“Immediately she straightened up and praised God.”

The Reverend Shirley Smith Graham, August 26, 2007, St. Martin’s Episcopal Church

There are mornings when I feel quite bent over – and perhaps you do too.  I feel shorter than I really am until, after that first cup of morning tea, I stand at the kitchen sink and visualize more length in my spine.  I remember my college ballet teacher encouraging us to pull a hair at the top of our heads and feel our spines lengthening.  Other times, I imagine space emerging between my vertebrae; I imagine space and air growing in between those vertebrae.  And, as my spine extends, I breathe better; I breathe more.

Can you imagine the restricted breath of the woman who spent years bent over upon herself?  The Gospeller Luke tells us, in the Greek text, that the woman is bent over, folded upon herself, because of whatever condition has injured her.  She is bent nearly double, her head tilting away from her body like the top of a question mark.  Some of us can relate – either because of osteoporosis or muscles that won’t behave: some of us know what it’s like to be so bent that walking forward means looking down.

So the bent-over woman is looking down, as she stands somewhere on the compound of the synagogue.  And there, at the synagogue, her life changes.  Jesus sees her.  “Hindi,” look, says the language of the Gospel text, look, a woman crippled for 18 years, unable to stand up straight.  And Jesus sees her, just as clearly and momentously as during that mountain moment when Moses noticed the burning bush.  Moses noticed the burning bush and turned aside to look at it.  In the same way now, Jesus notices the bent-over woman, and we hear, “Idou.”  Look!  Jesus calls her over and says, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.”  And so she is set free, liberated to stand up straight, to pull the top of her hair and feel the space between her vertebrae.  She is free to breathe, free to look Jesus in the eye, free to look somewhere other than at his feet.  The woman is free from what had tied her down.

What commences after the healing is a controversy.  The leader of the synagogue is upset because Jesus has broken one of the religious ordinances: he has healed, and therefore, done work on the sabbath.  And now that misdemeanor needs to be settled.  However, the controversy doesn’t get settled.  Instead, the terms of the argument change.  I think the leader may be less upset about Jesus working on the sabbath than about the noisy crowd that has taken over the synagogue since he started teaching.  The synagogue leader turns not to Jesus to charge him with breaking the law, but the leader turns his complaint against the crowds, adjuring them to come back another day.  You have six whole days of the week on which to be healed.  Why come on the sabbath, when work is forbidden?  Why come on the one day when it is not lawful to work?  Can’t you just behave and come and be healed on one of the other six days of the week?!

So the tension in the story is not between being healed and not being healed.  The tension is not between preserving the sanctity of the sabbath and restoring the health of one of God’s creatures.  Rather the tension comes from reconsidering what work is permissible to be done on the sabbath while still keeping the day holy.  Jesus illustrates his point by using the analogy of the livestock.  “Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water?”

Jesus is saying, Don’t you do work on the Sabbath when you untie the donkey from its manger so that it may drink?  Well, of course you do.  Untying a knot is work.  But it’s necessary work.  If you don’t untie that knot, your donkey would die from thirst on the sabbath.  And how would the death of a creature be honoring of God?  So then, might not I untie this woman from her bonds and let her drink and live?

The tension of the drama comes not just from Jesus healing but from Jesus calling the crowds to think: what type of work might be permissible on the sabbath in order to sustain life?  What action is necessary in order to let the living live?  Yes, preserving the sabbath is a good thing.  But what other good things are necessary to be done, even on the Sabbath, to preserve the gifts of life – the donkeys and the people – that God has given into this world?

What good things are necessary to be done?  What a question, indeed!

I think this question is a deep and important question for people of faith.  What good things are necessary to be done?  It’s the question that many churches stumble over and get paralyzed with.  The problem is never finding good work to do.  The challenge comes in deciding that one piece of work needs to take priority over another piece of work and then having the resolve to live with the consequences.  In the Gospel for today, Jesus is content to live with the consequence that untying the donkey and healing the woman will compromise his observance of the sabbath day.  He is willing to live with the compromise in order to achieve both goods.

