August 21, 2022 – Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 16)

I want to begin by acknowledging the Reverend Dr. Matthew Skinner for his published information on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s book “Why We Can’t Wait”, from which some of the content for my sermon today is drawn.

Today we get another gem of a story from Luke — a gem which shows up in none of the other four Gospel writers’ accounts. It also doesn’t show up in Martin Luther King Jr.’s book “Why We Can’t Wait”, published in 1964. This book includes his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (written on April 16, 1963) and makes an argument to recognize the beginning of the “Negro Revolution” while extolling the effectiveness of nonviolent resistance like Black Lives Matter and the Women’s Marches, and the “colonists [who plotted] … against the crown.”

King’s “Letter” issues a call for urgency. He wrote it in response to eight local white clergymen who had criticized his activities in Birmingham and appealed for a more patient and restrained approach to lobbying for civil rights. The “Letter” expresses Dr. King’s disappointment with “the white moderate,” who “paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.” And the primary argument of the “Letter” still speaks to us today. In fact, that basic argument spoke long before Dr. King ever came along.

King never cites the story from today’s Gospel reading in his book. But he easily could have. Because “Why We Can’t Wait” could also be an appropriate title for Jesus’ declarations in this passage.

Don’t confuse the story about a woman with a debilitating spinal condition for “just another healing story.” It’s about more than Jesus astounding people with his power and frustrating his adversaries. This isn’t a story about power embarrassing weakness. It’s not a story about “out with the old and in with the new.” At its core, it’s a story about what God intends. It’s about the urgency of seeing God’s intentions brought to pass without delay. It’s about why we CAN’T wait.

The key to the story is Jesus’ argument against a synagogue leader who objects to Jesus healing a woman on the Sabbath. The leader expresses no qualms about Jesus healing the woman. One could presume that the leader is all for promoting the human race on the earth. But this woman’s condition wasn’t life threatening. She had learned to live with it for nearly 20 years. So no healing today, please, he responds. Just wait for the Sabbath to pass. Surely she can wait just one more day … just a little more time.

Jesus’ response to the leader is as scathing as it is succinct. The Sabbath — and indeed no tradition of any kind or any theological principle — is no excuse for willfully extending suffering and delaying the wholeness of any human. But there’s a deeper, unstated logic at work within Jesus’ words: the purpose of the Sabbath actually expresses the reason why Jesus should restore the woman now. The religious leader has misunderstood and misinterpreted the basic intention of observing the Sabbath.

According to Deuteronomy 5:12-15, the Sabbath is — at its heart — an offer to reassert weekly how much God values freedom and detests injustice:

Observe the sabbath day and keep it holy, as the LORD your God commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God; you shall not do any work — you, or your son or your daughter, or your male or female slave, or your ox or your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the LORD your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day.

The original intention of the Sabbath — according to the words of Deuteronomy — is to provide relief, even if only temporary, from any system that would deny a person or any part of creation a share of rest, peace, wholeness, dignity, and justice. The religious official says, “Wait just one more day.” Jesus answers, “No. The Sabbath is actually a great day for setting people free. In fact, the purpose behind the Sabbath — the value that God places on wholeness — compels me to do this now. We can’t wait.”

In Luke 13, Jesus reaffirms what the Hebrew Bible scriptures said: God sees no virtue in suffering. Nothing can be gained by subjecting a fellow human to one more day of unnecessary torment. To perpetuate injustice on this earth is to defile the holiness of the Sabbath day that God designated. To deny freedom is to offend God. It’s because of who God is that Jesus can’t wait.

Furthermore, Jesus calls attention to the dehumanizing nature of suffering by characterizing the woman’s painful and humiliating spinal condition as a form of “bondage” from which she needs to be “set free.” Suffering includes not just the physical pain and lost opportunities that an individual can experience, but also the scorn, alienation, marginalization, and oppression that the human family so heartlessly piles upon its own members.

Jesus says, “You release your own animals to give them basic care, but you want her to wait for relief? Don’t you realize that she is ‘a daughter of Abraham,’ a person to whom God has expressed favor?”

Jesus says, “She is a daughter.” In the 1960s, the famous signs that marchers carried and wore during civil-rights demonstrations read “I _AM _ A MAN.” Maybe people who first read “Why We Can’t Wait” in the 1960s or who witnessed the protests on TV would have replied to one of the activists holding the sign, “Well of course you’re a man! Your day of freedom will come soon, though. Just hold on and be patient.”

The white religious leaders to whom Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter” was addressed were not picked on at random, but reflected the views of the majority of Americans. One survey from 1964 found:

• 63% of Americans agreed that “civil rights leaders are trying to push too fast.”
• 58% agreed that “most of the actions that colored people have taken to get the things that they want have been violent.”
• 58% agreed that “the actions colored people have taken have, on the whole … hurt their cause.”

King was especially disgusted by those faith leaders unwilling to take a stand when he wrote in his jail cell. Similarly, Jesus criticized a religious leader for clinging to a misshapen understanding of the Sabbath and for being ignorant of just how urgently God desires to see human wholeness restored. King railed against churches that perpetuate injustice by hiding behind thoughts that expect God’s blessings to come only in the future.

To be clear, these problems that both Jesus and King are addressing are deeper than cowardice or callousness. Sometimes people’s understanding of God and Christian faith plays a part in why some of us see a need for pressing moral action while others fail to sense a need for urgency.

I think part of this stems from the two disparate views that run through the New Testament and our Christian tradition more generally. One view commends patient endurance as we wait in expectation of what God will bring to us in the future. The other view expresses an almost restless desire to see God’s intentions for humanity spring into existence now. Both views agree that Jesus’ presence in the world has changed something, and that God has set the world on a new course. And both views set forth an understanding that life continues to be filled with oppression, misery, pain, loss, and exclusion. The first view tells us that our faith in God makes people content to endure the current miseries. The second view says that our faith in God compels us to not wait.

Besides our understanding of God and the nature of our faith, other factors can make people prone to wait, even if waiting perpetuates the suffering of another. Those who live comfortably and privileged can usually see advantages to waiting as they are living in a climate in which selfishness can thrive. Commitment to idealism and principles can also slow down people. A rigid embrace of certain ideals can lead us to turn up our noses at good strategies for taking steps forward because we insist on holding out for what we think is the perfect political or ideological solution.

The good news from both Jesus and the Civil Rights movement is that all of these obstacles can be removed. A “moral revival” is within reach. There are people among us, speaking out in houses of worship, on statehouse lawns, and within sacred texts. Their voices can correct defective theologies and arouse people from their comfort and privilege.

Waiting is not always a bad idea … except when suffering or oppression or marginalization is at stake. If another son or daughter of God is in anguish or peril, then my patience — or my unwillingness to listen — becomes complacency.

The anonymous debilitated woman’s oppression led Jesus to act on the Sabbath. The oppression of a whole segment of God’s created society led Dr. King to press forward. Think of a time when you were particularly moved by someone else’s suffering. Whose similar circumstances demand our urgency today? Who are the people whose rights are at risk, only one action (legislative or otherwise) from having their whole lives upended? Who is unable today to get a fair shake? Who experiences fear on a regular basis? Who has been forgotten? What would it look like for you to be actively involved in easing or destroying that suffering?

Draw breath from the brick. Let the Creator ignite the fire within us and speak to us with hope. Why do so many of us still think that we can wait?