Pentecost 11 Sermon, Year C 2019
August 25, 2019
St. Michael’s Episcopal Church
The Rev. Canon Michael Horvath
Luke 13:10-17
Today’s gospel reading presents us with a woman unnamed – the “crippled woman” as she is known, because she was bent over and could not stand up straight. Her body said it all -- bent over and imprisoned by her physical debility.
That is, until she encounters Jesus, who sets her free from her ailment, and he does so incurring the indignation of the leader of the synagogue who upbraids him for healing on the Sabbath. I imagine the crowd staring in awe as this woman is healed, but this faith leader wasn’t having any of it. This leader wasn’t indignant because Jesus healed someone but because this healing occurred on the Sabbath when everyone should be resting and praying. The timing was his issue -- as if there were ever a bad time for freedom from bondage. But Jesus alters the religious standard. And once Jesus points out the faith leader’s hypocrisy, everyone erupts into celebration and joy at what Jesus did and said.
That does make a wonderful ending to this story. Almost too wonderful, too tidy and too neat, but there are implications that still need unpacking.
Jesus doesn’t refute the rabbi just to make an example of hypocrisy in the man, but to remind the crowd that the Sabbath, indeed any day, is a day worthy of remembering God’s grace in freeing them from slavery. There are two versions of the Sabbath commandment. The version found in Exodus (Exodus 20:8-11) says that we will rest on the seventh day because God rested on the seventh day after Creation. Here, however, Jesus draws directly from the Sabbath commandment in Deuteronomy 5:12-15, which commands the Israelites to keep the Sabbath and to “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.” Jesus connects the experience of true Sabbath rest and wholeness to Israel’s liberation from slavery in Egypt. Sabbath, Jesus says, gives us a taste of true freedom through rest, but our experience of this freedom should be tempered by the knowledge that not all people are free to sample the joys of this rest. And until all can experience this rest, there will be no rest for anyone. And with this he pulls the crowd back into remembering their experience as an enslaved people. Don’t forget, he says, we were all enslaved, just as this woman was enslaved by the spirit within her. Draw from your collective memory, he urges.
Collective memories are societal-level memories, shared through regularly told stories, and are often events we might have intimate knowledge of even if we weren’t born when they occurred. Fear of forgetting is part of what drives those who work to create collective memories. Human atrocities like genocide and slavery become part of collective memory in part to prevent such things from happening again.
To this day, our Jewish brothers and sisters celebrate holy days of remembrance every year – it’s called Passover, and it has been observed in some form or another for over 3000 years, and it commemorates the exodus of the Jews from slavery in Egypt, the very thing Jesus is reminding the crowd about. The holiday is ultimately a celebration of freedom, but also an intentional act of not forgetting.
The main ritual of Passover is the seder, which occurs on the first two nights of the holiday — a festive meal that involves the re-telling of the Exodus through stories and song and the consumption of ritual foods.
As I think about the seder - and if you’re ever invited to a seder, I highly encourage you to attend. It’s quite special - it’s not only the event itself, but the Jewish people’s dedication in observing it for thousands of years. And just how dedicated are they to ensuring that the collective memory of their liberation from slavery is never forgotten? Let’s take the Holocaust, where over 4 million Jews were exterminated by the Nazis, and the forces of resistance that grew up around it.
When we think of resistance to the Nazis, we often think of the French resistance or the Dutch resistance. They were indeed very brave, but there was another type of resistance that was no less brave. This was the resistance of the Jewish men and women who strove for spirituality and a common bond of hope in the midst of their darkness.
In his book Out of the Depths, Rabbi Israel Meier Lau, former Chief Rabbi of Israel, writes that even in the darkness of Buchenwald Concentration Camp, the Jewish prisoners drew on their collective memory and celebrated Passover. “Over and over they sang the holiday song from memory: ‘The darkness of the night will be lit like the light of day’.” Collective memory, the sharing of our stories, gives us resiliency in the face of atrocities and in the midst of trauma, by reminding us that we are not in this alone. We have each other, in fact, we need each other in order to reach the light of day.
August marks the 400thanniversary of the landing of enslaved Africans onto the shores of what is now North America. In many ways, and through various events, Americans are being invited to remember this and what it means to African Americans as a generational experience, and what it means to us as a nation. The Episcopal Church has invited all churches to pray and reflect on the meaning of this anniversary and to ring our church bells for one minute today. And indeed St. Michael’s, Bristol, a pivotal point of the colonial slave trade triangle, will toll its bell for one minute at 3pm today.
This anniversary has had different effects on different people – not all of it positive. Some are concerned that the 400thanniversary focuses on something that is now in the past and that they personally had nothing to do with - slavery. Others have called it revisionist history at its worst. There is a lot to unpack and I encourage you to have more discussions about what this all might mean for you. But I think what makes this anniversary difficult, even painful, is the fact that we are all being asked to take a long hard look at slavery and what it means to be part of its collective memory today. Not for the goal of placing blame or pointing fingers, or shaming others – but because there is an entire segment of our beloved community that still bears the pain, sadness and anger of generations on their physical body today. Like it or not, we are all part of the legacy of relationships, policies and systems stemming or benefitting from institutionalized slavery.
Slavery was officially abolished by the passing and ratification of the 13thAmendment in 1865, African Americans were granted citizenship in 1868 and the right to vote in 1870. By all outward appearances, our year should be marked by a ritual similar to that of a seder to celebrate the liberation of African American slaves, but there’s no such festive meal. You can’t share the story of your enslavement and celebrate your liberation from it when you have only ever experienced the first chapter of that story. For many years after Civil War Reconstruction, African Americans were denied their right to embody freedom and liberation through Jim Crow laws that circumvented all of the rights they had gained, and it would not be until the Civil Rights movement that African Americans would find any measure of success in claiming back their own bodies on this soil.
I feel called to be part of this collective memory making by remembering what happened this month 400 years ago, because the consequences of that event still ring through our land today, and in some cases those consequences are repeating themselves. When the highest office of our nation regularly engages in race-baiting and division making, we need to draw on our collective memory and remember that such words and actions have been similarly used by past generations with dire consequences. As the French humanist, Voltaire, said, “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” And we need only recall the racially motivated murders in Charlottesville, Pittsburgh, or El Paso; or understand the effect of mass incarceration on African Americans, to see these absurdities lived out.
As Christians, we have a lot of loving to do, a lot of healing work to engage in and a lot of reconciliation that still needs to be done around the issue of slavery and its effects on race relations in the United States. It may seem overwhelming, but that is our work and our model is the love of Christ, to whom even this seemingly insignificant crippled woman is important enough to upend traditional but twisted interpretations of Sabbath observance. No one is beyond God’s healing grace at any time. No one.
Today, even if we only start with today, we can be a compassionate presence to each other and to the African American community, and share their pain, sadness, and anger about this nation’s history with slavery. Equally important, we can be a part of their faith and hope. Their faith that God will never abandon them and their hope that we still carry enough love in our hearts to walk with them in our common healing - to find ways to help each other find the true meaning of Sabbath liberation. If ever there was a way to remember and honor the memory of the Africans slaves brought to our shores 400 years ago, then loving each other and seeking wholeness for one another can be a start. As Jesus makes graciously clear in the Gospel today, there’s never a bad time for freedom from bondage, - remove the yoke from among you, Isaiah says - and no better place to do so than here at God’s table. Amen.
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