of conflict. As our scene opens, Jesus is teaching in the synagogue on the Sabbath. And a woman appears who is crippled. She has been this way for eighteen years, because of a spirit, we read, and she’s unable to stand up straight. We don’t read that someone brings her for healing, or that she asks Jesus to heal her. She’s just there, where Jesus is teaching. He calls her over, and says, simply, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” He lays his hands on her, and she stands up straight. She praises God for what has happened to her. But the leader of the congregation becomes indignant. Jesus has healed on the Sabbath – it is against the law! He tells the crowds to come on any of six other days if they want healing – but let the Sabbath be a day of rest. Jesus calls him and the others 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?” he asks. “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?” We read that his opponents were put to shame, and the crowds rejoiced at what Jesus had done. The woman had waited eighteen years to be healed, and he would not let her wait one day longer for freedom.
In the scene we are confronted with what should seem like simple circumstances. A woman needs healing, and Jesus provides it. Now, we might not be able to heal as Jesus heals, but the point is, he sees a need and meets it. If someone was hungry, you could offer them food. If someone was sick, you might offer medicine. Simple. And it is also the Sabbath – a day God told the people to set aside – a day of rest, to honor God, to worship, to remember God’s rest in creation. It’s the Sabbath, so rest and honor God. Simple. But things have been complicated. In the act of healing, Jesus has broken the law. Not just any law – one of the Ten Commandments. But keeping the Sabbath wasn’t just a simple matter. There wasn’t just the one law, based on the one commandment. There were hundreds of laws about keeping the Sabbath. As Jesus mentions, there were clarifications. You could make sure your animal was fed. You could do certain things, but not others. You had to know what counted as work and what counted as rest. It was all mapped out in many laws. And the rabbis would comment on the laws, interpret them. Not so different from the situation I described at the start, about the man trying to hold a job. So many rules, just to do one thing – honor God, keep the Sabbath holy. Jesus points out that somewhere in the leader’s protest of Jesus’ healing, the leader has missed the point of something simple, and so missed not only the opportunity to have the woman be healed, but also the opportunity to truly honor the Sabbath day. Simple, made complex. We are so good at making simple things more difficult for ourselves and for others.
One of my favorite courses in seminary was a theology class in my first year that introduced me to a kind of theology called process theology. Process theology is a kind of approach to faith that integrates math and science and works with them to come up with a way of looking at God and God’s work in the world. Something about the combination of logic and spirituality really appeals to my questioning approach to my faith. Well, according to process theology, God wants us to become more and more complex. God doesn’t want us to just become more and more crazed and busy – that’s not what complexity means in this context, this theology. But the idea is that God wants us to experience abundance – the fullness and richness that is available to us through all that God has created, the fullness that is available to us when we open ourselves completely to God’s calling on us and God’s plans for us. It is what Jesus offers in my favorite Bible verse from John 10 – “I have come that you might have life, and have it abundantly.” God’s purpose for us is abundance, and in process theology, this is called complexity – that’s what God wants for us. That’s good complexity.
But there’s another way we use the word complexity, the more common usage, where complicated has a sense of overwhelming hassle. If we say something is complicated, we mean it is too hard to even explain clearly. It’s a mess. Things are muddled. That’s complicated. Complexity has this negative weight to it. If we have struggles in our faith journeys, I think it is because we’re trying to make things complicated where they are really quite simple. I did a little research for my sermon today into my own preaching habits. I figured out that in my four years I’ve preached about 250 sermons at St. Paul’s, if you subtract the one or two Sundays I was out of town and add in the evening worship services where I preached. And I also did a word count on my sermons, and discovered that my sermons average around 1900 words – about four or five pages. 1900 words times 250 sermons gets you 475,000 words preached to you in my time at St. Paul’s. It would seem like all those words are making complex a message that is really simple. I might dress it up in different ways every week, but I think behind the words, if you boil them down so you are left with the meaning, I’m really saying the same few things over and over again. God created us, created you so uniquely. To God, you are precious, and loved, without condition. And by God’s grace, God asks you to love in return – to love God, and to love others. That’s it. It really is that simple. Not easy. But not complicated. What God asks of us is to love. And if we need hundreds of clarifications on exactly what loving means, I suspect that it is because we’re trying to get out of doing what we already know is right. We’re the ones who complicate what is otherwise clear. We’re the ones adding extra rules and regulations to the gifts from God that come to us free and without price.
Jesus brought freedom to a woman who had been bound for eighteen years. He didn’t want her to wait one day more, not because he would ever be flippant about keeping the Sabbath, or honoring God, but because eighteen years was eighteen years too long for the woman to be bound. Neither she nor Jesus could wait any longer. What is offered to us by God is so simple in all its overflowing abundance – love, a gift, free, without cost. Haven’t you waited long enough to accept God’s love and return God’s love? Haven’t you been bound by rules and complexities more than you can stand? Don’t wait through the next 1,472 words of a sermon to respond. Don’t wait one day more.
Amen.