August 24, 2025

I speak to you in the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

How many of us are rule-followers?  [Ask why people might want to follow rules.]  There’s a certain comfort in following the rules – in knowing what to expect.  After all, society benefits when things are ordered and people have a common understanding of how to behave.  Just imagine what it would be like, for instance, if we couldn’t agree that red means “stop” and green means “go” at a traffic light.

But I’ll bet each of us can think of a time where we found some good reason to bend a rule.  Or maybe even break it.  More often than not, these are times when following the rules doesn’t seem to get us any closer to our goals.  They’re times when being disruptive can open up new possibilities. 

In my last congregation, we had a rule that the acolytes would extinguish the candles before the altar party processed out.  But one Sunday we sang “this little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine” while the acolytes dutifully extinguished the candles – and something about that didn’t seem right.  So our worship team considered the rule, and it’s theology, and whether the rule aligned with our goal that worship would point to the deeper realities of God.  Being disruptive opened up new possibilities for us to experience the Living God.

And that leads to what I want us to be thinking about this morning: how do we respond when the rules take on a life of their own?  The answer is to disrupt by interpreting the rules with divine compassion.  Divine compassion that opens up new possibilities.

In many ways, it’s unsurprising that Jesus would pick the sabbath as the rule to break.  Because Sabbath has a muddled theology that can make it hard to interpret.  Scripture gives us two different justifications for practicing Sabbath.  One is found in Exodus as part of the Ten Commandments, where God insists the Israelites keep every seventh day holy by resting because God rested on the seventh day after creating the universe.  The other justification is found in Deuteronomy, where God commands the Israelites to keep the sabbath holy in remembrance of His delivering them from slavery in Egypt.  It’s a mixed message – does one take rest for rest’s sake, or does one keep the day holy to remember God’s deliverance from slavery?

Over centuries, the rabbis and legal experts leaned into the “do no work” rationale as they interpreted the sabbath commandment.  And this explains the synagogue leader’s outrage – how dare Jesus do work of any kind on the sabbath?  For him, Jesus’ healing of this crippled woman is an affront to God’s command to set aside this day by resting in thanksgiving for the creation.  Jesus is breaking one of his culture’s most important rules.

Jesus, though, sees the flaw in this interpretation of the commandment.  The interpreters have forgotten – or ignored – the fact that sabbath is a religious practice that’s also meant to remember and honor the liberation of God’s people.  How, Jesus says, can it be wrong to liberate someone from bondage on a day that is meant to celebrate and remember liberation? 

Think back to the beginning of the Exodus story.  On Mount Sinai, God tells Moses that He has become fully aware of Israel’s suffering under Egyptian slavery.  God sees the oppression, hears the cry of God’s people, and intimately knows Israel’s pain.  Acting out of divine compassion for their plight, God resolves to bring the Israelites out of slavery and into freedom.

That divine compassion is at the heart of the entire Scripture story.  Over and over again, we see God’s people messing up.  Making the wrong decisions.  And over and over again, God offers forgiveness and reconciliation.  Driven – always – by God’s divine compassion for us.

Jesus demonstrates what that compassion looks like as he calls the crippled woman over to him.  Jesus sees the crippled woman, and his heart is moved with compassion.  The same compassion God showed the Israelites all those thousands of years ago.  And working through Jesus’ compassion, God does for this woman what he did in the Exodus – what God does throughout all of Scripture.  God brings this woman out of slavery and into freedom.

Jesus’ disruption of the rules opened the possibility for a new interpretation of the Sabbath commandment.  An interpretation based not on a narrow reading of a few Scripture passages, but on the “Big Story” of the Bible.  An interpretation rooted in God’s compassionate love for the world, and our call to love God in return.  An interpretation rooted in Jesus’ teaching that all of the law and the prophets hang on two things: love God – and love your neighbor as yourself.

The reality is that we read the Bible differently when we are engaging our neighbors with love and compassion.  When concern over the suffering of our fellow human beings – when the same compassion God showed for the enslaved Israelites – becomes a lens through which we view the world, then we know how to interpret the rules of Scripture and faith.  We use them as tools to engage in the work of the cross.  Living out values that promote justice and peace so that, in compassion, our actions respect and enhance the sacred dignity and worth of every human being.

So, my friends, who will we be today?  Will we witness Jesus’ healing of this woman – his freeing of her bondage on the sabbath – and be like the synagogue leader and the Pharisees?  Offended that our safe, comfortable rule-following that neglects the burdens of others has been disturbed?

Or will we be like those in the crowd?  Those who see with eyes of compassion and rejoice in the true Sabbath – God’s time-and-again gifts of life and freedom?  Will our own compassionate rule-breaking disrupt the world around us and lead us to encounter the Living God?

Let us pray….

God of the Sabbath, may your love stretch the fabric of our hearts

and inspire us to the compassion that makes us Good News to all we meet;

through Jesus Christ, the shamer of the powerful

and the raiser of the dead.  Amen.