Slack (proper 16c)

Slack (Proper 16C)

Homily Delivered 25 August 2019

8:00 a.m. Said and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

The Very Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson

Isaiah 58:9b-14; Psalm 103:1-8; Hebrews 12:18-29; Luke 13:10-17

God, give us hearts to love and feel,

Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

 

A few years ago, Elena and I went on a cruise in the waters of Alaska and British Columbia, during which time we saw some of the great cliff-bound inlets of the Inner Passage.  One of these is called Ford’s Terror.  It is named after one Harry L. Ford, a crew member of the US. Coast and Geodetic Survey Vessel Carlile P. Patterson.   One day in 1889, Ford, doing a survey of the area, , took a small rowboat into the steep and glacier-bound fjord alone.  The water in the narrow inlet as he entered was calm and relaxed, what sailors call “slack water.”  After a short time looking at the icebergs, harbor seals, and high cliffs, he rowed back to the inlet to go back to Endicott Arm and his ship.  But the tide had turned.  What had been calm, peaceful, and still turquoise water was now a raging torrent of white with a wall of curling surf taller than his boat was long.  For the next twelve hours, cold and hungry, he waited in terror, fearing that perhaps the calm water would not return before he died.  But at the next low tide, during the short interval between the tide going out and coming in, the water went slack again, and he was able to row out again, grateful and with a story of terror that would immortalize his name in maps and Gazetteers.  

“Slack”—the term draws up images of calm and peaceful water, but, for wind sailors at least, also risks water that is too relaxed, without enough wind above it to drive a sail-boat.    Slack sails are useless.  The word thus also means the lack of tension and tautness necessary to accomplish things.  My father always told me as a boy to “give it some slack” when I was fishing so that the line would let the baited hook drift naturally in the deep water.    Later, as a teenager, I came to feel he was perhaps a little too attentive to my life. “Give it some slack,” became “Cut me some slack, will you?”    Even later, one of the worse epithets my children hurled at each other when they might not be pulling their own weight was “you slacker!” 

Today’s Hebrew Scripture asks us to cut each other some slack, give each other a break.  Remove the yoke from among you.  Don’t exploit each other.  Remove the pointing of the finger, speaking ill of others. Don’t reduce others to objects to be evaluated and judged, ridiculed, made fun of, or maligned.  Give food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted.  Stand with the downtrodden.  Help and don’t judge.  Give them a break because they need it, not because they deserve it. 

The passage also asks us to cut ourselves some slack.   It ties these social justice issues to the Sabbath.  We shouldn’t place a heavy yoke upon us ourselves, even if we think this serves our purposes.   We shouldn’t belittle ourselves, or think ourselves slackers when we take needed rest.  We need to find time to rest each week, and make this a priority.  We need to not consider this shameful, or slacking off, but rather honorable:

If you refrain from trampling the sabbath,

from pursuing your own interests on my holy day;

if you call the sabbath a delight

and the holy day of the LORD honorable;

if you honor it, not going your own ways,

serving your own interests, or pursuing your own affairs;

then you shall take delight in the LORD….

To be sure, the Sabbath is not just a call for regular down time.  “Remember the seventh day by keeping it holy.”  This means, as the Prayer Book puts it, a duty “to set aside regular times for worship, prayer, and the study of God’s ways” (p. 847).  

Yet rest is still at the heart of the commandment.  In the catechism of the Roman Catholic Church, we read, “"[The Sabbath] is a day of protest against the servitude of work and the worship of money" (Catechism of the Catholic Church, para. 2172). 

In the Gospel reading today, Jesus gives a woman a break, and cuts her some slack.  She has been bound down by muscle tension, here personified as a demonic spirit, that held her doubled over for years.   He simply lays his hands on her, unbinds her, relaxes her, and restores her slack, natural posture.   She rejoices, thanking God. 

But a community religious leader nearby is not pleased.  He sees Jesus as a competitor calling for people to be lax in following the Law, slack in their religious duties.  He doesn’t want that particular yoke removed, and he points his finger:  “Your business appears to be faith healing and here you are, doing business on the Sabbath! Jesus, you slacker!”

Most rabbinic treatments of the Sabbath allow the saving of a life, even if the effort otherwise looks like work.  When Jesus is criticized for breaking the Sabbath by healing in John, what is at issue seems to be not the healing itself, but the means he uses:  he mixes his saliva with dirt to make a kind of eye ointment.  Mixing mortar for building or clay for potting were defined as work forbidden on Sabbath. 

In today’s story, being bent over clearly does not rate as a life-threatening condition.  “There are six other days of the week on which you could have done this,” says Jesus’ opponent.   His list of things forbidden or allowed on Sabbath has become taut and inflexible, the opposite of the restful slack Sabbath intends.    

Jesus points this out by noting that his critic fails to see the joy of the woman.  Pulling animals out of the mire was allowed on Sabbath in rigorous interpretations, even if their lives were not immediately threatened.  This woman was more important than an animal!  Her taut binding, bent over in pain for years, was worse than the suffering of a beast caught in the mud!  So couldn’t an a fortiori case be made to allow healing her? 

We are seeing here a Galilean legal flexibility running headlong against Judean legal rigor:  rural slackness versus urban tautness.  

Generally a critic of rigorists, Jesus himself could have his moments of tightness:  it is almost certain that the Historical Jesus forbade any taking of oaths or swearing on things, and the casual repudiation of one’s dependent spouse that was the divorce of his day.  

Second Isaiah had said, “if you honor [the Sabbath], … then you shall take delight in the LORD” (Isa 59:12-13).  The woman who has set free from her bonds here is rejoicing in the Lord, and so, thinks Jesus, how can we possibly have violated the Sabbath?   A good tree yields sweet fruit, a bad tree, bitter.  What possible criticism is there when such obvious good has been wrought? 

Knowing when to cut ourselves and each other slack, and when to keep taut the line that ties us to the Good and the Right, and gets things done, is a trick.  Using a set of external rules to tell us this will, invariably, lead to a tight, inflexible rule that itself must be broken.  It leads to the pointing finger, the heavy yoke.  This art cannot be mastered without an open heart and open hands, without trust in God, and benevolence or good will for all.  It is rooted the principle that Jesus taught: forgive others that we may be forgiven; treat others as we ourselves would want to be treated.   This complex of ideas is covered by what Buddhists call detachment, compassion, and doing no harm. 

When Harry Ford was caught in what is now called  Ford’s Terror, he almost certainly prayed for slack water.  We all pray for slack at times and we all must be able to give it. We are all in this together, and proper humility demands that we have solidarity with all our other creatures.  It demands that we be gentle.  

Remove the yoke, take away the pointing finger. The rule of thumb that Jesus uses here in this story is good—look at how our actions affect ourselves and others.  Regardless of pointing fingers or the yokes laid upon us, we must give the line slack or pull it taut as necessary to advance human dignity, love, and freedom.  

Jesus said his mission was to announce the Year of the Lord’s Favor, to break the bonds, to set the captive loose.  He announced the coming of God’s Reign in full power, and acted in ways that show he saw himself as the Year of Jubilee when all debts were forgiven, as the Sabbath of Lord, when all could rest and rejoice. 

He wants to cut us slack; we should let him do that.  He calls us to cut ourselves and each other slack.  This is how the pointing finger will be removed, and yokes broken.  Let go.  Cut someone some slack.  Give them a break. And let’s give ourselves a break as well. 

In the name of Christ, Amen.