Sermon

Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

August 22, 2010

Luke 13:10-17

A funny thing has happened in my life in the last year or so. And in a nice turn of events, the same thing has happened in Mary’s life as well. We have, here in the somewhat advanced middle part of our lives, discovered baseball. Of course we’ve always known about baseball, but these days we keep up with the scores, we know who the home team is playing and where, we watch games on TV and we get out to the park from time to time to eat junk food, drink a beer and cheer for the team. And the team isn’t just the team, but a a bunch of players whose quirks and talents and foibles make the game interesting. Part of the joy of an Adam Dunn home run is watching him blow bubbles with his gum as he runs the bases. You gotta love the way Nyjer comes up all smiles out of the cloud of dust that represents yet another stolen base, and you have to wonder how some crazy ump in Atlanta can throw an all American nice guy like Ryan Zimmerman out of a game. I’m even a fan of Ian Desmond who’s got more errors to his credit than just about anyone in the game. I think he’s gonna be remembered as a great player. I’m pulling for him. How can I not have known the joys and pains of baseball before now.

Oh, it isn’t that I never knew about baseball or that I never paid any attention to game. I had a glove, I played sand lot ball as a kid. I had a transistor radio in my pocket and was listening at my post as a crossing guard in the sixth grade when Tim McCarver’s grand slam won the Cards the fifth game of the World Series in 64. I was listening to the game that day because I lived in a family where the Cardinals were the law. St. Louis, just 250 miles from Memphis was the closest major league team so they were pretty popular in my town, and my father’s home was in Missouri so the Cards being our team always made sense. Dad would watch the game on Saturday and yell at the players as if he was at the park. He was et up with em, and I never questioned they were THE team to pull for.

Since those days though, I haven’t paid much attention to baseball. Maybe it had to do with the way sons sometimes pull away from their fathers, which I know I certainly did. Anyway, I haven’t been serious about baseball in all the years since then until now. My faithfulness to the sport has been sort of a Christmas and Easter kind of participation. If the Cards have a shot at the pennant or are in the series, I might look at the sports page to see how they’re doing, but that’s been about it. Until now. Now I have gotten caught up in the doings of the Nationals and I have become a fan, which brings me to the point if all this baseball talk. Next Thursday evening, I expect to find myself right in the middle of some serious tension between ancient teaching and current practice. I’m sure I will feel pulled in one direction by the law with which I was raised and in another by a deepening understanding of the good that law was meant to serve. Mary and I have tickets to see the Nationals play the Cards. It should be an interesting evening. I’ll try not to picture my father, sitting there, staring aghast in open mouthed disbelief that I could be cheering about Pudge getting another RBI.

“Don’t you know, Jesus…..don’t you know,” ask the leaders of the synagogue, “that you aren’t supposed to do any work on the sabbath? Healing this woman looks like work to us. The people are coming to you for spiritual guidance and here you are breaking the law.” I wonder if Jesus every got really disheartened--frustrated sometimes at how difficult it could be to teach his simple lesson. How often in the story do we hear Jesus trying to open and soften the hearts of those around him only to run into the stone wall of law. “Imagine what is possible,” Jesus seems to say. “That’s not the way we’ve always done.” it comes the answer.

Again today we find Jesus at odds with those who are responsible for teaching the faithful how to behave. For those leaders, the answer is simple. Our calling is to observe the law. That is how we will know we are in right relationship with our God. God gave the laws. We follow the laws. What could be more clear? For Jesus too the answer is simple. Love God and love your neighbor. Strive to make sure that everything in your life, even the laws you cherish, serve that end. What could be more clear? Today the question is raised as to the intention of not only the law about keeping the sabbath, but all the laws by which the people of God are guided.

I speak sometimes about Christianity being not so much about following the rules as it is about being in relationship with Jesus. I have long been drawn to that message when I hear it in the gospel story. I admit that in part, some of my agenda in that discussion has been to separate myself from the parts of the faith that I found troubling. I resonate at times with Jesus’ challenge to the institution of religion and to the authorities. Yet even as I recognize my desire to pull back from some of the rigid-seeming teachings, I know at the same time that I want something more substantial in their place. Rules can seem cold and hollow unless they are grounded in the warmth of love and community. All laws worth following are created to serve the cause of love. I hear Jesus saying as much today as he asks those leaders, “how could I not free this woman on this day or any other?” Jesus’ standard of love trumps the law about the sabbath.

There are times when we have to choose between the law and love. We see it in civil law: civil disobedience, revolution, writers protecting a source, whole villages that broke laws, lied, stole and more as they hid Jews from the Nazis, times when the Church has provided sanctuary to those outside the civil laws. But what about the laws given us by our ancestors in faith. They came to understand in their early experience of God that some lessons are so important they should be carved in stone and passed on from one generation to the next forever. Should we ever question those laws? Jesus did.

Honor your father and mother, we are told. In the service of love--that is in the service of spreading the news that God has entered the world in a new way to bring new life--Jesus calls poor old Zebedee’s boys to leave their father and follow him. Seems like a poor way to honor one’s father. I wonder if Zebedee ever understood.

And today’s story is not the only one about Jesus upsetting the righteous by doing good works for others on the sabbath. And his breaking the rules about the Sabbath isn’t always in the service of others. When his disciples are caught picking corn on the sabbath because they are hungry, Jesus basically tells his detractors that the question is a no-brainer. The sabbath, says Jesus, was created to enhance human life. What then could possibly be wrong with feeding oneself on the sabbath?

And then there are those long lists of laws from Moses. Jesus sometimes tumbles those like the tables of those money-changers outside the temple. “You have heard it said you shall give and eye for an eye, says Jesus, but I tell you love those who hurt you and treat them well.

Living well into the relationships the rules were meant to serve is much more difficult--and much more rewarding--than simply following the rules. It would be much easier for me to be a Cards fan. I wouldn’t have to spend money on games, I enjoy cheering from the comfort of my easy chair. Being a Nats fan is messy--crowded trains, eight dollar beer. For forty five years I told people I was a Cards fan. What that really meant was, “in my family, growing up, I was taught that we were Cards fans.” What I’m learning is that being a fan involves cheering for the team even when they are down ten to nothing. Sometimes it means sitting in the sun on the first base side in July. It means believing in the hitter and hoping for a run even though he has been in a dry spell for weeks.

We’ve all hear that keeping the sabbath is a good thing, the law, even. But we don’t keep the sabbath. We are all busy on Saturdays, cutting the grass, shopping, driving kids around. We do show up here fairly often on Sunday--which is not the sabbath or seventh day, but the first day of the week--we do try to remember God mark a few moments in our week as holy. But the good that the law about sabbath was meant to serve too often gets lost in our busy-ness. Maybe real sabbath happens for us in many little ways throughout our week, not on any particular day. Sabbath is about restoration and family and grounding, and being renewed. Those good causes may be served in a few moments of quiet at the end of the day, or maybe listening to music in our car while stuck in traffic or texting a child who is away at school. Maybe you find sabbath during an exercise class, or a meal, or a conversation in which you remember that our life is part of something much larger.

Maybe in this way at least, sabbath is a bit like baseball . For me, these days, the joy of baseball lies in what I am discovering and what I have yet to discover, not in staying with what I was taught about the sport as a kid.