Sermon Sunday, August 26, 2007
Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost
Brothers and sisters,
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
In our Gospel lesson this morning Jesus appears to be providing healing for a woman in great need of healing. But does that really get to the heart of what is going on? Does that sum up the events that we read in this lesson? Is this just one more healing in the list of all the other healings that Jesus performed?
To answer that, perhaps we should first look to the way the leader of the synagogue responds to what Jesus does. If you look in the lesson it says that the leader of the synagogue was indignant because of what Jesus had done. But in the translation that we read from the leader of the synagogue uses the word "cure" instead of "heal" which I don’t quite agree with. The original Greek word here pronounced therapeuo, is actually better translated as heal.
In other words the leader of the synagogue sees that there is a healing going on, which is generally understood to be more meaningful than simply a cure. But even by recognizing that there is a healing going on, the Pharisee still sells what is taking place in front of him short because he tries to fit it within the rules and traditions that he was used to by condemning Jesus for performing a healing on the Sabbath.
But is he so wrong for being mad? I mean think about it. This woman whom Jesus is healing has been stricken with this ailment for 18 years. What’s one more day?? Why couldn’t Jesus have told the woman to wait a few more hours and she would be healed? Sabbath is from dusk to dusk, so really she wouldn’t have even had to wait until the next day, she would have just had to wait until the sun went down. Is that such an unreasonable request?
Apparently it was, because Jesus turns around and reveals the hypocrisy of the Pharisees by showing that even they, the Pharisees, these models of piety, are guilty of even doing some work on the Sabbath. And whether you can call the miracle that Jesus performs in the synagogue a work or a healing or a cure or whatever is irrelevant, because ultimately He is showing here today in His Word, to you that He is about much more than either a cure or a healing.
After Jesus performs this miracle He then says to the woman that she has been set free from the ailment. He doesn’t just say that she is cured or healed, but that she has been set free. And what has she been set free from? Well in verse 16 Jesus refers to this woman as a "daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years."
And there you have it. Jesus does not come to bring merely a cure or healing, He comes to free you from bondage to sin, death, and the devil. He comes to provide release for the captive and recovery of sight for the blind. And He does so not by providing merely a restored life, or a transformed life, as so many people in contemporary Christianity like to say, He does so by providing new life. A new life in Him that will not be constrained by any social order or tradition.
The fact that Jesus performs this miracle on the Sabbath shows once again that He comes to upset the apple cart of the old way of thinking. And to do something as simple as merely waiting a few hours so as to avoid performing a healing on the Sabbath and thus appease the leader of the synagogue, would have been more in line with preserving the old way than to bring about a new way and a new reality. He shows that He will not allow even a piece of the old way to be preserved, because He knows that it is in our nature to cling to the old way of the law.
Jesus comes not just to defy social conventions and traditions but to defy and provide release from the dominion of Satan. He comes to reveal His kingdom. And this is something that the Pharisees were all in favor of, but they wanted to believe that the defeat of Satan and revelation of God’s kingdom would come through them with great pomp and circumstance. And in the same way we want to believe that Satan will be defeated and God’s kingdom will be revealed through our best and most pious efforts, or through the right political candidate, or through military might or whatever earthly means we might imagine.
But Jesus won’t have it that way. Jesus does not have His kingdom revealed in a way that is dictated or determined by rulers of the world. In today’s lesson Jesus reveals the kingdom of God not through the grand authority of the Pharisees ruling from on high, but through a woman who had been struggling with being crippled for eighteen years. She was a woman and she was crippled.
This would have pretty much made her a social outcast in her culture. And yet it is through this woman, and not through the Pharisees that Jesus reveals His kingdom. It is not through being served, but through servanthood that Jesus reveals His kingdom. And it is this servanthood that would eventually take Him to the cross where the full glory of His kingdom was revealed, as sin, death, and the devil were defeated for you, not through great military might, but through the laying down of His life for you, where He bore the burden of your sin; all of it, every last bit of it, past, present, and future.
And as we read in John’s Gospel, the words Jesus was heard to say before breathing His was last were "It is finished" and He meant it. And what was finished was the captivity to sin, death, and the devil of God’s people, no matter what the future might hold. No matter how much you struggle with sin on a daily basis, and you do. He continues to come to you as He does now in His Word and will in a few minutes as you come forward once again to receive the bread and the wine in His Supper.
