Luke 13:10-17: 10 Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath. 11 And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. 12 When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” 13 When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God. 14 But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the Sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the Sabbath day.” 15 But the Lord answered him and said, “You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? 16 And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the Sabbath day?” 17 When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame; and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing.
It
truly is great to be here this morning, able to offer a word in the middle of a
pretty busy time of year for our community.
When Robyn and I talked about stepping in one Sunday while Mark was on
sabbatical, I jumped at the chance. Then
about two weeks ago I realized that I had acted without really thinking it
through. This week, the very newly hired
Learning Center staff has been participating in Curriculum Boot Camp, as our amazing
trainer Bev Briggs has suggested we call it.
With three full days of training this week and two more to come next
week, we are right in the heart of it. At
the same time, this is the time to ramp up for the school year all our Children
and Youth programs, like Sunday School, Youth Groups, Confirmation and so on
which slow down a little in the summer.
It
really is a busy moment for many of the “lower level” staff and volunteers,
myself included. So how appropriate is
it that in the midst of my leap to say yes first and think about my schedule
later, that same action-first message is at the heart of our gospel text
too. This text gives us a glimpse at how
Jesus’ swift action to heal comes before any concern over breaking rules, or before
the leaders had the opportunity to tell him no, and even before the woman asks for
healing. This seems like a moment of act
first, ask forgiveness later. Or… in
this case, act first, call-the-authority-on-the-carpet for standing in the way
of someone suffering, later. Not really
the same as my analogy, but that’s Jesus for you. The wonderful radical, revolutionary, active
Jesus we see in this text and so many others.
The Jesus who says, I see injustice in this life and I am willing to do
something about it, will you join me?
In our text this morning, we are dropped into the middle
of Jesus’ teaching in the synagogue, without giving us the context of his
teaching. We don’t know if his teaching
had anything to do with healing, or rules, or even if the leader of the
synagogue was agreeing or disagreeing with his teaching before the interruption. Instead, we are presented only with a real
“teachable moment.” I’m guessing you
have heard the phrase before, a moment in our lives when the lesson plan goes
out the window and instead, we use what is happening in our environment to
teach a better lesson than we had planned.
In the midst of his teaching in the synagogue on that unknown topic,
Jesus finds a woman in need present
with him, and quickly switches from the
teaching to the reality in front of him, which might be more meaningful
than the teaching in progress.
I’ve had many of those moments in my life. In fact, much of my lesson planning is often reactive
teaching to what is going on in the lives of my group. When teaching confirmation last year, I tried
to use the youth’s lives, school activities, or emotions to help connect with
the text we were studying that day.
Sometimes, that is easier said than done, and sometimes, it can be real
gold.
This
summer, I attended Confirmation Camp with four of our confirmands in July. While I’ve been to Lutherwood before for
weekend retreats with the youth, this was the first week I have spent at camp with them. I grew up attending camp as a youth, so the pattern
and schedule of camp came pretty easy to me.
But what was new was that I wasn’t a counselor or staff for the first
time in my life. I was sleeping in a
cabin with only adults, few responsibilities and had hours of preparation time
each day. Being a guest at camp was
new. But each morning, I had about three
hours of concentrated time with my St. Andrew crew to discuss our own
curriculum based on the 5 core care values, to talk about our own issues, and connect
that to the Lutherwood curriculum of the week.
What
a gift to be able to take these few who knew each other well, and ask them to go
even deeper in their relationship building.
Each day, in the middle of our time together, everyone at the camp
attended worship up in the woods, and then would return to our separate
sessions. One day, after talking about
Sin and Forgiveness in worship, I took the girls on a hike while we discussed
our morning session and the worship focus.
I had a destination in mind, but had never actually gone there myself. Neither they, nor I knew exactly where we
were going. We just went. I feel pretty confident in my directional
sense, and knew it couldn’t be too far, so I knew we wouldn’t get lost. Don’t worry parents, I promise we were safe!
But
as we hiked out in this beautiful forest, up a pretty steep hill, I posed
questions to the girls, like where does racism and sexism play into sin? Have you ever experienced sexism? What relationship is there between Community
Care and sexism? Their answers floored
me, and the group’s ability to listen to one person’s answer, and then relate their
experience was a gift to the conversation.
“Yeah I saw that too!” “I’ve had
that happen to me too” And all the while we kept hiking, talking about the
forest in the middle of the conversation and spiraling upward higher until the
sounds of the other campers couldn’t be heard any more and we reached the
highest point, Mountain Village. There
we stopped, sat and looked down at the world below us. At the end of our conversation, at the end of
our hike, we were presented with this wonderful gift of God’s Creation right in
front of our eyes. Better than any
lesson plan I could have come up with staying at our normal spot in the field in
the field and asking my prepared questions, or reading more sections of the
psalm we had been studying, the girls and I participated in an act of gratitude
for our surrounding environment and went deeper into our conversation because
we let our expectations disappear. We
didn’t even have to look at each other when someone said something more personal. And in that known AND anonymous state, more
could be shared. We concluded our
session with prayer and headed back down the hill to camp and lunch. I can’t say if that hike meant as much to the
girls, but to me, it was a real teachable moment, and required that I be
intentional about making space for the girls to express their reality to each
other in a safe space, while creating enough DIS-comfort for the conversation
to be real and valuable.
This
too is what Jesus has done here in this text.
By creating discomfort in the leader by healing on the Sabbath, by calling
into question what is considered work, and who is valuable enough to receive
the gift of new life, Jesus is intentional about creating a certain amount of
dis-comfort. It is interesting to note
that the woman has not asked for healing.
