I preached this sermon on Sunday, August 24, 2025, for the Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 16, Year C), at St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church and Pro-Cathedral, Brooklyn, New York. The lectionary texts cited can be found here.
I don't know how obvious this is to all of you, but I have a perfectionist streak …
I guess it is obvious. It's something I've really been working on. I started in earnest in seminary: The screensaver of my computer said, “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.” Over the years, I’ve internalized the need to live and let live; to settle for something that is less than perfect if it's what's required in the moment, or if it brings people closer together, or if it relieves me of some of my stress.
But all of this to say, I understand the need to want everything exactly so: to have clear-cut answers, to have a level of certainty and control. Of course, what is perfectionism, what is certainty, except trying to impose control on a world that is so often uncontrollable?
That is the story I believe we're entering into in this interaction that Jesus has in the synagogue: healing a woman who had been bound by an ailment for 18 years and being criticized by the leader of the synagogue for doing so, because Jesus healed on the Sabbath.
Now, what do we know about the Sabbath? Well, if you were in Holy Happy Hour the other week, you'll know an awful lot about the Sabbath because we talked all about theologies of work and rest, and the importance and intricacy of the Sabbath. You may recall (even if you weren't in Holy Happy Hour) that the Sabbath is instituted by God after the six days of creation. In Genesis 1, we hear that God created all the world in six days, called it good, and then rested on the seventh; so, humans also rest on the Sabbath day.
If you read the Ten Commandments, the commandment given to rest on the Sabbath (in Deuteronomy, in Leviticus) … It’s not only human beings who rest: it’s animals, it's everyone, every living creature in a given community rests on the Sabbath. It's a pretty radical idea, actually—especially in this capitalistic world we live in, especially in the United States that is so driven by a Protestant work ethic. The idea that a day of rest for all human beings, no matter your status or station, for all animals even, is kind of revolutionary.
So, why would Jesus confound this commandment to rest on the Sabbath when it seems like such a good thing?
It's important to notice, if you didn't pick up on this in the Gospel, that Jesus is not actually drawing people away from the tradition. He says, “Even you would untie your animal and bring it to a well to drink on the Sabbath day,” right?
What we need to understand entering into this snippet of an interaction is that clearly, conversations about what the Sabbath means—how to interpret the Sabbath, what is permissible or not permissible to do on the Sabbath—have been going on in this community for a very long time.
The creation stories that we receive in Genesis are thousands of years old, many, many centuries before Christ. So by the time Jesus is teaching and preaching and healing in the first century, the Jewish people have had a long time to dialogue about what this sacred command from God might mean for them, how it might be interpreted. How do we actually live this out in community?
Jesus is not breaking the commandment of Sabbath. Jesus is saying, by your own dialogue, by your own interpretation, by your own sense-making of this sacred command from God, even you would do certain kinds of work on the Sabbath.
And what did we hear from Isaiah? Isaiah says, don't pursue your own interests. Don't chase after your own affairs on the Sabbath. Don’t try to self-aggrandize. Don’t try to get ahead. Don’t do work that is going to move you forward in the world on the Sabbath.
We also hear in the paragraph before about all the freedom-making that we're supposed to be doing—about all the liberatory work that we're called to in the name of God. It’s from liberation that Sabbath follows. In fact, the command to rest on the Sabbath as given in Deuteronomy is connected to liberation from slavery in Egypt.
So, Jesus is not the first person in this tradition to connect rest to liberation, to connect Sabbath to works of justice and mercy and freedom.
I wonder what our lives would be like, what our communities would be like, what our country would be like, if we could release some of the need for control that we feel around certainty, around clarity, around sure answers, so that we can follow this radical call into liberation.
I'm in a real mood of trying to interpret these various figures in the Gospels as charitably as possible. So, taking the synagogue leader … It says he was indignant. I wonder if part of his indignation was a fear that Jesus was introducing confusion into what ought to be, in his mind, a simple commandment. He is trying to lead his people in faithful lives in a good act—which is to rest; to refrain from labor; to honor God by resting the mind, the heart, the body.
And here Jesus comes along, showing people, “Oh, maybe you don't actually need to rest on the Sabbath.” And the synagogue leader is like, “What are you talking about? This is one of the core tenets of our tradition. This should be one of the simplest things that people can do together. If nothing else, we should all be able to rest one day a week. What are you telling them?”
Maybe he's upset with Jesus not because he rejects the words of liberation, but because in his mind, the clarity, the certainty, the cut-and-dry answer will help people live more faithful lives.
What would our lives look like if we surrender to uncertainty? What if we don't have all the answers? What if we wade into waters of interpretation and risk being wrong? What if we grasp for something and then stumble a bit? What if we followed Christ, followed the prophets, followed God in a radical message of liberation that did not leave easy answers?
What if we don't always know what we're doing, and not everything can be perfect, but we're working toward the very best of our ability—and we're working together to create a world in which people are the most free they can possibly be, the most unbound and unburdened that they can possibly be? When rest means that we are all resting. When freedom means that we are all free.
I think oftentimes what is labeled as complacency is really a fear of being wrong—a fear of not having certainty, a fear of doing or saying the wrong thing.
But the Christian life is inherently a life of risk. It's inherently a life of not knowing. It is a life of believing things that we can't prove, of feeling the movement of Spirit in us and between us and not being able to say exactly what that is, but knowing it is more real than anything else.
I think about this moment we're living in—with all the suffering in our world, in our neighborhoods, our country, in so many places abroad—and the hesitancy, the fear we feel about speaking out because we might say the wrong thing. What if we don't quite get the rhetoric right around immigrants or around mass incarceration? What if we speak out about starvation in Gaza and someone is offended? What if we try to uplift the rights of trans people and we get the language wrong?
Is that complacency?
I don't think so. Not in this community. I think it's such a deep desire to do things right, to do things well, to be perfect, that we mortgage radical liberation.
The call in our Gospel story today is to wade into waters of uncertainty—to trust that God's ultimate message is freedom, is liberation from spiritual trouble and the troubles of this world. If we are following Christ in liberation, then we can't be on the wrong path.
It means that we have to look at our tradition, we look at our texts, we look at the wisdom passed down to us from our ancestors, and we say, “Okay, if God's ultimate dream for the world is freedom for all, then what must the Sabbath mean? Then what must ethical labor mean? Then what must community mean?”
We take liberation as our starting point. Because God made the world in goodness. And God liberated his people from slavery in Egypt. And God sent Jesus to reconcile all of humanity to God's self—to heal us, to unburden us, to bring us back into ultimate eternal love.
We cannot go wrong if we take liberation as our starting point, our ending point, the lens through which we interpret all things.
And we still might get it wrong along the way. We still might mess up the language. We still might have the theoretical framework a little bit wonky. We might stumble. We'll definitely have to rely on others.
But we’ll be following Christ. We'll be living out a message of grace, of love, of justice—more encompassing than we could ever imagine if we're fixated on being perfect.
So, as you exit the sanctuary today and go out into the world, your communities, your homes, I encourage you to lean into the discomfort of uncertainty, to surrender control, and to trust that if you are following the path of liberation in the footsteps of Christ, then you are upholding the sacred tradition better than anything else.
May it be so.
Artwork: La femme malade depuis dix-huit ans (The Woman with an Infirmity of Eighteen Years), by James Tissot, 1886–1894. Wikimedia Commons.
