Sermon of August 23, 1998

Transcription

1 Sermon of August 23, 1998 Rev. Mark Trotter First United Methodist Church of San Diego (619) Fax (619) Galatians 3:23-29 Luke 13:10-17 "NOW STAND UP STRAIGHT" Some of you give me books that you would like me to read, which I am very happy to do. It usually takes me some time to get to them, so sometimes I save them to take on planes with me. If it is near the summertime, I save them to take with me on my summer vacation. Sometimes, I am embarrassed to confess, by the time I get around to reading the book, I can't remember who it was who gave it to me. That has happened with enough frequency lately that I have thought of putting a table out on the patio, pile all these books on top, and put up a sign up that says, "Come and get them." But since the number of books I can't return roughly equals the number of books that have never been returned to me, I figured there was some sort of natural law at work here, some invisible hand that was meting out justice. 1/7

2 One of the books that I read last week on my vacation was, Turning Toward Home, by Joyce Hollyday. If you loaned it to me, I want to tell you that it is available now in the office for you to pick up. I hope you will let me know who you are, because I want to thank you. It was a very interesting book. It is a story of Joyce Hollyday's religious pilgrimage from a childhood of innocence and protection in Hershey, Pennsylvania, the "Chocolate City," to the Sojourners Community in the slums of Washington, D. C. The Sojourners Community is a group of people who intentionally live a Christian life in the midst of poor neighborhoods. They do that as Christians to identify with the poor, following our Lord's example. Jim Wallis, the founder of Sojourners Community and magazine, preached from this pulpit earlier this year in February. Some of you will remember that. Hollyday talks about some of the poor families that she worked with as a member of the Sojourners Community. One in particular consisted of three generations of women, all of whom, in early adolescence, were either raped or molested by men. All of them had babies while they were in their teens. All of them were continually the victims of violence by men. That is a sordid and pathetic story, the details of which I am not going to share with you. But suffice it say that these women were trapped, not only in the cycles of sexual and physical abuse, they were trapped in poverty, with no real chance of escape from it. They all had these wonderful hopes. It is almost pathetic to hear them talk about the dreams they had for their lives as young girls, because their heroic efforts to achieve those dreams were always defeated, either by circumstances outside of them that they could not control, or by their own defeated spirits. Almost all of them believed that the situation that they lived in was what they deserved. They deserved nothing greater than the life that they were living now. Lest you think that the situation that she described is an isolated phenomenon among the poor in our cities, she reported that unilateral violence done by men to women is the fastest growing category of crime in the nation. In fact, we live in a world in which violence to women is traditional and universal, as she pointed out, growing to epidemic proportions with a rape occurring every eight minutes in this country. According to the FBI, one out of every two women is beaten at some point during her marriage. To bring the point even closer to home, she wrote about a group of women in the Sojourners Community who got together for support. They were all middle class, educated women. So it is not just a phenomenon of the poor, or a certain class of people. Every woman in the group confirmed that she had at some time been the object of unwanted advances by professors in college, or by colleagues in the workplace. Two of them had experienced rape, one of them incest. She names the rise of pornography in our time as another instance of violence to women. The rise of pornography in the last fifteen or twenty years has been phenomenal. It outsells everything now in our culture. She said, "If violence is the threat to women in our society, pornography is its propaganda." She pointed out that the nature of pornography is power. It is power of men over women, humiliation of women by men. She quoted the publisher of five socalled men's magazines, who said, "Men don't want to be equal. It is as simple as that." 2/7

