August 22, 2010 | 8:00 a.m.

Release Me

Jo Preuninger
Interim Director of Evangelism, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 103:1–8
Isaiah 58:9–14
Luke 13:10–17

There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be; not to own, but to give; not to control, but to share; not to subdue, but to be in accord.

Abraham Joshua Heschel
The Sabbath

Those of you who are fans of TV serials—Lost, Entourage, the old series Dallas, etc.—and those of you who love a good novel know the challenges of picking up a story in the middle. Without some recap of prior episodes, a review of what happened, you miss forming your opinions of the true character of the individuals or the meaning a writer has embedded in the sequence of events.

The same is true in our reading from Luke, one of the four Gospels—or stories of the good news of Jesus Christ—which we have been reading in the common lectionary this past year.

Scholars consider the Gospel of Luke to be one of the most elegant compositions within the Christian scriptures. The author is gifted in the Greek language, employing subtle nuances of words and eloquent phrases that sound beautiful in Greek. Luke is also a master storyteller. Rather than just telling a reader about Jesus, he persuades. He crafts dialogue, quote speeches, relates what an eyewitness thought, or situates individuals in the midst of conflict, so the reader can assess the measure of their character. Readers can also develop a keen interest in what this means to them.

I realize for many of you the Gospel of Luke is as familiar and beloved as your comfortable bedroom slippers. You may have grown up with the stories and know just where to turn for the prodigal son or know the uniqueness of Luke’s resurrection account. You may even know Luke was thought to be a physician and also the author of the Acts of the Apostles. To you, I ask for patience while I offer a review of prior episodes that directly relate to our reading.

At Christmas you would have heard other people anticipate Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem as a savior to end oppression; shepherds and wise men worship him, and the star appears. Then he is presented in the temple according to Jewish custom on the eighth day; the old priest Simeon and Anna somehow recognize Jesus as the promised savior.

At thirty, Jesus is baptized by John, and a voice from heaven declares, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” These three chapters conclude with the paragraph of the genealogy of Jesus, his family tree, from Joseph back through David, Moses, Abraham, and finally as the Son of God.

So far, Luke’s story arouses your curiosity of Who is the man? and What is his mission in my world? Then Jesus takes center stage and reveals by actions and interaction with people who he is.

Jesus enters the temple on the sabbath to teach. He is offered a scroll and stands to read a passage from Isaiah. Jesus reads, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free.” Unfortunately this enraged the people in the synagogue, and they drove him out of town.

OK, that was a great big hint. Luke then proceeds to document Jesus as a healer, on the sabbath, casting out unclean spirits, and people liked this. Also on the sabbath, he healed Simon Peter’s mother-in-law along with casting out more demons and curing those with various diseases.

Trouble really begins to fester when Jesus is confronted by some religious leaders questioning his actions on the sabbath: he has been caught healing and was also gathering food. To these leaders, Jesus says, “the Son of Man is lord of the sabbath.”

Now the leaders are watching him, trying to trap him. On another sabbath, Jesus is caught healing a withered hand, and in defense of his actions, Jesus asks, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to destroy it?” Luke tells us the leaders were “filled with fury.”

Jesus actually admits to his motive: he tells his disciples and the crowd gathered around him, “I did not come to bring peace.”

Now, in the midst of this tension we come to our reading for today (Luke 13:10–17).

• • •

More than twenty years ago, I was young sales rep with a large company in Baltimore and worked closely the owner of a new company that was both a distributor and business partner. I loved working with him. He was creative, tenacious, fiercely competitive, a terrible workaholic, who would, on occasion, pepper our conversation with sage wisdom or a story concerning fairness, ethics, or faith. We were working on a new project that would help my fragile career and propel his company into a new realm of business, one with great risk, but also rewards of revenue and respect. As some of you may have experienced in starting new projects, there comes a crescendo of anxiety, a flurry of activity to close deals or save them from failure, and the timing is often beyond your control. You just keep at it.

Just at the height of our negotiations, he was to leave for a family vacation that had been scheduled months ago. Everyone in the office knew how much his wife insisted on a trip “away” for uninterrupted “family time.” She also made it known how much she resented the energy and time he invested in their business. We all thought it was pretty selfish of her. As I watched him, I could only wonder if going away would be just jumping from one stressful situation to another, with equally demanding expectations. And if he left, would this jeopardize all we had worked to accomplish? I cannot hide my selfish motives or fears.

