August 26,2001
12th Sunday of Pentecost
Year C
Title: Standing Up “Straight”
Theme: Crushing rules and death-dealing rules had bent this woman’s
spirit for 18 years—but Jesus sets her free both physically and
emotionally, reminding us that love supersedes all rules and all
restrictions.
I was reading an article this week about male clergy and their gradual
slippage out of the professional middle class—all very discouraging if
you happen to be clergy—but one of the statistics they pointed was that
ministry remains primarily a male profession. 94% of clergy are still men,
which is shocking to me, to be honest. When I was in seminary, probably
half of my seminary class were women, so I guess really was really
surprised that professional ministry remains such a male dominated
profession. I had a friend in seminary who was an extraordinary woman,
but who reminded me a lot of the woman that we meet in this story from
Luke. She didn’t have a physical ailment, but she definitely had felt the
crushing blow of sexism, of Satan, in her constant battle for respect from
male clergy colleague for her ministry. She would tell stories that still
send me into shock, of men who verbalized the lie that she certainly
couldn’t be called to be a pastor, because, of course, she was a woman.
And, of course, historically, women have not served as pastors, though
there is some historical evidence that in the first 200 or 300 years of the
church, woman were very much in leadership roles, and that they were
even in the roles of pastors, though the possibility of those roles eroded
away as the institutional church stopped listening to the spirit, and paid
more attention to consolidating its social and political power.
My friend in seminary carried with her the bruises, the spiritual bruises,
and the emotional scars of constantly reminding people of the truth that
God calls women as well as men to serve the church as full equals in the
life of the church. But for my friend, there is only so much that you can
experience without it having it beat you down, without its effect being
inserted into your marrow and it becoming a part of who you are, flowing
through your veins and becoming the stuff that poisons your life, the
stuff that bends your spirit. I think she had struggled with that, I think,
because just anger was deep, and the sense of betrayal by the church
was overwhelming. She paid a heavy price for paying attention to God’s
call and calling the church to do its work of justice towards those whom
the rules and regulations had excluded. I have no doubt that the woman
that we see in this story is physically sick, but to be honest, I suspect the
deeper illness was the restrictions and rules that had dismissed her
existence, that had told her that she was never going to be the equal of
men, that she was a second-class person, that she was quite literally the
property of her father, which was then transferred to her husband.
When you get beaten down, you start looking at the floor, the dirt on the
ground, and it eventually becomes the only thing you can look at it, and I
wonder if all of a sudden she found that it was all that she could see and
that her bent eyes had become her bent back and now it harden into the
only position she knew. I have no doubt that Jesus healed her of her
illness, but what she was healed was the bondage of crushing rules that
dismissed her humanity and her equality in God’s eyes, and she was set
free of the death-dealing restrictions that had hemmed in her life. The
rules remained in that moment, no doubt, but she was no longer defined
by those rules—she stood up straight, the ground no longer was the only
thing she saw—she saw, perhaps for the first time in her life, that she
was valued, that she was a worth daughter of Abraham, and that she
was valued as full member of the household of God.
Its amazing to me that the church is often so stubborn in its ability to
listen to voice of God’s spirit, that it will go back to the rules, even if they
know that they haven’t worked and that it is rule-based religion that
Jesus sets us free from. But it’s a constant struggle, isn’t it? Look at the
how the leaders of this religious institution couldn’t see the wonder of
healing before them and they resorted to what they thought the rule
taught about healing on the Sabbath. Something wonderful happened
here but religious leaders wanted to talk about the rule. You shouldn’t
heal on the Sabbath, they said, this day of rest set into the eternal
calendar as a reminder that rest is as important as work in our lives. But
someone how the gift of the Sabbath became a rule, became something
that was all about DON’T DO THIS rather than DO THIS. The command
to rest, to take care of ourselves, became a rule that bleed away even
the possibility of doing good on the Sabbath, of healing another person.
And Jesus is once again frustrated—how could this happen?! How could
you get it so wrong, how could you wring the goodness out of a
command to live life fully, and make it into yet another burden, yet more
work? I don’t know why we do it, why we would rather have the rules
rather than the life. Maybe we’re just scared of the grays, the black and
whites are easier to deal with. Somewhere and somehow rules came into
being that tore away at the equality of women in God’s creation, and the
rules became instruments of emotional and spiritual death, both for
women AND men.
