Aug. 22 Sermon: Breaking Free
Breaking Free
Holy Covenant UMC
Sunday August 22, 2010
Rev. Kate Hurst Floyd
Luke 13:10-17
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She’s a broken woman.
She’s also faithful, coming to the synagogue every single week on the Sabbath. To pray, to sing, to worship God with her community, her community that’s become her family.
For eighteen years she’s walked into that sanctuary bent over. Broken.
364 times she’s entered that space, week after week, year after year, and she couldn’t see anything but the small piece of ground right underneath her eyes, her vision reduced to the patch of land around her feet. 364 times she’s walked into that synagogue, bent over and broken.
She lives in deep pain, all the time, which affects more than her body—she’s a powerful witness that body, soul and mind are always interconnected and her pain seeps into all aspects of her life. She’s broken because she’s a woman in a culture that values men—for their ability to work and gain political and religious power. But even in these constraints she’s not a very good woman: it’s nearly impossible to cook and clean when her head hangs so low. Animals are more valuable to the world than she is.
And there are people who look at her and they see only her bent-over-ness. She’s so tired of being reduced to her ailment…they see the small patch of ground where her body bends over, but they can’t see that she loves a good joke, lost a beloved son in war, survived cancer and makes a mean falafel. They look at her and don’t even know her name: oh, there’s the bent-over woman, here again. A broken body, back to worship.
We, too, enter the sanctuary, broken.
For some of us, it’s our first time here. Others come week after week, year after year.
And we carry with us our own ailments:
Wounds we’ve carried for 18 or more years: alienation from parents, chronic back pain, rheumatoid arthritis, self-loathing and shame, grief over a lost brother or the aunt who raised us.
Or fresh hurts bubbling over the surface: divorce, sudden unemployment, fears about paying the mortgage or finding our next meal, the recent news that a loved one needs surgery.
We carry our woundedness with us here and lay it on the altar.
Many of us know, like the bent-over woman, what it’s like for people to look at us and reduce who we are to a small part of our lives: when we reveal a cancer diagnosis, faces change and that’s all anyone can think about us; or they say: he’s the one who’s HIV positive; she had the miscarriage; his lover left him and ran off with another man. When people look, they see that small patch of ground around us, and call us broken. All the while having no idea that we’re killer scrabble players, avid bike riders, compassionate daughters, and we volunteer every week at the Night Ministry. That our deepest longing is just to be seen for exactly who we are. In the church and the world, people look at us and see a broken body, back to worship.
We confess too, though, that when we enter this space, sometimes it’s easy for our vision to be reduced to the ground right underneath our eyes, seeing only our own feet. Getting so consumed with what’s going on in our little patch of the world that we forget to look up. Forget to be grateful that we have the capacity to see beyond ourselves. We find ourselves ignoring the pain and the brokenness of the people around us. Sitting next to us, singing the same songs and saying the same prayers. “That’s the gay guy, I wish he’d stop talking about equality”; I’ m just going to come in and slip out, afraid that if I go deeper I might become vulnerable…and hear someone else’s vulnerabilities. If we don’t ask, we won’t know that the woman next to us struggles with an eating disorder and longs to tell someone; if we see the guy in the pew across from us solely as that person who disagreed with me in a meeting, we can feel self-righteous and overlook that his anger is because his mom’s about to die. We too often overlook the humanity that’s living all around us.
We carry a lot of brokenness when we come to worship.
The synagogue and its leaders are broken.
The leader tries so hard to be a good and faithful Jew. He studied since he was a young boy: reading the sacred texts, engaging the rabbis, living out the law as he prayerfully leads his congregation. He has really good intentions and wants to be good at his job. Successful.
When he got out of school he knew that he’d work harder than anybody…be the first one at work and the last one to leave. That’s the advice his father always gave him and why his father rose to the top of his law firm. But the more he pours himself into making other people happy, gaining the approval of the rabbis and priests who are over him, the less connected he finds himself to God and to his people.
He watches a miracle right before his very eyes—a healing of one of his parishioners. He knows she’s in pain, he’s heard her story, ministered with her family, held her hands at doctors appointments. He should be ecstatic! The woman is in pain no more! But instead, he lives out of fear—what will the chief priest think if he knows there was healing on the Sabbath here, in his synagogue? Will he be fired? Is this really what God wants? What other laws will people start breaking. In response to the healing, he shouts out: Stop! Why did you do that! Don’t heal her today! Wait for tomorrow!
He’s broken.
We, church people and church leaders, find ourselves broken.
We know what it’s like to compromise who we are for our jobs. Starting out with good intentions and then ending up pouring ourselves into work that doesn’t give us much meaning or fulfillment. We sacrificed our relationships at the expense of “success” and don’t quite know where that’s really gotten us.
And the church likes to say: Wait! Stop! It’s not time for healing. Leave that until tomorrow. We’ll take away pain another day. When it’s more comfortable. When we’re not afraid of the church hierarchy. We’ll get to that when we have a committee in place to review it.
