This sermon, offered at  St Andrew’s Episcopal Church’s online liturgy, on September 27, 2020, is built on the readings assigned for Proper 21 in Year A of the Revised Common Lectionary.

You can find those readings here

This sermon, offered at both the Episcopal Diocese of Milwaukee’s, and St Andrew’s Episcopal Church’s online liturgies, on September 13, 2020, is built on the readings assigned for Proper 19 in Year A of the Revised Common Lectionary.

You can find those readings here

This sermon, by the Reverend Andy Jones was offered during St Andrew’s Episcopal Church’s online service of Morning Prayer on July 12, 2020 in Madison Wisconsin.

The sermon is built around the texts assigned for Proper 10 in year A of the Revised Common Lectionary.

You can find those readings here.

Here is a recording of the sermon:

And a transcript of the recording:

May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of our hearts, be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our Redeemer.

Amen.

It’s been another difficult week. Bewildering, frustrating. It’s hard not to be dismayed and discouraged. It seems so clear. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength; care for the widows and orphans; clothe the naked, feed the hungry, heal the sick, lift up the poor. Care for one another. Love one another as God has loved us; and in doing so realize the gift that is all around us: a life that is infused with God, colored with the eternal, characterized by peace.

So why is it that some of us won’t wear masks? Why is it that some of us deflect the pain and dismiss the history implicit in the cry, black lives matter, by saying that all lives matter? Why don’t we have healthcare for all people? Why do we continue to chip away at the social safety net, leaving people hungry, homeless, without hope, and on the margins? How is it that we continue to turn our backs on God’s dream, God’s vision for creation, on the gift that God longs to give us. It’s bewildering, dismaying, frustrating, discouraging.

I’m sure that the disciples felt the same way as they sat there on the beach listening to Jesus speak to them from the boat that morning. They had given everything that they had. They had walked away from their homes, their families, their vocation, their livelihood; all because the words that Jesus was offering, the narrative he was constructing, the vision he was sharing, was so beautiful and compelling that they couldn’t imagine not following him, not doing everything they could to live the life to which he called them.

But the whole chapter of Matthew’s gospel preceding what we just read this morning is filled with conflict, with people resisting what Jesus is offering, and what Jesus has to say. Again and again, the religious authorities seek to trap him, to get him to say something for which they can condemn him, which they can use to discredit him, that they can use to condemn and convict him. They must have been every bit as dismayed and discouraged as we are right now. So Jesus has a few of them take him off from the shore in a boat and he offers us a parable.

Now I’m sure that this parable is familiar to almost all of us, the parable of the sower and the seed that lands on different kinds of soil; good soil, rocky soil, the path, soil that’s already choked with weeds. But I think it’s important to take note of the fact that Jesus offers us this parable with no judgment. He doesn’t say some of the seed falls on that wonderful fertile ground where people respond and live according to the word, not like that awful rocky soil, and the people whose lives are so filled with distractions and other priorities and concerns… There’s no judgment in his parable. There’s simply a description of what is. He’s telling us what he sees and how the world works.

I think that in that lack of judgment, there’s an opportunity here for transformation. Because when we are freed of the sting of rebuke, when we’re freed from the fear that God will somehow find us lacking and decide that we are the hardpacked soil of the path that the seeds can’t penetrate, then we are free to take a step back and look at ourselves, honestly, openly; to look at our lives and to see where we have been good soil, and where we have been packed so tightly that nothing can penetrate and grow within us.

Am I the good soil? Am I the bad soil? What day of the week is it? What time is it? Have I slept well? Have I had enough to eat? Did I have a fight with my partner or my children this morning before I left the house? Did somebody cut me off in traffic? I think that all of us are all of the soils that God describes in this parable. We can be any of them at any given moment. We can even be all of them all at the same time. But when we take away the sting of rebuke and the fear of judgment, we are in a place of transformation. We can take a close look at those moments when our soil has not been open, has not been well watered, and we can work to be different. We can look for the seeds that God is sowing in our lives and make sure that we notice them, make sure that the furrows are open, that the ground is rich, and that we are watering and tending those seeds, so that we are the good soil more often than we are the dry and rocky ground.

