Luke 13:10-17, Jeremiah 1:4-10, and Psalm 71:1-6

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    When I was teaching high school English, I found myself ending each class period on Fridays the same way.  My parting words to my students, I’m sure, rose a bit out of my own anxiety about what exactly they were up to when they weren’t sitting in my classroom and holding a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird.  They went like this, “Be safe, and make good decisions.  Use your powers for good.”  I don’t know exactly where they came from.  I suppose it was my way of telling them to be careful, because they were beautiful and good and important.  And—they mattered to me and to each other whether they realized it or not.
    At the beginning of the year, I got a lot exasperated looks and rolling eyes aimed at me when these words shot of my mouth.  But, it somehow became a ritual, and soon my kids were saying it with me, if not as self-talk, then definitely as playful banter.   I think they also chanted along to let me know they heard me, even if they didn’t intend to follow my instructions.
    As ritualized words often do, our Friday mantra has stuck with me, and it surfaced a lot as I was living with the scriptures for this week and getting ready to speak with you this morning.  I don’t suppose to speak for Jesus, but I can hear him saying to the leaders of the synagogue and the people who followed them (perhaps blindly),
Make good decisions, friends.  Use the powers God has given you for good.  The power of the Sabbath is the power of rest and relief.  These are meant for you and for all God’s children.  And don’t forget to read chapters 10-13 of To Kill and Mockingbird before Monday.
Oh, wait—maybe not that last part.  
    So what is this rabbi teaching his students in the synagogue?  What exactly is he getting at with this healing?  Well, in this instance Jesus bypasses the simple Sabbath command to refrain from working on the day of rest.  Instead, he leans on the meaning of the Sabbath teachings found in Deuteronomy.   There’s usually something significant in a choice like this.  Here’s how Deuteronomy reads,
   "Observe the Sabbath day and keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you.  Six days you shall labor and do all your work.  But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God;     you shall not do any work—you, or your son or your daughter, or your male or female slave, or your ox or your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you.  Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day."
    Yes, the call of Deuteronomy is to holy rest, but it’s an active holiness, Rabbi Jesus is pointing out to his students.  Give relief, the scripture commands.  Recognize the humanity in yourself and all those around you.  Recognize and honor the divine intention that all should live well.  Know that God was and is compassionate to you, so that you might learn to be compassionate to others.
    Luke’s Jesus is calling the leaders of the synagogue and the people who follow them on their definition of what it means to keep a holy Sabbath.  He brings into their vision the suffering of one of their own.  Here is an unnamed woman.   My guess is that that is not an editing error.  She’s bent in body or spirit, unable to meet the eyes of those with whom she worships, because of her crippled stance and the fact that what ails her has made her unclean and stripped her of the lifelines of community.
    Eighteen years is a long time to suffer, apparently long enough for her hardships and alienation to become just background noise to the leaders and the crowd.   They don’t name her.  They don’t see her.  She has absorbed this dismissal too.  She doesn’t ask to be healed, but Jesus sees her need.
But rules, they’re what’s important to the leaders of the synagogue.   There are ways they do things and ways they do not.  This situation is one of those “do nots.”  This healing disrupts, inconveniences, and makes them teeter a bit on their podiums of control and power.  
Having to actually see this woman makes them wrestle with things they would rather not wrestle with.  And to free her of her bowed status on the Sabbath disrupts the social hierarchy of power and makes them uncomfortable.  And then Jesus touches her, crossing all sorts of boundaries, and welcoming her back into community.  Well… that’s just too much.
    Barbara Essex, author of Bad Girls of the Bible writes of this, “What looks like a simple healing on the surface is actually a challenge to the powers and principalities, structures, and systems that keep persons burdened, bowed down, and bent over.”
    This kind of challenge is bound to make those holding the reins more than a little nervous.  As they tremble with rage and probably a little fear, Jesus teaches them what they should already know—that the point of the law is to shape the character of the community in love, cooperation, compassion, mutuality, and reverence for God.  This is what the active holiness of Sabbath should look like.  And truthfully, is any of this really about the Sabbath?  Isn’t it more about power- whose got it, who doesn’t, and how it can be wielded?  
What first appears to be a simple healing story is really a call to overturn a way of living and thinking that fails to see and act on behalf of those who are suffering.  Jesus names the bent over woman as a member of God’s family.  He touches her and restores her to the community.  He calls the highly anxious leader of the synagogue and those who stand by and watch beyond the comfort of the their gathering place, across social boundaries, and into the kind of love and life that liberates the downtrodden so that they too may stand and praise God.
