I have an odd existence.

I understand most folks who know me would rephrase that statement as “I am odd,” which is true, but hear me out.

I am a Christian, a pastor, whose native culture is “geek.” My cultural touchstones are Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, Dragonlance, Discworld, Role-Playing Games, and Star Wars.

And both the religious and cultural communities of which I am part are filled with what are known as “rules lawyers.”

Geeks are known for their passion about the things they love, and that can sometimes make them inflexable. Star Trek fans sometimes know the pseudo-science of Trek better than the writers, and will howl when some rule of the universe is broken. Star Wars fans scream when long-standing concepts get tweaked. Lord of the Rings fanatics will know the lore of Middle Earth better than a Fundamentalist Christian thinks they know the Bible, and you have not seen people cling to rules until you’ve played a role-playing game. Arguments over the rules or the lore or the science wind up splitting fandoms into camps, and when those lines get drawn they do not often get crossed.

Now, we are in a church, a worshipping community which proclaims the good news of Jesus’ kingdom and the coming of the new creation. So let me ask you. Do the battle lines which split up geek-fandoms between camps sound at all familiar to you? How many denominations do we have? How many factions exist within the different denominations? “Conservative” and “Liberal.”
“Welcoming and Affirming” and “Biblical.”
“Charismatic” and “Traditional.”

How many of us have survived worship wars or watched someone claiming to speak for Christianity on TV and thought, “That does not speak for me?”

When I stroll through my geek communities, and then look back at church communities I sometimes wonder if our churches are less about being disciples and more about being a fandom which is fixated on religion. The rules-lawyers are there to make sure that the “pure” fandom is upheld when someone dares to suggest that “our” side needs to be critiqued.

Jesus met a rules-lawyer in Luke 13:10-17. He was teaching in the Synagogue on the Sabbath, which was not unusual as Jesus was a rabbi. And in that gathering was present a woman who had been bent over, by something described as a spirit, for eighteen years. She was so afflicted that she couldn’t even stand up straight and Jesus, upon seeing her, called her over and said, “You are set free.”And she stood up, for the first time in eighteen years, and began praising God! And everyone was excited by this and joined in, right?

Wrong.

A rules lawyer was offended. He came at Jesus wielding a rule he believed was created by the LORD God. He was indignant, he saw himself defending “the right way” to do something, he was armed with the self-assuredness that the rules were on his side.

“There are six days in which it’s necessary to work. So why didn’t she come on one of those days to be cured, and not the Sabbath?”

I mean, there are rules!

You can almost feel the air sucked out of the room. The woman’s praise becomes choked off before the crowd can join in, fearful that by doing so they too would be rule-breakers and get in trouble.

And then Jesus steps in.

“Hypocrite!”

He then lays out an argument which, in common parlance, could be seen as being “Whataboutism.” That’s when someone gets accused of doing something horrible and, instead of addressing their own awfulness, they deflect by saying, “But what about…?” Positing that because the person doing the accusation did something against the rules then they shouldn’t be able call anyone else out.

But here’s the thing, while a shallow reading could lend you to think Jesus was just deflecting the accusation the synagogue leader was tossing at both him and the woman who was healed, this isn’t the case. Jesus wasn’t pulling a “what about” move. He was calling out the people in charge of the community for displaying a lack compassion on someone for whom they were supposed to be caring. Jesus called them out because the synagogue leaders were demonstrating that they thought the way to follow God was to keep to the letter of the Law to the point where inconvenient notions like compassion, mercy, forgiveness, or justice didn’t get in their way. And in so doing they missed the point of the Sabbath.

And they knew it. They knew it because, as Jesus pointed out, they all would “work” on the sabbath by making sure their animals were fed and watered—because leaving an animal suffering from dehydration on the Sabbath would be an act of cruelty. And if they were willing to help an animal, why on Earth would they not do the same for a daughter of Abraham who’d been suffering for eighteen years? The point of the Sabbath is to take a rest from the burdens of life and when Jesus told that woman she was free she was able to rest on the Sabbath for the first time in almost two decades.

And with that answer Jesus broke the rules-lawyer’s spell. The woman stood up, the synagogue leaders were shamed, and the crowd rejoiced. The bubble of joy had almost been popped, and Jesus said, “Not on my watch.”

Now, listen, communities do need guardrails and boundary-markers to function. There are behaviors which just aren’t acceptable, such as when people are intent on doing active harm to others. But rules exist to make space for life. When the rules are used to sap a community’s ability to create a space for life they need to be challenged. And rules-lawyers need to be confronted. That’s what Jesus did. And he didn’t do it to grasp on to power for himself or to control others, he did it because there was someone in need of mercy in front of him and that’s what his Kingdom looks like.

May all of Jesus’ followers learn to look like him. And when we don’t may we repent and walk forward again. Amen.