Getting Straightened Up at Church

Transcription

1 George A. Mason 14 th Sunday after Pentecost Wilshire Baptist Church 21 August 2016 Blessing of the Backpacks Sunday Dallas, Texas Getting Straightened Up at Church Luke 13:10-17 If only Jesus would have stuck to teaching. Everybody loves a good teacher. It s when that teaching goes to healing that it disrupts the fellowship and things get tense. Like the story Luke tells of Jesus teaching in some synagogue, when some bent-over woman catches his eye, and then some man who was the leader of the synagogue starts fuming because Jesus should have known better than to do things the way he did when there would have been a better time or place to have done it if it really needed doing at all. Oh, my, do we understand why Luke doesn t name these people? He names people in other stories. He names all the key players in the birth narrative we have Mary and Joseph, Elizabeth and Zechariah, the Angel Gabriel, and so on. The two sisters from Bethany namely, Mary and Martha. The tax collector who was the wee little man, Zacchaeus. But here we have a powerful story of all unnamed people. I wonder why. I wonder whether Luke just wants us to crawl into this story and find ourselves in it, name ourselves our church even. Just wondering. He also doesn t tell us why this woman in the synagogue that day was so bent over. He says she couldn t stand up straight for 18 years. She was so bowed from the waist that she looked like a walking jackknife. After our children s moment this morning, I got to thinking it might have been a condition of backpackitis. I live across the street from an elementary school. I see kids getting out of their parents cars every school day, and they hoist their heavy backpacks filled with books and other burdens. I sometimes worry that they ll fall over backwards, except for the forward lean they use to balance their march to school. After 18 years of bent-over walking like that, maybe they won t ever be able to straighten up again. What do you think? Be careful, kids. To everyone else s eye, this woman suffered from a physical ailment. She was so bent over that she probably leaned on a cane and would

2 have gotten used to talking to your knees. Today we might call it ankylosing spondylitis a condition that causes people to be locked in a bent-over position. I ve seen people who suffered from this in their later years. I always think, why can t some doctor do something about that? Then it occurs to me: I m a doctor. When my kids were little and their friends found out that their daddy was a doctor, they were often quick to clarify: yes, he s a doctor, but not the kind that can do you any good. But that s usually because we think of illness mostly in physical terms. Luke was himself a physician, and he tells us that this woman had been crippled by a spirit for 18 years. Now that may conjure up some scary movie about demonic possession that makes you spill your popcorn in your lap just thinking about it. But even now, when we talk about people who suffer emotional or psychological trouble, we say things like, she struggles with personal demons. And those demons can become squatters in your life that make themselves at home without your permission. They become hard to live with. They reside in your head or heart, and you can feel powerless over them: helpless, hopeless. But here is the Great Physician, Jesus himself, untrained in the medical sciences but with a keen eye for what ails people from the inside out. Something spiritual is crippling her more than something physical. Even that has a medical name now: conversion disorder. In other words, sometimes something we have done, or something that was done to us, or something that just is us and we have a hard time accepting it, becomes so paralyzing that it affects us physically. I know a woman who has a hard time looking any man in the eyes because of what one man did to her against her will let s just say 18 years ago. I wonder about that woman in Luke s story. What happened to her? Truth to tell, lots of us in this room today know how this woman might have felt. Let s do an experiment, shall we? Are you up for this? All right, now let s see whether we can imagine how this woman felt when she went into let s just say church that day. Stand up if you are able. Good. Now bend over at the waist. Go ahead. Now hold that position. How does it feel? Vulnerable? Humiliating? Painful? 2