And if we can get past the ugly phrase, “You hypocrites!” then we will see that Jesus is calling the whole crowd into a mindful evaluation of the needs of the day.  Jesus is noticing that people have choices, and he is asking them to make decisions in such a way that their actions will reflect their values, in this case the dual values of honoring God and restoring life.  Jesus is asking them to do a risky thing, an adult thing, a mature thing.  Jesus is asking them not to choose between a good and a bad thing.  Jesus is asking them to look at two good things and prioritize them in relation to one another.  Observing the sabbath and healing are both good things.  Which gets prioritized over the other one today, and what consequences get accepted as a result?

When people make good choices that are different from what we expect, it may startle us.  It’s our tendency as human beings, when we are startled, to act in unpredictable ways.  Sometimes, when people startle us with their unexpected choices, we condemn them.  Sometimes we praise them.  Sometimes they live long enough that they start out being condemned, or at least marginalized, and then end up being praised.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta was a person who, Jesus like, pushed herself and others to make decisions and live with the consequences.  In a time when India was a fledgling democracy and so much energy was being put forward to establish structures that would make “progress” happen, people who were considered disposable languished on the streets.  In the face of the gigantic effort to be made to bring India out of the “third world,” India was willing to overlook people who were not important.  But Mother Teresa looked at those unimportant people in the streets, and said, “Idou!”, look, here’s a man who is suffering; here is a child who is hungry.  This one needs to be washed.  This one needs clothes.  This one needs her wounds treated.  This one needs a comfortable, safe place to die.  And her work was unpopular with many.

Mother Teresa’s work was unpopular with many people because they were focused on other goods: educating children, for example.  As a woman of education herself, shouldn’t Mother Teresa be applying her valuable knowledge to educating others?  But Mother Teresa looked at the two goods: educating children and helping a suffering person live in dignity for one day and said, they are both good.  It is also good to alleviate some suffering and educate less.  Yes, the consequences have to be lived with.  There will be one less teacher to teach today.  But there will be one more person who is consoled and comforted, and that person will experience the kingdom of God as a result.  The priority, thought Mother Teresa, sometimes needed to be on bringing consolation to one person today, and she was willing to live with the consequences.

It is ironic that this woman who brought the comfort of God’s presence and the promise of God’s eternal love to so many ended up herself, the bent-over woman, as you see on the front of your bulletin cover.  One of the consequences that resulted from Mother Teresa’s choice of serving the poor was to forgo some comfort care for herself.  But in her choice, she found freedom from the spirit that bound her; she was set free in the love of Christ to love, and for her, that was the ultimate healing, a healing that touched the world.

We at St. Martin’s are being invited to see the choices, to evaluate all the good actions that we might take, and to make priorities.  It is unlikely that any decision we consider would result in one course of action would be absolutely bad and another course that would be absolutely good.  Rather, it is more likely that there would be two (or three or four) good courses of action and that we will be best served to have a conversation about which thing we choose to prioritize over another thing.  Just as if we were standing in the synagogue and hearing Jesus with our own ears, we will have the gifted moment of making choices to decide which thing to prioritize over the other (if you will, whether to preserve the sabbath unadulterated or to do a little work and save a life, thereby observing the sabbath in a different way).  These moments of choice are gift when can freeze-frame the moment, realize there is a choice to be made, and prayerfully consider possibilities that will lead us into faithfully living the Gospel.  In these moments, we learn to articulate our personal and group desires, to share our dreams with one another, and to decide together which things we do first and why.

In this sermon, I’m not leading up to a proposal on any particular issue.  It is not the day to decide if we replace the ice machine or fix the one we have.  This is not the day to decide when we should hire an assistant rector.  Rather, I’m drawing our attention to the act of evaluating our choices and making decisions because this is what Jesus is pointing us to today.  If they would untie the donkey, wouldn’t they untie the bent woman also?  Jesus is standing in the middle of his community and pushing that community to a mature place of thinking about the decisions they make.  He is urging them to make new decisions that reflect their priorities and values. 

So now, let’s apply the lesson.  When we as the community of St. Martin’s see that there is a choice to be made, how will we go about the decision making process in such a way that creates room in our community life together to realize we have choices, to approach that moment of choice as “gift”, and to make decisions that we believe are the ones most in line with the Gospel and the season of life we find ourselves in?  We might even find ourselves being able to heal on the sabbath.  Amen.