That’s a great transformation to experience. It gives us hope. It gives us a place to move. It gives us space to breathe. But that’s not the only transformation that’s available here in this story. It gets even better. Focus on God for a moment and not the soil. God is doing something extraordinary, something almost foolishly extravagant; sowing seed, a precious resource in a subsistence agrarian society, sowing seed on places where it may not grow! That would seem foolish to the people that Jesus was telling this parable, and when we think about it, it seems foolish to us today. Why would God waste God’s seed on places where it might not grow? And then suddenly we wake back up again to the transformation that’s been affected in us, and we realize that that’s us, God is sowing that seed in us and on us, even when we are unreceptive, when we are packed to tightly to receive it.

Then we recognize that God is doing the same with the people all around us in our lives. If there’s no judgment for us when we are bad soil, then how can we judge others when their soil is too dry, or too rocky, or too tightly packed to receive the seed that God is sowing? God is sowing seed everywhere, all the time, and it’s not up to us to judge those in whom it’s not taking root, and growing.

Transformation, freedom, liberty, a place to grow a place to breathe, that’s just the beginning. The transformation goes on. When we find ourselves in that joyous place then we can’t help but want to nurture the seeds that are being sown, the seeds that are being sown in us, the seeds that are being sown in others, the seeds that are being sown around us. And what we know, if we think about it, is that we can’t nurture seeds if we are at the same time judging the ground in which they’re sown. The only way to nurture those seeds is to water them, to shed light on them, to help them work their way into the soil; through an encouraging word, maybe even a challenging word offered in love; through deeds and examples that provide fertilizer to help those seeds grow where they are; to tend and nurture the seeds in the people around us.

It’s been a bewildering time and it’s easy to be frustrated, dismayed, discouraged. It’s even easy, I think, to be angry with the people around us who don’t understand or don’t seem to share the truth, and the values that we hold so dearly; who don’t recognize the beauty of the gift that’s being offered to us, if only we can love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, mind, drink, and our neighbor as ourselves. But the transformation that we have experienced, the freedom that we have been given, the space to grow and to breathe, instills in us a sense of joy and commitment and love for the people around us, and it calls us to help them to experience the same thing that we have experienced.

If it feels like too much. If it feels too hard. Remember, if you will, the words that Matt read to us from the book of the prophet Isaiah, where God promises that those seeds will in fact take hold and grow,

As the rain and the snow come down from heaven,
and do not return there until they have watered the earth,

making it bring forth and sprout,
giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,

so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
it shall not return to me empty,

but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

For you shall go out in joy…   (Isaiah 55:10-12a)

Therein lies our vocation or calling our project and our joy.

Amen

The sermon preached by The Rev. Andy Jones, on May 24, at St Andrew’s Episcopal Churchs, online service of Morning Prayer.

You will find a video of the Morning Prayer service on St Andrew’s web site on the 1833 Online page.  The sermon begins at 11:30 into the video.

From the Gospel assigned for the Seventh Sunday of Easter in Year a of the Revised Common Lectionary:

“Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.”

(John 17:11b)

Good morning.

So much has changed in these last few weeks, in these last couple of months.  Sometimes it seems like nothing has been spared.  Everything has changed.  And that has even extended, at least for me, to my prayer life.  There’s so much to pray for, so much to pray about right now.  I pray for family and friends, that they stay healthy and safe.  I pray for my aging parents, that they stay home, and stay safe.  I pray for this community, that we may stay bound to one another.  I pray for our leadership: national, state, and local governments, that they may make wise decisions.  And I pray for all of you.  I pray for the members of our community who are home alone, people who are sick, and even for a few of us who are dying.  There’s so much to pray for.  Sometimes it feels a little overwhelming.  And so, there are days when I am so overwhelmed, I seem to have lost my voice.  I don’t know how to pray, or for what I should pray.

That’s one of the reasons why I am so grateful for this gospel passage today.  Here on the last day of the Easter Season, here on the last Sunday before we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost, we get to hear Jesus pray.  We call this chapter of John’s Gospel The High Priestly Prayer, twenty six verses in which Jesus prays for us.  I think that we can find some direction for our own prayer, in the words that Jesus says today.

