Getting the Church to Straighten Up

Transcription

1 George A. Mason 14 th Sunday after Pentecost Wilshire Baptist Church 25 August 2013 Promotion Sunday Dallas, Texas Lk. 13:10-17 Cool down, papa, don t you blow your top. I don t know why the Billy Rose lyrics of that song came to my mind while reading this text. My strange mind, I guess. But let s move in closer and see if you can see the connection. Jesus is teaching in a synagogue on the Sabbath. We aren t told which one. It was probably somewhere in Judea on the way to Jerusalem, but I think Luke wants us to assume it could have been anywhere, including, if you have enough imagination, a church in East Dallas. I say that because the gospel of Luke was written after A.D. 70, when the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, and after Christians were expelled from the synagogues. Luke is using this story to instruct the churches more than to record a Jesus miracle. Luke wants the church of Jesus Christ to straighten up and fly right. He doesn t want us to fall prey to the drama we see in this story. Now at first blush, you might think that straighten up and fly right would apply to the woman who had entered the synagogue just as Jesus was teaching. Luke says she was bent over and could not stand up straight. She d been that way for eighteen years. We don t know the condition exactly, although there is surely some kind of arthritic diagnosis for it today. I remember my friend, the late Jim Lane, getting into this bent-over state in his later years. Jim was one of the kindest gentlemen of our congregation, a sweet man of God and a wonderful evangelist. He was a retired Presbyterian minister whom we re-ordained as a Baptist at his request. He got to the point that he couldn t come and sit in worship or stand to sing the hymns. And how I wanted to have the power of Jesus to cure him on the spot. Jesus had that power and did just that for the bent-over woman. He laid his hands on her, and immediately she straightened up and began praising God. Jesus wants us all to be able to fulfill our created dignity as

2 children of God by standing up straight and raising our voices in praise. This is what the Sabbath is made for. Whenever a human being is so crippled that she can t do that, the whole church is hindered in its praise. After Jesus heals this woman and the leader of the synagogue starts chortling about it, Jesus says she had been bound by Satan all those years. We should say a few words about that. Some people see Satan under every rock and around every corner. They think all illness is the work of Satan. But Satan is not a power up there in the air somewhere like a second divine being only evil instead of good. Satan is a word that means adversary. And the Adversary is at work in the world in individuals and in political, economic and even in social structures to strip human beings of their God-given dignity and to rob them of their voices to praise God. Listen carefully: Satan has only the power that human beings give him, but we give him a lot of power that he should always be denied. And when he gets his way with us, it s only the power of God that can break the chains. Medical science could not be consulted in Jesus day to give an account of this woman s condition, but Jesus wasn t wrong when he said that Satan had bound her for so long. I know you are thinking, Well, duh, I didn t expect you to say that Jesus was wrong about something, George. But it s more important to say that he was right about Satan afflicting this woman. Physical illness often brings with it crushing emotional and spiritual effects. Our spirits can get sick when our bodies get sick. Sometimes our spirits or our minds get sick even when our bodies are otherwise well. And then we may begin to think we are to blame for our illness. Guilt and shame can chip away at our souls. We may feel that we are not worthy to be with the able-bodied or able-minded people in the church, that somehow wellness is a sign of God s favor and illness a sign of God s disfavor. Sometimes abuse also can take such a toll on people that they become convinced they are as bad as the treatment they have received from their abusers. It s not enough to say, Oh, that s silly; people feel the way they do, and our dismissing their inner pain doesn t soothe them. They need 2

