"Free on Sunday"

First Presbyterian Church
Peter S. Buehler
August 26, 2007
Luke 13:10-17

And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham
whom Satan bound for eighteen long years,
be set free from this bondage on the Sabbath day?

In the Christian tradition, Luke is the physician. When he tells about someone being healed by Jesus he provides details that show a level of medical knowledge we don't see in the other Gospels.

In fact, Bible scholars point to our passage today, the woman healed on the Sabbath, to show that Luke had the eye of a physician. It's as if he's making notes to add to her medical chart. A specific detail he wants us to pay attention to is that the woman who appeared in the synagogue as Jesus began teaching was "bent over and …quite unable to stand up straight." Luke wants us to see her in our mind's eye, that she is completely stooped over. Physicians today would diagnose her condition as ankylosing spondylitis, or A.S. It is very painful, and very debilitating. A.S. involves inflammation of one or more vertebrae, also the joints between the spine and the pelvis; eventually the affected vertebrae fuse together, which was the woman's predicament. Even today there is still no known cause for it, other than the result of genetics.

But imagine not ever being able to stand up straight. It is something most of us take for granted. Imagine not being able to look anyone in the eye, to not see the mountains or the sky, to not see much of anything other than your feet, others' feet, the ground or the floor.

One commentator on this passage said something that especially struck me.
He noted that the woman would have had almost all of her social relationships disrupted. Her life -- eighteen years of being bent over -- would have been a life of exclusion, a life of loneliness.

People today with serious illness have to deal not only with the pain and weakness and tedium of their medical condition, but also with loneliness, with feeling isolated from friends, family, and community.

Eighteen weeks of this would seem like an eternity, eighteen months would be an entire chapter of life gone missing. But eighteen years of this pain, physical and spiritual -- who can say. The courage to live each day, the faith it would take to smile, would be tremendous.

Yet Luke would have us notice another detail -- that the bent-over woman had come to the synagogue that day to worship. She refused to be away; she would not stay away. The synagogue was her lifeline.

Then suddenly she was called by Jesus. He noticed her. He had just started to teach when he saw her, and he did not hesitate to set his lesson aside, whatever he was teaching, because she was what mattered. For Jesus, a human being in pain was a reason to stop. While we see him always moving, always on a journey, Jesus was always stopping, stopping for people.

And we notice something else, that nothing at all is said about the faith of the woman, nothing about her knowledge of Jesus, nothing about any secret prayer she might have had for healing or relief. She's just there in the synagogue with everyone else. And then Jesus calls her over to him. Others must have assured her that indeed it was she Jesus was calling, since she couldn't see his face and couldn't be sure, and probably thought he was calling someone else. Couldn't possibly be her.

But it was. And then the words spoken in her ear, Woman, you are set free from your ailment. And his hands on her. And she felt the freedom. Being able to stand up straight was only part of it. All of her was free, all of her was healed, all of her praised God.

Another of Luke's details: the verb he uses indicates that she didn't stop, she kept on praising. No quiet, pious, private little Thank you, but an all-out, top-of-the-lungs, I'm-standing-up-straight-and-don't-you-try-to-stop-me Hallelujah! Praise the Lord! After eighteen years of seeing only her own feet, in an instant, in a moment of grace and power, she was standing tall and seeing a world of faces -- and the face of Jesus.

How we long to see the face of Jesus! How we long for his healing! Suffering itself is long; it seems to last a long time. And the temptation to give up hope, to stop believing that God cares, that God can heal -- or heal us; that temptation is ever-present. So we're cautious. We don't set our hopes too high, it feels too dangerous. Our doctors are cautious, not wanting to promise more than they can deliver. So our prayers are tinged with realism; they are sensible, something God can manage.

Yet we long to see the face of Jesus, and we long for his healing. So the story from Luke is dangerous! Is such healing really possible? After eighteen years -- after what has seemed like forever? Is this a dangerous hope?

Yet who is to say that miracles don't happen all the time? Less visible miracles.
The healing of secret disabilities. Years-old anger that has kept festering and hurting, then the miracle of reconciliation -- a healing. Life-long pride that has kept us blind to our family and friends, then the miracle of humility -- a healing.
The fear that our needs will never be met by anyone, human or divine, but only by something that deadens our pain, then the miracle of sobriety -- a healing.
Who is to say that miracles of grace don't occur; healings of the mind and heart; old wounds bound up, sometimes in an instant.

And we stand up straighter. Suddenly, by God's grace, we accept our illness or disability, somehow we know we can live with it, truly live with it -- is that not a miracle of healing?

A prayer of confession offered in Jewish homes at the start of the Sabbath could be a Christian prayer as well: Days pass, years vanish, and we walk sightless among miracles. A powerful prayer! It's saying that we need to pray, and we need to expect answers to our prayers -- miraculous ones.

What is the healing of the woman bent over for eighteen years saying to you, to us? Is there any prayer that is off-limits to God? Any hope too high? What is your prayer? How high is it? And how is Jesus calling to you? Is there healing happening now?

One thing we know, one thing we learn from our passage, is that when we want to worship -- when out of our hearts, spontaneously, come the words Hallelujah! Praise the Lord!, or we find ourselves incredibly happy for no particular reason -- we know that a healing has occurred. Our true worship is our response to something in us that is healed. And we find ourselves standing straight.

