Grace and peace to you from God our creator and from our Lord and savior Jesus the Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
Every three years in early August, almost a thousand delegates from across the country attend the Church Wide Assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran church in America, or just Churchwide assembly for short. Nearly every year, I watch the livestream with rapt attention, like the big church nerd that I am, and I was lucky enough to be a delegate in person in 2019 when it was held in Milwaukee, back in my home state. This year though, I was on maternity leave…. But I admit I still watched a lot of it! And it turned out that our brand new daughter liked to watch Churchwide too, even though parts of it were like watching paint dry. Roberts rules, voting machine problems, amendments to amendments, and seemingly endless amounts of confusing rules for discussion.
I know that in theory there is a good reason behind using Robert’s Rules of order, especially with such a large group of diverse opinions, and with so many important topics to be discussed. But often it felt like these rules got in the way of this necessary discussion, like when it took 30 minutes to talk about adding 30 minutes of discussion time to the agenda. I wish I were kidding. It was at times like this where, as one pastor friend so wisely put it, “the institutional patterns are set up to be more important than individual need.”
Turns out this is a problem humans have always had - as long as there have been institutions, there have been rules established to ignore the needs of marginalized individuals within those systems. Of course this was the same in Jesus’ time, as he was preaching and teaching, as is so often described in the Gospel of Luke, where he often goes head to head with institutions on behalf of the needs of these individuals.
You may remember Jesus’s controversial first sermon at the beginning of the gospel of Luke, where Jesus proclaimed that through him, God would release the captives, give sight to the blind, and let the oppressed go free. That one was not exactly well received, but here Jesus is again, teaching in the synagogue… where now he stops, mid sermon, for someone in immediate need of that freedom and release.
That woman was literally invisible. Bent over double for as many years as it takes a newborn child to graduate from high school. She was unable to stand up straight, unable to see and participate in the world around her, in a world where she was already mostly invisible for being a woman.
When Jesus sees this woman, he stops everything. Her healing cannot even wait until the end of the sabbath day, or even till the end of his sermon! He has to heal her RIGHT NOW….and in doing so, Jesus broke the 3rd commandment. Or at least according to how some were choosing to interpret it.
“Remember the …. Sabbath day, and keep it holy.” That is the 3rd commandment …. But What does THAT mean? Martin Luther explains in his Small Catechism, “We are to fear and love God so that we do not despise preaching or God’s word, but instead keep that word holy and gladly learn from it.”
Just as God rested on the 7th day of creation, we as God’s people need a day of rest. All in God’s creation were commanded to embrace our limitations and be reminded that God created us for life, not for exhaustion. But, what do we humans too often do with things that are free gifts from God? We try to control them, regulate them, and create a lot of rules.
To their credit, these religious leaders were doing their very best to preserve expressions of their faith in a world that worked against them at every turn. They tried to be faithful to their ancestral ways of worshiping God while heavily oppressed. They tried to save the shape of a tradition and, in turn, forgot that God is the creator and maintainor of these traditions, and they were created for OUR sake.
So when the bent over woman became UN-bent, this leader became BENT out of SHAPE. He could not see the true shape of what sabbath is … the shape of care over rules, life over order. Sabbath was created in the shape of justice and mercy, for freedom of those marginalized and oppressed. These leaders could not see that when one of us is in need of freedom, we all are.
With Jesus there is no more waiting. According to Jesus, Now is the time. This is the day to be set free – that YOU are set free - from bondage. WE are set free... so we can free others.
While some of the work discussed at the ELCA churchwide gathering earlier this month WILL take time to implement, some of these very sabbath-oriented tasks have begun, or can be started immediately: For example, we elected a new ELCA vice president Imran Siddiqui, the first person with Middle Eastern roots elected to this position in the ELCA. We adopted resolutions to seek justice with our Indigenous and native partners, including land acknowledgements and funding ELCA indigenous ministries. We as a denomination committed our churchwide office to reduce their carbon footprint by 50% by 2030 and and be net zero by 2050, and we can follow their example,
And this is just a fraction of what was discussed - because of, or perhaps in spite of, all the rules and regulations. Necessary changes were passed and honest conversations happened and justice was at least begun, if painfully and imperfectly.
We as ELCA Lutherans have inherited a legacy of always reforming ourselves and our church, of always being made new by God’s grace. It’s messy and imperfect and sometimes awkward and painful, because being part of a community is messy. But this work, hard as it is, is necessary and life-giving. And getting to be part of it and watch this new shape of freedom unfold is humbling. And sometimes parameters and and keeping to a particular shape is needed … but we must never let them get in the way of the needs of ourselves and our neighbors, NOW, for rest, for restoration, and for justice. Thanks be to God. Amen.