The last line of our reading this morning, “Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.”  So that they may be one, as we are one…  In the twenty-six verses of chapter seventeen of John’s Gospel, Jesus prays three times that we may be one.  Just a few verses after the line we heard today, Jesus prays, “that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us.”  And then “The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one…”  Three times Jesus prays that we may be one as he and God are one.  That’s a powerful prayer, and a powerful prayer to repeat over and over again.  May we be one as Jesus and God are one.   What exactly does that mean?  What would it mean for us to be on as Jesus and God are one?

Early theologians liked to talk about the Trinity, the connection between God, and Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, as a connection of movement, as a dance of three persons, so united in desire, and will, and being, that they move effortlessly together, like a couple that are so used to dancing together that they glide effortlessly across the dance floor, and it’s hard to tell who’s leading and who’s following.

Jesus isn’t praying that we all agree.  He’s not praying that we all come to the same conclusions, or that we find our way forward with the same sorts of paths.  I think that what Jesus is praying for in this moment is that we learn to dance together.  That we learn to accommodate one another.  That we give and receive both identify and understanding in that movement that flows back and forth between us.  That we may be one as Jesus and the Father are one.

Now what Jesus doesn’t say here, but which should become obvious as we think about Jesus’s movement in this dance, is that in order to be one with someone else in this way, we have to be ready to give, to bend to move, to allow the other to lead.  There is some sacrifice involved.  I may be entitled, it may be my right, but that might not be the best thing for the ones with whom I am dancing.  So, I need to be ready to give, to give way, to allow the other to be and to breathe.  When we all do that together we are participating in the dance that is the inner life of the Holy Trinity; moving, flowing effortlessly together; understanding that the others agenda needs to become ours, even as ours becomes theirs; as the needs of the other become our needs, as our needs become theirs.  I think that this is a particularly powerful and profound way for us to pray right now; that we may all be one; and recognizing that we are all bound together, and that there are no disposable people.

As we continue to move through these difficult times, and our federal, state and local governments begin to remove the restrictions that have kept us Safer at Home, we need to consider the needs and the agenda of the other before we jump in with both feet, stepping on their toes, asserting our own rights, privileges, and agenda.

I think this is particularly true of us in the church.  It may be that Dane County, Madison, say that we can open our doors and come back together in our building, but that may not be the best thing for all of us.  And if it’s not the best thing for all of us, I’m not sure that it’s the best thing for any of us.  What will it look like to gather with no more than ten people in our building?  What will it look like when we are allowed to have as many as fifty people in our building, but because we need to maintain six feet of separation, we may only be able to accommodate thirty at a time?  If only thirty of us can come to church then is it really appropriate for us to open the doors and gather in that way?   And even when we are allowed to gather, there will be those in our community who will be prevented from joining us because they are in a high-risk population.  I say that with some real trepidation as I approach my sixtieth birthday this summer, and will be joining that group of those officially designated as at risk.  Someone told me earlier this week that whether or not I want to admit it, I am part of that group.

So how will we gather in a way that brings us all together and allows us to be one as Jesus and God are one.  One of the things we know is that we will not stop live streaming our services.  In this time of pandemic, we have been forced to try out some new tools that we may not have explored if not for the urgency created by our current context.  And so as we figure out how we can come back together in or building we will work to make sure that we all have access to the community that we love and depend on.

Our Bishop, Bishop Steven Miller, has a Task Force assembled and they have been working on guidelines for reopening our parishes.  He has submitted those in draft form to the clergy and the wardens in the diocese and we’ll be meeting with him on Tuesday to discuss them, and then we will be ready to share them with you all.  Mother Melesa and I have gathered together a Task Force of St Andrew’s Parishioners so that we can figure out how those guidelines work with our architecture, in our space, within our walls; and we will be working and sharing our progress with all of you as we think this through.  The Task Force will then make a proposal, or some recommendations to the Vestry for their approval.  All of this will take time.  And whatever we do, I imagine that we will be behind our state and local government, watching to make sure that it is safe, that they have made appropriate and healthy decisions for all of us, as we strive to do the same for our community.

