Orchard Ridge United Church of Christ

Preached by Winton Boyd on Sunday, March 7, 2010

Almost lost in this story from Luke is the fact that while a religious debate is going on around her, a woman is healed. Easily obscured during the the theological fine tuning is the fact that this woman, “straightened up and praised God.” Cutting through the theoretical struggle/discussion, she bears witness to the power of love and healing.

We live in the same world – with debates and arguments of all kinds. Easily overlooked in this animosity is the simple witness to the God of love. Easily neglected in our attempts to be right, to prove others wrong, to find answers that suit our worldview – is the power of a tender witness. Missing in the struggles of our heads, in the fears that arise when we are attacked or misunderstood – is the simple “praise God.”

William Loader has written that thhe theology that informs Jesus’ attitude appears to be diametrically opposed to the theology reflected in the leader of the synagogue. Both would affirm that we must love God with the whole heart and soul and strength and that this needs to show itself in action.
For the leader this meant keeping the commandments. That made sense. Behind it is an image of God saying: I am God. I must be obeyed. I alone deserve your loyalty and service. The outcome is: we seek to know what God’s commands entail, how they apply, and we keep them. Our devotion is reflected in the extent we take that challenge seriously…

BUT, what if God’s chief focus, Jesus asks, is love and care for people and for the creation? Then the focus moves from God’s commands to God’s people and world. It is as though God is telling us to get our priorities right.
Commandments, rules, guidelines, traditions, laws, scriptures are also subordinate to that purpose: love. God’s focus is not self-aggrandizement, but generosity and giving, restoration and healing, encouraging and renewing.
How absurd it seems to object to someone being made well! How absurd to imagine God would be more worried about having the Sabbath commandment protected than having people healed! But, before we just get critical and make fun of these stiff necked religious authorities, we need to see that the story had a function: to contrast the two approaches. ..

Jesus spent much of his ministry, it seems, in a struggle to portray a different way of imagining God which more matched the reality. God is not to be modeled on the aloof king and powerful father, but on the mother looking for a lost coin and the dad running down the road to meet a lost son. It is a very different model of God and produces a very different way of handling human life and biblical tradition.

Both models represented in the story reflect deep devotion. Both in different ways protect some things that are valuable. Both are based on scripture. One is healing. So is the other, but healing is subordinate to other concerns.
The story, however, aptly reflects a kind of paralysis which is chronic in religious communities.

But when we do look at the exchange between Jesus and the woman, we see that when he saw her, he called her over and said, ‘Woman you are set free from your infirmity.’ He laid his hands on her and immediately she ‘stood up straight and began praising God.”

Kyphotic is the original Greek word used to describe her. According to Jana Childers, preaching professor at San Francisco Theological Seminary, the word translates not just “bent” or “bent over;” a better translation would be “bent together” or “bent with.” This is a woman who is bent in on herself.
She is not just a woman with an infirmity but, as Luke says, with the spirit of an infirmity. Whatever it was that had bent her, whatever emotional or physical burden she had born, Luke suggests, ultimately became part of her until her very body was conformed to its image…

Childers continues that if we have ever been caught on the horns of the faith dilemma—knowing that the one thing we need to straighten ourselves out is the very thing we can’t seem to come up with—maybe we can understand kyphotic state.
Maybe, she writes, you can imagine how astounded she was by Jesus. “Startled” or “surprised” doesn’t really begin to say it… not by what Jesus said, but by what he did.
Did you see what he did?

The King James says “And seeing her, Jesus called her near…”the text says. How near do you suppose he called her. It’s like saying “he called her to him.”
Do you think he would have pronounced those words without looking her in the eyes? “Woman you are set free.” Would he have said that looming over her? This is Jesus we’re talking about here. He called her near and looked her in the face, don’t you think?

If she is bent together, as the Greek so picturesquely puts it, it’s possible that he had no choice but to get down on his knees—way down on his knees, down in the dirt on his knees—and crane his neck up to look into her face.

The next question is “How did he touch her? Where do you suppose he touched her? How could he have, as the text says, laid his hands on her? If you are kneeling on the ground, looking up into somebody’s face, what are your options?

Maybe, just maybe, he put his hands on her feet. Tenderly on those dirty, broken toe nails and scabs that were the only thing she had seen for eighteen years. Maybe he put his hands on her feet, maybe he wept on or kissed her feet. Maybe he just held them.

