Psalm 71:1-6 Rescue me!
Jeremiah 1:4-10 I will deliver you.
Luke 13:10-17 Set free from this bondage
I.
We cannot know for sure what caused the woman to spend eighteen years of her life bent over. Presumably, she had some physical ailment, some spirit as folks in her time understood such things. To make matters worse, she bore the stigma of shame in her neighbors’ eyes. There must be something deficient about this woman’s character or background that causes her to be so cursed, they thought.
So the bent over woman bore a double burden. She was physically impaired to the point that she spent most of her life going about looking at the ground. And, as if that weren’t enough, she also carried the burden of being misunderstood. Then, to make matters even worse, as a woman, she already was treated as second class in her patriarchal society.
It’s hard to walk bent over. Ever since an experience at a conference many years ago, I have thought about the possibilities for her posture. My assumption is that she had carried heavy burdens for a long time- hauling large jugs of water from a distant well to her sustain her family. Or large loads of produce to the village market to sell to add to the family income.
At a pastor’s conference, I was asked by a colleague to help with a dramatic reenactment of this story. I was selected to be the one who was to carry a heavy burden, in this case, a lighter colleague, on my back. This to dramatize the idea that we are to help another who is in need.
So, in front of some 500 colleagues, I found myself attempting to carry on my back an admittedly fairly light female colleague. It was embarrassing. In spite of her small stature, her weight began to hurt my back in just a few seconds. By the time in the skit in which I was released from carrying her, my back ached so badly that I felt like walking bent over to ease the pain!
Jesus instantly experiences the bent over woman’s pain- her physical ache as well as her emotional sorrow at her society’s treatment of her. He knew how she yearned to be free of her ailment and to stand tall among her peers. He understood that living life looking mostly at the ground- viewing the road ahead only with the greatest difficulty- can be limiting at best. We need to see the horizon, appreciate the sunrise and the sunset, the mountain vistas and ocean’s farthest waves, to know God’s hopes and dreams for us.
He touches her, she is healed in an instant, stands tall and grateful as she gazes fully into her future writ large on his strongly kind face. Delivered from illness to health, from limited possibilities into the limitless eternity of God’s future. Now, she is a daughter of Abraham (vs. 16), just like the tax collector, Zachaeus, (Luke 19:9), considered sinful by his society but accepted by Jesus as a son of Abraham, worthy of a new start. Students of this text feel that by this healing, Jesus signals the equal status of woman in God’s realm- a revolutionary idea for Jesus’ day and still so for some in ours’.
II.
As the saying goes, no good deed goes unpunished. Temple leaders are less impressed with the healing and all that it might stand for then they are that in the act, Jesus seems to be violating one of the Ten Commandments, (Ex. 20:9-10) that no work should be done on the Sabbath. But Jesus reasons from the lesser to the greater. Why is it that you temple leaders untie your animals and lead them to water on the Sabbath but fault me for unbinding this human being from her burden? In appropriately shaming them, Jesus once more preaches that the law was made for humans, not the other way around! God intends that we are to be set free from all that hinders us from fulfilling holy orders!
Our entire Bible is a liberation story. Jeremiah quickly learns that God’s call to him to be prophet of Israel means that he will be delivered (Jer. 1:8) from all dangers. The aged psalmist (Ps. 71) is convinced from long years of living that God will rescue him from all ultimate dangers. The Israelites are freed from Egyptian bondage; and freed again and again from exile and persecution at the hands of their enemies. Freedom is at the very heart of the Judeo-Christian story. Even in baptism, we pray for the child or the adult to be given the strength to resist oppression and evil (UCC Book of Worship). In our UCC Statement of Faith, we affirm that we will be freed from aimlessness and sin.
III.
But what are we freed for? We know how easy it is to slip into selfish, self-destructive ways. John M. Buchanan, Senior Pastor of Chicago’s mighty Fourth Presbyterian Church, answers this way-
The first two words most babies learn to speak consistently are no and mine.
You might say that a lot of us go through the rest of our lives saying these
two words over and over. No and mine. The Bible calls us to say yes and yours,
or at least, ours. From the very beginning, biblical religion would call you out
of yourself into something bigger, broader, more beautiful.
We are called out of ourselves to the love and praise of God, which is, the faith
knows, to be truly and completely alive. It is an idea, a definition of religion
that is contrary to , and the opposite from, the organizing idea behind a lot of
contemporary spirituality, which is unabashedly, unashamedly about you. It’s
about me; my feelings, my adjustment…success…happiness…relationships…
salvation…tak(ing) the basic biblical message of getting out of self in order
to love and live for God and neighbor and turn(ing) it around 180 degrees,
refocusing everything back on the self. (Context, Martin Marty, Jan. 2007).
William Sloane Coffin once said,
Love is the final measurement of our stature: The more we love, the bigger
we are…There is no smaller package in all the world than that of a man all
wrapped up in himself. (Ibid.)
The once bent over women, set free by Jesus, presumably became one of his followers in his movement to reform the ancient synagogue. There, in that serving role, she would have continued to stand up straight, looking at God’s far horizon of hope and Life, not turning to self-indulgent living which would have returned her gaze to the ground.
We all need to be set free from whatever it is that burdens us. God can heal us in two ways, physically and/or spiritually. And sometimes the spiritual healing is by far the more rewarding. For, as Fr. Henri Nouwen reminded us, in a new closeness with the Holy, with hands wide open to receive such Love, we learn the absolute joy of giving ourselves to loved ones and strangers, students and colleagues, vocations and peacemaking.
In a world that has all but forgotten what true peace really is, such peacemakers can make an enormous difference. As we build bridges of understanding and respect for Islam and its faithful, for example, we find new sisters and brothers in the cause of building a more just world that all people my prosper. And, when all prosper personally and nationally, the incentive to make war is largely eliminated.
May you and I, too-often engaged in internal warfare with our compulsions and fears, our habits and our prejudices, our preconceptions and our pride, open arms and hearts to the only One who can set us free.
That, in our joy, we might set forth to set free all who ache and struggle from burdens to great to bear and lives focused only on the ground.
Amen.