• Jeremiah 1: 4-10

Jeremiah records his call as a young boy.  “…[T]he word of the Lord…” informs the child that while he was still in the womb, the Lord “consecrated” him.  The youth points out the obvious problem with this call– he is too young to know what to say and to be taken seriously.  But the Lord tells him these are not problems, because “you shall speak whatever I command you” and “to whom I send you.”  Indeed, the message which Jeremiah is ordained to deliver will “pluck up… pull down… destroy… overthrow… build and… plant.”

• Psalm 71: 1-6

The psalmist looks back over her life and realizes that the Lord has been “my hope… my refuge since my youth… from birth….”

OR

• Isaiah 58: 9b- 14

The Isaiah text promises that when human behavior shifts from blame and gossip, (“pointing the finger” and “speaking evil”), and instead focuses on “the needs of the afflicted,” then the individual as well as the entire society  will be revived, restored, renewed.  This promise of restoration by focusing on justice includes keeping the sabbath a “delight” and “honorable” rather than for one’s own needs.

• Psalm 103: 1-8

The psalmist honors the Lord with his entire being because the Lord forgives, heals, redeems, satisfies his needs but also reveals “justice for all the oppressed.”  “Compassionate and gracious is the Lord….”

• Hebrews 12: 18-29

The writer who wanted to address “the Hebrews” recalls the past occasions of God’s revelation, which were accompanied by fire, darkness, gloom, tempest, “the sound of the trumpet, and a voice from heaven whose words made the heavens beg that not another word be spoken…” as very different than the most recent Self-revelation of God:  “Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant…”  Because Jesus speaks “from heaven” there is even greater urgency to “not refuse the one who is speaking….”  Our worship, therefore, should be done with “reverence and awe.”

• Luke 13: 10-17

Only Luke tells of an encounter in a local synagogue between Jesus and a woman severely crippled for eighteen years and the conflict this encounter causes.  Jesus invited the woman, who was presumed to be possessed by “a spirit,” to come over to him.  Jesus immediately told her “you are free of your ailment.”  He then laid hands on her and she stood up straight!  The “leader of the synagogue” was furious with Jesus for healing on the sabbath.  But Jesus mocked the “hypocrisy” and implied that the sabbath is as good as any day to “be set free from this bondage….”  The leader was humiliated, but everyone else celebrated “all the wonderful things he was doing.”

Human nature prefers rules, predictability, consistency, solutions, procedures.  Maybe religious people like them more than most out of caution.  Maybe religious leaders, therefore, feel compelled to protect, define, expound upon and enforce the perceived rules.  The initial impulse of the leader of the synagogue in Luke’s story is quite understandable in this way.  He saw that the religious rules had been broken, a boundary had been trampled.  What he did not see, however, was God at work.  Another maverick, Jeremiah, understood that his message from the Lord, also, would destroy some old things but also enable some new things to start up.  Isaiah even re-interprets one of the ‘Ten Commandments in the light of a higher priority– “the needs of the afflicted.”  In Luke’s story, the priorities of the religious leader are presented as just the opposite of Jesus’ . What Jesus focuses on is what everyone else had just come to take for granted, including the woman herself, that her disability was permanent.  Jesus takes the initiative when he invites her to come close to him, despite the commonly held assumption that her disability was a sign of possession by a “spirit.”  Without her even making the request, (perhaps it was beyond her to hope or imagine anything else for herself by this point in her life), or any preliminary requirements whatsoever, Jesus tells her, “Woman, you are healed,” lays hands on her and she “immediately” stands straight up.  This act of unrequested, unimagined, unexpected complete generosity upsets the religious leader, but everyone else “was rejoicing.”  Particularly in stories like this one from Luke’s narrative, Jesus disrupts conventional religious expectations so that God’s goodness can happen again and in new ways.

One of the founders of “Radical Orthodoxy,” John Milbank, has written that he sees Christianity as inherently suspicious of human-made categories, rules and boundaries; he also anticipates that such constant questioning creates conflict.  In an essay, “Postmodern Critical Augustinianism: A Short Summa in Forty-two Responses to Unasked Questions.” (excerpted in The Postmodern God, Graham Ward, ed.), Milbank explains:

“I mean by this that it is possible to construe Christianity as suspicious of fixed ‘essences’ in its approach to human beings, to nature, to community and [therefore] escaped the grasp of ‘totalizing’ metaphysics.” (p 267)  “…I want to claim that [Christianity can] think difference, yet it perhaps tries to deny this necessarily… entails conflict.” (p. 268)

Religious ideologies, Milbank believes, are inclined to define and enforce boundaries based on human-made abstractions and interpretations that attempt to understand and order humanity and nature.  But, Christianity, which is “suspicious” of such abstractions, should not draw boundaries, and the Church is not so much a settled, regulated nation as it is  “a nomad city.” (p. 269)

If Milbank is recapturing an understanding of Christianity that is closer to the biblical, (especially in Luke’s narrative in general and today’s excerpt  in  particular), then the church lives with the constant tension, anxiety and outright conflict, internally and externally, with expectations of where, when, how as well as to, with and through whom God is at work in the world right now.  Rules, definitions, traditions and their interpretations are useful, but the gospel is inherently “suspicious” of human-made constructs and always retains the potential to challenge them, as Jesus does when he broke one of the Ten commandments and a venerable, strict rule: he put the Sabbath to a new use and he invited and healed a woman whose ‘essence’ had been defined by her condition.  She was presumed to be crippled by “a spirit,” Luke says.  Using Milbank’s analysis, we can see how this story challenges head-on Western Modernity’s and Western Christianity’s complicity with an obsession with “essences” and “boundaries” to the detriment of missing where, when, how and to, with and through whom God is already at work right now, today.  But the breaking or re-interpreting of rules, definitions, traditions is not capricious; it always is trying to discover the new locus of God’s ever-expanding work, which always has unique, specific, identifying traits: it restores, builds-up, renews, makes whole again.  It causes  people to stand straight up again who had been bent over by the weight of their own and society’s assumptions about them.  As Jeremiah teaches us, God’s word/work has that effect– it destroys some things so new things can raise up.  With whom do we identify more in Luke’s remarkable story: those focused on the rules so much that they miss God at work in new ways or those who see and celebrate “all the wonderful things” God is doing so they can enlist in the work to enable them?