KGL+
Sermon
Trinity Church Boston
Year C, Proper 16
August 24, 2025
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts together always be acceptable in your sight, O God our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
I thought that walking part of the Camino with a clutch of wonderful parishioners from Trinity would be one of the most spiritual moments of my life. Indeed, it’s been a bucket list item for the better part of my adulthood. As I shared with the Camino group, I had in mind this image, clearly largely cultivated from curated social media and memoirs full of selective memories, that I would be strolling down winding lanes under a blue sky, gazing into the distance and thinking my ‘very deep thoughts’. In many ways, that was not wrong. We watched sunrises from atop hills; found ourselves in the midst of fields and farms and local chapels; stopped to look into the sky at a particular cloud formation or ask Scott Street to identify a bird for us (my bird requests were always pigeons, it seemed); even sing a verse from the hymn Jerusalem together upon seeing the first glimpse of the Cathedral de Santiago spires from a hill outside the city.
What I also discovered, along with a body unaccustomed to walking for miles on end, was the staggering amount of time I spent looking at the ground. Rocks and gullies and downhills peppered with pebbles, uneven gravel and concrete roads, made the walking itself not treacherous, but worthy of attention. Rolling an ankle or taking a digger would not have been terrible, but I didn’t want to take the chance, so navigating my footfalls became a part time job as I walked. Even aside from the downhills, I regularly found myself at the end of the day climbing some inevitable hill in order to enter the town we would be staying in—and, dearest friends, it was never a sympathetic hill to climb at the end of the day. It was always an ascent manufactured, it seemed, to taunt tired pilgrims, and so even when I wasn’t worried about foot placement, by the end of the day I found myself creating rhythms from my steps and walking poles: one, two three, four, one two three four. Head down, immersed in the cadence, I know I missed so so much along the way.
I wonder what it must have felt like to have only had that perspective for eighteen years: seeing only the ground, never looking to the sky, or at the faces of people, or away from one’s own feet.
What we know from the gospel this morning is this: Jesus calls a woman, hunched, bent over for eighteen years, to him, and offers her healing. She doesn’t ask for healing. She doesn’t come to Jesus looking for help. Perhaps after eighteen years of being bent over, staring at one’s feet, and the dusty road, and others’ shoes, looking only from side to side and never straight ahead, one begins to imagine that they are no longer healable. That maybe that narrow perspective is something deserved, a burden somehow aligned with past indignities.
But Jesus does call the woman over. And he heals her, enabling her to stand up and see straight ahead. The crux of this situation is that Jesus heals the woman on the Sabbath, much to the consternation of the Pharisees who witness it. Why today, they cry. There are six other days of the week to do this work, as good as healing is; but the Sabbath has been set aside for our rest, they say. And to an extent, the Pharisees are right. Sabbath rest was, and remains, a sacred part of the tradition and culture that, in the ancient world- though not unlike ours, worked all the time. Observing the Sabbath protected servants and slaves and animals and yes, even the ground, from running dry. To honor the Sabbath was to preserve life by hallowing rest and worship of God. Jesus would absolutely have known this.
So why heal the bent over woman on the Sabbath?
Perhaps it was to shake up their notion, and ours, of what Sabbath really means.
Sabbath, the day of rest, typically the seventh day, is grounded in one of the two creation stories in Genesis. God created all the elements of the earth, culminating in humankind on the sixth day, and then famously rested and saw that all God had created was good. But what if rest was not the only reason for that seventh day? Could it have been that God, our creator, also wanted to delight in the creation God had just made? That, like new parents with their child, or new pet owners, or even as a child with a new toy, God wanted to spend some time cultivating that relationship, that deep knowledge of this new extension of God’s love and being.
The prophet Jeremiah speaks the words that God may have very well spoken that first day after the creation—that we are known, and beloved, even before we were, anointed to be God’s messenger before we had words for it. That on that first Sabbath, God did rest, but perhaps God’s rest wasn’t just about ‘not doing’ more creation, but rather ‘connecting’ with the creation God had made and hallowed; about delighting in what creation had to offer; in exploring the wideness of God’s expanding love and playfulness. Maybe God buried God’s face in our toes and laughed at our expressions and simply enjoyed learning the quirks of the animals and oceans, of the ferns and redwoods.
Our gospel today is not really about miraculous healing, nor shaming the Pharisees for their seemingly callous defense of Sabbath keeping—by the way, we Episcopalians don’t have much of a leg to stand on given our own legacy of being huffy about legislating right and wrong ways of worshipping God– but instead about Sabbath reigniting that intimate relationship we have had with our God since the beginning of creation; when the word was spoken and became flesh. Sabbath is not intended to be another challenge to accomplish, climbing further into holiness like it’s a triathlon, but rather invitation to lift our eyes up from the ground and experience the world, creation, God, each other, with the sheer wonder of someone who has been, if not literally, then metaphorically, staring at the ground for years on end. Sabbath as reclaiming that seventh day in the creation story, when we had a chance to look into God’s own face and know our creator and God’s creation ever more closely.
Rabbi Abraham Heschel explores this idea more in his book on Sabbath:
The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time. It is a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation; from the world of creation to the creation of the world…
…Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul. The world has our hands, but our soul belongs to Someone Else. Six days a week we seek to dominate the world, on the seventh day we try to dominate the self.
“The world has our hands, but our soul belongs to Someone Else.”
The notion of legalistic Sabbath has gone the way of Massachusetts Blue Laws. It is not practical, nor universally applicable in this time and age. But it doesn’t need to be. Sabbath is perhaps when we lift our eyes from our small vantages and are given the gift of sight and perspective. It is when we step back from our lives lived by list and agenda and imagine that we, too, delighted in that seventh day of creation, getting to know our creator, to feel love, to give love, to imagine ourselves as more than what we do the rest of the week. Sabbath isn’t about self-care or Sunday resets, it is about intentionally reclaiming relationship with God. It’s being told that our lives are more than the road directly under our feet.
The woman didn’t ask Jesus for this sight. Jesus didn’t ask if she wanted it. He simply told her that it was hers. We often don’t think that we need to reconnect with God, or our friends, our communities, those we love in order to live life fully. But perhaps we can tend to be like the woman who doesn’t even think to ask for healing. Jesus doesn’t ask us if we want that healing. He simply tells us it is ours as gift.
May we be bold enough to take that gift with grateful hearts. To lift our eyes up off our dusty road, from our dusty feet, and look into the eyes of the One who created us.
Amen.