The text only says “When Jesus saw her, he called over and said, ‘Woman,
you are set free from your ailment.” Freedom and healing are intertwined here
with rules and illness. And it is the human touch that frees her, and us, in
our places of pain. The woman is the
recipient of the free un-earned gift of healing and her story gives us another
insight into the grace we are given so freely, so openly by living as a grace
loving Christian.
As
in much of the healing stories in the Gospels, it is touch that heals, and
there are many reasons for this.
Physically, touch can trigger a decrease in stress, or pain, and
mentally, touch also puts us immediately into an awareness of community, an
important aspect to any of Jesus’ moments of healing. His work here and in many other moments of
healing echoes what we heard in the Isaiah passage this morning, repairing and
restoring the afflicted to community.
And Jesus does the work of restoration in the most personal way
possible, touch. Many studies point to the ability for massage, and a gentle
warm touch to lower blood pressure and decrease stress in people of all ages,
including newborn babies. I am reminded
how necessary it is for our development as infants to touch real living
skin. And yet, something so necessary
for our health can be laden with so many layers of pain and suffering. How many of you can think of times when all
you really needed was a hug to break the mental barriers you were holding
up?
The
text doesn’t tell us anything about the woman’s life before she literally appears in front of Jesus, if she is isolated in her life, if she is crippled by a
life of service, an injury or genetics.
But we can see evidence of her isolation in the simplicity of her
story. She has no one who has come with
her, nor is she requesting the miracle.
She might even have made peace with her ailment, and her lack of
community. We might not know where she
comes from, or where she goes to, but we know that her life has been given new
freedom and in that, she offers praise!
But
the story doesn’t end there. Her
newfound comfort and relief is also the specific means of creating discomfort for the leader.
“There
are six days… come on those days and be cured.”
What a rebuke to the crowd! It is
no wonder the crowd ends rejoicing in all the wonderful things Jesus is doing
while the leader is shamed. This statement
is a slap in the face of the woman who did not ask for the gift, not even spoken
to her, but rather generalized toward everyone gathered. It is much like the leader is turning to the
crowd and saying “Don’t get any ideas people!
This was wrong and I know the rules better than
you.” Given that tone, I know I stand
with the crowd, rejoicing in Jesus’ rebuke to the hypocritical leader. Yeah! That’s right! Take him down! Take that hypocrite! Ha!
And
isn’t it interesting that two weeks in a row we are confronted with hypocrisy
in the lectionary readings. I can’t help
but be a little grateful that Robyn preached last week on the text calling the crowd,
all people, all of US, out on our hypocrisy, while I just have to work anger
toward with hypocritical authorities, something we might all be able to relate
to. But there is something odd about the
pattern of those parallel stories of hypocrisy, and seem almost backward. If I were creating a lesson on this, I might
turn them around. We can all get behind
calling someone else a hypocrite, placing blame outside ourselves. Then from that stage, confront our own areas
of hypocrisy, calling the blame into question as well. But here, we confront first our own issues,
and then move back to looking at the world.
As I worked with these texts in this order, I have had to question even more
my own hypocrisy, which provides me the freedom to have compassion for the
leader I might not have otherwise felt.
It
is uncomfortable, however, to see the stories in this order. It breaks with what we might see as the
correct order for teaching and provides us with another avenue with which to
see the integrated moments of grace at work here for all in the text. It is inevitable
to be uncomfortable when trying something new.
Much like a baby learning to walk, there will be bumps and bruises along
the way. Very few of us think the steps
through long enough to just stand up and walk -right off the bat. It is the same in stories like today’s which challenge
our mental assumptions. The discomfort
we feel is indicative of a need to push
into the discomfort to better understand what it is that is making it hard
to find a comfortable and simple solution to the situation. Maybe there isn’t a comfortable answer, and
that reality is incredibly important to listen to. It means something is really going on here.
In
the text from Isaiah, we are told, that if you “satisfy the needs of the
afflicted, your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the
noonday.” But Jesus certainly does not
feel the darkness rise, and is instead shot down when satisfying the needs of
the afflicted. He is the restorer of
life, and yet is confronted with confusion, discomfort and the continued need
to call out hypocrisy. But maybe that
just means the story isn’t over yet. This
story is told in community, about community, and about leadership as a vocation
of stewardship in the community. This
leader has been entrusted with the gift of a rich religious tradition, and yet
does not use that tradition to bring “light to the world” through the
interpretation of that tradition.
Instead, he just attempts to contain order. What is the harm that will be done to the
tradition by healing on this day if it is equivalent to untying the donkey,
giving water to the ox, or maybe feeding the dog? It could be that the leader is reacting out
of a fear that if people would come on this day to receive, his job would be
harder, that he would end up feeling overwhelmed and working overtime.
And
I can certainly understand the need to maintain boundaries around your time so maybe
he is just holding onto the rules because he doesn’t know what else to hold onto. But is that the message of Isaiah? Is that the voice of the Hebrew
Prophets? There is much more to the law
side of the tradition than just keeping rules.
The God we can glimpse in Jesus is more concerned with justice than boundaries, and is
more uncontrolled and intimate than the rules might allow. This is God who breaks down to rebuild, whose
actions speak louder than words, who teaches that LOVE will always trump order and
restriction. By worshipping the God of
divine abundance, WE can live into a life of abundance, a life of freely given
unearned gifts, of grace.
Together
we worship a rule breaking God. Who, Isaiah
foretells will “guide you continually, and satisfy your needs in parched
places…”
We
worship the God who Luke presents here questioning a generic set of rules that
merely maintain order, who sets us free from the bondage of pain and suffering
and invites us into the life of grace available to us here.
How
can we go out today, listening for the call to break boundaries and guide the
un-named sources of pain in our lives toward freedom and praise? A life of healing touch and community
conversation, A life of grace.
