This sermon was preached for Sunday, June 2, 2024 at St. Mark's, East Longmeadow. The texts of this sermon were: Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17, 2 Corinthians 4:5-12, and Mark 2:23-3:6.
In Rabbi Sharon Brous’ recent book on faith, community, and connection, The Amen Effect, Rabbi Brous tells a story from one of her days as a seminary student. She describes being in the midst of a joyful worship celebration at the synagogue one Saturday. As the congregation burst into spontaneous dancing, she noticed a forlorn figure making her way to her. The woman explained to Brous that her mother had recently died. The mourner wanted to know if it was okay for her to join in the dancing. As a seminary student, Brous began making all sorts of calculations in her head: Jewish mourning customs would prohibit the daughter from dancing so soon after the mother’s death but at the same time, the dancing was in the context of worship…Finally, totally flummoxed and afraid of getting it wrong, Brous pointed the grieving woman to her own actual rabbi.
“I watched the mourner make her way over to him,” she writes, “She whispered in his ear. Without a thought, [the rabbi] leaned over and wrapped his arms…around this woman and held her in his embrace as she broke down in tears.” Brous realized that what the woman needed most of all was not the answer to a Jewish legal question. “What she really wanted,” she writes, “was to tell someone who should care that her mother had died. She needed someone to help her hold both her profound grief and her deep desire to live. My rabbi got it; I did not. I had fully misunderstood what was being asked of me.”
What Brous’ rabbi “got” was the whole purpose behind Jewish mourning customs: to ensure that mourners are seen and held in their grief. The rituals, particularly the rules about what’s to be done in the first week, then the first month, and the first year after a significant death, all those traditions are there so that the mourners aren’t forced to just jump back into regular life as if their world has not been ripped apart. The customs are there, too, to prevent mourners from isolating themselves, from disengaging from their community. The mourner is obligated to name their pain; the community is obligated to show up in response, to check in, and to offer grace - all the grace possible for a tender time. What Brous’ rabbi got was that all this - all the rules and traditions and customs - it is all, in the end, about connection to God and to each other. About love.
The tension between understanding the letter of the law and honoring its spirit has been an inherent part of Judaism - and Christianity and Islam, too - for pretty much ever. The scene from today’s Gospel is part of that great tradition - a rabbi and another group of rabbis arguing over the interpretation of how to properly practice their faith. Today’s story goes like this: Jesus is in the middle of an argument with other Jewish leaders about what’s lawful to do on the Sabbath, the Jewish day of rest. As he’s going into the synagogue, Jesus encounters a man with a withered hand in need of healing. The religious leaders watch to see whether Jesus will heal the man - something the text implies these leaders would consider to be working on the Sabbath and therefore not allowed. “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?” Jesus asks them. After all, as he’s already pointed out, the Sabbath was created for humankind, not humankind for the Sabbath.
What Jesus is doing here - reminding the other religious leaders of the purpose of the Sabbath - is not a new, Christian invention. He’s well within the ongoing debate within Judaism about what is important enough to override Sabbath restrictions. It’s always been true that Sabbath restrictions must be abandoned in order to save a life. Jesus is here challenging and expanding the notion of what saving a life means, and what it looks like in this moment with this man with the withered hand. Healing this man’s hand would have meant restoring his dignity and his ability to provide for himself, rescuing him from poverty, exclusion, and oppression. It would have meant saving his life.
To follow God’s law we must first and foremost understand its purpose. The purpose of Sabbath practice is not about proving our obedience and loyalty to God. The purpose of Sabbath is rest, restoration, and liberation. Sabbath declares that all people deserve to be free. Sabbath insists that all beings have a right to one full day a week to be restored to the goodness, the restfulness of that seventh day of creation. Time to reconnect to God, to ourselves, and each other. And there, standing before Jesus, was a man disconnected from his community, his body, and his own sense of self.
Jesus looked around at them with anger; he was grieved at their hardness of heart and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored.
