Luke 13:10-17 and Words from Oscar Romero
August 24, 2025
By Nicole M. Lamarche
Thank you again for being here, I invite you to take some deeper breaths, reminding us to never get too far from our breath.
As you are moved join me in a spirit of prayer. God, Love, Light, Creator and co-creator with us what shall be, where we need a turn toward gratitude, help us to take in all that is good. We give thanks for our lives, for this day, for this place for this people. Expand our sense of gratitude and joy. Open us to hear whatever we need to today. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
I have been wondering if some of us have idolized what is legal, which leads us to ask the wrong questions or consider just part of the picture, making decisions from incomplete information at the very least. But the problem with this, at least for me and many in my coming of age and maybe yours too, what is legal and what is right were presented as the same thing. Don’t get me started about the DARE Program, that is a great example!
We are living in a time when we are off the rails, so it’s hard to know what is guiding our shared life together, other than a consolidation of power, domination seems to be the strategy of the day. For some the truth doesn’t matter, painful history and facts themselves are negotiable. I found myself wanting to shout, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts.” Expertise tossed aside; science is dismissed. So today I feel moved to talk about the difference between what is legal and what is right.
I confess I have wanted to have this conversation with you for a while now but I knew I would get it wrong and so from the get-go let’s just say I have already failed. That’s done. For my personality type that is just really hard. It’s impossible to get it right; I put it off. But I took vows and made promises about 20 years ago, related to what I would commit to with my ordination when taking this on and speaking from the pulpit and being privileged enough to be in your lives so I take seriously what I owe you.
What is legal and what is right are now being presented as the same thing. But they are not. And with all the noise and chaos of these days, as people of faith and people of conscience, it feels important to say that boldly.
Now over 60,000 Palestinians have died in the Israel-Hamas war and many of the hostages from the attacks on October 7th where 1200 people were killed have still not been returned. Oddly enough I had already arranged to preach against war so I mostly stuck with what I had written, but in that sermon, I said that I believed that Hamas attacking civilians was terrible
and that strategically, I doubted that doing what they did would make life better for the average Palestinian.” I said that “what is also true is that the lives of those who live surrounded by a wall with barbed wire and checkpoints and is basically a prison. I am not sure I would feel the way I do if I hadn’t been there myself on a pilgrimage in 2007.
Tens of thousands are dead. Now a famine has been declared. Everyone is less safe. The whole region is more unsettled. And on it goes. I find groups are divided over this, families, our own City Council.
After one of our Jewish neighbors was attacked on Pearl Street in early June I gathered with a group of colleagues, and we cried and someone asked us why we hadn’t talked about it. I said, “Because we wanted to stay friends.”
After that day I did start to write the letter with a colleague. It has taken months to get the wording right. Someday it will be a good story. But it’s because it feels almost impossible to talk about, to write about, or speak about, which is partly why it has taken me so long to get it right so that everyone feels seen.
And part of what I want to say is that when people tell us it’s too complicated to understand, (at least in my growing up) that can be a way to dismiss. We don’t always need to understand every part of the history to fully to be a part of talking about what is right.
Among the hardest articles for me to read about what is going on in the Holy Lands are those about the legality. Those essays that say that laws of war only apply in particular situations and in this case, they apply in armed conflict only if it’s an official occupation. Because if it’s officially an occupation, there are legal obligations that include the immediate provision
of food, water, shelter, medical services, and whatever other critical resources are needed. The State of Israel goes out of its way to use the phrase “take control” instead of anything like occupy or occupation. And I have also learned that international humanitarian laws govern only the conduct related to hostilities and is distinct and separate from the law that
governs the decision to use force.
But what if this is one of many situations in this moment where people of conscience must ask stop all of that: is this right? Is what is happening right? And even when it’s risky we need to ask.
Because we can hold the complicated history of a place, we can be a both/and people, we can have relationships across all the chasms, and at the same time, we can ask with clarity ask: is this right? Is this aligned with God and the love God wants for us?