By the grace of God revealed to you in Christ Jesus, the kingdom of God has been revealed to you, and in the waters of baptism God claims you, His children as His own and marks them with the cross of Christ, seals them with the Holy Spirit and brings to you you place in His kingdom, the kingdom which we read about in the lesson from Hebrews which the author of Hebrews describes as the kingdom that cannot be shaken.
As most of you know, I just returned from vacation. I spent part of my vacation visiting my sister and her family in Los Angeles. And, I’ll be honest when I was in LA and I thought of Grenora or Zahl, it felt almost like I was on a different planet. It’s a very image-conscious culture out there. It seems like everybody has a new car and they all have the most current model of cell-phones along with the text-message things, and they all have really nice homes. And I’ll admit there was a part of me that got a little swept away in all that.
But then when I came back and I was going through my mail I came across two thank-you notes; one from a family member of someone for whom I had done a memorial service, and another from a couple whose wedding I had presided over, along with a simple greeting card from a fellow pastor who went to the churchwide assembly in Chicago, the same week that I was enjoying my first week of vacation.
And maybe I am overstating it, but in those two thank-you notes and that simple greeting card I saw something that was pretty difficult to see in the image-conscious driven culture of Los Angeles; and that is the kingdom of God. And that is not to say that I don’t think that God’s kingdom is being revealed in Los Angeles. Of course it is. But in that simple contrast I was reminded that it’s not in the image-driven materialism that we as a culture embrace, that God’s kingdom is revealed.
Rather, through faith in Christ Jesus, God’s kingdom is revealed through that which often might seem small and insignificant in our culture; things like simple gestures to reach out to someone, a crippled woman in need of healing, or a rural community of faith in North Dakota. It’s all a part of the Kingdom that cannot be shaken, the Kingdom that you have been made a part of.
Amen
Brothers and sisters,
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
In our Gospel lesson this morning Jesus appears to be providing healing for a woman in great need of healing. But does that really get to the heart of what is going on? Does that sum up the events that we read in this lesson? Is this just one more healing in the list of all the other healings that Jesus performed?
To answer that, perhaps we should first look to the way the leader of the synagogue responds to what Jesus does. If you look in the lesson it says that the leader of the synagogue was indignant because of what Jesus had done. But in the translation that we read from the leader of the synagogue uses the word "cure" instead of "heal" which I don’t quite agree with. The original Greek word here pronounced therapeuo, is actually better translated as heal.
In other words the leader of the synagogue sees that there is a healing going on, which is generally understood to be more meaningful than simply a cure. But even by recognizing that there is a healing going on, the Pharisee still sells what is taking place in front of him short because he tries to fit it within the rules and traditions that he was used to by condemning Jesus for performing a healing on the Sabbath.
But is he so wrong for being mad? I mean think about it. This woman whom Jesus is healing has been stricken with this ailment for 18 years. What’s one more day?? Why couldn’t Jesus have told the woman to wait a few more hours and she would be healed? Sabbath is from dusk to dusk, so really she wouldn’t have even had to wait until the next day, she would have just had to wait until the sun went down. Is that such an unreasonable request?
Apparently it was, because Jesus turns around and reveals the hypocrisy of the Pharisees by showing that even they, the Pharisees, these models of piety, are guilty of even doing some work on the Sabbath. And whether you can call the miracle that Jesus performs in the synagogue a work or a healing or a cure or whatever is irrelevant, because ultimately He is showing here today in His Word, to you that He is about much more than either a cure or a healing.
After Jesus performs this miracle He then says to the woman that she has been set free from the ailment. He doesn’t just say that she is cured or healed, but that she has been set free. And what has she been set free from? Well in verse 16 Jesus refers to this woman as a "daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years."
And there you have it. Jesus does not come to bring merely a cure or healing, He comes to free you from bondage to sin, death, and the devil. He comes to provide release for the captive and recovery of sight for the blind. And He does so not by providing merely a restored life, or a transformed life, as so many people in contemporary Christianity like to say, He does so by providing new life. A new life in Him that will not be constrained by any social order or tradition.
The fact that Jesus performs this miracle on the Sabbath shows once again that He comes to upset the apple cart of the old way of thinking. And to do something as simple as merely waiting a few hours so as to avoid performing a healing on the Sabbath and thus appease the leader of the synagogue, would have been more in line with preserving the old way than to bring about a new way and a new reality. He shows that He will not allow even a piece of the old way to be preserved, because He knows that it is in our nature to cling to the old way of the law.
