Sermon for Sunday, August 21st 2022 – Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost, rcl yr c, 2022
St. John’s In-Person and Livestream
JEREMIAH 1:4-10, LUKE 13:10-17

​Today, I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms,
​to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow,
​to build and to plant.​Jeremiah 1:10

Law and gospel. The very stuff of the Word of God. It’s not easy to navigate. It’s not easy to embody in the life of discipleship, because it’s both-and, not either-or. Our human nature prefers either-or and keeping things simple.  Unfortunately, the Word of God and, to be honest, the world we live in with all its demands and complexities, require our commitment to law and gospel, both at once, all at the same time.

In the account we just heard from Luke, the leader of the synagogue in which Jesus was teaching confronts Jesus for defiling the Sabbath by doing work.

Six days you shall labour and do all your work [we read in Genesis 20]. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.[The fourth of the Ten Commandments, given by God through Moses.]

The “work” Jesus did was the healing of the woman who had been crippled for eighteen years.  Luke tells us that she was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight.  Jesus calls her to come to him, and he proclaims for her the good news that she is set free from her ailment, lays his hands on her, and heals her.  “Immediately,” we read, “she stood up straight and began praising God.”

Without question, Jesus is mindful of the call of God’s law and, as we know from his teaching and preaching, he has an intimate connection with God, the giver of the law.  But we see  in today’s story in Luke that he is as deeply called by compassion, and cannot deny his healing gifts for those who are suffering.  He understands the law well enough to know that God’s law is good; that it is not God’s will that the woman should be so miserable and disabled.  The leader of the synagogue faults Jesus because he interprets Jesus’ actions as superseding the law, the fourth commandment.  They do not, Jesus argues.  It is more accurately compassion overruling legalism.  Just as love is at the heart of the gospel, so love is at the heart of God’s law; and the two expressions of God’s will may appear at times to be in conflict with one another, but they cannot be separated.  This is why justice is the precondition for peace. Peace is never easily won: it takes work; it requires a full meeting of law and gospel, not unlike the restorative justice process that Community Justice Initiatives practices, and not unlike the Indigenous peacemaking circles or Indigenous healing circles that call together those who have harmed and those who have been harmed.

I mentioned earlier that human nature would tempt us away from the hard work of embracing law and gospel, of living beyond ourselves. Jeremiah, from today’s First Reading, is reluctant to answer God’s prophetic call for good reason. His audience, the rich and powerful of Judah, had turned their back on God’s law and were writing their own; and the only love present in their homegrown version of the law was self-love and the love of privilege and power.  Their opportunism, nationalism, and elitism had ruined Judah. Judah’s leaders had caved and lost their moral centre and abandoned the gracious call that had established and formed the Hebrew people as a holy people.  In Jeremiah’s vision, God lays out the hard work that lies ahead of the prophet, saying “I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.” To his credit, Jeremiah answered the call. Thank goodness he was a writer, because so much of what he said initially fell on deaf ears.

Sadly, our so-called Developed World is not unlike the rich and powerful of ancient Judah in that we have become a law unto ourselves concerning our environment, the natural world. Prophetic voices call us to account, but there still seems to be no shortage of deaf ears.  The gospel of the natural world is all around us, especially at this time of the year when the fruit of the land is so bountiful. But the law of this same world calls us to live beyond ourselves, to recognize that earth’s resources are not inexhaustible and that we do have the power to destroy the very things that are essential not only for human survival, but also the survival of millions of plant and animal species.  

Over the past three years, advocacy groups in Wilmot, Woolwich, and North Dumfries townships have been fighting the blight of new gravel and most recently sand pits that threaten to take over precious farmland and spoil our water supply.  These advocacy groups are not simply NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) groups, they are farmers, environmentalists, environmental engineers, and now, mercifully, some politicians who understand that the cost of destroying farms and quite possibly our region’s aquifers is wrong-headed (to put it mildly). Bonhoeffer wrote of cheap grace. Cheap grace in this case is taking for granted things like abundant food and pure water, clean air and good weather. Bonhoeffer would remind us that these things are not free for us to use as we please: there are limits, and respecting those limits, living and using earth’s gifts responsibly and with accountability for the needs of the many, not just the few, is the same marriage of law and gospel to which Jeremiah called the leaders of Judah and to which Jesus calls his disciples in that passage we read today from Luke.

In that reading from Luke, there is something else.  Jesus actually does something with the healing gifts he has been given.  If he had merely talked to the woman and told her that God loved her in spite of her suffering and disability, the gospel would not have been proclaimed.  His words would have been pious blather.  Living under the banner of law and gospel, Jesus shows us, means doing something; it means becoming involved and using whatever gifts we have to show the compassion that lies at the heart of both law and gospel.  It means getting involved in issues that affect the well being of others and getting in the face of those who would do harm to others, especially those others who are not in a position to call the shots.  It means that we become Jesus’ proclamation of law and gospel for our own time and place.  

Law and gospel: given that we, too, might become the very stuff of the Word of God.