Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost August 24, 2025
I am starting this morning with a confession. It has to do with a personal addiction that started years ago.
It is an addiction that is sadly aided and abetted by the internet…and the easy availability in connecting with whatever you need or want these days – however good and salutary to your health, however bad and ruinous to your life.
Years before there was an ‘internet,’ (can you remember what your day was like without computer and smartphone?!), it was a bit of a chore satisfying one’s addictions. For me, it took hours of anxious searching. And lost time! Driving around and around. Braving unfamiliar streets. My car consuming gallons (pardon me – litres) of gas. All to get my ‘fix’. Nowadays, satisfaction for me is the click of a mouse away!
I can find what I’m looking for on the internet! Any time of the day or night. In any location and any community. Gone are those anxious days of getting lost looking for street numbers.
Searching (often in the dark of night) for that place I saw only in a grainy newsprint photo, that place that just might quench my desires. For only the time being, of course!
Many times I returned to my rectory, deflated. Unable to find, even in the light of day, that elusive goal. The one thing I was after.
I was on the search for that House For Sale sign! And even better…an Open House sign!
But now, thanks to the internet, for the property junky, www.realtor.ca does the trick!
From the comfort of my own chair and my own tidy home, with the drapes drawn, or with the windows left brazenly wide open to the curious, I can read about and peek into house after house listed and posted for sale by realtors I will never have to meet.
Realtors I will never have to meet with the pretense, “Oh…I’m just looking for an out-of-town friend.” Or, “I’m looking for a busy relative thinking of moving to the city.” I can now gawk at what I love about old houses – and for me, they invariably are old houses: the architectural thrills of plaster moldings, high baseboards, carved mantels and original aged wood floors. Hands-on craftmanship. Hard to find these days!
I can even take a spin through all the rooms of the house courtesy of the on-line 360 degree ‘virtual tour.’ I usually end up with a case of vertigo! I’m still not that adept at mastering the myriad of programs with their baffling speed controls.
Now…in case you are nervously wondering where I am heading, and what possible connection my real estate addiction has to the gospel reading of the day…I once found a listing for a wonderful old home in the Forest Hill area of Toronto.
I lived, then, in working class south Etobicoke, an area which has dramatically changed as trendy townhomes and condos – with all the bells and whistles we are told people are clamouring for – now replacing the dreary factories (like Campbells Soup) where many members of my congregation spent a lifetime earning a living.
Forest Hill was, and still is, one of Toronto’s tonier neighbourhoods, not far from Sir Henry Pellatt’s Casa Loma. I remember being taken aback by the listing saying the house was blessed with a ‘shabbat elevator!’
My seminary learning taught me a smattering of Hebrew: I knew shabbat meant sabbath. So, I knew it had something to do with religion, particularly Jewish beliefs and Jewish practice.
I did my research and found that a ‘shabbat elevator’ is a sabbath elevator. An elevator that can be set automatically before Friday sundown (the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath) to open and close its doors, and to go up and down floors on its own. The observant Jew could use it on the Sabbath day without having to push the buttons and thereby break commandment number four,
“Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labour and do all your work, but on the seventh day, you shall rest.”
Since then, I discovered many larger homes and apartment buildings in Jewish neighbourhoods throughout North America, and in Israel, have ‘shabbat elevators’. I picture them continually going up and down on the Sabbath, doors endlessly opening and closing, allowing enough time for folks to get on and off without the chore of pressing a button, and thus, breaking the commandments.
Now, for you, and for me…and for Jesus in Luke chapter thirteen…it is the Sabbath day. And Jesus is attending the Shabbat service in one of the synagogues along his way to Jerusalem. He was doing some teaching (before the service began) no doubt speaking about God’s kingdom and God’s love and God’s grace.
A woman from the local community entered for worship. For eighteen years she had been crippled: “bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight,” we’re told. Luke 13:11
Jesus saw her. He was obviously moved. His heart went out to her. He caught her attention, and matter-of-factly said to her, “woman, you are set free from your ailment.” 13:12
“He laid his hands on her,” says Luke, and “immediately she stood up straight and began praising God.” 13:13
Now, where you and I might expect her friends and neighbours in synagogue (not being Anglican, of course, and thus, not bound by proper decorum) might jointly raise a loud and thunderous, ‘Hallelujah!’ seeing the woman (someone they knew well) healed of what ailed her.
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Instead, the indignant “leader of the synagogue,” we are told, reminded the congregation of the fourth commandment, telling them bluntly, without mincing his words: “there are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the Sabbath day.” 13:14
And again, surely, with a touch of anger (like we heard in last Sunday’s gospel), Jesus once more cannot hold his peace. “You hypocrites!” he says! “Does not each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? Ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the Sabbath day?” 13:15-16
Or, in other and straightforward words: who makes the rules by which God’s healing grace is set to work bringing release and wholeness to a person’s life?!
Sometimes, it may very well be that you and I experience the powerful love of God and know his healing presence and grace while at prayer, in church, on the Sabbath day. More times than not, you and I will run into God and experience God’s presence and God’s love and healing when we least expect it. We experience God’s presence and God’s love and healing at perhaps the most inopportune moment, not of our choosing.
Our experience of God’s presence and God’s love and healing is definitely not in keeping with our religious sensitivities, nor familiar assumptions about God and about how he works in our lives.
If God be the healer, and if God longs for us to be healed of every-thing (and of any-thing) that afflicts us – which, I believe, we all would agree is ‘gospel truth’ – then, surely God is able to reach out and to heal on any day, and at any time of day, and in any place!
Surely, our Christian experience (yours and mine!) teaches us what can happen in people’s lives when the door to faith is opened – even a small crack. We learn by our experience that God cannot be bound by our rules. God follows not the best ways we feel to make himself and his love known and experienced. God works freely, on his own.
Now everything we have been hearing from the gospel according to Luke these past Sundays, and in the Sundays coming, points us in this direction.
Following Jesus on his journey to Jerusalem throughout the gospel of Luke, we learn that God is free of any constraints in making himself known to us. There is nothing that holds him back. Except…perhaps ourselves!
God does, and God will, reach out to us in love and mercy in a broad variety of ways – through people, through experiences, through events, many (if not most!), constantly surprising us. And many (if not most!) marvelously unexpected. Like the Cross on Calvary.
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We might find God’s love and mercy confusing at times. And we will, time and again, find God’s love and God’s mercy, and how it works, confusing, and unsettling, and always challenging.
But God’s love and God’s mercy is never, is ever, unwarranted!
In a short while as we begin the Offertory of Mass, we will sing:
“O Christ, the healer, we have come
to pray for health, to plead for friends.
How can we fail to be restored,
When reached by love that never ends?
From every ailment flesh endures
our bodies clamour to be freed;
yet, in our hearts we would confess
that wholeness is our deepest need.” *
Amen.
Fr. Ted Hales
*Hymn 346, Common Praise, Canterbury Press, Norwich U.K.