One of the things that Jesus says in his High Priestly Prayer, is that he hopes and prays that we will be one so that the world will see us and know that it was God that sent Jesus into our midst.  Jesus hopes that by our unity, by the depth and strength of the community that we form and sustain, the world will see Gods presence, and be moved, and be changed.  This is a moment for the Church to lead.  This is a moment for the church to say that we might be entitled to gather in this moment but we will not do so until it is safe, and we know that we can all be one in ways that are healthy and life giving.

If you’ve been paying attention to this discussion on the internet, you will know that Bishops across this church, clergy across this church, have been saying that the government did not close our doors, and the government cannot open them.  We closed our doors.  We chose to stay home, because we know that that is the best way for us to love on another in this moment.

Jesus prays that we may all be one.  We can’t gather together as a body in our building right now, but by staying home and protecting one another, we are one.  God has given us a way to be one even when we cannot be together; and that is by honoring and respecting the needs of all of the members of our community, by loving one another, by staying safe, and by doing all we can to keep each other safe at this time.

It has been a difficult time and there has been a lot to pray for.  I hope that you will add to your prayer list and not feel like I am imposing on you when I make this suggestion, but I think it would serve us all well if we close our prayer time in the days ahead by echoing Jesus’s words.

Heavenly Father, makes us one as you and Jesus are one; Jesus in you and you in him, and us in you and you in us, so that we may be one, and continue to love one another in ways that only you can show us.

Peace,

Andy+

On the first Sunday of each month at St Andrew’s, we work to make our worship accessible for all our members young and less young. We do this through an intergenerational sermon and opportunities for children and youth to take on leadership roles.

This sermon was preached from the center aisle, without a transcript.  The sermon is built around the readings for he First Sunday in Lent in Year A of the Revised Common Lectionary.

You can find those readings here

Here is a recording of the sermon delivered at the 10:30 service on March 1, 2020

Here is a transcript of the recording:

May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of our hearts, be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our Redeemer.

Please be seated.

Church looks pretty different today, doesn’t it?  I don’t know about you, but the first thing I noticed when I came in here this morning is that there were no flowers up front.  All of the beautiful color that’s usually right there at the top of the steps missing today… well, except for the purple.  For the last couple of months, we’ve had a short green super frontal across the front of the altar, but today we have this great big beautiful purple linen hanging off the front.  And we have this purple cloth up here on the cross.  And then, as if that wasn’t different enough… we started out with a parade this morning! We came up the center island back down the side and back up the center…  It was like a big figure eight here in the room.  Church is very different today, isn’t it?

That’s because this is the first Sunday in the season of Lent.  And this is a season where we remind ourselves that we might not have been doing all that we can, to walk in the path that Jesus walked before us. We spend the season thinking about the ways that we may have hurt other people, the ways that we may have hurt ourselves, and the ways that we may even have hurt God; by the things that we’ve done, and the things that we haven’t done.  And the point of all of that is to be better at doing the very thing that Jesus came to do.  Jesus came here and walked among us as one of us to show us how much God loves us, and to teach us how to love God back, and how to love one another, even how to love all of creation, the world around us. So in this season of Lent, we look for ways when we might not have been doing the things Jesus taught us as well as we might have.  And this purple cloth, The purple cloth on the cross, the flowers missing, that great parade we had at the beginning… we do those on the first Sunday of Lent every year.

But there’s another thing that we do on the first Sunday of Lent every year.  Every year on this Sunday, we hear the story of Jesus in the wilderness.  So, let’s just put that story in its place in the narrative.

Jesus goes to the river Jordan where he’s baptized by John the Baptist.  And in Matthew’s gospel, the one we’re reading now, there is a voice from heaven that says “This is my son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”  Jesus knows beyond a doubt who he is, and then all of a sudden, he goes out into the wilderness, to figure out how to be God’s beloved, the one with whom God is well pleased.  Jesus knows that it’s his job to show us how much God loves us, and to help us love God it in return in the same way; and to help us to love one another, and the world around us in the same way that God loves us.  And so, he goes out into the wilderness to figure out how to do that.