3 It is a terrible fact, this irony. If pornography is the propaganda of violence to women, then religion is its ally. Every religion in the world has advocated male superiority. Every religion in the world has been used to justify what can only be described as abusive behavior toward women. The Bible, itself, has been interpreted to say that women, by order of creation, are subordinate to men. The Garden of Eden story in Genesis 3, has been interpreted to say that woman are temptresses by nature, and that they are incapable of moral decision making. I was reading all of that on my vacation, these unpleasant facts about our society today, things that we would just as soon sweep under the rug. In fact, we have swept them under the rug. The fishing was lousy. The reading was depressing. I said to Jean, "Let's go home." Then I started working on this sermon. The text for this morning is the story of the bent-over woman from the 13th chapter of the Gospel of Luke, the woman that Jesus healed on the sabbath. I saw it now in a new light. I realized, this story is an emancipation proclamation. I had always read it as a story against sabbath laws. The fourth commandment says, "You shall remember the sabbath day and keep it holy." Jesus healed the woman on the sabbath. The religious leaders objected. They said, "You have broken the sabbath law." Jesus says back to them, "You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his ass from the manger and lead it away to water it? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the sabbath day." The amazing thing about this passage is that he doesn't argue the sabbath laws here. In other instances he will do that. His disciples walk through a field of grain. They pick the grain on the sabbath day. That is considered breaking the sabbath. He is criticized by the scribes and Pharisees. Jesus will then argue the sabbath law. He will say to them, "The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath." But not here. He doesn't say that here. Instead, he argues the tenth commandment, "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thy neighbor's wife, thy neighbor's manservant, thy neighbor's maidservant. Thou shalt not covet his ox, or his ass, or anything that is your neighbor's property." Here he says to the Pharisees, "You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his ass from the manger, and lead it away to water it." It is an unmistakable reference to the tenth commandment. According to the tenth commandment, woman are the property of men. "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's property." Women, according to the priority scale in the tenth commandment, are above the servants and the animals, but below the house. So when Jesus says, "You will water your ox or your ass on the sabbath, but not heal a woman," he says there is something terribly wrong with this society. When he heals her, he is saying to her, you are not property, you are a child of God. And when he said, "You are a daughter of Abraham," he was saying, you are equal to men. Men were the "sons of Abraham." That is, men were the members of the covenant. God entered a covenant of grace with Abraham. Men, therefore, were the recipients of this grace, this goodness of life given to them as a gift by God. "You are a daughter of Abraham." He is saying, you are equal with men and entitled to all the grace and goodness of this life. I tell you, this passage is not about sabbath laws. This passage is about emancipation. "Jesus came upon a woman who had been bent over for eighteen years." Do you know what I saw 3/7

4 when I read that? I saw those women in Washington, D. C., who are bent over with the burden of poverty, the burden of violence, bent over with the burden of discrimination. "For eighteen years she had been bent over. And when Jesus saw her, he called her and said to her, `Woman, you are free.' And he laid his hands upon her, and immediately she stood up straight." Which means immediately, when Jesus touched her life, she stood tall, she gained dignity, she became a woman of worth, freed from all these burdens that had tied her down. This is no sabbath story. This is an emancipation story. All these stories of Jesus' encounters with people are there to give us illustrations of what it means to encounter Jesus. If you are a woman, therefore, bent over because of abuse and discrimination from the outside, or if you are bent over because of feelings of inferiority and insecurity about yourself from the inside, to have Jesus touch your life will mean you can stand straight, and tall, and move with strength and dignity through this life. Emily Dickinson wrote a wonderful poem: We never know how high we are Till we are asked to rise. And then if we are true to plan Our statures reach the skies. Jesus asked us, everyone of us, to rise, to stand up. This story is about a bent-over woman, and is particularly appropriate for women who are the victims of abuse. But Jesus had the same effect on everyone who felt that they were not who they were created to be. A number of them were women, especially in the Gospel of Luke. Jesus is always associating with women, raising them to dignity. But there are also others, who because of who they were, or because of what had happened to them, or because of what they had done in the past, who were categorized and labeled, marginalized, ostracized, demonized. And Jesus went to every one of them, women and men, and he touched them, and they stood up straight. Look at the epistle lesson for this morning, from the letter to the Galatians. It gives us an insight into how the early Church organized itself. The passage read to us, in fact, is an announcement of a new way of living in this world because of what Jesus Christ has done for us. It is an emancipation proclamation in itself. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. Therefore, there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. In the first century, in that society, foreigners, slaves and women were all less, all subordinate, were all inferior, were all, in fact, considered to be contaminated. They had to go through rituals of purification before they could associate with the "righteous." Society treated them as inferior. As a result, they thought of themselves as being that way. And they acted that way in their lives. Until Jesus touched them. And they changed, and stood tall. "You never know how high you are, till you are asked to rise." 4/7

