Sabbath Unbound

“Sabbath Unbound”

August 24, 2025 Cobleskill United Methodist Church, Pastor Anna Blinn Cole

Psalm 71:1-6; Luke 13:10-17

Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost 

Psalm 71

Prayer for Lifelong Protection and Help

¹ In you, O Lord, I take refuge;    let me never be put to shame.² In your righteousness deliver me and rescue me;    incline your ear to me and save me.³ Be to me a rock of refuge,    a strong fortress^[a] to save me,    for you are my rock and my fortress.

⁴ Rescue me, O my God, from the hand of the wicked,    from the grasp of the unjust and cruel.⁵ For you, O Lord, are my hope,    my trust, O Lord, from my youth.⁶ From my birth I have leaned upon you,    my protector since my mother’s womb^. My praise is continually of you.

Luke 13:10-17

Jesus Heals a Crippled Woman

¹⁰ Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath. ¹¹ And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. ¹² When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” ¹³ When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God. ¹⁴ But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the Sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured and not on the Sabbath day.” ¹⁵ But the Lord answered him and said, “You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger and lead it to water? ¹⁶ And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the Sabbath day?” ¹⁷ When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame, and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things being done by him.

It's really, really good to be back with you.  I’ve been traveling for many weeks and my last Sunday with you here from the pulpit was June 22^nd.  That’s a long time.  In fact, it had been so long since I preached, I couldn’t even remember the folder on my computer I that I was keeping my sermons in.  And not only that but the lights even stopped working and this poor TV screen might have decided to go on leave from its signal indefinitely. 

I was gone for an extensive period this summer because I was taking what’s called a sabbatical-- an allotment of time off that our conference encourages pastors to take in regular increments for rest and refocus.  The folks in leadership here at CUMC gently and lovingly nudged me to take the time that was allotted for this reason, I’m thankful to have had the time.  

The word sabbatical shares a lot of letters in common with the word sabbath, in fact it’s an extended form of the sabbath, spiritual rest from work, spread over a longer period of time than one day, which is typically the way we think about sabbath.

The bible tells a lot about sabbath.  Not only is it one of the ten commandments, with that famous line from Deuteronomy: “‘Observe the Sabbath day and keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you. ¹³ Six days you shall labor and do all your work. ¹⁴ But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—.” (Deuteronomy 5:12-14) 

But also, we know about the spirit of sabbath from our creation story when God worked hard for 6 days and on the seventh day, God rested.  Because of the rich history and commandments to keep the sabbath, sabbath culture was very strong and very strict throughout much of Jewish and Christian history. 

We know about sabbath, too, I hope.  There are times in our weeks and in our year when we take a pause from the usual.  Maybe you have a tradition you like to keep on Sundays that involves doing something life-giving or relaxing.  Maybe it’s another day of the week when you carve out time to give yourself rest from your usual labors. Maybe you have a yearly tradition of breaking the normal routine and camping outside or going to the beach or spending time with family. 

I enjoyed some of  the classic experiences of rest over the course of my sabbatical during the last few weeks including sitting by water, just sitting.  There’s really nothing I enjoy doing more.  I also spent a lot of time with my family, which I loved.  I also got to camp in beautiful parts of the country as we made our way around the western half of the United States visiting national parks. But there were also some unexpected experiences on my sabbatical… experiences that made me think… I’m not really sure this fits into the “sabbath” experience I was going for.  

One of those experiences was cleaning bathrooms on Iona.  The sacred pilgrimage site where I spent the last two weeks (some of it with folks from the church, too!).  Iona is a breathtaking place of beauty and meaningful worship and experiences of the divine and the earthly coming very close together.  I have to say, I didn’t experience a tremendous amount of divinity or sabbath when I was cleaning the insides of shower stalls.  It wasn’t an activity I would have put into the Sabbatical column.  

And yet, it was I who elected to live in community at the Iona Abbey for my second week on the island.  It was I who knew living in community has joys and also sacrifices for the good of the whole.  And to be sure, it takes everyone doing their part to help a community of volunteers and guests function well and stay healthy.  The bathrooms have to be cleaned by someone.  It was a humbling experience to learn that some things are necessary to do even when on an extended sabbath because we don’t live in a vacuum.  We are not at the center of our own world.  We are always part of a community.

This… expanded… unbound… understanding of sabbath is where Jesus was going in our scripture today, too.  He lived in a religious and cultural world where sabbath was pretty strictly understood as a clean break from all work.  A day of rest and nothing… nothing! …shall get in the way. 

