I love VBS, I guess the first time I ever taught or preached was for Mrs. Wells’ 4th grade VBS class as a 12 year old Moses with a bathrobe, an elastic banded gray beard,  two tablets fashioned from spray painted kickboards and a memorized script! Our scriptures today and next week are the lessons from Operation Restoration, our children’s Vacation Bible school theme. Learning the stories of the faith is essential to following Christ in the world. We are called to love God with our hearts, soul, strength and our minds! 

 In our story today, Jesus and an unnamed Rabbi do not agree about how to apply one of the Ten Commandments. And that is okay! Exodus 20 instructs us “Remember the Sabbath day and treat it as holy” is the general principle, but Exodus adds more detailed instructions. “Six days you may work and do all your tasks, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. Do not do any work on it—not you, your sons or daughters, your male or female servants, your animals, or the immigrant who is living with you.” The Exodus recorder tells us why: “Because the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and everything that is in them in six days, but rested on the seventh day. That is why the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” 

How do you interpret the commandment?  How do you keep your Sunday’s holy? What is work, worship or holiness? John Wesley’s 1765  Preface to the New Testament offers some practices for interpreting and applying Scriptures: 1) Read the Bible every day. 2) Read Scripture seeking to find God’s will. 3) Keep your eyes open to “the analogies of faith” and the bigger ideas. 4) Read prayerfully because “scripture can only be understood through the same Spirit by which it was given.”  5) Pause and examine yourself. 6) Apply what you learned right away. 

You may take different lessons from the story than I do. That is okay.  You might be captured by the bent over woman’s untold story. Why do we not learn her name, was her anonymity her choice?  Some of you might wonder about the miracle, was there some science or psychology behind her standing up straight or was it just a temporary suspension of the laws of the universe? I think God is in every honest pondering. As a preacher, I was struck by a clergy colleague so bound by something that they could not celebrate with their own congregation as a person broke free from 18 years of bondage. 

 “Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath.”  Sit with that one verse for a moment. What does it tell us about healing, Jesus, the woman and our story?  1) Jesus was Jewish.  2) Jesus practiced his faith inside a community of believers and seekers.  3) The leaders of the synagogue allowed or perhaps even invited Jesus to teach that day.  So maybe the disagreement between the rabbi and Jesus is more of a family squabble than a break between Christians and Jews. Jesus debated the rabbi, but such rabbinical debates are a key feature of Jewish theology, offering two opinions instead of nailing down just one.  Seeing both sides of an argument might be a good lesson for us in reading the Bible and in talking with out neighbors. 

Dr. Carol Christ, the retiring chancellor of UC Berkeley, who was a student activist in the 1960s, spoke to the broken state of our shared speech on campuses and across the nation  “I’ve come to recognize that while freedom of speech is an absolute, just because you have the right to say something doesn’t mean it’s right to say,”…  We all use censorship in our speech in relation to the occasion we are in. If you value your community, you have to find ways of sharing your views that are not vitriolic, that are not needlessly hurtful to other people.” nytimes.com/2024/06/06/us/berkeley-carol-christ-protest-free-speech

In Luke Jesus radically asserts “the sabbath was made for humanity”. Our rabbi is deeply focused on the Commandment  “to do no work”.  Jesus is focused on human  renewal. Our rabbi is focused on our tendency to engage in activities that get in the way of renewal. We go to work, we work out, and make it work out.  We Americans might even worship productivity more than sabbath. Jesus is not saying don’t keep the sabbath. Jesus is digging a little deeper beyond the rule to the idea of renewal that undergirds the commandment.  

I once had a church member, who had held a grudge against the Methodist Church for a lifetime, actually over 65 years.  As a teenager, growing up in the south in the 1930’s Clarence went to school and worked on the farm every day except Sunday. On Saturday night and Sunday after church, Clarence and his friends started playing baseball in an empty field, next to the Methodist Church by the railroad.  In time they wore out basepaths and began mowing the field with push mowers. As teenagers without adult supervision, they drove tractors into town and disked up a proper dirt infield. They felled trees and built a 25 foot backstop, added a fence in the outfield and even built homemade bleachers. The RailRoad decided to give the ballpark to the teenagers, but there was no official league, board, or city council so the railroad deeded their ballfield to the Methodist church. The next week the Methodist preacher put up a handmade sign closing the field on Sunday’s to keep the Lord’s Day holy. How do you read Scripture?.