The gospel tells us that he didn’t eat or drink anything at all for 40 days. Can you imagine how weak you would be, how tired, how desperate you would be for something to eat or something to drink?  That’s the moment when temptation comes along.  Matthew tells us that the devil shows up and says “If you are the son of God… if you are the person that that voice from heaven just proclaimed you to be, turn these stones into bread.”  Now Jesus is here to help us to love God the same way that God loves us, and I think in reality, even though Jesus is really hungry and this may feel like it’s about him, Jesus knows that the devil is tempting him to feed all of us with the stones around us, to win us over by providing the things that we need, by meeting our every need.  In essence, to buy our allegiance.  But Jesus knows that love that is bought isn’t true love. You can give people gifts.  You can give people presents.  You can give them everything they want, and they might follow you around for a while because that and of a nice thing.  But that’s not the way to get someone to really love you.  So, Jesus tells the devil “no, go away.”

devil is not finished yet.  The devil comes and tries again, and takes Jesus up to the highest tower of the temple in Jerusalem, and says if you are the son of God, throw yourself off.  Because Scriptures say that the angels will catch you before you hit the ground.  And when that happens, and people see they’ll know who you are. It would be silly not to believe you.  They’ll get in line and they’ll do whatever you say.  But that’s not what Jesus wants.  Jesus doesn’t want us to follow him because it’s logical.  Jesus doesn’t want us to follow him because it makes sense.  Jesus doesn’t want us to follow him because it would be foolish not to.  Jesus wants us to love him.  Jesus wants us to love God.  Jesus wants us to love one another and the world around us.  And so Jesus knows that proving can never lead to love.  Arguing, proof texting, showing the facts, logic, that’s not going to lead to what Jesus wants; the ability to love one another and to love God.  So, again, Jesus tells the devil to go away.

Devil says, I’ve got one more card up my sleeve, takes Jesus up to the highest mountain and says, if you will fall down and worship me, I will put you in charge. You will be the master of all you can see, everyone will obey you, obey you.  That’s about as far from love as you can get.  You can’t force someone to love you.  You might be able to force people to do what you want.  But when you do that it’s not very likely that they’re going to love you in the process, and you don’t learn how to love other people, or God, or the creation that God made, if you’re being forced to do that.  So, once again, Jesus sends the devil away, and at that moment the Angels came to take care of him there in the desert.

During this season of Lent, we are working, we’re trying to understand the ways that we have failed to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength, and we’re working to see the ways that we’ve failed to love our neighbors as ourselves.  And I think that we hear this lesson every year on the first Sunday of Lent because Jesus gives us the model. How do we love God with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength?  By loving others the way that God loved us; not by buying their allegiance, not by proving that we are right, not by forcing them to follow us. But by engaging in acts of self-giving and sacrifice, recognizing that love is built through trust and ongoing relationship, and commitment to holding one another up.  That love comes through being together and recognizing another person’s needs and agenda as equal to our own, and by making sure that the least among us have what they need to thrive and flourish.

Here in this season of Lent, we learn something very important about our God. Our God wants more than anything for us to love God and to love our neighbors and to love ourselves.  And God loves us so much that, even if in the end it might be good for us, God will make us do what God longs for us to do.  And even though sometimes it might make us feel better about life, God won’t meet our every need; turning stones into bread when we need bread.  Because God can’t afford to buy our love.  Because that’s no love at all.  And even though it would be nice, maybe, if we had a clear set of standards and beliefs, and some solid evidence that God is who God says God is, and that Jesus is who Jesus says he is; what really makes us human, and what makes us like Jesus, is our ability to love and to believe despite the evidence to the contrary.

God doesn’t want automatons. God doesn’t want blind followers.  God doesn’t want people who are following because they had their fill of the bread on the other side of the lake.  God wants us to follow God because we are so deeply in love that we can’t bear to be out of God’s presence; that we can’t bear to live our lives in ways that are outside of God’s vision and dream for all of creation; and all we want in our hearts is to step more fully into that relationship, leaving behind the things that distract us or drag us down.