5 The Galatians passage indicates that the Church was to continue the same mission that Jesus started. So the way Jesus touches a woman bent over in our time is through the hands and the words of those who are followers of Jesus. I remember reading about the Christian mission to lepers in India, started by Paul Brand. He said of all the things that they were able to do for the patients, all the medical science, the wonderful drugs that they were able to give them to stop the disease from spreading, the one thing that the patients said meant the most to them was when they first came to the hospital and the staff reached out their hands and touched them. They actually touched them. That was it. They could stop the spread of disease with drugs. That is called "cure." But they also brought back a sense of humanity, a sense of dignity, a sense of worth and respect as a child of God, just by touching those who had been told by society, you are untouchable. And that is called "healing." You can't cure everything, but you can heal everyone. You can make whole. That is what healing means. That is what salvation means. It means to restore life, to be made whole again. You can't cure everything, but you can heal everyone. It happens all the time. Rodney King, the video of him being beaten in Los Angeles, has become one of the images that is emblazoned upon the history of the 20th century, pictures of him bent over, receiving those blows. After the riots in Los Angeles that resulted because of that beating, he was invited by Chip Murray, the pastor of the AME Church in Los Angeles, to come and speak to a gathering of about 3,000 young people, most of them members of gangs. It was sort of a gang summit. Chip Murray invited Rodney King to address them. King hesitated. He said, "I can't speak to this large group of people. I just can't do it. I don't know what to say." Murray said, "Just say what God gives you to say." King stood there in front of the crowd for maybe thirty seconds. Then he said, "Will you love me?" He told of the abuse he had received as a child. Nobody had every told him, I love you. He asked this crowd of young people, "Will you love me?" God so loved the world he sent his Son. The Son sent his disciples into the world to touch those who are bent over, so that they will stand up straight. One of the most gratifying and also the most humbling experiences that a pastor can have is to receive a testimony from somebody who has been healed in the Church. Most of the time they can't pinpoint when it happened, or how it happened. It has happened in this church many times. Just being a part of this community has touched so many people and made a difference in their lives. Their lives have been changed by you reaching out and touching them. Incidentally, very often they leave after that, because the Spirit is now taking them along a new path. They even change vocations. One such person wrote me after she left and recorded her experience in a poem, and gave it to me. I feel as though I live in a plastic bubble. It surrounds me, but it cannot be seen. I see everyone around me, I hear them speak. Behind their words, they hide from me. They look at me and think they know me. But they don't see my bubble, they don't look long enough to see it. I try to talk with them, to share myself, but my 5/7

6 words return, unlistened to. And nobody hears. I move through the days insulated in my protective bubble. I reach out to ones that I love, but they don't notice. They don't feel my need. When I extend my hand, no one takes it. Heavy hearted, I withdraw it, vowing never to offer it again. I call to those around, I beg, "Please, help me. Please touch me. Please love me." And nobody hears. Though not made of plastic my bubble is real. It is comprised of many things. The sting of harsh words, spoken thoughtlessly. The heartache of love unrequited. The disappointment of a trust broken. The guilt of mistakes past. The terror of, again, being rejected. These things envelop me, isolate me; in my torment I scream, but it is silent. And nobody hears. I sought escape from my invisible prison. I looked for someone, some person who would see my bubble and free me of it. I searched for years, to naught. And then, when all seemed hopeless, I turned my eyes in a new direction. There he stood, arms outstretched, beckoning me. He spoke to me. He touched me. Then I understood what I should have always known. Through all the empty years and broken dreams, I never had been alone. He was always there, just waiting for me to call. I closed my eyes and whispered, "God, please help me. Please touch me. Please love me." And he heard. "Jesus came upon a woman bent over for eighteen years, and he touched her. And she stood up straight." Help us to be masters of ourselves, that we might be servants of others, through Christ our Lord. Amen. Click here to send your comments via to Rev. Mark Trotter. If you find these sermons of benefit, please let us know. Printed or audio tape copies of all sermons are available by subscription. Your is welcome. Your browser must support mailto. Click here to send to the church staff. NEWS * SERMON * MUSIC * KIDS * YOUTH * COUNSELING * MAIL * HOME 6/7

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