A young man named Justin Scott shared a message on Instagram demanding that we stop confusing the law with truth. He said with passion in a video with now millions of views that when we talk about the word illegal, we cannot think that it ends the debate. He reminded his viewers that the Bible once freed slaves and criminalized their escape in the same breath. So, we cannot just say that something is illegal or legal and leave it at that.
Because the problem is that what is legal and what is right are being presented as the same thing. But they are not. Therefore, it is our job to keep looking for what is true. And you know there is a long list of people who have done this. The list of people who have given themselves to the gap between what is legal and what is right is so long we cannot possibly
recount it here right now, but we are going to say some: Joan of Arc and Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks and Susan B. Anthony and Wangari Maathai and Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi and Malala Yousafzai and wow we could keep going. Do you have some names? Greta Thunberg, John Lewis, Marsha P. Johnson, Jesus…
Today we have this beautiful story where Jesus dares to go against the law to heal on the sabbath. When the group gathered around tells him that what he is doing is wrong, he reminds them that they get their donkey what it needs, so they better get the woman what she needs too. It’s something like a First Century way of asking, I know it’s legal, but is it right? Jesus shows how we are called to respond within oppressive systems, he shows that we still have agency, that we have choices, that our job is to be creative about not participating, how can we opt out? As scholar Rodney Sadler Jr. wrote of this text in the Gospel of Luke, “The control of sabbath practice…represents a convenient way of maintaining an oppressive
system whereby some people are forced to endure perpetual suffering by others who are more concerned with sustaining a system that benefits them than alleviating the burdens of those it cripples.” To know whether something is right, we can ask: is this situation/person/organization more concerned with sustaining what is or alleviating the burdens of those suffering? The spiritual question for us, never starts with legality.
Because as Justin Scott says, the Mexicans became foreign on a land that used to be theirs. While migrant workers are being picked up at beloved restaurants, at immigration hearings, a young person detained on the way to a high school volleyball game, on the way to work at Home Depot, harvesting fruit in the fields, worshiping, a white woman even claimed to
have been pulled over because she had a Mexican flag bumper sticker, so many are putting them on their cars to confuse authorities. Maybe we should all put Mexican bumper stickers on our cars? What is legal right now are quotas. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers are trying to deliver on record level deportation, with the goal of up to 3,000 arrests an every single day, so it is now more a Latino terror campaign. But Justin Smith says that Americans don’t hate the undocumented, not really, because in fact we like our food cheap, our buildings tall, our lawns cut, our meat packed and our economy moving. He says the truth is that we prefer our co-workers invisible. Isn’t that a heartbreaking truth? He said let me
“Interrupt your fiction-the story that this country tells is that we are a nation of laws, but it is a country of illegal loopholes for the rich and cages for the desperate.” This means that some of what is happening isn’t blocking, it’s exposing.
You know Beloved of God, we are all about honesty here and especially in this time, where we need clarity, let us stop confusing the law with truth. Let us stop conflating what is legal with what is right. Let us stop thinking that what is happening is what God intended. It might feel impossible to speak about any of this without friction, but it is time because it is our job to care, our call to make imperfect statements, to live in the messy complications of doing what is right, knowing it is true. Jesus asks us now: What deserves our loyalty? The law or the truth? What is legal or what is right?
Oscar Romero reminded that we as the Church are entrusted with the Earth’s glory, which includes caring for one another. I believe that if we are to get through this with our hearts intact and our cores still solid, we must stop mistaking what human beings have created with what God intended and we cannot right now confuse what is legal, with what is right. We can
keep our grip on the truth, on God’s laws, the overarching power of love.
COMMUNAL REFLECTION
What does it look like for us to join Jesus in prioritizing the care of human beings over maintaining oppressive systems? What does it look like to put God’s laws first?
Beloved of God, let us not confuse what is legal, with what is right. We can do this together. May it be so. Amen.