Now, I want to admit that this theme of letting go of the rules, of being
rule keepers, rather becoming real disciples of Jesus, keeps coming up
and up again in my sermons. I keep wondering why it does, and I think
there are several reasons. The first is that when people come back to
the church after some time away, they often ask me about what the rules
of the church are…so, what do you think the rules are about this and
what are the rules about that? They grew up with rules in their church
and they want to know what ours rules are or what my rules are. Often
those questions are about sex and relationships, not surprisingly,
because for most of us, it is those rules that seemed to have dictated
our whole lives—what wasn’t and was OK to do in our bedrooms. And
when people ask me what the rules are, I reply that we don’t have any
rules. You’re an adult disciple of Jesus Christ—you and I know the only
commandments that must we must follow—love God and love your
neighbor as you love yourself. I may or may not agree with how you
understand that command to love, but I’m not willing to be anybody’s
lawgiver—as if any of you would allow me to do that! And the reality is
that it is much harder to filter everything through the command to love
than it is to follow the rules. The rules say you shouldn’t heal on the
Sabbath, but love says, “Of course you should!” The rules say that
women are not to even be spoken to in Jesus’ cultures, but love compels
one to speak and empower the powerless. Its harder to be a person of
love than it is to be a person of rules. Love is complicated and
sometimes ambiguous and requires more of me than a simple surrender
to the rules. It requires me to think about what is right and what is
ethical, and how my actions affect other people. Its just easier to say,
“No healing on Sabbath!” than it is to acknowledge that the rules get
suspended when love itself compels us to heal and make whole. Maybe
that is reason why we always seem to slip back into a rule-based faith,
because it’s simply easier to be a person of rules than it is to be a
person of love. Now, before anyone thinks I am saying that there is no
wrong and no right, let me clear this up: yes, there is most definitely
wrong and right—of that I have no doubt. There are blacks and whites in
life, but most of our lives are spent in the grays, and that means we
might have to use our hearts and minds to think about how to live our
lives—do we or do we not heal on the Sabbath, for example? We know
what the rules say, but what does love say to this woman in the Gospel
of Luke?
The other reason this comes up so often is because Jesus keeps
bringing it up, to be honest. He keeps challenging the religious leaders
of his day around this issue of rule-breaking—a huge part of Gospel of
Luke is this controversy about the rules surrounding what is and is not
allowable on the Sabbath, the time from sundown Friday to sundown
Saturday. It just keeps coming up again and again, and we can’t pretend
that it doesn’t, even as we, in our worst moments, scramble for more
rules in our lives. But the third reason, and perhaps the one that speaks
most clearly to me is the deep, powerful cost and suffering that living as
if we are to be the people of the rule rather than the people of love really
exacts upon all of us. That cost shows up in our lives all the time, it
shows up in my life, and it shows up in the lives of my friends, especially
the clergy colleague friend I mentioned earlier. The rules in the minds of
many men and, ironically enough, may women, the rules say that women
are not called to pastor churches—but Jesus demands that we filter the
rule through the hard strainer of love and finds clearly that this is a
woman called to pastoral ministry. That filtering process is exactly what
Jesus did in this story we have before us and many other instances in his
life. If we had paid attention to love rather than rules, we wouldn’t have
had had to take 1600 years before the church disavowed slavery, or
1800 years before the church got a clue about women’s equality in the
church, or 1900 years before we began to struggle with homophobia and
heterosexism. Following the rules, rather than being of disciple of the
one who calls us to the difficult work of love, has cost us too much and it
has left a mess in its wake—look at the legacy of slavery, of sexism, of
homophobia…and many of us can tell each other stories of what rule-
based faith has cost us.
And the good news is that we have the Christ on our side…and
instinctively, we know that we calls us to here is true. Life is hard, the
rules are tempting, and the call to love is harder than the rules, but it’s
the right thing to do. Look at the crowd in this passage, when Jesus puts
the religious leaders of his day to shame—they literally rejoice, the
Scripture says. Finally, someone got the point, they must have been
thinking. We know the truth deep inside of us. And love is that truth.
Love heals when the rules say no, love challenges our neat and order
lives, love says “you are set free,” and we finally stand straight up again
because we were not meant to have our spirits beaten down by rules
that drove the life out of us. “Woman,” he says to this woman in the
story, which is itself a radical act in this culture, this simple act of
addressing a woman directly, since husbands and fathers were the only
males who were allowed to speak to directly to woman—“woman,” he
says, “you are set free from your ailment.” “Woman, look up, stand up,
you have been set free from the spirit of brokenness and you are set
free now.” I think of my clergy friend, I think of me, I think of all of us, we
who are called to the difficult and challenging work of freedom, the
difficult and beautiful work of love.
