August 26, 2007
The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 16, Year C)
Isaiah 58:9b-14; Psalm 103:1-8; Hebrews 12:18-29; Luke 13:10-17
At Good Shepherd we are using the Revised Common Lectionary. Come Advent, all Episcopal churches will be using this lectionary to determine which lessons are heard and preached on each week. Some of us have begun a bit early, preparing for what will be. The gospel lessons are, most of them anyway, the same as the ones we have heard for a very long time in the previous lectionary. But today is an exception. For Proper 16 C the gospel lesson gives us this wonderful story of the bent-over woman and how she is healed by Jesus. She didn’t make it into the previous lectionary, though her male counterpart in Chapter 14:1-6 did. Luke was always very careful to give both a male and a female example of each parable or lessons, e.g., the lost sheep and the lost coin, one a man’s story and one a woman’s, even before it was "politically correct." This morning we have evidence that this new series of readings we will be using makes a concerted effort to be inclusive, to tell stories from the viewpoint of all genders, ages, and races. And I think that is something to celebrate.
So this morning I am preaching on the woman without a name, but with a powerful story, for the first time in my almost twenty years of preaching.
I can imagine this unnamed woman, can you? I can envision her stooped over, probably with a homemade cane, a sturdy stick wrapped with cloth at one end to keep her hand from becoming bruised or calloused any more than it already is. I can imagine her walking with great labor into the synagogue to hear the prayers, breathing heavily, sometimes stopping and sighing, the burdens of life getting her down. “Bent over from the weight of life” might be a good description of her, for her every step is an effort, and every encounter even more of one, because in the synagogue her status as a cripple makes her even less of a human than her status as a woman. But still she is there. No expectation, no hope – just there because it is what she does on the Sabbath. She goes to be with the people, her people, even though they don’t want to think of her as one of them.
Truthfully, they don’t really even notice her, like beggars and widows and orphans, all the needy who want more and more of what the respectable ones have earned and have. They just don’t see her. They are blinded, perhaps by the rush to get to worship themselves, by their own troubles, their own weights that cause them to bend. And so here we have an incredible drama unfolding.
A nameless, valueless, woman is part of that drama; the people who gather to worship with her and around her are part of the drama; and, of course, at the center of it all, is Jesus.
Jesus sees her. He sees her, and, even though she does not ask – she would not think to ask – he heals her bent-over body; and she is upright and whole for the first time in as long as anyone, even the woman herself, can remember. Then, perhaps more importantly, he touches her and blesses her.
And she. . .She praises God.
And the people around her condemn Jesus for healing on the Sabbath!
Wow! What a story of human nature!
I would suggest that each of us is, at some point in our lives, all of the people in this story in some way or another. All of us are bent-over with the weight of life, with the weight of conflict or work or loneliness or illness, or fear, or sadness, or depression, or grief. All of us. All of us know the feeling of being on the outside, of not belonging (just as the woman did). And sometimes all of us get so absorbed in our own pain, like the woman, that poor bent-over woman, that we don’t even see Jesus standing right there. We accept that we don’t belong and stay on the fringes, sometimes we even mutter!
And sometimes we are the crowd, worried about the rules. By golly, we follow those rules and everyone else should, too! Especially Jesus, he of all people! So what if he was healing? The Sabbath is for rest and he abused the Sabbath!” Sometimes we get absorbed in the inconsequential details of something that seems important at the time, absorbed in our own pain, absorbed at our frustration with each other, and we forget that before us is a bent over woman besieged by the weariness of living and illness and bad fortune.
And sometimes, a very few times for most of us, sometimes we can emulate Jesus, and we can speak a few words, touch a shoulder or a hand and healing begins, perspectives are changed, and relationships are restored.
Now, of course, in life none of these things happens in the time it takes to relate two sentences in scripture. Reconciliation and healing and the ability to let go of self-righteousness all take time, human time, not God’s time. Fortunately for us “God’s time” is not even two sentences. God forgives immediately! But for us, in human time, to let go of our entrenched bent over-ness or self-righteousness and to follow the one who redeems us all is sometimes a difficult thing to do. Our humanity gets in the way.
How fortuitous that this story is being told this week, today, in fact. For recently the wardens have made me aware that I have in the experience of a few people in this parish been very much like the judgmental worshippers in the story this morning. These few people have perceived me that way. And the wardens tell me I have caused pain for those people. As I reflect on what the wardens have said, and I have reflected almost constantly as I read this lesson, I am sure they are feeling as this poor bent over woman felt that morning at the synagogue. I am so sorry for that. I am not unfeeling nor have these actions of mine been intentional or deliberate, any more than the actions of the critics of Jesus were deliberately aimed at the poor woman who deserved to be healed. But like the worshippers, I did not see. I too was hurting in my own way. And for that I am immeasurably regretful and repentant. Like all of you I want to follow Jesus, do as he instructed, and above all be part of healing and reconciliation. I want to be one who is a part of ending brokenness, not part of the angry masses that point fingers and stand in self-righteousness instead of righteousness. And like all of you, I am, oh so regrettably, human, and I make mistakes. I wish I could do over my mistakes, don’t you? Don’t we all? Like all of us, I am dependent upon the healing, saving, redeeming grace of Christ to overcome that humanity.
So, I will work with the wardens and with an outside mediator to bring about such healing with those very few who are feeling alienated and bent over. But it is my hope that all of us will know the relief of healing and reconciliation.
One of the most difficult things for me to hear was that the people who are feeling pain because of something I said or did, felt they could not come to me directly. It seems to some that I am unapproachable. So they spoke instead with the wardens and others in this parish. I grieve that. And I have thought constantly through this difficult time of another passage, the one from Matthew 5 where Jesus instructed us that when we feel another Christian has wronged us, or there is conflict, that we are to go to them.
We are Christians. We can do this. I am here to serve all of you, and I plan on being here for a good long time. And I want you to be able to come to me no matter what. All of us need to listen to each other, hear each other, and be agents of God’s grace and healing to each other, with each other. We will not always get it right; I will not always get it right. But we can forgive each other and move on because that is what it is to be a Christian, forgiving and moving on. At some point in our lives, all of us are bent, including me, including those in pain, including each person here. And all of us are at some point and in some ways the self-righteous worshippers, me, you, those in pain, and yet what is most profoundly and absolutely true, is that all of us are equally loved and equally capable of being the agents of healing and grace that Jesus calls us to be.
May we at Good Shepherd be known for our healing and reconciling ways. May we, like the formerly bent-over woman, praise God, praise God for the healing Christ brings to our lives together!
Amen.
The Rev. Dr. Gale Davis Morris
Church of the Good Shepherd