Jesus comes not just to defy social conventions and traditions but to defy and provide release from the dominion of Satan. He comes to reveal His kingdom. And this is something that the Pharisees were all in favor of, but they wanted to believe that the defeat of Satan and revelation of God’s kingdom would come through them with great pomp and circumstance. And in the same way we want to believe that Satan will be defeated and God’s kingdom will be revealed through our best and most pious efforts, or through the right political candidate, or through military might or whatever earthly means we might imagine.
But Jesus won’t have it that way. Jesus does not have His kingdom revealed in a way that is dictated or determined by rulers of the world. In today’s lesson Jesus reveals the kingdom of God not through the grand authority of the Pharisees ruling from on high, but through a woman who had been struggling with being crippled for eighteen years. She was a woman and she was crippled.
This would have pretty much made her a social outcast in her culture. And yet it is through this woman, and not through the Pharisees that Jesus reveals His kingdom. It is not through being served, but through servanthood that Jesus reveals His kingdom. And it is this servanthood that would eventually take Him to the cross where the full glory of His kingdom was revealed, as sin, death, and the devil were defeated for you, not through great military might, but through the laying down of His life for you, where He bore the burden of your sin; all of it, every last bit of it, past, present, and future.
And as we read in John’s Gospel, the words Jesus was heard to say before breathing His was last were "It is finished" and He meant it. And what was finished was the captivity to sin, death, and the devil of God’s people, no matter what the future might hold. No matter how much you struggle with sin on a daily basis, and you do. He continues to come to you as He does now in His Word and will in a few minutes as you come forward once again to receive the bread and the wine in His Supper.
By the grace of God revealed to you in Christ Jesus, the kingdom of God has been revealed to you, and in the waters of baptism God claims you, His children as His own and marks them with the cross of Christ, seals them with the Holy Spirit and brings to you you place in His kingdom, the kingdom which we read about in the lesson from Hebrews which the author of Hebrews describes as the kingdom that cannot be shaken.
As most of you know, I just returned from vacation. I spent part of my vacation visiting my sister and her family in Los Angeles. And, I’ll be honest when I was in LA and I thought of Grenora or Zahl, it felt almost like I was on a different planet. It’s a very image-conscious culture out there. It seems like everybody has a new car and they all have the most current model of cell-phones along with the text-message things, and they all have really nice homes. And I’ll admit there was a part of me that got a little swept away in all that.
But then when I came back and I was going through my mail I came across two thank-you notes; one from a family member of someone for whom I had done a memorial service, and another from a couple whose wedding I had presided over, along with a simple greeting card from a fellow pastor who went to the churchwide assembly in Chicago, the same week that I was enjoying my first week of vacation.
And maybe I am overstating it, but in those two thank-you notes and that simple greeting card I saw something that was pretty difficult to see in the image-conscious driven culture of Los Angeles; and that is the kingdom of God. And that is not to say that I don’t think that God’s kingdom is being revealed in Los Angeles. Of course it is. But in that simple contrast I was reminded that it’s not in the image-driven materialism that we as a culture embrace, that God’s kingdom is revealed.
Rather, through faith in Christ Jesus, God’s kingdom is revealed through that which often might seem small and insignificant in our culture; things like simple gestures to reach out to someone, a crippled woman in need of healing, or a rural community of faith in North Dakota. It’s all a part of the Kingdom that cannot be shaken, the Kingdom that you have been made a part of.
Amen
posted by Steve at 4:39 PM
1 Comments:
Interesting sermon here. You really hit it good in telling them about what Xst does, espeically,
"The fact that Jesus performs this miracle on the Sabbath shows once again that He comes to upset the apple cart of the old way of thinking. And to do something as simple as merely waiting a few hours so as to avoid performing a healing on the Sabbath and thus appease the leader of the synagogue, would have been more in line with preserving the old way than to bring about a new way and a new reality. He shows that He will not allow even a piece of the old way to be preserved, because He knows that it is in our nature to cling to the old way of the law."
Then you moved into something personal. I liked the story and it was a great illustration of the kingdom of God, but I don't know what I think about it compared to the rest of the sermon-it left me puzzled. I think I liked it, but don't know why or how yet (if you understand what I mean)
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