Seeds of Love

Did anyone grow up and they weren’t allowed to do anything on Sunday’s because it was church day? That was never part of my family growing up but I have heard lots of stories from people I’ve known over the years that weren’t allowed to do anything other than church on Sunday. There was no TV there were no sports, they were limited to the most basic things on Sunday because it was marked for Sabbath rest.

Now don’t get me wrong, I believe that Sabbath rest is a good idea. I think we need to all take a page out of God’s own playbook and rest from our work and our labors. The whole reason pastors have a day off during the week is so that we can have that opportunity for rest if we need it. I believe that we should all find opportunities both here at worship and elsewhere during the week where we find a time and a place to just rest and be with God. I think the problem that we get into is that we force a rest when there may not be a good reason for it. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why people are upset with the church and faith. Perhaps they were forced into things that didn’t make any sense to them and they couldn’t find any reason in the Bible for it. Sabbath rest is good and important, but it should have a purpose and not forced on ourselves or others without good cause.

Or how many of you grew up going to church and you had to dress a certain way? Did you have to put on your Sunday best? I remember in my first call someone getting upset that the drummer at the church always dressed like he was ready to go graffiti the streets of Temecula. One Sunday someone came up to the senior Pastor to complain about the drummer for that very reason, and I’ll never forget what he said in response. “Isn’t it wonderful that he’s in here playing music for God, rather than out on the streets doing something else?” Sometimes I feel we get too caught up in tradition and ritual that we forget the reason all of us are gathered together for the same purpose.

Now there were plenty of laws in the Torah about Sabbath from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday and what constituted rest and what was considered work. There were a lot of these laws that were discussed by rabbi’s and those interpretations became the way to live by those laws in the Torah. We see these interpretations being shared with people by the Pharisees and the Sadducees. I believe that part of the issue Jesus is raising in the scripture today is how some of these interpretations were becoming too restrictive and could actually be doing more harm than good.

Let’s take a look at the first part of the scripture today and see how this applies. Jesus and his disciples are walking through a wheat field and they pluck, rub, and eat the wheat. Now before I get to the real point, I really want to know what these Pharisees are doing in the wheat fields with Jesus and his disciples other than trying to get him in trouble for whatever it is he is doing wrong in their opinion. The first thing Jesus and his disciples do are traveling. Now it was ok travel as long as it was under 3/4 of a mile, so we can probably assume Jesus and his disciples aren’t breaking the law there. It was actually also lawful for people to walk through someone else's field and pluck a bit of grain like the disciples were. The issue arises when the disciples rub the grain between their hands to free the grain to be able to eat it. According to the Mishnah, this action was considered the same as threshing which is an act of work. Work is forbidden on the Sabbath so the Pharisees are holding Jesus, their rabbi, for the actions of his disciples.

In the next encounter we see that a man has a withered hand and Jesus uses this man as an example to teach about God and the Sabbath. To heal someone of something that wasn’t life threatening was forbidden. So clearly the withered hand was not going to cause this man to die on the Sabbath so Jesus could have very easily have cured him the next day when Sabbath was over. He had been living with this withered hand for some time and had managed to carry on with his life, so what’s one more day? Right? Sounds exactly what a procrastinator would say!

One very important detail Luke includes about this man with the withered hand is that the hand was his right hand. The right hand, back then, was the hand that did all of the important work while the left was left for unclean tasks. So if this man is in the synagogue, that likely means that the man was in fact ritually clean, and if the man was ritually clean then that means that he had to rely on other people to do all the tasks that his right hand would be otherwise doing.

I guess another way to ask the question that Jesus is asking is this, “Is it fair to let a person continue to live in a way that is demeaning to them when you have the power to lift them up?” Why wait? Are we simply waiting because we’re not supposed to work today? Do we think that God would be upset and punish us if we loved our neighbor so much that we made them whole again? Do you think God would prefer we allow people to go on suffering any longer than they have already been suffering? Jesus clearly answered the question of how much longer should this man live this way by immediately healing the man’s hand.

Think of it this way. Last week we looked at our annual theme of Cross Connections, connecting ourselves to God, our congregation, and out to our community. The Bible verse I used was the Great Commandment found in 3 of the gospels. Jesus tells us that the most important thing in our life and faith is to love God and love our neighbor. If Jesus says that these two things are intrinsically tied together so much so that Jesus can’t answer the legal experts question with just one commandment, but these two, then wouldn’t it be correct to say that in keeping the sabbath, the day that we worship and love God would be mirrored and inseparable from our love of our neighbor?

In the feeding of his disciples and in the healing of the man with the withered hand Jesus is showing that the love that we have for God isn’t just lived out in the way that we rest and avoid doing anything, but it is also absolutely tied to the way that we love one another and this whole word in the process. If what I feel that I am doing for the sake of God comes at the expense of the good and the health and the benefit of my neighbor, then perhaps I need to rethink how I am loving God and my neighbor.

Jesus came to show us just how much God loves this world and everything in it. That includes people like the disciples, like you and me, it also includes the man with the withered hand who needs our help and our love today, not tomorrow. Embrace God’s love, set aside the things that may get in the way of that love, so that you can both fully accept and fully give God’s love to those who are most in need of it. For God loves this whole world more than we can fathom. Embrace it and spread it far and wide. Amen.