The scene Luke describes is a dizzy one—a familiar picture taken out of the frame and put back in upside down. Ancient Israel had a very nice painting of the God whose feet we grasp. The God whose ankles we throw our arms around. The God to whose skirts we cling.

Luke introduces the God who gets down on hands and knees with us. Luke’s God is a God who runs to fall on the neck of the prodigal and the feet of the broken. A God who bends to us…when we cannot even lift our own head!

We have a God who cranes, who reaches, who loves us before faith kicks in and when it gives out…

Childers shared a a story recently about a little girl living in a rural community, light years from where we live. It was just a few years ago, but it was one of those towns where driving down Main Street is like driving back into the thirties. She lived in a little house and went to a two-room school. She had loving folks and, from time to time, a good teacher. But the way she was growing up was not the way you would want your little girl to grow up. She had a cleft palate and the money for the repair hadn’t been there. By the time she was seven, she knew what the world was. She had heard the phrase, “only a mother could love that” and she understood it.

One day a special teacher visited the school and put the children through some basic speech tests. When it was her turn, the little girl went into the classroom that had been set aside for the exams. “Just stand over there by the door,” the teacher said from her desk at the far end of the room. “I want to test your hearing first. Turn your back, face the door and tell me what you hear me say.”

“Apple,” the teacher said in a low voice.

“Apple,” the little girl repeated.

“Man,” the teacher said.

“Man,” the little girl repeated.

“Banana.”

“Banana.”

“Okay,” the teacher said, “Now a sentence.” The child knew that the sentences where usually fairly easy—she wasn’t the first child to take the test, after all. She’d heard you could expect something like, “The sky is blue” or “Are your shoes brown?” Still, she listened very carefully.

So it was that standing with her face against the door, she heard the teacher’s whisper quite clearly, “I wish you were my little girl.”

I can’t know for sure if this story really happened, but I do know it’s true. In so many ways, often hurtful, we feel the pain and humiliation of a bent over woman, a differently abled child, the victim of injustice. In ways that often defy understanding, we are misunderstood, under-appreciated and taken for granted.

This has never been more evident in this congregation than this week. We’ve had two funerals. One revolved around a dear woman who had suffered from Alzheimer’s. The other centered on the suicide of a young man with depression. Both services revealed two things.

1. Pain and brokenness is widespread. Both families reported that many people at the funeral shared stories of their own family struggle with the same or similar issues. Both families were keenly aware after the services that they were not alone in the struggles they had faced.

2. Possibly our greatest ministry to one another is to receive and accept one another in our brokenness. To let one another share grief and sadness, to create the space for all of us, including ourselves, to be honest about the things that need healing. We can never underestimate what power there is in helping all of us – ourselves included – give voice to that which burdens us. Words like depression, suicide, Alzheimer’s, mental illness, grief, sadness…because they are a part of our lives they must be part of our conversation, and our prayers. If we are to be a place of healing we need to be a place of testimony, or bearing witness to both the truth of OUR LIVES and the truth of GOD’S SUSTAINING power in our lives.

In multiple ways, the story says, God loved this bent over woman as one of God’s own. What the story also says is that nothing can drown out that love. When we have known that “deep, deep love” of our creator, we too can bear witness.

The same God who saw her, sees each of us. Whether or not anyone else does, the creating, redeeming and sustaining God does. And so, what seems like a side point to the story becomes the power of the story.
It’s power lies in the fact that brokenness is a part of Jesus’ invitation to healing and praise. He knew it in others, he knew it in his own life, he knows it in ours.

It is brokenness bearing witness that lies at the center of our faith and the sacrament of communion. In the midst of a broken community and broken trust – Jesus shares a broken loaf representing his broken body. A loaf given not to settle arguments, but given to bear witness to the love he had known, to the God who sustained him and sustains us. As we share this life together, and as we share in the sacrament, may we rise from that which bends us over and in so doing, bear witness to the power of God in our lives. Amen.

Luke 13:10-14 (New International Version)
A Crippled Woman Healed on the Sabbath
10On a Sabbath Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues, 11and a woman was there who had been crippled by a spirit for eighteen years. She was bent over and could not straighten up at all. 12When Jesus saw her, he called her forward and said to her, “Woman, you are set free from your infirmity.” 13Then he put his hands on her, and immediately she straightened up and praised God.
14Indignant because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath, the synagogue ruler said to the people, “There are six days for work. So come and be healed on those days, not on the Sabbath.”