Stretch Out Your Hand - A Homily for the Second Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 4(B)

This sermon was preached by the Reverend Holly Huff at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark for the Second Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 4(B), June 2, 2024.

Raise a song and sound the timbrel, the merry harp and the lyre! We’ve got that much covered today.

To live in Sabbath is to allow our ourselves to be what we are: that is, created. Let God who made us—in all our rainbow Technicolor glory, human diversity in every hue—and called us good—continue to hold us up and call us into new life, letting God’s life shine radiantly through us for others in this hurting world. On the seventh day, God rested. And sanctified a day of rest for all people. Enter into the joy of my rest, God says to good and faithful servants. The Letter to the Hebrews underlines that now is the time of salvation, now is the day of the Lord, today, when you hear God’s voice, harden not your hearts—because a Sabbath rest still remains for the people of God.

The God who made us loves us. Without condition. Meaning, in every condition. However we happen to be today. Happy, unhappy, sick, well, rejoicing, mourning, proud or still ashamed… However we are, God loves us, unconditionally, just like this. “God don’t make no junk,” after all. Creation and Sabbath go hand in hand. Sabbath rest, the joy of the Lord, is more than particular set of dos and don’ts applied to one day out of seven. 

The Hebrew word for Sabbath means stop. Cease. Make an end. It’s a punctuation in the rhythm of each week: The first day, the second day, the third day. On the seventh day, God stopped. Each week we live it again: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, stop. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, stop. Stop and remember who made you. Stop and remember you are beloved. Stop and let God remember you and restore you. All of you—the Sabbath command is given to everyone, everyone in your house gets to rest, even the slaves, even the strangers in the land, even the animals. There is a radical leveling of hierarchies of domination as each creature is returned to our rightful place as part of God’s beloved creation answering to the one who made us and the one who feeds us our food in due season. 

So Sabbath rest reminds us of what is always true, Sabbath rest remembers us as the people of God who depend on our life-giving, liberating God for simply everything. “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt and said, ‘Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it.’” When our mouths are open, when we are hungry, searching, soft and open, rather than clenching our jaws or gritting our teeth—we find God is already giving us what we need, feeding us with bread in the wilderness, cooling our tongue with water from the rock. “Open your mouth wide and I will fill it”—God will give us words to speak, when we lean on the Holy Spirit to enable our speech, to give us the grace to preach the gospel, each one of us in our native tongue, in a language and idiom specific to the condition of our lives, each speaking from our unique history and make-up and struggles and gifts. Knowing ourselves to be loved exactly as we are, we can share with our neighbors the surpassing good news of that unconditional welcome, God’s running-out-to-meet-us-while-we’re-yet-still-far-off bear hug embrace. Just as some in our congregation are doing right now handing out water bottles to those marching in the parade—sharing the good news with a cup of cool water. 

What a contrast this open mouth is to the hardness of heart that grieves and angers Jesus in this encounter with the man with a withered hand. He has just defended his hungry disciples, who have left everything to follow him and are relying on the god of creation to feed them every day and twice on Sunday. “The Sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the Sabbath.” Sabbath according to Jesus is not a blind following of rules, but an invitation to live in alignment with our 

natural dependence on the God who made us and who holds us in being even still. No, the Earth will not fall out of orbit if I take a day off! Practicing Sabbath we practice trusting God to hold the world up. We surrender our lives to the care of the one whose eye is on the sparrow, who clothes the lilies of the field, releasing our clenched grip on an identity as active productive contributors to society! and returning to our plain, humble, earthy place among the rest of creation: we are created, we depend on God for simply everything. And all our right and necessary action will be graced for flowing out of this trust, this right alignment with things as they actually are.

All eyes in the synagogue are on Jesus as he charts a collision course with this man whose hand has been clenched up for so long. They watch him, suspicious, ready to attack and accuse. Treating the law as an idol, a rulebook in the place of God, these self-righteous religious folks miss the miracle, and call this healing a violation. And doesn’t the contemporary resonance of that readiness to accuse echo particularly loudly on Pride Sunday. (It’s all about loud echoes today, apparently!) But Jesus, under this unfriendly scrutiny, moves deliberately toward the man with the withered hand. Undeterred, he’s not reluctant to clash with the death-dealing onlookers. Jesus is not afraid of conflict. He’s eager, even, to set the record straight—the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath—and it is lawful to do good, to save life on the Sabbath. What could be more fitting? The one through whom all things were made is here in the flesh, restoring each person he encounters to their place in a new creation, smiled upon by God’s covenant faithfulness, the rainbow sign arcing the sky. “Come forward” he says to this man, who boldly joins Jesus in the disapproving gaze of the crowd. What a gesture of trust. “Stretch out your hand,” Jesus says, and this man does the impossible, the very thing a withered limb specifically cannot do, and stretches out his hand. How many times has he tried to spread his toughened fingers? But again he acts in that boldness that comes from trusting the steadfast love of our creator God, who came to walk among us in the person of Jesus and now lives in our very bodies in the Spirit, and by grace his hand opens like a flower.

We don’t know how to be open. We don’t know how to receive. As Paul told us last week, we don’t even know how to pray. We’re just clay jars, human beings totally homespun and fragile and made beautiful by the radiant treasure of God’s grace we have received and now pour out for others. The Spirit prays in us, with sighs too deep for words. Jesus comes to us, says forget the crowd with their judgmental stares and opens our stiffened fists. Even receiving grace is done in us by grace. And we find ourselves entering into the Lord’s rest: receiving our life from God’s hands, knowing we are created, depending on God in everything, trusting the one who said and still says, “Let light shine out of the darkness.” Sabbath comes to us in the messy day-to-day clay jar reality of our lives, calls us in that voice at once unfamiliar and nearer to us than our own breath. Come forth. Stretch out your hand. Open wide your mouth. Harden not your heart. Everywhere Jesus goes, he invites us to trust him, to believe the good news that the kingdom has come near, to open, and soften, and stretch out our hands, as he leads us into creation made new, and into blessed Sabbath rest arriving once more for God’s beloved, hungry people. Amen.