3 Now, let s say that a spirit has you in that position. Mostly I m thinking of a spirit inside you that makes you feel like you are bent over all the time. What is it? Are you bent over inside because of some memory that brings you shame and you don t know how to look people in the eye because you feel dirty or unworthy? Have you done something you can t forgive yourself for? Is anger just tearing you up on the inside? Are you depressed for reasons you don t understand? Have you just wanted to be some definition of normal all your life and you don t know how to deal with your difference? What is your bentness about? All right now, before you sit down, I want you to imagine that Jesus is here right now. He is. He sees you as you are from the inside. He sees the spirit of infirmity that keeps you crippled. Now listen: Woman, man, you are free from your ailment. Boom. Mic drop. Did you hear that? You are free. Now feel his hands on your back, straightening you up. Straighten up right now. There. Beautiful. How do you feel? Listen, this is no parlor trick. And, no, we re not going to pass the plate again. This is the good news. God does not want you to be knotted up with guilt, bent over in shame, torn up with worry or fear about who you are in the eyes of heaven. Jesus is the liberator of all things that bind us and keep us from knowing that we are children of promise. That s why when Jesus had to deal with the synagogue leader about this. He reminded the man that this woman was a daughter of Abraham. That means she is a child of promise. And so are you. Don t let anyone tell you any different. When Jesus finishes telling you the truth about yourself, you are free. Now don t start bending back over again to any evil spirits. Stand up in the sanctuary. Throw your heads back in gratitude. And praise God from this point on. Of course there s more to this story. Action and reaction. It s Newton s third law of motion: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. We didn t need a genius physicist to tell us, if we were just paying attention to life. Here we see it again. Jesus sees someone in need of healing on the Sabbath day. He has compassion on the person, and he heals her. Immediately the guardians of all things religiously proper throw a fit. In this case it s the leader of the 3

4 synagogue. He knows the Law of Moses, and the law of the Medes and Persians, and I wouldn t be surprised if he hadn t memorized Robert s Rules of Order, too, don t you know?! He is right in everything he says. And he is wrong in the most important way. He never takes time to take in what it might mean to this woman to feel like a full and dignified daughter of Abraham again. He doesn t run right up to her and sing harmony in her hallelujah chorus. He won t let himself cry tears of joy for one who is able to hold her head high now among the people of God. He goes straight into fixing blame and finding fault not, mind you, with what was done, but instead it was all about how and when and why. Sigh. What Luke wants us to see, I think, is that while the woman needed straightening up, the man needed straightening out. The woman needed less humiliation; the man needed more humility. Let s look at the man s argument. Work is forbidden on the Sabbath day, according to the law. Healing is work. Therefore Jesus is guilty of working on the Sabbath. He is sinning, in other words. And, maybe what s worse, he is messing with the orderly rules of the community that the leader is sworn to watch over. But before we get to what Jesus says, please note that the man doesn t actually accuse Jesus himself; he blames the woman for putting herself in the position to be healed on the Sabbath. Here we go again it s as old as the Bible and older: always blame the woman. Can we just stop that now, people? I mean, really, once and for all. Jesus reminds the man that the law may be strict but that accommodations are made for reasons of mercy. For example, feeding your animals on the Sabbath is work, but you get excused for that. And aren t people more precious than pets? Apparently not to all of us. Jesus is telling the church where to focus. People. The focus is people, people! We are to be a healing community that seeks the full dignity of every child of God, every son and daughter of Abraham in our midst. Compassion is the hallmark of a spiritual community that invokes the name of the All Merciful God of Jesus Christ. We can be so right sometimes that we re wrong. We ve 4

5 got to straighten out our hearts so that people can straighten up and claim their places of honor. The 1958 book The Ugly American tells the story of an American engineer, Homer Atkins a man with an ugly face who was sent to the fictional Southeast Asian country of Sarkhan to build dams and roads for the military. Atkins refused to build the dams and roads until the military first solved some of the everyday problems of the people. At the suggestion of his wife, Emma, he designed a bicycle treadmill pump to get water up to the hillside paddies on which the people depended for food. For centuries this water had been laboriously carried by pails. Emma was also curious about the fact that every woman over sixty had a bent back. Then she noticed that after the monsoon season, the sweeping of debris from the streets was done by older people who used brooms with short handles. Since wood for longer handles cost too much and was in short supply, Emma found a long-stalked reed and planted shoots from this reed by her door. She tended these reeds carefully. One day, when neighbors were in her house, she cut a tall reed, bound coconut fronds to it and began to sweep with her back straight. When the people questioned her concerning the reed, she told them where they could find them growing. Four years later, when Emma and Homer were back in Pittsburgh, they received a letter of thanks from an elder of the village. The letter read: In the village of Chang Dong today, the backs of our old people are straight and firm. No longer are their bodies painful and bent. You will be pleased to know that on the outskirts of the village we have constructed a small shrine in your memory... at the foot are these words: 'In memory of the woman who unbent the backs of our people. 1 Would that they could say about Wilshire someday that because of our acts of compassion, the backs and the souls of many people have been unbent