Every year on the first Sunday of Lent, we take away the flowers.  We change the frontal.  We hang a purple drape on the cross to remember, or to remind us of Jesus’s sacrifice, we listen to this story about the true love of the one who makes, creates, redeems and sustains us, and who gives us a clear path for walking in God’s light footsteps.

Welcome to the season of Lent.

Amen

This sermon, offered by The Rev. Andy Jones at St Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Madison, WI, on August 25, 2019, is built on the readings assigned for Proper 16 in Year C of the Revised Common Lectionary.

You can find those readings here

Here is a recording of the sermon

Here is a transcript of the recording

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord our strength and our Redeemer.

Please be seated

The parish that sponsored me to go to seminary back in 1999, boy that sounds like a long time ago, was situated across the street from the municipal sports complex; soccer fields, softball fields, there were bleachers and a little bit of a stadium up there.  There must’ve been fifteen or sixteen fields, and a very limited amount of parking.  I don’t know what happened after our first couple of years of that parish, but something changed, and suddenly the city started scheduling games at that complex on Sunday morning.   And we would arrive at church and find that our parking lot was already full of the cars of people that had come to watch their kids play in these games.  We grumbled, we complained, we wrestled back and forth with the city.  We tried to decide whether or not we should put up signs that said parking for church members only, or have people standing there checking ID cards at the gate as they came in…  But I don’t think that our complaints in our discontent over that moment holds a candle to what’s happening in today’s gospel story.

Jesus walks into the synagogue and sees a woman who has been crippled and bent over for eighteen years.  He heals her, in clear violation of the commandment not to work on the Sabbath.  The leader of the synagogue is incensed and keeps saying to the crowd, “there are six days on which work may be done come to be cured on one of them, but not on the Sabbath!”  You can almost hear him saying, “We are a nation of laws!”  They were…

The people of Israel, when they escaped from Egypt, wandering in the wilderness with Moses as their guide, are given a great gift.  Moses goes up onto Mount Sinai and comes back down with tablets of stone on which are carved the Ten Commandments.  Now it’s clear that these commandments were the requirements for earning God’s love, for making your way into God’s grace, because God chose the people of Israel long before the Ten Commandments were given to Moses.  God made covenants with Abram and told him that his descendants would be as many as the grains of sand on the shore and  the stars in the sky and; that his descendants would be a blessing to all people.  God already loved the people of Israel.  The Ten Commandments were the way that the people could live fully into that relationship, to experience the depth and the fullness of God’s love, and grace, and mercy.  So, when they received those commandments they were a gift.  And the psalmist, later on, writes about the Commandments, that they are sweeter than honey from the comb.  They weren’t constraining.  They weren’t confining.  They weren’t meant to punish or to judge.  They were given as a guide to life in God’s light, and grace, and love, and mercy.

They also set the people of Israel apart from the other people in the land.  As Moses is about to confer the Commandments upon the people, in the book of Deuteronomy, he tells them that other nations will look on them with awe and wonder and say,

“‘Surely this great nation is a wise and discerning people!’ ⁷For what other great nation has a god so near to it as the Lord our God is whenever we call to him? ⁸And what other great nation has statutes and ordinances as just as this entire law that I am setting before you today?”  (Deuteronomy 4:6b-7)

Adherence to the Sabbath became especially important to the people of Israel when they were in exile in Babylon, and they felt their identity as a people’s slipping away.  The Sabbath was what held them together, and helped them to remember who they were, and whose they were.  So when Jesus walks into the Temple this morning and violates the commandment to remember the Sabbath day and to keep it holy, there’s a lot at stake here in the mind of the leader of the synagogue.

You have to know that this isn’t the first time in Luke’s Gospel that this has happened. Way back, early on in Luke’s Gospel, we’re in chapter 13 now, back in chapter 6 Luke records a story where Jesus heals a man with a withered hand, in the temple.  He does it on the Sabbath, and the Pharisees go out and plot how to destroy him as a result of his violating that law.  The same thing happens in Matthew and in Mark, the same story, the same consequence, the religious leaders are so incensed the Jesus has healed on the Sabbath that they plot to have him killed.

