Readings – Jeremiah 1:4–10; Luke 13: 10–17
“There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not the sabbath day.”
Let me begin with a story from my mother country, about a young Presbyterian minister newly arrived in his first congregation, out in the rural parts of County Antrim where a strict observance of the Lord’s Day is considered essential, at least among Presbyterians. Having spent part of his training in Africa and another part in a deprived housing estate closer to home, the young minister was full of fire for God’s Kingdom to come on Earth as it is in heaven, and he tried to ensure his sermons inspired his congregation to work for social justice. Sometimes they may have even been a bit… whisper it… political.
Edinburgh Street Preacher, 14 December 2018 © Gerry Lynch
Not all of his congregation were impressed by these sermons, and one old spinster in particular would enjoin him Sunday by Sunday to return to more traditional themes. As the weeks turned into months she did so in increasingly shrill tones. Wasn’t it terrible Reverend Campbell, she said, that the supermarkets were open on a Sunday these days and, worse still, that some of members of this very congregation went straight from church to do their shopping, and wouldn’t he like to preach against that? Even worse, she later revealed, some villagers went to the pub for their Sunday lunch, and beyond even that, some of them went to pubs run by Roman Catholics. Now, surely that was something he needed to take a stand against instead of blethering on about the cassava harvest in Nigeria.
Eventually, the young minister had his fill of it, and found he had to say something, even to a lady who put a generously stuffed envelope on the plate every Sunday.
“Miss McDonald”, he said, “surely even our Lord healed people on the Sabbath.”
“Aye”, she replied, “And I didn’t think any better of Him for that either.”
I’m sure I’m not the only one here to have been at the wrong end of some obnoxious and aggressive Bible-thumpers in my time. It’s therefore always reassuring to rediscover, as we do in this morning’s Gospel, that Jesus, God made human, was the target for Bible-thumpers Himself. We’ve all known people about whom one might reasonably joke that “He would tell God he was wrong about the Bible.” Today’s Gospel reminds us that this quite literally did happen. We have the Bible itself reminding us that there are spiritual dangers in using it as a quarry to have a go at other people.
But remember, that applies to nice, broad-minded, thinking, Christians like us as much as it does to Pharisees, ancient or modern. So perhaps I shouldn’t refer to Bible-thumpers in the somewhat sneering way that I just did, even provided with such a convenient proof-text for doing so. This morning’s Old Testament reading relates Jeremiah having a sense of God speaking to him, saying, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you.” That’s true of all of us. God knows each of us intimately, made each of us in His own image and likeness. We should try to see the good in the other, and remember that Our Lord also called our fellow Christians to follow Him as He did us, even those who seem to feel superior to us, or whom we might be tempted to dismiss. All Christians only ever see dim images of what the truth of God actually is. Indeed all human perspectives are necessarily partial. Nobody can comprehend the whole truth of the world.
If I said from this pulpit that love is more important than the law and that love should always be the standard by which we make our decisions, I suspect I could have every head in the church nodding in agreement. But this is a difficult statement to apply in practice. If we try to pretend that all our actions are motivated by love, we are simply deluding ourselves; every society and every community needs to have standards, regulations, and boundaries. Of course, these too should be created in love, but try to codify love and you lose the essence of what love is.
Indeed, the issues that keep us up at night with worry are often about how to show love to those whom we do indeed love the most, when we are confronted with issues where loving course of action isn’t obvious, where every possible decision is fraught with deep moral grey areas.
One of the strange things to me about the present state of the world is that although we have an almost universal commitment across society to individual freedom, we have a statue book which is longer than ever, and hardly a day goes by without a politician calling for new laws to be introduced. Perhaps that is inevitable in a very transient society with weak social bonds, one that for different reasons the left, the right, and the centre, have all contributed to creating over the last sixty years. Tradition, community, and culture have a flexibility to be interpreted on the ground and a capacity to evolve organically. As they become weaker, we lose the common understandings and reference points they provide, and seem to need more detailed and rigid laws.
Christianity has eroded tremendously as a common cultural framework in the West, and as society becomes more secular, it also seems to become as legalistic as any Pharisee. At root, religious and secular fundamentalisms are very much alike, all rooted in a fear of the messy complexity of life and the way it constantly presents us with questions that have no obvious answers.
So, to return to the issue of the Sabbath. I think is important to have a common day of rest that most people can take as a day off most of the time; most human cultures across history seem to have developed one. It is important for family and community life, and indeed important for workers’ rights. That’s why Keep Sunday Special campaign has always been a curious alliance of Evangelical groups and people from the trade union movement who are often convinced atheists.
Yet after Church, I am going to go to the pub for lunch with friends. Does that make me a hypocrite? Perhaps it does. But before you condemn me as such, beware the secular Pharisaism that demands a simple black-and-white answer for every issue. Just because some people need to work on a Sunday, and some may indeed want to, doesn’t mean that most people should. There is a balance to be struck between the sort of sabbatarianism that, long ago, used to lock the public parks up on Sundays even in England, and the current drive to turn Sunday into another festival of the consumerism that is in fact the dominant form of worship in our society.
Consumerism is a much more powerful force than the Church, certainly in the England of 2022. Even if we look to preserving our hallowed individual liberty, it is consumerism that needs restraining, far more than the Church. I don’t think people in Germany or Poland suffer some great infringement to their freedoms because the supermarkets there are closed on Sundays – perhaps the opposite, because over there the families of supermarket workers know they can go to the pub for Sunday lunch together.
If that sounds like a messy conclusion, then that reflects that we live in a world which is a messy place – a gloriously messy place where, to return to Jeremiah, things are constantly being destroyed and overthrown, but also built and planted, where there are often no easy answers but equally no end to the beauty and creativity we human beings make when confronted with the new situations. If that messiness frightens you, remember that walking with Jesus means taking the risk of placing love above the rules even when you can’t be sure if you are doing the right thing.
And now to God be the glory, the Father the creator of all life, the Son the restorer to new life, the Spirit who breathes in all life, now and forever, as is most justly his due. Amen.
