Serve Impactfully

Luke 13:10–17 NRSV

Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. 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. When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God. 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.” 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 away to give it water? 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?” When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame; and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing.

Have you ever had a conversation with someone about something controversial and realized pretty quickly that you were way outmatched? Now I’m not really talking about the way that discourse tends to take place in social media type spaces where we are ugly and nasty to one another who think differently than us and refuse to take anything they say seriously.

I’m talking about a genuine conversation between you and a friend or a peer of some sort where you have something that you’ve always presupposed as a fact, until you’re confronted with a different set of data points and ideas.

I think we all have had an experience like this, where our way of seeing or understanding the world or certain people and situations is changed. Our text today invites us to step into the world of Jesus and his peers and experience this very type of interaction, where the very fabric of the institutional mindset is challenged by Jesus. And the beauty of it is that this interaction teaches us something so important that if we were to embrace it we might see true transformation in our world.

We are now in the 4th week of our sermon series “Rooted” where we are looking at some of the core values of our Wesleyan Theological heritage, and learning about what it means for us to truly live out our lives as United Methodists. We’ve already looked at what it looks like for us to embrace God’s people widely, read scripture faithfully, and grow deeply in our spiritual lives. Today we are going to look at how the way of Jesus and our Methodist roots teach us to serve impact-fully.

It’s kind of funny that this is something that I preach about as being an identifying characteristic of Methodism, because I grew up in the United Methodist Church and I couldn’t tell you that I remember outward service as something that we were notably involved in. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen… it just means that it didn’t really make an impression on me until much later in life. Which is good, it means that just like all of you I’m moving along down the journey of sanctification — which is just a fancy way of saying “becoming more like Jesus.”

So lets look back at our text. Jesus, being Jesus, is hanging around in a synagogue on the sabbath. A very proper thing for a first century Jewish man to do. Also a very proper thing for a 21st century Jewish person to do.

And a woman wanders in who is crippled. According to Jesus she’s got a spiritual malady that has manifested in physical disability. Don’t ask me about the science on that one. The text says what it says and I’m good with that. The important thing here is that Jesus lays his hands on her and heals her.

To which all the people said amen right? Well we do maybe. But Jesus’s colleague in the synagogue are not thrilled. Jesus has offended him because technically healing is work. And you aren’t supposed to work on the Sabbath. Now, what constitutes work? Well that’s pretty subjective, but in the time of Jesus the generally accepted interpretations of the law had gotten more and more strict. Basically any physical exertion at all was considered work.

No cooking, no carrying anything over a certain weight, no picking food, no nothing. Certainly no healing. So the leader is like, look man, can’t you do that the other six days of the week? Why are you coming into my place and breaking the law in front of all these people I’m trying to teach how to live?

Well, Jesus challenges them right back. He uses the provisions of the law to show them how deeply they misunderstand the point. Jesus points that although technically “work” it was not unlawful to untie one’s livestock and bring them to water.

If it’s ok to free an animal from bondage to lead them to the source of life — water — isn’t it even more important to free a human being from bondage to lead them to the source of life — salvation and restoration at the hands of her God?

This all points us back to that idea of being shown a new perspective, or a new data set that forces us to reshape our understanding of the world, and even our religion at times. Jesus presented this synagogue leader with a new interpretation of the law that challenged the way that he saw this woman. While he saw a burden and a person who was a disruption to the sabbath ritual, Jesus saw a person who needed restoration and had come to the right place to find it.

And listen, don’t jump in your mind to disparaging Jesus’s contemporaries for the way that they interacted with Jesus and with their world. We are talking about a people group who experienced a lot of hardship over the thousand or so years that led up to Jesus walking this earth. We’re talking about people whose foundational story began with a promise from God that they would be blessed and that they would be God’s people.

And for most of that history, it really didn’t seem like it was trending in that direction. They failed a lot, but also they got handed a lot of really raw deals. And so the religious atmosphere of the second temple era Judaism was one that was really trying to figure out what had gone wrong. And what the best of the theologians came up with was that they had not kept the law well enough, and so they came up with really strict subsets of laws and interpretations of laws in order to try to force people into living in a way that could not possibly go against the Torah. This would hopefully usher in a new era of prosperity and fulfillment of God’s promises to Israel.

But Jesus comes in and he’s like “listen y’all. That’s not how this thing works.”