This was incredibly bad timing, and as he left, he was anxious. Could he relax, and if not, could he work? How do you juggle being away with so much to do? When he returned, he looked—amazing.

“What happened?”

“As I sat on the plane, I had to let go. This was more than what priority—work or family—would win. I needed to do it for my being. I prayed to God, ‘Release me.’”

Release me. I’d never heard him speak of his faith in such intimate terms or of his relationship or reverence of God.

In spite of it being such a huge deal—one that was career changing, business trajectory influencing, involved a new client, winning, all the stuff that got our engines revved up—I don’t remember if we won or lost this project. But, I remember seeing what I now know of as sabbath keeping—being released from our work, all that we do, our material world, and being in time and space as a creature of God with those you love.

The opening chapter of Genesis, the first book in the Bible, narrates our beloved story of God’s creation, each day God calls into existence, first the heavens and earth, the sky and moon, water, land, animals, human beings. God calls each day “good” or “very good.” But on the last day of creation, in which God finished work and rested, God blessed the day. God set aside what we now call the sabbath from all the other days in which space and time were created, blessing it and calling it holy.

Our understanding of the sabbath is to commemorate God’s rest and for us to rest in a sacred time along with God. This is part of our Ten Commandments: observe or keep the sabbath. It is the only twofold commandment, one that both describes what we are to do (“observe the sabbath and keep it holy” and that prohibits action (“you shall not do any work and your slaves, children and livestock are not to work”).

The Sabbath directly confronts the seemingly unbreakable rhythm of work, even when our seasons or other circumstances seem to preclude the possibility of rest. Our work may have its rewards, but only if its limits, pressures, and demands are kept in check by the safeguard of the sabbath as a sacred time to recognize God as our creator and not us (Patrick D. Miller, The Ten Commandments: Interpretation,p. 121).

The sabbath is both personal (you shall rest) and communal (you shall ensure others rest, naming everyone—slaves, children, livestock). Isn’t it ironic: At the time the command was given, all people were included to ensure the privileged would not trample on those in a lower status. Today, the type of people who most need to be reminded to keep the sabbath, by refraining from work and subtly pressing others, are oft times the senior managers or leaders who work as if the world would stop if they rested. Sometimes they are the ones who need to be reminded of the need for all—including them—to keep the sabbath.

Abraham Joshua Hechsel was a widely admired Jewish scholar and rabbi born in the early twentieth century. He writes, “The sabbath is meaningful to God, for without it, there would be no holiness in our world of time. Observance of the sabbath is more than a technique for fulfilling a commandment. The sabbath is the presence of God in the world, open to the soul of man” (Hechshel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man, p. 60). His commentary is actually quite liberating for us in that throughout the centuries, this notion of being in God by refraining from work and resting morphed into a series of prohibitions, a long list of “do not’s,” to the extent you can become so consumed with a “do not” that you actually forget the love of God behind this command and the prescription for what we are to do: be at rest with God in a holy space and time.

Apparently, as a people of God, we have had trouble through the ages with observing the sabbath. Our first reading comes from Isaiah, a prophet who lived hundreds of years before Jesus. It is part of a long monologue in which he criticizes the people for thinking their rituals were righteous when, in fact, they were forgetting the true nature of worshiping God or keeping the sabbath.

Isaiah reminds them, “You shall call, and God will answer” along with a long series of if-then statements: “If you refrain from trampling on the sabbath, from pursuing your own interests on my holy day; if you honor it . . . then you shall take delight in the Lord.” Isaiah’s call for obedience also attempts to infuse it with an understanding of what refraining from work will enable: if you honestly call for God, God will answer, and if you stop doing all the things you should not be doing, you will actually allow room in your life to recognize God’s presence.

