Luke 13.10–17

A sermon delivered at West Huntspill Church, August 2016

I have a box of things under my desk. I call them sermon props. Mostly they are things that I can’t bring myself to throw away or part with. Things like a full sized plastic skeleton, a whole bunch of daft sunglasses and a wooden artists model. I think I’ve got a fishing net there too. The thing is, they are all wrapped up and put away tidily in a box, mostly because there isn’t room for them to be more accessible. My study is quite small.

Consequently, I often don’t bother to explore what I’ve got in the box, and I probably don’t use them enough. (I haven’t got a prop with me today, for example!). We can wrap things up so much that we forget what they are, and make them inaccessible to us all.

And so, here we are on our Sabbath day… All very nicely wrapped up and tidied.

But what is it for? What is in it? When did you last unwrap the Sabbath Day and think about it as anything other than a wrapped up part of our faith and church life? Here we are, sitting in this lovely building, singing hymns of praise and worship, saying prayers of thanksgiving and petition, sharing in a mysterious meal that we wrap up in posh words such as ‘Eucharist’ and ‘Holy Communion’. It’s Sunday. It’s what we do, isn’t it? Maybe. After all, that’s what Sunday is all about, isn’t it? That’s how we’ve wrapped it up, isn’t it?

Well, by way of exploration, I want to share with you a little bit of my past.

As many of you will know, I have not been a confessing Christian all my life. Until around 1999/2000 I was most certainly an atheist, and not simply someone who couldn’t be bothered with God, but one who most definitely reasoned that there was no such person, no such idea. So, you can imagine that Sundays were very different for me then. Certainly, they were very different to what they are for me now, as an ordained priest: as you all know, it’s actually the only day I do any proper work! (yea, right…)

As a non-Christian, you might think Sundays were a totally different experience to what they are for Christians. No expectation to go to church. No desire to go, even. Right? Wrong. I grew up in a society where Sunday was special and had been so for centuries. Where, as a young boy I went to church with my parents. The pattern of the week was built around the day of rest. That pattern was set for me very early and remains throughout my many years away from the church.

I know that I am not unusual. Sunday remains a day of the week that has a different feel to it still even for those who never go to church, and have never gone to church. It is a powerful pattern, whether you ‘believe’ or not. But it comes from a time of enforced observance, and that is significant, I think, for our contemporary culture.

But is it a day of rest?

It’s now 22 years since the Sunday trading laws changed to permit shops to be open (except for Christmas and Easter, of course), and in that almost quarter century, Sunday has certainly changed. It has become less of a day of church attendance, but is it any less a day of rest? And does it matter either way?

Of course, the biblical example we have for the Sabbath comes from Genesis 2:2–3, from the seventh day of creation and whatever your beliefs about Creation, the idea of a day being special during our week, remains a valuable notion. Whether it is Sunday or a different day is not the point, we all seek and see the value of a day of not being rushed, a day of not ‘working’. The pharisees, and the old Jewish customs of the Sabbath were invoked to ensure that people took time away from the daily grind. Not simply to have time off, but to value the time off as a gift from God, and it’s just this idea that is being revealed to us in the gospel today as Jesus heals a crippled woman.

Jesus, we are told, made the leader of the synagogue ‘indignant’ because he had been doing work on the Sabbath. And, oddly, I can identify with the leader of the synagogue. Not that I want to impose upon anyone the idea that we should somehow exist in a state of isolated holy inaction on Sunday, or that, more particularly, we shouldn’t help anyone in need when they come to us. That is just plain daft, and cruel. But, the synagogue leader (notice, not a priest; he might have been the church warden or some other important person) is concerned that the Sabbath day is ‘kept holy’. It is a commandment. It’s number three or four depending on what bible you refer to, and is was special because of that. Keeping it Holy is the point. The commandment is to keep the sabbath day holy.

Holy means ‘special to God’. Reminding ourselves that God loves us, and seeks our wellbeing at all times and in all places. That is one way of thinking about holiness. If something is holy, it is blessed, and if it is blessed, then that is because we give thanks to God for it. Keeping the Sabbath holy is all about using that time to remind ourselves of how important God is to us, and how important we are to God.

In Jesus’ day (and for centuries since) that commandment was interpreted as ‘do nothing else but pray, or sing, or share in the holy communion’. And that has actually worked rather well, in one sense. It was because of the profound observance of the Sabbath (as a Sunday) that I as an atheist grew up knowing that Sunday was a day of difference, a ‘day of rest’, perhaps. But, as so often with our faith, we go too far. We wrap things up too well. We think they are too fragile and to vulnerable to mess around with. We make up all kinds of rules and regulations that end up making us do just the opposite of our initial intentions.

The response of the synagogue leader (and of all the law makers of his day) teaches us a valuable lesson, one that we continue to mess up to this day: that God loves us all the time, and we don’t really have to make any laws to ensure that this happens. Instead, the response of Jesus, in healing the crippled woman, reveals to us that we must not let the laws get between us and God. The Sabbath is the Sabbath not in order to test us and then to make us fail at being good Christians, but to give us the space to remember — through worship, prayer and praise — what God has done for us (and through that knowledge to know what it means to be a good christian).

So, today, Sunday, a day of holiness, is a day during which we can reflect on what it means to be loved by God. In healing the crippled woman, and then pointing out that she too should be set free from bondage on the Sabbath, Jesus is reminding us that, even though we might value rest on the Sabbath, that does not mean that we should turn away from God’s desire that we love others as well.

The leader says that she should come on another day and be healed, but not the Sabbath. He’s desperate to keep the day Holy, but misses the point that the holiness we seek is the knowledge of God’s love for us. And that continues day and night, week by week by week, for all eternity. All he does is keep the Sabbath wrapped up tightly.

The release from bondage happens whenever we seek it. No conditions, no ‘wait a day and come back tomorrow’. No. It happens as soon as you consider it. The freedom and the love of God doesn’t stop on a Sunday. The holiness of the Sabbath is a wonderful convenience created for us and interpreted by us. It is not something we should wrap up so much that we forget what is in it, however. When we wrap things too tightly we are in danger of making them impossible to use. Just like the box of sermon props I have beneath my desk: I don’t delve into them deeply becasue they’re wrapped up and difficult. When we loosen and unwrap things we can engage with them more.

When we wrap up God’s desires too tightly, we forget just how valuable they are and forget to look at them, play with them, use them.

The Sabbath is a gift. Unwrap the gift and use it: to the glory of God.