Luke does a curious literary thing, that I simply adore. Now this is where I’m going to do the Bible nerd thing for a little bit so hang with me. Right before the sabbath healing story Jesus tells this Parable:

Luke 13:6–9 NRSV

Then he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?’ He replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’ ”

It’s a weird story, until you read the story of the sabbath healing. Jesus is talking about this entire heritage of God’s promise and God’s chosen people. While they’ve been really trying to drill down on following the law by getting more and more legalistic, Jesus is saying that it’s not about following the law for the sake of following the law. It’s about following the law for the sake of bearing fruit: also known as loving God and loving people. But Jesus, being a good vineyard owner, has come to spread something new into the minds, hearts, and worldviews of his people. He has come to confront some long held presuppositions and to remind the world that God’s purpose for us is to bear the fruit of faith.

What is that fruit of faith? Well we need to look to what Jesus says immediately after the story of healing the woman on the Sabbath:

Luke 13:18–21 NRSV

He said therefore, “What is the kingdom of God like? And to what should I compare it? It is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in the garden; it grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air made nests in its branches.” And again he said, “To what should I compare the kingdom of God? It is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.”

The fruit of faith is that the kingdom of God infiltrates the world. And when the kingdom of God infiltrates the world, the world is provided for. Just as a tree serves the birds of the air and yeast serves to turn flour into fluffy bread, so our religion is meant to push us into a life of service.

As Wesleyans we believe that a person is saved by faith, but we believe that a person is saved for good works — or saved for the purpose of serving the world in a way that brings about personal and communal transformation. This is the point Jesus was making. John Wesley once said

Good works are so far from being hindrances of our salvation; they are so far from being insignificant, from being of no account in Christianity; that, supposing them to spring from a right principle, they are the perfection of religion. They are the highest part of that spiritual building whereof Jesus Christ is the foundation… Of these our Lord himself says, “Hereby is my Father glorified, that ye bring forth much fruit.” Much fruit! Does not the very expression imply the excellency of what is so termed? Is not the tree itself for the sake of the fruit? By bearing fruit, and by this alone, it attains the highest perfection it is capable of, and answers the end for which it was planted. Who, what is he then, that is called a Christian, and can speak lightly of good works?

Wesley’s point is the same as Jesus’s. If there’s no fruit what is the point of the tree. If there’s no good works, what’s the point of the community of faith?

But good works are hard. Serving impact-fully is even harder. And I think it’s hard, mostly because we want to see the impact… and we are tempted to give up when we don’t see the impact. This is particularly true in our service to the most vulnerable populations. We want to see lives transformed and brought to the wholeness that we have found in Jesus. And sometimes we do. But most of the time we don’t. We won’t get to see the impact until one day when we are standing there with Jesus and he gives us the map of just how far our impact went.

But you know what we can see? We can see people. I think that one of the greatest tragedies of the kind of mission focused, service oriented Christian movement is that it so easily devolves into projects. We get so hung up on all of the necessary preparations, implementations, and tracking mechanisms that we forget to slow down and see people as people rather than as a project. And that’s when we get hung up on seeing the impact. And the truth is, we don’t often see the impact because we are looking for the wrong thing. We are looking for what we want the impact to be, not necessarily for the impact that God is working.

You see, if we just slow down to see people, to truly see them, then it’s impossible not to see the impact. Projects demand results. But people aren’t projects. People are driven by relationships. And when we build relationships with people we are impacting them in ways that we could have never imagined. And that is an impact that we can see.

This principle doesn’t just apply to the vulnerable. It applies to the way that we serve one another inside of the church. It guides us to live and to serve in ways that seem like foolishness to those who do not yet understand the way of Jesus.

Jesus’s interaction in the synagogue seemed reckless to his peers. But it was the right thing to do. And honestly, that’s the kind of service that has the most impact. The service that seems foolish and reckless — because if it seems foolish and reckless then it’s probably not getting done by anyone else around.

So, how will you see people and serve them this week? There’s endless opportunity. The showers are one way, there’s other opportunities in the waiting, there’s new children’s ministry opportunities happening at FK Sweet, there are people who need to be visited, there’s walls that need painting. The point is this: Jesus expects us to do this work, but this work can’t be done simply out of obligation. It must be done out of a deep desire to become more like Jesus. I’ll leave you with these words of the Apostle Paul:

Philippians 2:3–11 NRSV

Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.