Heschel offers this Jewish rabbinic legend:

At the time when God was giving the Torah to Israel, God said to them: My children! If you accept the Torah and observe my mitzvoth [commandments], I will give you for all eternity a thing most precious that I have in my possession. And what, asked Israel, is that precious thing which thou will give us if we obey thy Torah? The world to come. Show us in this world an example of the world to come. God answered, the sabbath is an example of the world to come. (The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man, p. 73)

Isaiah’s teaching, coupled with our reading from Luke’s Gospel, underscores the importance the theology of the sabbath’s holds and how misunderstandings can lead to such controversies surrounding its interpretation. There is a strong connection between what we believe—our theology—and what we do – our ethics—and if you lose sight of this connection, then you run the risk of sliding into empty practices that actually diminish your life, obscuring what you believe.

Jesus was an observant Jew. He read and taught from scriptures; he prayed, worshiped in the synagogue and temples. Jesus upheld biblical laws. So it is not Jewish theology he took issue with. The problems he caused, the peace he disrupted, stemmed from the way practices gained importance over faith.

When we reviewed “prior episodes” in Luke, we heard Jesus proclaim his ministry “to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, and let the oppressed go free.” As a storyteller, Luke foreshadows with this claim so much of Jesus’ life, mission, and meaning. The Greek word Jesus uses is aphesis, which can be translated as “release” or “go free.” Throughout the Gospel, we find variations on this word in the work Jesus performs: releasing a man with unclean spirits on the sabbath, rebuking the fever that held Simon’s mother-in-law, casting out diseases and demons, freeing free people from what holds them from living a full life.

In the particular passage we read today, a woman “crippled by a spirit” is set free from her ailment. Some biblical scholars point out that the woman never asked, verbally, to be healed. But if the effort and faith to continually get your body, your crippled body, into the synagogue is not a plea for healing, what more would words do? Who knows—maybe for the first eight, ten, sixteen years she asked the leader for healing only to be shushed. The way she observed the sabbath was an attempt to be close to God. Jesus responds to her silent plea and recognizes her as “a daughter of Abraham.” After Jesus first tells her she is set free and then lays his hand on her, she begins praising God, maybe with words similar to those in the psalm we read: “Bless the Lord, O my soul; bless his holy name.”

Then the trouble starts. The leader of the synagogue becomes “indignant,” speaks not to Jesus but to the crowd within the synagogue; he claims “work—even healing work—ought not to be done on the sabbath day.” Although the leader does not directly address Jesus, Jesus lumps him in with the crowd: “You hypocrites, ought not this woman whom Satan bound for eighteen long years be set free from bondage on the sabbath day?” Here Luke slips in a narrative: “The entire crowd rejoiced at the wonderful things he was doing.” Jesus had challenged them as being obedient to actions but forgetting to seek an intimacy with God and to lift up what binds others from a full life in God. They were so busy doing, that they forgot their being and their creator.

We all have things that bind us, distract us from God or being able to rest in God. A job. Unemployment. School. Anger at a bad marriage. Greater interest in a ball game. Self interest. Shopping. Fatigue from too much work. Fear the bills will not be paid. Anxiety about kids. Concern for aging parents. We have things in our lives that bind us, consuming our time and attention. It gets to be exhausting and can be crippling.

Release me. I still think of my business partner and his prayer for release. It is now part of my prayer life. When I traveled, I often prayed for release as soon as I sat on a plane. At 1:00 a.m., when I cannot throw off the day—“God release me.” When I am afraid I cannot set aside my ego to do what God needs me to do—“release me.” When I come to worship, I believe our prayer of confession is a longer, more thoughtful “God, release me.” And following our prayer of confession, we are granted the greatest gift, an assurance we are pardoned or released from our sin—“In Jesus Christ we are forgiven.”

What is your prayer for release? What are the habits, the strains that bind you, bend you over like the woman? How are you estranged from God?

Jesus is not just a prophet or a priest. Luke portrays Jesus as God incarnate, who crashes into our world, in human flesh. God meets us in the business and messiness of life. The Greek word aphesis is also used in the New Testament to signify another type of release: forgiveness, release from sin and guilt. Jesus’ ministry is good news to the poor and poor in spirit, a ministry that includes the sabbath principle to release the bonds that hold and oppress humans (The Ten Commandments: Interpretation, p. 159).

In our worship today, we have the opportunity to pray for release. We also are invited to the Lord’s Table as a particular way to observe our sabbath. Jesus meets us today at this table to celebrate life, to be with us and restore us.

We see Jesus as a glimpse of the world to come, the agent of our release, the lover of our life, the one more concerned with us than anyone. Amen.