Sometimes it happens in the midst of suffering and sadness, we feel joy for no particular reason -- unreasonable joy -- and at precisely that moment our eyes need to be open because Jesus is standing right there in our sight. He is with us.
He is risen, he is risen indeed.

And how often we recognize true healing, the Lord's grace, on the Sabbath, on Sunday. We stop our usual activity, we get dressed for church, we make it a priority for our lives -- a healthy habit for ourselves and our family -- we come in to worship, we greet friends, we sing, we pray, we listen, and maybe not always but often a word comes to us we could never have anticipated, a message -- perhaps something undefined, maybe a sense of confidence, a feeling of hopefulness -- and it is for us a healing. We leave worship standing a little straighter. We see people differently; we see the mountains and the sky differently; we see our lives differently.

What was the leader of the synagogue's problem? Why didn't he get it? A bent-over woman, suffering for eighteen years, is healed by Jesus in an instant, amazing! -- she starts praising God, which you think would be exactly what all worshippers are supposed to do -- and all this man can be is annoyed! He's the one who is bent over!

I attended a preacher's conference years ago, and during one of the worship services Gardner Taylor preached. He is the senior pastor emeritus of the Concord Baptist Church of Christ in Brooklyn, N.Y., the dean of black preachers -- all of us preachers, as far as I'm concerned. A courageous civil rights advocate, Taylor received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in year 2000. That day he got going in the pulpit and I found myself overcome with emotion. I don't know what Gardner Taylor said, or what was on my heart, but I do remember vividly that I was hearing the good news, and that it was like being in the arms of Jesus. Afterward a fellow came up to me and asked if I was OK. A fellow Presbyterian.
He thought I was hurting -- a Presbyterian would assume this, of course. I appreciated his thoughtfulness in speaking to me, in being concerned for me, but I tried to explain to him that what I was feeling was the opposite of hurt! You can also cry when you're happy. Tears can be healing; they can reveal healing,

Yet we can all be like the leader of the synagogue, even we in the church. We can be unprepared for healing; we can be unprepared for surprises, even miracles; we can be unprepared for God! We can want worship to be what we need for ourselves, for our spiritual nourishment, for getting ready for the week ahead, but what happens when God addresses something deeper in us? Or when that happens for our neighbor sitting beside us, are we ready? When God causes someone who has been bent over for years to stand up and shout Hallelujah!

For the leader of the synagogue, the issue was the Fourth Commandment: the matter of not working on the Sabbath. Healing someone was, by definition, a work, therefore the healer was breaking the Sabbath commandment. He had the rest of it right, of course, so we shouldn't be too critical. Most everything else, other activities, can wait for another day of the week. There needs to be one day in seven left open for God. This is important.

Author Thomas Cahill writes in his wonderful book, The Gifts of the Jews, that "no ancient society before the Jews had a day of rest. The God who made the universe and rested bids us do the same, calling us to a weekly restoration of prayer, study, and recreation (or re-creation)."

It is a happy day, a joyous day, a day for having our eyes open to our amazing God and his grace-filled Son. It's the day of the week that is like the dessert at the end of a meal -- sweet!

Yet the Sabbath, its promise of rest  and recreation, is only truly discovered when we let things go. When we cease our striving, when we let our activity come to a stop. When we let the full day, all of Sunday, be our Sabbath then we understand the rest God that God wants us to have. This is a challenge for many of us; I know it is for me. I have my list of things to get done, and often I pay more attention to it than to anything else. But I'm encouraged, prodded and challenged, by the wisdom, the gift, of the Sabbath -- and how believers today are rediscovering it. I love what writer Christopher Ringwald says, the discovery he makes about setting aside one full day for rest: "I now see the unfolding opposites of the day. We do less and are more, we stop earning and grabbing and have more, we cease from making and make more, we let Creation be and in our response we see it to be more than we ever knew."

So the leader of the synagogue had it mostly right, the part about doing less, doing little on the Sabbath -- it's just that he also got it hugely wrong. He was looking down when he should have been looking up. His problem -- and it is the problem with legalistic faiths, religion that is more about obeying rules than trusting God -- his problem was that he didn't expect anything from worship, he had no thought about what God could do, worship was just another religious duty. For him, the Sabbath had stopped being about people. It had become a "work." He had forgotten his people's story, that the Sabbath was about liberation, that God freed his people from slavery in Egypt, that God is always freeing his people from slavery.

So Sunday morning is about freedom. In the risen Christ, God raises us up. The healer stands with us, sharing every burden, freeing us from fear, freeing us to live our lives with hope, courage, and love.

What a difference it makes when we come to worship on Sunday morning expecting to be freed, expecting to be healed, expecting to be met by the risen Christ! This is why we invite our neighbors to church, because we want this joy for them, this assurance for living, this personal knowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, that he is compassionate, merciful, powerful. His healing is deep; it is always miraculous. It is for us.

Which is why, should we happen to ever find ourselves on a Sunday morning in no mood for church and tempted to stay home, pulling the covers over our heads, not wanting to see anyone or talk with anyone, having no interest in singing, let alone praying -- if on that Sunday morning we are convinced that God doesn't notice us and doesn't care about us -- that of all Sundays is the day we need to get up and go to church, because something is going to happen. Something good. Something unexpected.

Come in late, that's fine. Sit in the back. Sit near the door. Wear no nametag, wear a wig -- whatever it takes for you to be anonymous, fine, but don't stay home. Do come to church, do expect something to happen, do let the Lord call your name.

Expect healing. Expect freedom. Expect Jesus.