3 the power of God to heal them. We had a memorial service for Elaine Greer on Friday. Elaine had Alzheimer s disease and hadn t really known anyone for the past 10 years. She had worked with children in our church for a long time. Her husband, Gene, played in Wilshire Winds and was a great servant of God with Texas Baptists. At the memorial service, one of Elaine s sons read a handwritten testimony by Elaine that he had found among her possessions. She told about being an only child whom her parents always wanted to be perfect. Because she wasn t, they worked all the harder to get her shaped into the image of the child that would honor them with her success. But she came to think of herself as being someone who just couldn t measure up. She withdrew into a shell and had a hard time believing in her worth. When she met Gene Greer, he took one look at her and loved her as a precious gift from God. He taught about God s unconditional love for her that was made known in Jesus Christ. And she said that that was the good news that she had longed for all her life. She was freed by Jesus from the crippling view of herself that had been imposed on her by her parents and that she had internalized herself. She determined to live as a free child of God from that moment on. And I believe that her work with children in the church was in one way an extension of her gratitude and a way of wanting every child to know the healing power of God s love for them. The story is told of a certain man who went through the forest seeking any bird of interest he might find. He caught a young eagle, brought it home, put it among the fowls and ducks and turkeys, and gave it chicken food to eat, even though it was the king of birds. Five years later a naturalist came to see him. After passing through the garden, he said, that bird is an eagle, not a chicken. Yes, said the owner, but I have trained it to be a chicken. It is no longer an eagle. No, said the naturalist, it is an eagle still; it has the heart of an eagle, it has the wingspan of an eagle, and I will help it soar high up in to the heavens. No, said the owner. It is a chicken now and will never fly. 3

4 They agreed to test it. The naturalist picked up the eagle, held it up and said with great intensity, Eagle, thou art an eagle; thou dost belong to the sky and not to this earth; stretch forth thy wings and fly. The eagle turned this way and that, and then looking down, saw the chickens eating their food, and down he jumped. The owner was quick to say, I told you so. The naturalist determined to give it another chance the next day. So the next day he took it to the top of the house and gave the same invocation: Eagle, thou are an eagle and so forth. Same thing. Undaunted, the man tried the next day. [Why does it always take three tries?] He rose early and took the eagle outside the city, away from the houses and to the foot of a high mountain. The sun was just rising, gilding the top to the mountain with gold, and every crag was glistening in the joy of the beautiful morning. He picked up the eagle and said again, Eagle, thou art an eagle; thou dost belong to the sky and not to the earth; stretch forth thy wings and fly. The eagle looked around and trembled as if new life were coming to it. But it did not fly. The naturalist then grabbed its head and made it look straight at the sun. Suddenly it stretched out its wings, and with the screech of an eagle, it flew out of his hands, mounted higher and higher, and never returned. Though it had been kept and tamed as a chicken, it was an eagle. Listen, each and every one of you who has come into this house of God today: You are a human being, and you are meant to stand up and praise God. If you are crippled in any way whether physically, emotionally or spiritually you are welcome here. Christ is here to raise you up and return you to your rightful self. Dennis Smith was telling me about a coworker who had chronic back pain. She went to a chiropractor religiously for relief. One day Dennis was struggling with back pain from moving some equipment. She gave him her chiropractor s card, which contained not only the usual contact information but also this lovely line: Crawl-ins welcome. Not just walk-ins, mind you crawl-ins. We want this to 4

5 be a church where crawl-ins are welcome, too. But we hope over time that you will be able to walk out after you ve crawled in, because of the healing touch of Jesus. It turns out that the leader of the synagogue was really the one who needed to straighten up and fly right. He was crippled, too. His spirit was crippled by a legalism that drained the life and joy out of the community of faith. He was so religiously scrupulous that he was no spiritual good. A critical spirit like that robs the church of its joy and keeps others bent over in fear that they will do the wrong thing at any moment. I have seen it many times often in the most upright people. It reminds me of the line from Mark Twain: He s a good man in the worst sense of the word. The ruler was technically right but spiritually wrong. Healing was work, and work was not to be done on the Sabbath. But Jesus rightly pointed out that there were always provisions made for the well-being of animals. And if for animals, how much more for people? rule you. Rules are meant to lead to life, and when they suck the life out of relationships, they have to be challenged. Jesus did that. Notice that Luke is talking about how Jesus did this and that, but when Jesus answers the ruler of the synagogue, Luke says, But the Lord answered him and said, You hypocrites! God won t have rules put before people. And what s beautiful is that the people know it. When the woman is left standing erect after the man tries to shame her, the man and his ruling cronies are put to shame, and the people rejoice. I said that this straighten up and fly right had to do with the church. It s interesting that the Greek word Luke uses for Jesus raising the woman up is the same word used for the rebuilding of a house. When Jesus straightens up the people of God, the church is raised up and is able to praise God with full voice. And all God s people should stand up right now and say, Praise the Lord. Compassion trumps rules. You have to be careful not to let rules 5