August 21, 2016: May God’s words alone be spoken, may God’s words alone be heard.  Amen.

I have back issues.  I mean sometimes, getting out of bed can be a pain – and I mean that literally.  So, this story that we heard in our gospel lesson today, about the woman bent over for 18 years, seems unimaginable…not to mention making my back ache just thinking about it.  And, I used to think it so far removed from my life…until the other day.  I was walking in NYC and I was shocked to find that I was surrounded by people just like her!  There were all these people walking around staring straight at the ground – bumping into folks because they didn’t see them.  Of course their handicap was that they were TWW – texting while walking.  A self-imposed ailment if ever there was one.  Still, it got me thinking about what was happening in this gospel story.

This woman was bent over in such a way that the only thing she likely could see was what was below her or just to the side.  So not only was she unable to stand up, she couldn’t see what others saw.  It would have been difficult for her to look into someone’s eyes, to see a sunset, to enjoy the beauty of a full moon.

Jesus releases her from that bondage.  She is able to stand fully upright, walk with more ease and comfort, see all that is around her.  And for that, she enthusiastically thanks God.  But she isn’t the only one in bondage that day…there is also the temple leader.

He too has limited vision.  He rebukes the woman for coming to Jesus to be healed on the Sabbath.  He tells her and the rest of the crowd, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.” Now, I just love it when Jesus does a smack down.  He calls the guy, and all those like him, hypocrites – reminding them that they care for the livestock on the Sabbath, leading them to water, but would deny this woman the living water of healing grace?

Yup – that’s my savior alright – yours too.  Pretty awesome.

He is calling out the temple leader for being blinded by dogma, rules, and a “this is the way it has always been done” mindset that prevents him from not only seeing the good in what Christ has done, but from having any empathy for the woman who was in need.  In his noble desire to keep true to God’s commandments, he has followed the word, but not the spirit, of the law.  Without realizing it, he had become imprisoned in no less a way than the crippled woman – both were unable to see beyond their narrow scope.

We have a lot of those types in our faith now. People who claim to be Christians, who go to church on Sundays, but act as though they can’t see their brothers and sisters in need, or worse, are responsible for their condition.  Is it any wonder some think the church is full of hypocrites?  Now, in fairness, some of this can also be unintentional.

It may be difficult to believe, but the truth is – there are many of us who move through life like this bent over woman and this temple authority – and no, I’m not just talking about texting and walking, though that is related to the condition we as a society are in.  We often get so caught up in our own worlds, our vision narrowed to just what we need to see (with most of the focus on ourselves) that we can often fail to see what is right in front of our eyes.

All of this reminds me of an old and familiar naval story:

A battle ship was on exercise at sea in bad weather.  The captain was on the bridge. It was foggy.  Just after dark the lookout spotted a light off the bow.  The captain asked if it was steady or moving.  The lookout replied the light was steady meaning they were on direct collision course with that ship!  The captain ordered the lookout to signal the other ship.

“Change course 15 degrees South.  We are on a collision course.”

There was a pause.

The signal came back: “Advisable for you to change course.”

The captain signaled, “I am a captain. Change course 15 degrees.”

“I am a seaman second class. You had better change course 15 degrees,” came the reply.

The captain was furious. He sent back, “I am a battleship. Change course!”

Back came the signal, “I am a lighthouse.  Your call.”

The captain was so focused on who he was, where he was going, and how big his ship was, that he could not, for his own peril, imagine the possibilities that lie ahead.

How many of us are so caught up in who we are, and what we have on our schedules, that we can’t sometimes see what lies directly ahead of us either. I mean, it is absurd to think about, but one of the number one causes of fatal traffic accidents today is DWD – driving while distracted (and the number one distraction is texting while driving).  We are so focused on other things that what is right in front of us – a stopped car, a pedestrian, an animal…we don’t see it until it is too late.  I mean, imagine – you are getting in a 2,000 bound object that has the capacity of killing someone if you hit them, and instead of focusing on the road ahead, we are think a text is more important.  It’s absurb when you really think about it, right?

Those people I saw in NYC were blind to those around them in no less a way than the woman in the gospel.  And that woman, and the leader in the synagogue, were both suffering from limited vision.  Christ set them free to rise up and see the world as it is, and most of all, to do something about it.  And the good news is that Christ offers that to us too – and the world needs us to accept the freedom he offers, and fully live into it.

Christ is calling us as he did the crippled woman – calling us to be healed, to stand up, to look around at the world – to really truly see what lies ahead and all around us.  But healing is a two way deal – we have to want to be healed (anyone in a 12 step program can tell you that).  We have to step toward it as the woman in the gospel did.  We must allow Christ to free us from bondage – the bondage of seeing only things that we want to see, or perhaps worse, seeing but not responding.  We must choose to be freed also from the bondage of law, tradition, and dogma trumping justice.  And the bondage of self-centered living – bound to our technologies, our multi-tasking, our lack of time for what and who is important.

And with that new freedom comes a responsibility as a follower of Christ, the Christ that called us to love and serve one another as he loved us – to act with love, compassion, and an unquenchable desire for justice.  We are called then to release others from their bondage – to use our newly found sight to be prophetic witnesses in the world.  Because the world needs us – needs our prophetic voice – needs our response to Christ’s commandment to love one another, and we must never ever be the one on the sideline telling people why healing can’t be done.

I do not need to repeat the horrific news of the past several months, really years, nor remind anyone again that we still have people living on the margins, living where we have pushed them – outside the edges of our tunnel vision.