Clarence’s disagreement with the Methodist Preacher endured for 65 years, especially because the preacher would not meet with Clarence. Clarence held a different interpretation of work. Clarence did not see baseball as work, but indeed the opposite of work: baseball was play- recreation- renewal.  Now, one might argue that our youth sports culture today is more about work than recreation, with paid coaches,  adult imposed rules, lengthy travel, tryouts, cuts, drills, and a focus on performance actualized by potential scholarships.  What re-creates and renews us? How do we keep the sabbath? 

Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath. Now, A woman was there who had been disabled by a spirit for eighteen years. She was bent over and couldn’t stand up straight.  Jesus saw her. 

What happens when you feel unseen? When people take the time to see us, not just our diagnosis, status or affiliations, good things blossom! At our WDS graduation there was a child who was not singing with their class. They just stood there nervously looking around.  Suddenly they saw their people and began smiling and wildly waving to their family. Only after being seen did the child open their mouth and start singing. They needed to know there were people in the sanctuary rooting for them. Healing often works like that.   

Jesus saw her and called her over and spoke with her.  The Bible does not give us every word of Jesus’ conversation, just as a newspaper never gives us every word of a jury trial or play in a ball game. How long did they chat? What did Jesus’ therapy look like?  I wonder if the rabbi understood Jesus was working, as therapy is work. Luke moves us past the healing details to the conclusion of the healing work declaring, “You are set free from your sickness”. Jesus then placed his hands on her and prayed a prayer “ You are set free!”  

Nicole K. McNichols Ph.D. blogged that “The research demonstrating the need for human touch is vast. From a developmental standpoint, infants literally cannot survive without human touch. Skin-to-skin contact even in the first hour after birth has been shown to help regulate newborns’ temperature, heart rate, and breathing, and decrease crying.” (The Vital Importance of Human Touch in Psychology Today) Touch itself  is healing. 

After walking around for over 18 years, stooping over, looking at the ground, she stands up straight and looks Jesus and her community in the eye. The congregation joins her rejoicing, but the rabbi can’t seem to enter the celebration. “Incensed that Jesus had healed on the Sabbath, the rabbi responded, “There are six days during which work is permitted. Come and be healed on those days, not on the Sabbath day.”  

I hope reflecting on his reaction during evening prayers, the rabbi realized he could have done better.  Maybe they were ashamed that they had never really seen this woman as a person?  Maybe they were jealous that after all the conversations they had shared with this woman, a charismatic guest preacher helped her find her footing? Maybe the loud rejoicing felt undignified to them? Maybe they were so locked into rules, so fearful of a punishing angry God, that they could not see the life giving miracle?  How  sad that the rabbi missed the beauty, wonder, and rejoicing as their people celebrated  a never-again holy moment. That got me thinking, are there prejudices, biases or rules that close off our hearts to wonder, liberation and humanity? 

I wish Jesus was kinder to the rabbi. Luke writes “The Lord (Luke says- not Jesus said- but the Lord) replied, “Hypocrites! Don’t each of you on the Sabbath untie your ox or donkey from its stall and lead it out to get a drink?  Why add the insult “hypocrites”? Maybe Jesus’ conversation with the woman stirred anger on her behalf as Jesus learned of her exclusion?  We do not know, but Jesus’ questions probe deeper than the surface of the rules. Friend, don’t  you do a little work every Sunday because you have compassion for your donkeys, cows and chickens?  Won’t you walk for miles seeking a lost sheep any day of the week?  If one of your goats gets a bucket stuck on its head, you won’t wait til Monday to reelave its suffering- will you?  Dig down and find your compassion. You have compassion for the creatures in your care just as our Creator holds compassion for all creation: sheep, goats, monkeys and forgotten people. Interpret Scripture through a lens of compassion. 

I like to imagine that next week, when the woman strided into her congregation, our rabbi friend offered her a blessing:  “Beloved, I am sorry, now remember you are set free!” Amen.