Sermon: I’ll Believe It When I Sing It
from Sunday, August 24, 2025
Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath. And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight.
When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said,
“Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God.
But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the Sabbath, kept saying to the crowd,
“There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured and not on the Sabbath day.”
But the Lord answered him and said,
“You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger and lead it to water? And 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?”
When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame, and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things being done by him.
This is one of those stories in the Bible where there is just too much to talk about. Any time I see a healing story in the Bible, I am drawn to question what it means to think about healing. What are the ideas I have about healing and about perfect bodies? How do ideas of healing and ideas about the spiritual connection between physical disabilities and evil spirits impact our thinking even today?
There are questions of how this woman is involved in her own healing—she doesn’t ask to be healed—what is her agency in her own story?
Any of these, and more, can be fruitful avenues through a story. They can challenge our assumptions, help us understand a context more critically, and inspire us with new possibilities. Any of these questions might draw us deeper into the mysterious question—what does it mean to be a faithful disciple of this Jesus? How is Christ alive in this story, and how is Christ living in us right now?
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we live faithfully as Christians right now. We are living in a really scary, confusing moment. I do not have to tell you that our democracy is fraying, and that there are plenty of people cheering it on. I do not have to tell you that the consequences of our ecological devastation are getting more and more severe. We are watching a genocide continue to unfold in Gaza, funded by American taxpayers, and we are watching a violent, lawless crackdown on our immigrant neighbors here in our own country.
It's getting harder and harder to see any reasonable way out of this mess. It is feeling more and more like we have actually reached the tipping point. Some of us are feeling hopeless.
Over the past several weeks, this summer, I have been doing a lot more singing with you. I’ve always been very shy about singing in public, but I’ve recently experienced a shift. I have realized I can sing. And while I’m not planning to become a soloist anytime soon, I’ve become a better singer simply because singing together makes everyone better.
And I have found something profound in this new freedom. It has had an incredible impact on my spirituality. Protestantism has for a long time been locked inside its own head. We’ve taken a clear and logical approach, combining insights of the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution with the best of human reason.
That tradition expresses itself through social action and through a tradition of preaching that is incisive and clear.
I confess that I have enjoyed that tradition greatly, and yet I have found it lacking lately. I struggle to articulate a vision for the world that I can actually believe.
The people in the story we heard today are in a similar place. They are resistant to real change, they are stuck in their ways, they cannot imagine something new is possible.
You will hear some people say that they were scandalized by the fact that Jesus healed on the Sabbath. Some interpreters will suggest that this is what scandalized the religious leaders—and indeed, it seems as if that is what the leaders are trying to hide behind. But Jesus reminds them that they already know that healing on the Sabbath is not prohibited. Jewish Sabbath law has always placed the care and preservation of life and wellbeing at the center of life. Jesus doesn’t show them that they are wrong about the Sabbath, he reminds them that they already know about Sabbath-keeping.
The scandal here seems to be that the people came seeking healing. The people came on the Sabbath, when there would have been many people there to see them, and they imagined healing. They imagined a burden being lifted. They imagined liberation, justice, peace. They had something of a prophetic imagination. This woman, who was bent over, burdened for 18 years—nobody could imagine a way for her freedom. She imagined beyond what was possible—and the horizon of possibility suddenly expanded.
I believe singing is like that. I believe singing, praying, art, poetry, dancing, allow us to imaginatively express possibilities that reason cannot disclose to us. I can explain to you how the Church might work for justice, and how little by little that might one day bring about a world of peace—but I cannot believe that it is possible.
And yet—I believe it when we sing it. I hope that a peaceful, just world is possible, but I know it when I sing it.
We are (all of us, collectively) bent over with the burden of despair.
We are not going to be able to reason or think or argue or even vote our way out of this.
Jesus reminded the religious people of his time that they had always been called to creatively reimagine how to take care of one another. The ancient Jewish practice, tikkun olam, the repair of the world, has always been about prophetic imagination, about finding ways to dream impossible dreams and somehow see them made real.
There is no way for me to tell you it is going to be ok.
There is no reason to believe that things will not get worse.
And yet we are equipped to sing and dream and dance and love in such a time as this. Jesus spoke of the end of the world, and called us into a radical way of love.
Please hear me: this is no resignation. In fact it is a radical embrace of reality.
Resignation is accepting that the world is ending, and simply letting go.
Christ calls us to answer the question: what are the songs you will sing when it feels as though the world is ending? How do you love a world that feels irredeemable?
Faith, hope, and love are not about what we understand—they are not acts undertaken after careful consideration. Faith and hope and love are daring acts of courage carried out in a setting where they seem to make absolutely no sense.
So yes—we will keep showing up and organizing and protesting speaking up for the things we believe.
But let us embrace with newfound exuberance the practices that allow us to imagine beyond what we can believe. Let us dream and sing and pray of a world that is impossible—nothing else is worthy of our deepest hope.
This is the heart of the life that Jesus calls us into. It is a work of the heart. An iterative process of time and time again cultivating a space where the Kin-dom of God might take root.