Readings for August 25, 2019: Jeremiah 1:4-10; Psalm 71:1-6; Hebrews 12:18-29; Luke 13:10-17
When I was a kid, growing up
in the 1960’s and 70’s, life was different than it is now. In the predominately white, Anglo, Christian
communities found in Minnesota, Sundays were the days businesses were closed.
It was the rare gas station or grocery store that would be
open. When we would go out of town to
visit my grandparents, or go camping on a weekend, we would have to make sure
we had enough gas in the vehicle to get home on Sunday night. If we stayed in town, we had to make sure we
had the groceries we needed to make the meals we wanted on a Sunday.
For many of us, we might call these “simpler times.”
If you didn’t take care of it Monday through Saturday, you
would simply have to make due or go without.
But do you know what never closed? Hospitals.
There were no urgent care offices inside a drug store if anyone had a
fever or a rash or a very sore throat. If
it was bad, you went to the hospital, to the emergency room. They never closed.
When I got out of college and began working as an assistant
manager in a drug store chain in 1985, times had begun to change. At least in my world. The store was open every day of the
week. Sundays had shorter hours and the
pharmacy wasn’t open as long, but we were still open. We were the place to go on holidays for the
emergency over the counter medication. I
know. I worked many of those days.
Now, we may have the 24-hour nurse line, urgent care or
pharmacy contact information plugged into our phone. We know that we can get some kind of help
when someone starts to feel unwell.
Yet even now, when our illness is chronic or has been a
part of our lives for days, weeks, or even years, using one of those systems
designed for urgent, acute illness is frowned upon.
I mean, why would you expect to be helped for something you’ve
lived with for years, like your osteoporosis, on a holy day? I bet you wouldn’t.
And the woman in today’s Gospel didn’t. She didn’t expect to go to worship and be
healed. She went to worship. She went to learn. She went to praise God. She went to be in community with her faith
family.
She had been bent over for 18 years. Some people knew her and loved her and
supported her the best way they knew how.
I’m sure others shunned her, thinking she was cursed or contagious. If she was orphaned at a young age or
widowed, she would be someone’s ward. And
if there was no one to care for her, she probably lived on the street and
begged for what she needed to survive.
We don’t know much about her. All we know is that she did not stand
upright. That her view of the world may
have been limited to the ground under her feet.
Some people might think that her disability, her different ability, made
her less than human, less than able to be integrated into everyday life and
worship.
We don’t know if she was in pain. We don’t know if she wanted to stand
straight. We don’t know anything more
than she was at her place of worship and she was bent over.
Oh. And we know one
more thing. Jesus saw her.
That’s the thing about Jesus. He saw people. He saw all people in all their humanity. In their health. In their sickness. In their abundance. In their lack. And he told stories, fed people and healed
people to help us all see the beauty of all of God’s beloveds.
Sometimes he did all these things in ways that made
religious and political authorities angry or frustrated because he did them at
times or in ways that broke familiar laws and rules.
That never seemed to stop him. Did it?
Jesus had the uncanny ability to help people whether they
asked or not. Hungry people were
fed. People with infirmities,
deformities, disabilities were freed of their ailments. Folks encumbered by society – what I mean by
that is they struggled with laws and expectations that harmed or marginalized
or refused justice for them or for others – those people were given permission
to live and give and love in ways that expressed their faith in God first.
Yet Jesus also had to answer to the religious leaders when
they took him to task for doing more on their day of rest, their Sabbath, than
they believed anyone should do.
Jesus lets them know that there are always exceptions to
the rule.
In today’s story, Jesus heals the bent over woman. Remember, she didn’t ask him to do anything,
he saw that she participated in life and in worship the best she could, and he
wanted to give her the opportunity to be as fully engaged in life and worship
as she could be. Because he straightened
her back, she was now able to praise God from an upright position.
But those religious leaders didn’t like that he did this on
the day of Sabbath. They wanted to know
why he didn’t do this any other day of the week. He could have. She had been suffering for 18 years. Why did he do this while they worshiped? What was the point?
I don’t believe it was to show that he could do
miracles. There was nothing cocky or
presumptuous in his healing. He healed because
he was present in that moment and saw a need.
For him, it was urgent. Even if
it wasn’t for anyone else, it was for him.
It was as urgent to him as it would be for any one of those present to
feed and water their animals, or to pull a child from danger, or stop the
bleeding from a cut, or to provide comfort for a fever, or to pull someone into
the shade and give them water so they would not suffer from heat stroke.
He saw her need, and he helped her. And she, along with many of the people
present, rejoiced.
I don’t know about you, but I am always thankful that I can
go to the grocery store or buy gas or find an urgent care on a Sunday. I know that some of those things happened because
we are a consumer driven society. Some
of it is because people from all religions, with their own style of worship,
own businesses. I am also thankful when
I see a business close and lock their doors to respect their religious or patriotic
beliefs.
As a kid, I was also very thankful that on Sunday evenings,
when we would drive home to Shorewood after our weekend in Lake City, that the
Dairy Queen in Hastings was open and we would stop and each of us would get a free hot dog
with the purchase of our malts.
Let us pray.
Giver of Life, we thank you for all the ways Jesus
showed us how to pay attention to the people around us, recognizing that help
can be given any day of the week, especially when given in your holy name. Amen.