    Jesus is demanding an overturning of what is—the what is that only belongs to the privileged few, so that what will be in God can really be—for all, no matter which way they’re bent, how far they’re outcast, or how long they’ve been downtrodden.  Jesus is asking the people (that means us too) to choose what is uncomfortable and messy and vulnerable and risky so that all God’s children can stand and lift their voices in joy.   He’s asking us to make good decisions and use our powers for good.
    In today’s terms, I think that means finding ways to question our own vision and asking ourselves who we see and who we don’t.  It means voting in ways that will protect God’s most vulnerable children and staying in close touch with our elected officials to make sure they do the same thing too.  It means taking a careful look at what we have and how we live and readjusting the excesses of our lives so that others may simply have what they need to survive and the earth can breathe a little easier.  It means measuring our decisions by the rules of love and compassion.  It means finding ever-new ways to embody the radical welcome and extravagant love of God, even when it makes us squirm.  It means opening our doors and our hearts and holding our institutions, our rules, our wallets, and our ideas of how things should be with careful hands and loose grips.  It means helping each other stand.  It means naming the worth of each child of God.  It means touching the untouchable and so providing a lifeline of human connection.  It means making good decisions and using our powers for good.
    This doesn’t sound especially easy to me.  It sounds like it might take, as we heard in the Jeremiah passage for today, some plucking up and pulling down of what we’ve known and grown accustomed to.  It might take some destruction of walls that have protected us and sheltered us from need and change and vulnerability.  It might require the overthrowing of the little synagogue leader that lives in our heads—the one that thrives on anxiety, hands clutched tight around the reins of power in order to protect the status quo, and what works for me.  
    It might mean upsetting some relationships, networks, systems, and groups of which we are a part.  And if you’ve ever studied any kind of systems theory, you know the difficulty in that.  The system will fight the change, even if it’s healthy, life-giving, and maybe even life-saving.  But our self-doubt, selfishness, fear, or resistant relationships should not stop us when it comes to this call to use our powers for good.  1.)  It is from God.  (That’s a biggie.) and 2.) as, the great William Sloane Coffin would say,  “All of life is the exercise of risk” and “People who fear disorder more than injustice will only produce more of both."  
    This is exactly the complicated and difficult call Jeremiah is experiencing too, much to his dismay, in our reading from the Hebrew scriptures.  He balks at it, he protests that he is too young, too inexperienced, too tongue-tied, and not the right boy for the job.   But God knows differently and refuses to let Jeremiah excuse himself from the job.  I’m going to give you the words, God says.  I’m going to protect you.  I will give you the power you need to overthrow what gets in the way of my vision of life and love.  You can do this.  You will do this.  Now get busy making good decisions and using your power, my power for good.
    Friends, we are today’s Jeremiahs.  We are the right ones for the job.  Go ahead, give God your best excuse.  Believe me, I have.  
Me, God?  No.  Not me.  I’m too young.  I’m too old.  I’m too busy.  I have children.  I work.  I drive a lot of carpools.  This makes me uncomfortable.  I could never find the words.  I’m too weak.  This is too hard.  They’ll never listen.   You see, God, it’s complicated…
    And God answers as God always does… (Jeremiah, Leah, Merry, Gary…insert your name here), you were born for this.  Trust me.  I’ll give you the words, whatever you need.  Don’t be afraid—I’m with you.  My power will be your power.  We’ll do the hard work of tearing down, plucking up, and overthrowing all that keeps you and all my children from living life with joy, and then we’ll build and plant together.  Just wait until you see what blooms.  Now, go on.  Make good decisions, and use my power for good.
And God will be faithful.  The Psalmist tells us so. “Even to old age and gray hairs,” she says in the second half of Psalm 71.  Even in the face of troubles and enemies, weariness and confusion, insecurity and flickering hope.  In you, O Lord, I take refuge,” the Psalm reads.  “Deliver me.  Rescue me.  Listen to me, and save me.   You are my rock, God.  My refuge.  My strong fortress.  You rescue me.  You are my hope and my trust.”
This is indeed a prayer of hope and trust.  May it be ours today as well.  Like the woman bent with troubles, may we be given the power to stand up, face life straight on, and let our lives praise God.  Like Jeremiah, may we heed God’s call (even if we have to protest a bit first).  And like Jesus, may we challenge the powers that threaten life and live in the power that is Life.  May it be so with us.  Amen.