Jesus saw this man’s suffering first, above all else. They saw the argument; he saw a human being and he saw a moment that needed love. Jesus was angry that the religious leaders’ focus on right and wrong, lawful and unlawful, was distracting them from the compassion the law calls us to in the first place. They had fully misunderstood what was being asked of them. The highest law, the greatest commandment, is always love. All this, Jesus says in the Gospel of Matthew, all the law and all the prophets hang on this: the commandment to love God and love neighbor. It is the spirit of the Sabbath law that pulls Jesus toward the man with the withered hand and pulls the man toward Jesus.
Stretch out your hand, Jesus tells him. He stretched it out, and his hand was restored.
Doing as Jesus does means seeing the suffering, the human being first above all else. We are to take any withered life we encounter- someone curled up in on themselves, someone excluded, someone plagued with self-doubt, self-hatred, wounded with a lifetime of hurt and insecurity - and work with them and God to restore them.
And you know what withers us most? What withers us most are the rules and laws and policies that cut us off from each other, from the needs of our bodies, from our true selves.
I think you know these kinds of rules. Maybe some of them have withered you more than others: rules like the rule that says men don’t cry and women don’t lead. The rules like the one that says children should respect adults at all times but don’t themselves deserve respect. All those laws and public policies that keep the poor, poor.
One of the biggest lessons I’ve been taught by self-acceptance and liberative movements - whether that’s body positivity, racial justice, feminism, or LGBTQ pride - is their insistence that those who have been taught to shrink themselves down should instead stand at their full height. Take up your space, these movements encourage, use your real voice. Stretch yourself out to your full self - and make room so others can do the same. Be the marvelously made self God longs to restore.
The dream of Sabbath is a dream of restoration and freedom. The audacious notion that everyone deserves a day where they are free to just be - where they can stretch out to their fullest selves. I think we caught a glimpse of that dream yesterday, at the Springfield Pride Parade, when the city came out to loudly, proudly celebrate identities and ways of loving that are far too often denigrated and shoved away. I love how kids’ book author Emily Neilson describes the people and crowds at the pride parades of her childhood: “Everyone is wearing whatever makes them feel most like themselves. Even if that means wearing hardly anything at all.” The streets were filled with people determined not to wither, and the friends, family, and communities who showed up to say to them right back: “We will not let them wither you.”
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| St. Mark's and other Episcopal churches at the Springfield Pride Parade. |
People come to me fairly frequently to ask me for advice about how to respond to other Christians who insist that openly queer, trans, or gay folks are going against God’s law - in particular friends and family members. And the thing is, I can teach you how to go head to head in a legalistic debate on this issue. I can teach you why sexual codes from Leviticus are irrelevant for Christians, what kind of relationships St. Paul was actually railing against in his epistles, the original meaning of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, and what eunuchs have to do with all of it, too.
But defeating an opponent with strong, righteous arguments is not always, not even usually, what’s really being asked of you in those moments. In a real relationship with an actual person you know, what’s usually really being asked of you is to do what Jesus does. What Rabbi Brous’ rabbi did. In the midst of debate, Jesus saw a person in pain and moved to heal him. Rather than an intellectual question, Brous’ rabbi heard a daughter’s grief, and enveloped her in a hug.
My real advice is to remember the purpose of God’s law first, the greatest commandments above all the others. To start from love. In each encounter, even with someone with whom you vehemently disagree - look for the disconnection, listen for the pain, identify what and who is withered, and respond to that. Hear the ache of loneliness that radiates from the grandparent who has cut themself off behind walls of judgment and contempt so high they can’t find their way back. Notice the quiet, queer teenager who’s been paying close attention to your words and actions - and your silence and inaction - trying to gauge whether you can be that the one safe adult with whom they can be their real selves. The need for love is there, I promise you. It’s there wherever an interpretation of God’s law has led people to harden their hearts.
God calls us to more connection, not less. We are to dismantle everything that withers people and to build up what restores them. We are to believe people when they tell us what makes them feel alive and loved. We are to celebrate when they stretch out to their fullest selves. We are to meet suffering with compassion and heal disconnection with love.
As followers of Christ, our highest calling is to the restoration of the goodness of creation - not to the enforcement of order and control. Our highest law is love.
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