Lift up your heads

Isaiah 58:9b-14

If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom will be like the noonday. The LORD will guide you continually, and satisfy your needs in parched places, and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail. Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in. If you refrain from trampling the sabbath, from pursuing your own interests on my holy day; if you call the sabbath a delight and the holy day of the LORD honorable; if you honor it, not going your own ways, serving your own interests, of pursuing your own affairs; then you shall take delight in the LORD, and I will make you ride upon the heights of the earth; I will feed you with the heritage of your ancestor Jacob, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.

Psalm 103:1-8

Bless the LORD, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless God’s holy name. Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all God’s benefits - who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases; who redeems your life from the grave and crowns you with steadfast love and mercy; who satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is renewed like an eagle’s. O LORD, you provide vindication and justice for all who are oppressed. You made known your ways to Moses and your works to the children of Israel. LORD, you are full of compassion and mercy, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

Hebrews 12:18-29

You have not come to something that can be touched, a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom, and a tempest, and the sound of a trumpet, and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that not another word be spoken to them. (For they could not endure the order that was given, “If even an animal touches the mountain, it shall be stoned to death.” Indeed, so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, “I tremble with fear.”) But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.

See that you do not refuse the one who is speaking; for if they did not escape when they refused the one who warned them on earth, how much less will we escape if we reject the one who warns from heaven! At that time his voice shook the earth; but now he has promised, “Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heaven.” This phrase, “Yet once more,” indicates the removal of what is shaken - that is, create things - so that what cannot be shaken may remain. Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us give thanks, by which we offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe; for indeed our God is a consuming fire.

Luke 13:10-17

Now Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set fee from your ailment.” When he laid his hands on her, immediately she was set up straight and began praising God. But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.” But the Lord answered him and said, “You 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? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from his bondage on the sabbath day?” When he had said this, all his opponents were put to shame; and the entire crowd was rejoicing at the wonderful things that he was doing.

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Do you see the woman? It’s a question Jesus asked his host six chapters ago when eating at the table and having his feet washed by a ‘known sinner.’ Remember? We had that story in our cycle of readings three months back, but it’s a theme again here, in a way. Here is a woman in the synagogue on the Sabbath who does not call out to Jesus for healing, who does not make a scene yelling for him to heal her ailment, but still he sees her. And presumably he knows her, or talks with her, to find out she had been carrying that weight that bent her back for eighteen years. If Jesus was 30 years old when this ministry of his began in earnest, eighteen years ago would have been about the time of his bar-mitzvah. But that’s purely speculation, filling in the gaps which aren’t all that important to the authors of the text. Except, eighteen years is the length of Jesus’ own adult life so far. While he was learning and working, living into his adult faith and gaining his reputation, she, too, was getting a reputation. I wonder if she had given up asking to be seen, or if she appeared defiantly in that place despite everything that weighed her down. I wonder if the way Satan bound her up those long years had anything to do with the way her family, or neighbors, or that synagogue leader, might have piled expectations on her, and shames, and disappointments.

Do you ever feel that kind of weight on your shoulders, pulling you down? Some days it’s hard to imagine living without guilt, without accusation. And if we don’t feel it ourselves, the evidence of it happening all around us is commonplace. Slut-shaming, moralizing, talk of revenge, dehumanizing others who disagree with our political views, making excuses for why another black man deserved to die... how much can we pile on top of each other, and how much pressure can we carry ourselves, for how long?

Sometimes, we find ourselves like this woman in the synagogue, going about our business, so used to being weighed down that we can’t even think to ask for help standing up again. Or having made peace with our burdens and showing up anyway, daring those around us to say anything about it. Regardless of her motives, Jesus saw her in the midst of the assembly and called her out for healing. Then he did the work of God, which is what the Sabbath day is for, and of course those who had shamed this woman into her lowered position tried to reclaim their power over her. “There are six other days!” they shout at the assembly. “Come and be healed on those days! Not on this, the Lord’s day! What is wrong with you, using our holy Sabbath day like this!?” They said this to the crowd, not to the woman directly, not to Jesus directly. They tried to stir the crowd with them to move against Jesus and the woman who could now finally stand tall.

But the Sabbath is a day for putting our work down, for letting go and resting. And it’s a day of rest for everyone, rich and poor, factory workers and CEOs, servants and elites. Sabbath is not a day for putting more burdens on one another, but a time of remembering God’s day of rest at the beginning, and of observing that holy rest ourselves. In other words, Sabbath is a day of liberation. Unfortunately, the spirit and the letter of the law get conflated when fear and power get involved, and the synagogue leader was very clear that, by being healed, this woman was going about the whole thing all wrong. Or, rather, it was Jesus who was messing up their day by setting the woman upright in the first place.

But was he, really? Or was Jesus acting in freedom to bring about the freedom of everyone in that place that day? Whatever burdens that woman was carrying (and the fact she doesn't get a name, but neither does the religious leader, is problematic because it leaves her defined only by this one event), whatever weight bent her back would have been affecting her walking and her breathing and her ability to look other people in the eye. It wasn’t the community that stood her up again, and it wasn’t the religious institution, either. If Jesus is here acting on behalf of God, living into his divinity, that liberation work is God’s act. If God is worth our worship, it is because of that liberation, the grace and mercy, the freedom and new life and unconditional love which stands us upright again with power to reflect that life into the world around us. This phrase used in our story today, where Jesus ‘sets her upright,’ is the same one Luke uses in chapter 21, where Jesus tells the people to stand up and raise their heads, to be on the lookout because their ‘redemption is drawing near.’ Over and over again we see the work of redemption in the loosing of bonds, the letting go of guilt and grudges, the insistence on freedom and justice for the oppressed. This is Sabbath work, holy work, living into our freedom day by day, set upright over and over again, being seen and known and released from the assumptions and expectations and burdens so that we can breathe freely and walk upright, offering praise and thanksgiving not only on the Sabbath day, but every day.