Out of sight, out of mind, out of heart – as though the entire world is bent over like this woman.

And yet I know that in the face of this, we can sometimes become immobile ourselves, feeling inadequate to the task.  Even if we want to be healed, even if we want to live into our call to heal others, we just feel we aren’t up to it.  We are a bit like the prophet Jeremiah in the reading we heard today.  You know, the funny thing about that reading, it is one of the scriptures recommended, and often chosen, for ordinations to the priesthood.  It was read at my ordination.  And there is a good reason why.

God chooses Jeremiah to be a prophet, saying “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.”

And Jeremiah, feeling like any of us would I think, tells God “Hey, I am just a kid here – you’ve got to be kidding, right?”

God had an answer for him though.

God tells Jeramiah that he will not do this alone.  God will be with him, and give the words to speak.

The reason we read this at ordinations, and the reason this is important for all of us to remember, is that we have fear of being prophets because we think we have to do it all ourselves. That is the trip up for so many.  Makes sense…if it were true too.  But it is not.  We don’t do this prophet work alone – and I want to be clear – we are all Jeremiah – we are all called to be prophets.  We have to remember what the captain of the ship in the story forgot – that his journey across the seas is guided by lighthouses…our journey in life is guided by God, through the Holy Spirit.

We are free to be all that God intends…and the Holy Spirit will guide us to live into that…if we allow Christ to heal us, to stand us up so that we can see, really see the Christ in ourselves, in one another, and in everyone we encounter.  Because if you think about it, the woman in the gospel story saw Christ for the first time – really saw him – once he healed her and she was able to stand and look directly at him.  And when we open ourselves to this healing, which is simply the knowledge that we are loved by God beyond measure, then we can too.

And it is then that like her, we can rejoice in the love and grace that is freely ours, and in the knowledge that we are called and guided for great work in the world. Once healed and raised up, we have a life changing choice to make: ignore it all and go back to life as it once was – to our bent over lives that see nothing….or we can respond to the call of God to be prophetic witnesses in the world.  It’s that blue pill – red pill choice we saw in the movie “The Matrix” (a very theological & philosophical movie to be sure).  “In the film, [Morpheus, played by Laurence Fishburne] offers the main character Neo, [played by Keanu Reeves]…the choice between a red pill and a blue pill. The blue pill would allow him to remain in the fabricated reality of the Matrix, therefore living the “ignorance of illusion,” while the red pill would lead to his escape from the Matrix and into the real world, therefore living the “truth of reality” even though it is a harsher, more difficult life.”[1]

We have a choice too, from the moment we are born. We can either swallow the proverbial blue pill, remain bent over, and never live into who we are as children of God.  Or, we can choose to take the healing grace of God, the proverbial red pill, and live into our prophetic potential.  The choice is ours, and if we step up, if we allow ourselves to be healed, to see the world around us, it is then that we will really come to know the beauty of God’s grace all around in creation, and the horror of humanity’s ability to hate, to abuse and to oppress it.  We will know the joy of love, and the pain of those who are persecuted for who they love.  We will know the beauty of people of all races, cultures and languages, and we will know the agony of the oppression they experience.  We will see the loveliness of the earth, the sea, and the sky, and all the creatures that live with us here, and our hearts will break from the pollution and abuse we do to it all.

Now, when we do this prophetic work, to be clear, it will not be easy.  There will be push back.  There will be anger.  We know what has happened to some prophetic witnesses – arrest, persecution, and even assignation or execution.  But there are also more subtle walls that will be thrown up against those who answer God’s call to heal and be healed.  There will be proverbial temple leaders telling us we have no business doing what we do in ways far less obvious.

And all of it will wear us down.

It can be both rejuvenating and also exhausting to do this prophetic work, to join God in the work She is doing in the world, to be the body of Christ offering healing and hope.  When we are tired, we can lose heart, we can fail to see who is in front of us, we can lose our way, we can feel bent over, and we can lose hope.  It is then that we need our Sabbath rest – and we can always find rest here in this place.

See, Jesus wasn’t saying that we should find no Sabbath rest, not at all.  He often tried to find some himself, or send his disciples off to get some.  He was instead, as one commentator noted, telling those temple leaders to “give it a rest”[2] – to stop holding so tight to the letter of the word, and rest more in the Spirit of it – something those who read the bible literally need to pay more attention to, because the words of our sacred text should never, ever, be used to marginalize, or to exclude anyone, as this temple leader found out.

Yes, rest here – now.  This prophet work is hard.  Take rest in this place, and nourishment in the Eucharist and fellowship.  Because it is this healing rest we get here that will enable us to rise up like that woman did, exclaim our thanksgiving to God that we are no longer walking in darkness, no longer limited in our vision of what is, and what can be.  And once restored and renewed, we can then go out from here ready to be a prophetic voice for hope, justice, peace, and God’s all abiding grace and love.

So rest today – be healed…because a world hungry for God’s all-inclusive love and grace needs your prophetic voice now more than ever.

Amen.

For the audio from the 10:30am service, click here:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_pill_and_blue_pill

[2] The Rev. Bob Eldan, preachingtips.com

 

The Rev. Diana L. Wilcox
Christ Church in Bloomfield & Glen Ridge
August 21, 2016
Pentecost 14 – Year C
1st Reading – Isaiah 58:9b-14
Psalm 103:1-8
2nd Reading – Hebrews 12:18-29
Gospel – Luke 13:10-17