The Gospel of Luke features Jesus in several instances demonstrating, though, that real life doesn’t always follow the rules because in real life we don’t live in a vacuum.  We are always part of a community and sometimes that will make demands of us that encroach on our literal understandings of rules.  Jesus taught us that we are surrounded by others and sometimes their needs appear suddenly in what we might have wanted to be a pristine experience of sabbath.  This is what happens in Luke Chapter 13.  Jesus, the rabbi extraordinaire, is in the synagogue on the sabbath teaching (like a good rabbi!).  And while he is teaching a woman appears who has needed to be in a bent over position for 18 long years due to a health problem.  She didn’t make any presumptions when she came into the synagogue.  She just came as she was, presumably to worship God.  But as soon as Jesus saw this woman, he stopped his regular sabbath activity and he laid a healing hand on her.  This may not seem like a stretch to us, but for the religiously rule-following people in the room, healing anyone on the sabbath broke all the rules.  It was work.  It was effort.  It was a desecration of the Lord’s Day.  

The religious elite complained: She should come back any one of the other six days of the week!  What was she thinking!?  Six other days of the week she could be healed, not on the sabbath.  That’s not what sabbath is for.

What does Jesus think about this reasoning?  He thinks it’s hypocritical.  To say you want to follow God by following the rules so closely that you don’t see the image of God in the bent over human right in front of you…. It’s hypocrisy, plain and simple.  When we follow the religious rules so literally that we lose sight of the way God is working right in front of us, we have turned the right and proper practice of religion into our god, not a means for serving God.

My initial surprise at cleaning bathrooms on Iona notwithstanding, I don’t think we have a strong culture presently for what it means to keep the sabbath.  The blue laws are gone, most of us don’t think twice about cooking or mowing the lawn or even helping a neighbor in need on the sabbath.  And some of us even work regularly on the sabbath as part of our jobs out of necessity.

It’s hard for us to imagine this kind of stringent observation of sabbath in our current Christian culture.  We don’t have these same standards around strict observance patterns that previous generations did, including in Jesus’ day.

But what’s not hard to imagine is how the letter of the law, particularly in religious practice today, replaces the spirit of the law.  A decree from the scripture taken so literally that it prevents God’s grace from moving us to do the right thing, not the literally correct thing.  

Jesus sees religion differently.  It’s not about precise and literal readings of the rules.  It’s about finding the ways the rules fall short of uplifting the community around you and then expanding our understanding of God, who can’t be boxed in by rules or anything else.  Jesus is particularly interested in protecting God’s creation, especially the vulnerable parts of it, from a religious practice that borders on abuse and distortion of God’s will for abundance and mutual flourishing. Sometimes we religious folk get so caught up on what does the Bible literally say that we miss the fact that over and over again Jesus moves the needle.  It’s not about repeating in exactitude what our ancestors of faith have always done.  It's about understanding that love is at the root of all things, including sabbath practice, and that love is a lens through which to approach the world around us, even and especially on the sabbath.

But ultimately, this isn’t really just about sabbath is it?  It’s about how God wants everyone to have access to abundant life.  And not just after we leave these earthly bodies, but while we’re still in them.  God wants us to be whole and healthy and unbound.  And sometimes that means we have to find the bad rules and break them.  To stand up for the least among us, even when it’s not popular.  We don’t live our perfect religious life in a vacuum.  We live in a real and complicated world and we’re not at the center of it.  What this means for those of us who call ourselves Jesus-followers, is that it’s our job to look for ways where our tradition has made our religion too narrow.  To look for places where the letter of the law has blind spots.  To see the people who get left behind by “holy” practices that actually distort God’s love and limit its reach.  

Today is the sabbath day and I hope you will experience rest and refocus this day and in sabbath experience you create going forward.  But also I want to prep you about a certain upcoming sabbath day in our near future.  On September 7, in two weeks, we will have a glorious morning of church and then right after church I invite you to shift the focus to our neighbors who need to know they are loved by us and loved by God. For three hours we’ll throw a party to spread this message.  We call it our Block Party.  And we invite everyone in the neighborhood to come and experience sabbath love: good food, good music, good ice cream sundaes, and good fun.  But in order for us, the church, to open this day for others to be loved, we must become servants ourselves.  Bringing wholeness and healing to our neighborhood by scooping ice cream and setting up tables and wrangling the bouncy house line and picking up trash on the lawn afterward.  We have a whole list of ways you can help unbind sabbath love for our neighbors and it’s on a glorious clipboard waiting for your name.  And I think I can safely promise there will be no shower stall cleaning involved.  

Even so, I trust that you will be moved to de-center yourself in the experience of sabbath that day, and perhaps always, open to the possibility that God’s love lives outside of our best efforts to keep a nice and tidy religion. 

Let us pray: 

Bent over by Steve Garnaas Holmes

             There appeared a woman

             with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years.

             She was bent over, unable to stand up straight.

                                                                —Luke 13.11

What is bent over in you?

A gift repressed... a feeling denied...

a story unheard... a strength decayed...

a hope, a hope, still hoping...?

Not everything, maybe, but something

is being healed,

standing up in you.

Don't be the ruler who says “Not yet.”

Be the woman

who stands.

There may not be a final cure,

but sit still long enough

to feel that hand on your back.