What sabbath creates
Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale
August 24, 2025—Proper 16C
Isaiah 58:9b-14 , Luke 13:10-17
On the one hand, it’s a healing story. Jesus meets a woman while he is teaching in the synagogue. We never discover her name, but we are told that she has been crippled by a spirit, that has kept her bent over for eighteen years. And many of us know what it is to be bent down. To be hampered by, even imprisoned by, a pain that we cannot seem to escape. Back pain, neuralgia, migraines … depression, anxiety … any one of these can push us down and lay us out flat … unable to work, to move through the world, let alone to enjoy life.
And we long to be released. Long to hear Jesus tell us that we have been set free. Not just healed, but liberated!
But the miracle stories in the gospel are always about more than just the surface action. They carry layers of meaning, so that they are not just about cleansing lepers, they’re about what it means to be excluded from community and then brought back in. Not just about multiplying loaves and fishes, but about the abundance of salvation, and God’s intention to share it with the whole world, and not just the chosen people. Not just about giving a man his sight, but about the ways in which people who consider themselves righteous and holy are often blind to the troubles of the people around them.
In this case, the deeper meaning of the story of the bent-down woman is the power and purpose of sabbath. Look at the story. Jesus heals her, releases her from whatever has bound her for so long, and she sings out praises to God (“Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless God’s holy Name”--Ps 103:1). But there are those whose first response is not to praise God. Leaders who see this only as an opportunity to attack Jesus. Those who have forgotten what the sabbath truly means, and seek to use it to discredit him.
Which gives Jesus the chance to remind them. Remind them that they know, they KNOW, that sabbath observance does not come before life and health. That those who keep sabbath will still care for animals, and that they are commanded to save a life, if the opportunity arises. They know this, and so he reminds them: Should not this woman “be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?" (Lk 13:16).
Because the whole purpose of Sabbath is life and liberation. Yes, its observance is a powerful act of discipline and obedience, but that is not all it is. In its origin and its intention, it not only permits healing and liberation, it actually has the power to bring them about.
Written into the story of the creation of the world, we find it: God creates for six days, and on the seventh day, God rests. The sabbath is born!
Sabbath is born, reminding us that God wishes to free us from ceaseless toil. Sabbath is born, reminding us that our bodies, souls, and spirits need a rhythm of work and rest. Sabbath is born, inviting us into the possibilities that arise and grow, when we stop to allow them space to do so.
It is life. It is liberation. It is the endlessly necessary counter-balance to so much of what this world works itself into.
Sabbath stands over and against the economic exploitation that seeks to wring the maximum possible labor out of every worker. Reminding the feudal lord, reminding the factory owner, reminding the CEO that their serfs, their workers, their employees are not simply a means of producing wealth. That they too are human beings, children of God, whose labor must be honored with both the pay and the rest it deserves. Here let us stop to give thanks to labor unions, and their monumental fight not only for fair pay, but for reasonable working hours, for what we now know as the weekend. In other words, for the liberation of sabbath rest. Doing God’s work!
(Today, of course, we need some different answers, for the problems of those trapped in poverty, forced to piece together three or even four part time jobs, with no room to breathe, let alone rest, just to put food on the table, pay rent, maybe afford some basic medical care. There is more to be done, to answer the call of Isaiah to set the oppressed free, and defend the value of sabbath against the demands of constant toil.)
Sabbath is rest. Sabbath is life. Sabbath is liberation.
On a more individual level, Sabbath offers a counter-weight to the uncritical (and very American) embrace of hustle culture. We practically worship doing and striving and producing. Pretending that if you just do it hard enough, you will have everything you ever wanted: you will become a multi-millionaire … you will be loved and admired … you will have purpose and meaning … you will not die (seriously, we don’t say it out loud, but there is a subtext of magical thinking in our culture that if we don’t stop moving, we can outrun death).
Sabbath joins with our primary physician to remind us that the opposite is true: if we don’t stop our constant striving and going and never resting even for a moment, we will actually die early, from all the stress.
Sabbath is rest. Sabbath is life. Sabbath is liberation.
If we can only learn how to stop… if we can move into the pause, that God took at the end of Creation. And perhaps wonder: How long did the dream of the world move within God, before God spoke that first Word? There is … space … on all sides of creativity. Creation emerges out of rest, emerges out of stillness, emerges out of stopping and allowing the idea of something to become.
What might you discover, if you were to stop once in a while? What might emerge, in the stillness?
Some of us don’t want to know. Some of us know all too well, and that’s why we’re moving so fast. We know that the quiet of rest will surface all the internal stuff we really need to work on, but would really rather not. That’s a whole other sermon, but it too is about healing and liberation.
But it’s not just the things we’ve been trying to ignore that will come to us in the stillness. There is so much possibility. The let and let and let that the poet writes about (Kei Miller, Book of Genesis), daring to imagine what you might desire, what you might be allowed, what you might create. If you stop, and give yourself some space to move around in … what might God let you become?
Sabbath is rest. Sabbath is life. Sabbath is liberation. And Jesus is in our midst, bending down to look us in the eyes, bowed down as we may be, under the many weights of the world, and he longs to set us free. May it be so, Amen.