CProp16

Luke13:10-17

August 26, 2007

I was at a clergy workshop for a couple of days last week

at Columbia Seminary in Decatur.

In the evening a few of us went to a little French restaurant for dinner.

It was a quite small, with only about 10 tables, very cozy.

As we were chatting, waiting for our dinner to be served,

we heard a man come in and greet the waitress in French.

Then we saw him as he came by us.

He was bent over, at a 45 degree angle from his waist.

And so, had to walk with a shuffle, with his knees bent.

And he strained his head sideways

so he could see the table he was being led to.

I couldn’t help but think about that man,

as I tried to picture the bent woman in the synagogue.

I tried at home to walk like them.

I couldn’t see my walls and ceilings, couldn’t see the countertops.

I went outside on the deck

and the sky and treetops were all beyond my view.

The world is much smaller when you can only see the ground.

You see lot of feet, and dirt,

rather than people and all that their faces communicate.

I don’t know medically what is wrong with their bodies,

- this bent man and this bent woman,

but their physical limitations must affect the whole of their lives.

Their ability to work and play.

Limits placed upon their social relationships.

The loss of freedom to ‘live and move and have their being.’

Luke says that the bent woman appeared with a spirit

that had crippled her for eighteen years.

A spirit that pressed her down, kept her bound, bent her over.

limited her freedom, isolated her.

A spirit that was in conflict with the inbreaking of new life and freedom

that Jesus had come to reveal.

When Jesus singles her out and calls her over,

he tells her she is set free from her ailment.

And she stands up straight,

sees the world in its fullness for the first time in eighteen years

and immediately she begins praising God.

The leader of the synagogue sees

Jesus’ touching her and healing her as work

which is forbidden on the Sabbath.

She’s been like this for eighteen years!

What is one more day,

so that this ‘work’ could have been done after Sabbath ended?

Jesus uses a clear and homely example,

that people regularly untie their oxen and donkeys on the Sabbath

so that the animals can get to their drinking water.

Jesus had simply untethered this woman from what had held her down.

The question in between the lines is ‘what, really, is Sabbath?’

The Hebrew people who had been slaves in Egypt –

they had had no Sabbath as long as they were enslaved by Pharoah.

But when they got out from under their bondage,

it was God, the God who had rested, that was in charge of them.

Sabbath becomes possible in peoples’ lives

when they are freed from their bondage.

Freed from a life of relentless pressure to produce.

Freed from demands that never stop.

Freed from restrictions placed upon us.

Perhaps freed from the never-ending motion of our 24/7 world.

The very heart of Sabbath is to set free and to give rest.

To become untethered from everything

and to let everything go - and to stand up!

free to praise God and to rest with God, to be with God.

And to remember who we really are in God’s eyes.

No longer a bent woman, known only by her disability

but a daughter of Abraham.

Known no longer by what has bound her.

Known by the One who has freed her and saved her.

What is Sabbath?

A stooped woman freed to stand up,

reclaim her true identity, and praise God.

And when Jesus’ listeners witness this healing,

They, too, begin to praise God,

rejoicing at the wonderful things they were witnessing.

And those who had opposed Jesus

were put to shame, and it is they who walk away stooped and looking down.

Today we will baptize two handsome baby boys - Holden and Josh.

And you’ll hear yourselves promising to uphold them

as they grow into the full stature of Christ.

May they never be known by such spirits

that would bind them and limit them.

But instead may they be known, and come to know themselves

as God knows them and loves them.

I hope they will absorb the Sabbath life of freedom.

I hope they will have belonging among a Sabbath people,

who also, with them, have been raised to the new life of grace.