Untitled Sermon

Paige Swaim

26 August 2007

Pentecost 13+, C

Untitled

I’m at this point in my life where I find myself suddenly redefining who I am. And I have to tell you that I feel a little bit ashamed of that. I mean, I’m 24—little for that game, right? Shouldn’t I know who I am by now? And shouldn’t I have the confidence to just be that person, and not be so afraid of what other people think about me? But the truth is, I’m realizing just how much of my former confidence I drew from the people around me, and an environment where I was comfortable. I spent this summer coming to terms with the fact that I am deeply afraid of confrontation, and deeply afraid of failure. So now I enter my bright new future as a graduate student feeling less excited and more uncertain that I expected—uncertain about my abilities in a lot of areas, but most of all in my ability to be who I believe I am.

I remember vividly a good friend of mine calling me early last fall and telling me, with great frustration, that going to law school was a lot like going back to high school—cliques, drugs, in-crowd and all. Much to my surprise and disappointment, I’m starting to fear that divinity school may not be so different. Sure, the people here are much “nicer”—they are polite, even friendly—on the surface. But is that the same thing as true Christian community? And do I have the courage to call it like I see it, to face rejection and labeling to be friends with the people the “in-crowd” consider (however “nicely” they put it) weird, boring, or just plain unworthy? I feel like a fourteen-year-old again, and God is having to re-teach me disciplines I thought I had mastered long ago. It doesn’t help that some of these people might someday hold my job in their hands! I’m realizing now, as I’ve been realizing all spring and summer, that this life of love God calls us to really is totally radical—even to the very people who are trying to devote their lives to it. Following the example Christ sets for us in this passage from Luke will be far more difficult than we think, but it is also desperately important for our Christian community and the world at large.

We find our gospel passage this Sunday towards the middle of what scholars call Luke’s Journey narrative, a time when Jesus and his followers are traveling towards Jerusalem and the Passion. Luke couches many of the “great teachings” of Jesus in this narrative, including the Luke-an version of the Sermon on the Mount. Along the way, Jesus speaks, by turns, to his disciples, the crowds of followers, and his opponents. This construction of Luke’s text makes beautiful sense: As they travel towards the heart of his mission, Jesus is preparing his followers for the tests they will soon face in—and after—Jerusalem. And as we as readers follow Jesus’s journey, we also learn about the kingdom of God and the actions of true disciples. Throughout this journey narrative, we are being prepared for what is to follow in Jerusalem—and because the author of Luke-Acts is uniquely concerned with the life of the post-resurrection church, we are also being prepared to carry on the ministry of Christ in the world around us.

One question, then, is this: What is this message God empowers us to live? What might this gospel passage, in particular, teach us about the ministry to which we are called? Let’s take a closer look at this text, and see what we can find out. We enter the story to find Jesus teaching in a synagogue on the Sabbath. He sees a woman come into the synagogue who is “bent over,” and immediately he calls her to him and restores her. Although Jesus tells the synagogue leader and worshippers that the woman has been bound by Satan, the story doesn’t read like a typical exorcism. Instead, Luke continually uses the language of Jesus’s metaphor: Jesus sets free—unties—the woman, just as most Jews would untie their valuable ox or donkey to lead the animal a few feet to water.

The synagogue leader is distressed. Jesus has just really upset the status quo—which is usually a difficult thing for people, especially powerful people, to accept. But let’s not give in to the temptation to completely villainize this man: the problem was really much deeper than a threat to his comfort zone, or even to his power. For the Jewish people in this story, the interpretation of what is Sabbath would have been a question of deepest identity—as it remains for many in the Jewish faith today. How Sabbath is interpreted reflects an understanding of God, of God’s chosen people, and, as one of those chosen people, a spiritual understanding of self. By healing this bent woman, Jesus has usurped the leader’s supposedly God-given authority to interpret the Sabbath and its worship. He has also threatened the understood Jewish identity in a number of ways.

Jesus has called attention during a sacred time to someone—and a woman, no less—whose disability would have been seen as a mark of God’s displeasure; he has risked ritual uncleanliness by touching her; and he has violated the interpretation of Sabbath rest and worship that defines his people and their understanding of God. It’s no wonder Jesus’s actions cause such a controversy—and, judging by his similar Sabbath healings earlier in Luke’s gospel, a controversy that Jesus probably expected from the second he began teaching that day. Jesus purposefully caused a major identity crisis for an entire community!