I think Jesus is here this morning helping us to remember who we are, and whose we are.  He’s helping us to remember the place from which the law springs.  The summary of the law that we sometimes say to begin the service in Lent, says you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and your neighbor as yourself.  That is the core and the foundation from which all other laws are derived, the core and foundation from which all laws spring.  And it is out of God’s love for us, God’s compassion for us, God’s desire that we experience God more fully, that God gives us these laws.  The laws in and of themselves… they’re not the end, they’re not the goal, they’re not the purpose.  The purpose is God’s love, and the laws themselves are just tools to help us realize and experience it.

So what’s happened here this morning, and what happens in all the instances where Jesus heals on the Sabbath, and people complain and object, is that they have mistaken the laws for the end and the goal.  Jesus tells us in Mark’s version of that story of the man with the withered hand,

“The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath.” (Mark 2:27)

The Sabbath is a gift to us.  It was a gift to the people of Israel who’d escaped Egypt where they were told to make bricks without straw and didn’t have any time to rest, to pray, to worship, just to be.  The Sabbath sets us free, just like all of God’s commandments set us free from the things that would bind us, and tear us away from God.

Jesus’s mission is to set us free.  We know that because in the fourth chapter of Luke, when he returns from his temptation in the wilderness, he quotes the prophets and says, “I have come to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, to set the captives free, to give sight to the blind.”   God’s goal, Jesus’s mission, is to liberate us and set us free so that we can live fully into the relationship with God that God offers us.  Love, grace, and mercy, come first.

Now Jesus recognizes that even the leader of the synagogue, and the people whom he’s chastising in this moment, know that that’s the truth.  He says, look, if any of you have an ox or a donkey, on the Sabbath you untie it and you take it to drink.  You show that level of grace and mercy to your animals, when it’s convenient to you.  But here in this case, there is a person, a woman standing in front of you who has suffered for 18 years…  Why is it that you are willing to deny that same grace and mercy to her?   Why is it, that when it’s not convenient to you, the letter of the law is more important than the spirit of the law.

Jesus, I think this morning, is offering us a caution and calling us to account.  When we pass and enforce laws that don’t set people free; that don’t offer them life, and love, and grace, then we have made the law an end and a goal in and of itself.  And we’ve forgotten that all of those laws need to spring from God’s love.

I think that we need to think deeply about this moment in Luke’s Gospel, especially when we consider the fact that of all the nations on the earth, we have the highest incarceration rate per capita of any of them.  We have more people in prison now than any other country in the world.  So how is it that the laws that we have passed, the laws that we have embraced, find at their core, in their center, love, and Grace, and mercy?  Something is wrong.

And we know that the laws that we do have are not applied consistently.  We know that there are populations in our midst who suffer at the hands of the laws that we have passed, who don’t receive grace and mercy at the same rates that others do.  The differential of incarceration rates between African-Americans and others in this state is astounding; almost 4 to 1, and nationally 3 to 1.  If Jesus were here this morning he might be standing in the space and calling us hypocrites.

The good news in all of this is that Jesus is here calling us to account.  Jesus is here because God loves us, to remind us of who we are and whose we are, to remind us of the function that law serves in our society and in our communities, and to remind us that the law needs to be designed to set if we are free.  If we are free, we need to work to make sure that others are as well.

Jesus is here this morning because God loves us and wants us to be free; pointing out that we need to apply justice, and grace, and mercy, evenly across all populations.  This wasn’t news to the people that Jesus was speaking to.  The prophet Micah says to the people in his community, why do you bring these gifts to the altar, and burn incense?  God hasn’t asked you for those things. But God has told you what is good

“…to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.”  (Micah 6:8b)

Those words are ringing out to us today across the centuries.  And Jesus is standing in our midst calling us to account,  and offering us the chance to turn, and to share with others the gift of freedom that we ourselves enjoy.  Because the truth is, that unless we are all free, none of us are free.  And if we would be whole, our neighbor must be whole.  If we would stand in God’s light and love, without fearing the shadows on the periphery, then we need to know that everyone is standing in the same light in which we stand.  Jesus is here today because God loves us and is calling us to return, to remember who we are and whose we are.

Amen.