What Are Rules For?

 

Rev. Debbie Cato
Deuteronomy 5:12-15  and Luke 13:10-17 
Fairfield Community Church 
August 21, 2022

Let us pray:  God of Glory, open our hearts and minds to the hearing and receiving of your Word today. May we listen, discern, and follow wherever you call.  Amen.

What are Rules For?

 

I may have said this before so if I have, I apologize.  I’m old enough that I remember that on Sundays all the stores were closed.  You could not buy groceries, go to the mall (malls didn’t exit yet!), you couldn’t buy gas, you couldn’t eat out in a restaurant.  No one worked on Sundays.  It was the Sabbath. 

If Mom didn’t have what she needed for dinner, she was out of luck.  If we got sick and she needed cough syrup or aspirin and she didn’t have any, we waited until Monday to get it. 

Of course, in those days, pretty much everyone went to church on Sunday mornings also!  We got all dressed up in our Sunday best and we all headed to church.  No debate.  It’s what we did.

Times have changed.  Sundays are just like any other day of the week now.  You can shop wherever  you want on Sundays, eat wherever you want, do whatever you want.  And as we well know, fewer and fewer people view Sundays as the day to get  up and go to church and worship God.

But in Jesus’ time, the Sabbath was Holy.  The Law in Deuteronomy, given to Moses by God clearly laid it out.    “You shall not do any work - not you, or your son or your daughter, or your ox or your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female slave may rest as well as  you.” No one was to labor on the Sabbath.

This is the letter of the Law so to speak.  The intent of the Sabbath and human rest from work was to acknowledge the Lord’s consecration of the Sabbath.  God made the Sabbath holy.  The human activity of observing and keeping the holiness of the Sabbath is to honor and worship God alone and to render justice to the neighbor.  This understanding of holiness is at the heart of the Old Testament prophetic traditions. 

Jesus is teaching in the synagogue as he regularly did.  A woman comes in who is crippled and so bent over that she is unable to stand up straight.  For 18 years, she is bent over and can only see her feet and the ground.  She is unable to look up and see people’s faces or the things around her.  It doesn’t seem that she came in looking for Jesus or looking to be healed.  She just came into the synagogue, likely to hear the day’s teaching and to worship God.  It was the Sabbath.  The woman does not approach Jesus, she makes no request of him, and nothing is said of her faith.

Of course, Jesus notices her.  He stops teaching and calls her over to him.  Jesus takes the initiative, this woman still has not said anything to him. “Woman,” Jesus says.  “You are set free from your ailment.”  He puts his hand on her and immediately, she can straighten up and stand up straight.  After 18 years of being bent over, she can stand up straight!  She wasn’t looking for a miracle, but a miracle found her. She praises God. Fully aware that God Himself healed her. 

This is too much for the leader of the synagogue. He knows the Sabbath Law handed to Moses by God.  “You shall not do any work - not you, or your son or your daughter, or your ox or your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female slave may rest as well as  you.”

Here is Jesus, the Son of God, teaching in a Jewish synagogue, on the Sabbath, and he heals this woman – which is considered labor, breaking the Sabbath law, given to Moses directly by God.  No one was to labor on the Sabbath. The law is clear. I can understand the synagogue leader’s outrage.  Can you?

But, as usual, Jesus is after the heart of the law.  Remember, the heart of holiness of the Old Testament prophetic traditions was honoring and worshiping God alone and rendering justice to neighbors.  Jesus sees room for compassion in the law.  He saw a woman who was bound by her crippled condition.  For 18 years she could not stand up straight.  She caught His attention merely by entering the synagogue. Jesus, acting out of compassion, healed her and freed her from her bondage.  “You hypocrites!  Does not each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger and lead it to water? ¹⁶ 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?” 

You see, of course a person was allowed to take their animals to water on the Sabbath!  Not freeing them to be able to drink on the Sabbath would be abuse.  If the animal was not carrying a load, they were not considered working.  And taking the animal to water was not considered work under the Sabbath law.  So how, Jesus asked, was freeing this woman from her bondage any less?

Are rules meant to bind and oppress us or to give us freedom in the Lord and help us to honor and worship Him more fully?  What exactly does worshiping God look like?

 We’ll be asking that question on the 5^th Sunday in October and most likely the 5^th Sundays of other months in the coming year – they come about once a quarter.  Your Church Council asked the question – could we spend the 5^th Sunday outside the walls of our church building doing community service rather than holding our “normal” worship service?  Could we worship God by being His hands and feet in the community rather than the way we normally worship on a Sunday morning – sitting in our church, reciting responsive readings, praying, singing, and listening to a sermon?  Can community service become our way of worship in the few months a year when there are five Sundays?

We call ourselves Fairfield Community Church and when I was called to be your pastor, I was told that we were the Community’s church and that I would be the pastor to the community.  But what does that mean?

In June, when we sat around these tables and talked about what the values were of this church, it was unanimous that community was one of our values.  What does that mean?    What does it mean that we value community? How do we live that out?

Council recognizes that we have not identified action steps or ministries to match our values yet.  That will happen on September 11^th when Katie Stark comes back, and we share lunch and meet around these tables again and share what God has put on our hearts.  How do we live out our values we’ll ask.

But Darcia raised the question at Council a few months ago.  Could we spend the 5^th Sunday in the community doing a service project instead of having our regular worship service?  And the rest of the council really liked that idea.  Let’s put our values into action, they said.

So, on Sunday, October 30^th, we will meet at the Community Center.  We will open with prayer and thank God for the opportunity to serve the community.  We will pull out shrubs and bushes and plant new plants that the Conservation District says will grow well in this environment and be low maintenance but provide beauty to the front of the Community Center.  Those of us who can’t do the physical labor will be inside the Community Center washing windows and blinds.  When we are all finished with the projects, we will close in prayer and hopefully share a meal together. (The eating part is my idea. I haven’t brought it up yet!)

I’m hopeful people from the community will join us.  There was excitement when I presented it at the Town Council meeting on Tuesday.  Regardless, we will be worshiping in the “doing”.  It’s not how we normally meet on Sunday mornings and it’s not how we normally worship.  I hope you will consider it any other Sunday and come and join us and be a part of our 5^th Sunday of October Community Service Outreach Worship.  Perhaps even some of your family members who aren’t regular attenders will come!  Seems to me we will actually be “being the church” instead of just going to church.  Seems to me we will be honoring God and rendering justice, meeting the Old Testament prophetic definition of the Sabbath.  What do you think?

  

Let us pray:  Holy God, thank you for setting aside the Sabbath for us to worship you and remember that you alone are Holy.  In today’s world, where the Sabbath is no longer set aside, help us to find ways to set aside time to worship you through word and deed, remembering that you alone are worthy.  Amen.