Earlier, I suggested that we examine this passage in light of Christ’s message and mission in the world. Here, Christ makes it clear that God values the well-being of Creation—and particularly she who is downtrodden, “bent over,” and overlooked—far more than unbending “religious” obedience. We are all of value both to God and to one another. We are a people called to receive liberating healing, and, as the body of Christ, we are also called to dispense it. Sabbath should be a time of restoration to that mythical pre-fallen state, a place of rest, peace, and joy in God’s presence; and as Jesus lived it, everyone is to be invited into Sabbath as an act of Sabbath. And that does mean everyone.

You see, in this passage Jesus reaches out to a person despised or forgotten by her people, and restores a bent woman to her dignity, healing her and honoring her with the title “daughter of Abraham.” She is an example to us all: she came to worship, and was healed. She was an outcast, and yet beloved of God. We can relate to her, and we should also reach out to those in circumstances like hers. Luke’s narrative also does this Daughter of Abraham considerable injustice, however. Although she speaks, praising God in fact, the gospel of Luke does not give us her words. She, like so many women then and now, is silenced for us; and as we speak the liberating message of Christ, we need to be careful that we don’t also become someone else’s “muffler.”

Yes, we are empowered to bring hope and freedom to those on the margins of our success-and-power-driven society. That is one of our missions. But we have to be cautious when we do this not to let the mission become our mission alone rather than God’s, and we surely must take care not to silence the many voices longing to tell their stories. And we all do some silencing, even when we may have good intentions in other areas of our lives. We become passionate about proving ourselves, making our case, even fulfilling our Godly missions—but it’s so easy to forget, or even not to realize, how we are part of the problem.

How many of us silence the voices around us with our sarcasm, our sideways-glances, our thinly-disguised “jokes”—or simply our inattention? How many of us admit theoretically to the value of all of God’s children, but are only willing to live that out in the ways with which we are comfortable—much like the synagogue leader? For some of us, we reach out to people “in the name of God,” but never in true unashamed friendship under our own names. Sometimes, we work willingly on behalf of the poor or those who don’t know Christ’s love, but can’t handle truly valuing the opinions of a person who disagrees with our perspectives. At times, many of us use what we see as our God-given platforms to criticize the journeys of people who are different from ourselves. How often do we, through our own disdain, silence others’ ability to flourish and minister, while at the same time professing to heal the world in Christ’s name? There is more than one way to be marginalized, and more than one way to be silenced.

I stand here, telling you all that Jesus tells us to love one another. You probably already know this, and it seems like such a “nice” message. I promise you, however, that what I’m up here preaching is not a gospel of “warm fuzzies” and “niceness” and “can’t we all just get along?” Christ demonstrates clearly here that there will be times when we don’t, in fact, get along with the authorities and the crowds around us. Very few people, it’s true, will ever be angry at you for being “nice” and “agreeable” all the time—trust me, I fall into that trap more often than some of you might know. But true, radical love—that’s a different thing altogether.

People will criticize you for loving the care of your neighbor more than your political party, or for believing that the crazy-annoying guy in your class has something vital to offer to your group of friends, or for seeing the sacred worth in a person who leads a lifestyle or holds opinions vastly different from your own. People will fear you because you will care more about doing the will of God than the will of the church, your family, or your employer. You will feel that you risk not being accepted, not being “successful,” that you risk having to confront and disagree with people who have real power in your life—and you will be right. Fortunately, you will also have God’s promise of refuge, and, hopefully, a community who like the crowd rejoiced over the Daughter of Abraham’s restoration, will take joy in God’s work in the world.

Luke follows the story of this liberation with parables about the nature of the kingdom (or kindom, if you will) of God, and I believe we can understand those parables as a kind of a commentary on tonight’s passage. Jesus is showing us what the kingdom of God—the “kingdom that cannot be shaken,” as our passage in Hebrews states—is like: who is included, and who we—as members of that community—are. So then, perhaps this passage is as much about identity—who we all are in the kindom of God—as it is about Sabbath. Maybe the two are more related than we usually care to realize. If Sabbath is a time to recall and recreate God’s intended world, then aren’t we all, as children of God, called to follow the Daughter of Abraham and Christ’s examples? We should come to God for renewal, and we should constantly be inviting others into that renewal as well. Christ calls us to find our identity not by excluding others to define ourselves, but to open our arms to people we see as totally different—economically, socially, intellectually, personally—so that we can define ourselves through community, purpose, and love. God empowers us, as God empowered Jeremiah in our Old Testament passage, to speak and live out this message to the world. Let us do so with discernment, compassion, and humility. Let us be a people who see as Jesus saw a Daughter of Abraham in a bent old woman; let us be a people who restore dignity and voice to everyone who is, as one poet writes, “bent / by unbending ways.”