by Parrish W. Jones, Ph.D.

©All rights reserved 2002

Jeremiah 1:4-10

Luke 13:10-17

There are hosts of lessons in the Gospels about Jesus and the Sabbath. This lesson is indicative. Each of the lessons shows Jesus as a liberator, one who frees people from the bondage of bureaucratic laws created by those who worry that most people are not smart enough to understand what breaks the Sabbath law and what doesn’t or by those who do not trust the judgment of anyone but themselves.

Most often Jesus is found healing physical or spiritual maladies on the Sabbath. This lesson has parallels in all the other gospels.

In our lesson Jesus is at synagogue teaching the people. A woman appears who is bent over by some spirit or other. The spirit is not identified. Her problem could be anything from arthritis to some emotional problem that simply weighed her down, oppressed her. We do not know except that whatever it was she was bent out of shape physically.

She is not unlike us. We often come to church or do not come because we are weighed down, oppressed by life. In our time social expectations are more likely to weigh us down and cause us to bend under the weight as not. Worry about our children and how they may grow up leads us to accept the common wisdom that the way off drugs, alcohol, sex and to a good self-esteem is to have them engaged in activity from birth to college and from dawn until bed time. Of course, to achieve this goal means that each parent becomes the chauffeur instead of a parent.

The media provides parents with all kinds of advise they can or “should” follow, depending on their children’s needs, so the children will be perfect. The advice includes

what to feed them,

what fashions will make them feel the best about themselves,

what vitamins or herbs to give the children,

what to expose them to and what to protect them from,

and a million “signs” to watch out for that signal pending disaster.

Each bit of advice is portrayed as absolutely necessary if you love your kids. Not to follow this or that piece of advise is tantamount to child neglect.

I often wonder if I am out to lunch on these things, but as I was working once more on this sermon, I picked up the February 21 edition of Newsweek that contained a brief on by Judith Warner on her new book Perfect Madness, in which she writes about her own quest for perfect mothering and the toll it exacted. It is followed by Anna Quindlen who writes on the “Good Enough Mother”.

    Their two essays corroborate my view that the drive to be the perfect parent, spouse, employee or child is ever present in our culture. We are stressed out by our quest for physical and financial security, prestige, reputation, and so on. Our homes, cars, accumulation of technology, clothes, our children’s achievements and the like all play a part in the elements of life that weigh us down and oppress us. While we may not look like a bent over woman, many mornings we wake up and feel like her spiritually, emotionally and physically.

When I was a young parent, the common wisdom that justified the working mom was that the amount of time one spends with one’s children is unimportant. What matters is that it be quality time. That myth like the contemporary myths simply did not recognize the facts.

Quality time happens by surprise. One cannot make it happen. One has to spend time with one’s spouse and one’s children to be able to have quality moments. I am sure that were some sociologist inclined to do so, one could quantify how much time has to be “wasted” to have one minute of meaningful time.

The problem with today’s myth is that when we are racing around to get from this to that place, all we are doing is racing around and stressing. Stressing does not lend itself to quality moments. Nor to salvation—the freeing grace of God.

With the danger of sounding like a curmudgeon, most of the time we are racing around these days, we do so wired to something. Mom’s and dad’s are talking on cell phones. Teenagers may be also. Children are listening to MP3’s or playing Game Boys or, in some cases, they can even watch TV in the car. When there is no “down time”, there is little hope for quality moments. In fact, we tend to have more of a relationship with various kinds of technology than we do with various kinds of people.

Even when we do spend time away from the technology and with each other identifying the quality moment is difficult. What a parent considers a quality moment or wasted moment, a child may identify as one of the most important of their lives. I remember when Kimberly and Celese (my daughters) were young and I was living in western Virginia and they in Florida, we went down before Christmas to pick them up for the holidays. On our return from Florida, we stopped here and there in the mountains: Went to Clingman’s Dome, visited Cade’s Cove, and stopped briefly in Gatlinburg. We did all that simply to break up the trip. To me those were interesting things I had done before but not so special. It included scenic views, hikes, a drive into the preserved past, but nothing one would expect a ten year old to think much of. On arriving home in Norton, Kimberly was barely sitting on her chair, as if ready to run as she usually did, and eating when she looked up and said, “Daddy, that was the best trip I’ve ever had.” I was judging it one way. She judged it another.

We had two presidents one of whom was the father of the other. Their names were John and John Quincy Adams. The elder Adams was a founding father of our nation, a senator, and member of several administrations including being President in one. One day he took his young son fishing. His son had written in his diary what a memorable day that was because his father had taken time to spend it with him. So memorable was it that he remembered the precise date.

After the father died, the son was cleaning out his father’s things when he came across his diaries. Curious how his father had recorded that day, he found the diary for that period and turned to that day. His father had scrolled across the page, “Took young John fishing. Day wasted.”

Now you may wonder why I tell these stories because they have nothing to do with Sundays spent together. What they have to do with is that humans have wondered and devised all manner of reasons why God commanded that we waste Sunday. Why not accomplish something?

We know that originally the Sabbath law played the role of a labor law. Property owners, slave owners, business owners, were forced to give their families, slaves and employees a day off. They could not make anyone nor anything work constantly. In fact, every seventh year was to be a Sabbath for animals and land. Work was to cease to give rest.

There are good ecological reasons for this law. Today, farmers do not follow it to the letter but to the spirit. Rotational cropping is a contemporary solution to Sabbath rest for the fields. Organic farmers use leaving land fallow to great advantage in controlling weeds and disease and is a more literal application of Sabbath rest than is rotational cropping.

The wisdom of the Sabbath is that healing never occurs without a respite. It never occurs without some trying moments. It never occurs by forcing it. Neither is health a result of doing just whatever. The scriptures teach us that our souls, our relationships, our communities, and our businesses need fallow time to be healthy.

When we succumb to the world’s vision and ignore the teachings of God, we find ourselves in trouble. The woman came bent over. Jesus set her free. He did it not because she asked, but because she was a contradiction to the kingdom he was calling into existence.

We come to church. We may not know why we came today. We may even come and come and come and nothing seems to happen. Yet, then one day when we are ready, when our hearts are willing, when our lives have reached what the Bible refers to as the pregnant moment, we receive healing. We are set free. We get a glimpse of God’s hopes and dreams for us and our world is transformed.

We cannot just get it when we plan it. God works in the interruptions, in the moments of least expectation. God works when we spend time with God. We may think it a waste of time, but God sees it as blessing.

Just as the truly illuminating and important moments of our lives with our spouses, children, parents come because we have spent enough time with them, those moments happen with God also. The difference is that the scriptures speak of how God yearns for time with us.

Sometimes that time is not spent with God because we are bent under the pressure of a world that tells us to compete, to have our children compete, to spend every waking moment in activity of some sort. Or we fail to spend time with God because we are busy carrying out all the rules the world has laid down for fixing every problem that may occur. Yet, God calls us to moments of boredom from the business of the world. Times to do nothing but maybe eat a meal, play a game with our family, drive four hundred miles to visit family, go to church together because God knows the most significant moments in everyone’s lives are what humans constantly call, “wasted and boring”. But God calls them Sabbath—Rest.