Inviting more young adults into our churches and ministry? Advocating for health care for all of God’s children; delivering aid to Pakistan, as much as we give to other disasters; inclusion for people of all sexual orientations and gender identities; racial reconciliation; gender equity in our pulpits and agencies…
We say wait! Stop! We’ll get to that tomorrow. It’s not on our to-do list for today.
We’ll start paying women of color clergy the same salary as white male clergy once we’ve done some more studies on it.
And often, we and the church don’t do this out of malicious intent, it’s just that life gets in the way. Rules stop us. Order and other priorities make us hesitate. I find myself hesitating on a daily basis.
I know it would bring some healing to Margaret to call her and know how she’s feeling, but the afternoon slipped away; We know we should go to that rally for immigration rights but we’re too busy—we’ll make it to the next one. Tomorrow. Or next week…are the laws really so urgent? I know my grandmother would love for me to visit but she just doesn’t understand how many other priorities I have. I know I should quit smoking so I can live a long life..but..but..
And before we know it, it’s been 18 years, 364 times we’ve walked into worship and we find ourselves completely bent over. Only able to see the ground ahead of us and in need of some serious healing.
This, friends, is when Jesus breaks in. He breaks into our brokenness! Because Jesus sees beyond his own feet and into our hearts and souls and bodies and minds. And he sees us individually for exactly who we are, and at the same time sees our place in the larger world. His vision expands to all of God’s children. We are under his gaze.
He sees the bent-over woman, and sees beyond her ailment…she is a child of God and so he calls her to him. She never asks for anything but he sees her and seizes her: He says “woman, you are set free from your ailment!” Then he laid his hands on her. He laid his hands on her and immediately, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God!
Because of her encounter with Jesus, his healing hands, she is set free from brokenness. Jesus breaks in and frees her up to be whole. To pick up her grandchildren, to live without pain, to have a future with hope.
In order for Jesus to heal brokenness, he first has to break all the rules. He breaks rules about men touching women to whom they aren’t married; about women’s place at the front of the synagogue; he calls her a child of Abraham, acknowledging to the whole gathered community that she is indeed one of God’s chosen and beloved. Part of the covenant. As much a part as any man. It was taboo enough to touch this woman, picking her out from the worshipping crowd.
But those aren’t all the rules Jesus breaks….he heals her on the Sabbath, a day meant for rest and no work. He breaks the power of the old ways…the ways that keep women down and men up; that take more care for animals grazing than people who need care; that ignore people simply because they don’t look like everyone else.
He heals her by breaking away from the ways the world tries to keep us trapped by death and destruction.
By breaking those rules, he also heals those gathered at the synagogue. We don’t know what happens to that leader, whether he one day repents…but all those who witnessed his healing in the congregation rejoiced! Rejoiced! We talked last week about how Jesus said he came to bring division…well, this is what he meant: the synagogue leader may be divided from his congregation because he’s not willing to follow Jesus who’s breaking all the rules. But those who recognized Jesus’ healing, transformative power are forever changed, forever saved.
Jesus says to them: You’re taking care of the animals but not your own parishioners? You can give them water to live another day but forbid healing so that she has abundant life?
Jesus says to our church: You’re spending all your energy trying to ban gay marriage when the church is dying out? When what we really need are passionate and engaged young people to help heal the world?
Jesus says to us: You’re spending all your time trying to make other people happy and it’s making you miserable. I’m right here laying my hands on you, loving you and making you whole for exactly who you are…look up and recognize me! Break free from the chains of the world.
Jesus is healing us, right here, right now…he may not be physically laying his hands on us, but he’s breaking all the rules of our carefully ordered society and lives and smashing them to pieces. And by doing so he restores us to wholeness. And he’s doing it, whether we ask or not…like the bent-over woman, we don’t have to beg, we just have to show up and recognize that he’s there. Because he is, calling our name, saying, you my child are one of God’s beloved. He may not be able to completely remove an illness from us, but his hands to save us:
When we think we’re past redemption because of the terrible things in our lives, Jesus says: you are forgiven. You are still unconditionally loved. And we begin to break free…
When we are terrified of death, of our own or of our loved ones, Jesus says break free from the world that says death is always the end. Know and believe that through him we have eternal life…death is reconciliation with God, not the end. We are free from that fear.
We are free to break the rules that tell us we are less than because of our color or gender or socioeconomic status or sexual orientation…Jesus says you are whole for exactly who you are, right where you are.
This gospel lesson tells us, this morning, that we have a choice: we can be like the woman in our Gospel lesson…recognize and receive the healing that Jesus brings, and then rejoice! Rejoice and extend ourselves outward to heal others. Or, we can live our lives like the synagogue leader….uncomfortable with the message of Jesus, afraid of wholeness, fearful of breaking the rules of the world…and never extending healing outward.
Because he’s calling us to go out there and help him heal the world, to be his hands:
It’s easy to wonder: Is the healing of Christ really so urgent? Can’t we wait until tomorrow? Ask the woman who was bent over and broken for 18 years if she can wait. Jesus breaks those excuses, breaks down our boundaries and calls us to start healing, right here, right now. This is cause for great rejoicing! Let us give thanks and sing in joy for all the wonderful things Christ is doing! And may we join that mighty chorus by bringing healing into the world, right here, right now.
Tags: Kate
