Honoring God
Luke 13:10-17[1]
One of the things that
have changed in my lifetime is that Sunday is no longer a “special” day. It’s
just another day of the week. We can debate whether that’s a good thing or not.
But I think it raises a question that I’m not sure we want to ask: what does it
mean to “honor” God in the 21st century? We know the answer that was
given to that question in the past: honoring God is about what you do and what
you don’t do on a particular day of the week. I think the question we have to
ask about “honoring” God is whether we want to make it all about what you do or
what you don’t do on just one day of the week. I don’t think that’s going to
gain much traction in our day. It's going to take something more compelling to
motivate this generation to honor God.
Forty years ago, I
pastored a country church on the edge of the hill country in Texas. They
basically gave me a chance to start learning how to preach. Because it was a
90-mile drive from where I was going to college, I stayed the day with families
in the church and then led an evening service. On those occasions, one of the
ladies who was in her late eighties used to tell me that when she was a girl
the only things they were allowed to do on Sunday was to go to church and read
the Bible. She was taught that honoring God was about what you do and what you
don’t do on a particular day of the week.
We see this question reflected in
our Gospel lesson for today. Jesus is teaching in a synagogue on the sabbath,
the Jewish day of worship. And in the audience was a woman who was so bent over
that for 18 years she couldn’t stand up straight! When Jesus saw her, he “released”
her from her “weakness.” Remember he said at the outset of his ministry that he
had come to bring “release” to all who were captives (Lk 4:18). But the problem
was that the Jewish religious leaders had determined that doing that meant
“breaking” the sabbath and dishonoring God. And so the “leader of the synagogue”
told the crowd to come on another day to be healed. It’s obvious that his
approach to honoring God was about what you do and what you don’t do on a
particular day of the week.
Jesus wouldn’t have
any of that, however. He called the man on his mean-spirited and stingy remarks.
He made it clear that he was following God’s commission to bring “good news”
and “release” to people, and that the sabbath day was precisely the day to do
that kind of work. Jesus made the “Lord’s Day” a day for carrying out God’s
work of extending mercy and compassion to everyone, especially those who have
been pushed aside to the margins of society. In fact, he said that this was
just as much a mandate from God as the original sabbath commandment (Lk 13:6!).
That’s what “honoring” God looked like in Jesus’ life.
I find the difference
between the woman’s response to Jesus’ act of “releasing” her from her bondage
and that of the synagogue leader to be revealing. The leader responded with his
heartless complaining and obsessive rule-keeping. By contrast, the woman
responded to being “released” from her bondage by “praising God.” I don’t think
it’s too difficult to figure out which of these two people were truly honoring
God on that sabbath day. And just to make sure that we understand that this is
what God’s kingdom looks like, however unlikely it might have seemed to the
people of that day, Luke adds the parables of the mustard seed and the yeast in
a batch of dough. Jesus was honoring God by carrying out the work of the
kingdom, on the sabbath day and every other day.
How to “honor” God in
the 21st Century has become more complicated than ever. And, like
every other question we face in these turbulent times, we’re not all going to
agree on the specific answer. But whatever honoring God looks like in our day,
it’s going to have to be consistent with the kingdom of God. And Jesus made it
crystal clear that honoring God is about doing the work of God’s kingdom: freely
extending God’s mercy and compassion to everyone. It’s not about how many
things you can come up with to avoid.
This brings me back to
where we started: how much Sunday has changed over the course of our lives. It
occurs to me that you may be able to impose all kinds of rules about what
people do or don’t do on this day, but you can’t make anyone honor God. That
has to come from the heart. You may be able to make people come to church,
using guilt or fear or shame, but you can’t make anyone honor God. They
have to want to do that. All the rules and restrictions you can come up with
aren’t going to make anyone honor God, on this day or any other.
People are going to
honor God when they are set free from everything that binds them, just like
this woman was. People are going to honor God when they really and truly
encounter the unconditional and irrevocable love that claims them now and
forever as a part of God’s family. People are going to honor God when they are
a part of a community that shares this incredibly open-hearted and open-handed
approach to life. When that happens they not only want to praise God, it may be hard to keep them from it! When we inspire
people with the boundless generosity of God’s love, they will honor God not
only on this day, but every day. We honor God by celebrating all the goodness
and mercy and love that God pours into our lives every day. We honor God not by
following rigid rules, but rather by extending God’s mercy and love to
everyone, on this day, and every day.
[1] © 2022
Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 8/21/2022 for Hickman
Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.
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