Vacation in Ely this summer was unique.  Tracy had just retired.    On the first Wednesday of the vacation, my friend, Joe, a physician, retired.  Looming on the horizon was today—August 17th—and my retirement.  We’d been through so many other changes together—getting married, having children, losing parents, you name it.  Why not retire together, too?

People who don’t have freedom long to be free.  They think of all the things that they would do if only they had the freedom to choose.  They’d do this or that. They’d go here or there.  They’d create this or write that.  They’d make the world a better place. It all sounds so good until the moment when they suddenly find themselves free.  They find themselves overwhelmed with choices and possibilities.  They make decisions in “fits and starts,” doubting the choices they’ve made and doubting other choices even before they make them.  Freedom turns out to be nauseating and paralyzing, the kind of feelings that can make a person ready to surrender their freedom or at least decide that rather than bear the burden of making their own choices, they’ll just let others decide for them.  Boredom becomes the enemy.  Our phones and our televisions anesthetize us for the fight.

In the past two weeks, we have been looking at how far Jesus would go to help someone else.  We watched as he ran into the bent over woman on the Sabbath and felt her pain.  How far would Jesus go to help her?  He was willing to break the sabbath laws with the sabbath “police” standing there and watching him.  It was more important to relieve the woman’s pain than it was to appease the authorities.  I basically tried to ask you, “Does your understanding of Jesus include the notion that Jesus was a rule breaker?”

Forty-three years ago, the very first class that I had in seminary was an intensive Greek course.  We covered a semester’s worth of ancient Greek in three weeks. There were 5 hours of class each day, Monday through Friday.  There was a quiz every day, Monday through Thursday.  Each Friday, there was a major exam.  So, when you weren’t in class, you just buried yourself in homework and preparation for the next quiz.  To top things off, the course was taught by a terrifyingly brilliant New Testament scholar from the University of Chicago, Larry Welborn, who seemed utterly stunned that we all were not as terrifyingly brilliant as him.  Mostly, we were just terrified.