Sermon 25 August 2013: The Movement of Grace 14TH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST Isaiah 58: 9b-14; Psalm 103:1-8; Hebrews 12:18-29; Luke 13:10-17 Pastor Julie Webb Today’s message can be summed up in a movement. That’s okay, because we’re used to moving in church: stand up, sit down; stand up again, sit down again; desperately try to cover your hymnal when the pastor sprinkles water at you; maybe sway a little to the songs; walk forward if you can, to receive the Lord’s Supper. . . . We may not move a lot, around here, but we do move. So we are ready to receive the message of the day. That message, and the full expression of Sabbath, and what the kindom of God is like – all that stuff can be expressed in a movement. And the movement goes something like this: (Starting from a very hunched-over position, straightens up fully, lets shoulders drop, and breathes deeply) At this point in the sermon, I’d like to pause and express my gratitude to my chiropractor. And now I’d like to invite you to join me in this movement, if your body will let you. But if your body thinks it might hurt a lot, or you might get stuck, then you are invited to participate in your imagination. If ever you have made movements like this, your mind remembers what they feel like. I should really be having Karen Peters lead this, because she teaches Rosen Movement classes; but I’ll do my best. Let’s slow the movement down, and notice how everything feels. Start by hunching your shoulders just a little, and turning in on yourself. Notice how your head moves down. Let your body remember all the times you’ve done this before. What feelings usually go with this position? (blame, shame, guilt, sadness, loneliness --) Now take it lower: bend over more if you can, and look for the floor. How do your back and neck feel in this position? How about your belly?! Your lungs? Do you feel how the burden of your body’s weight has shifted, and how your breathing has gotten restricted? Imagine if you had to walk around in this position. How would that feel? How would it affect the way you related to your community—the way you talked to other people, for example? Okay, my chiropractor isn’t paying me to do this, so let’s very slowly and gently begin to allow our bodies to unbend—leaving the shoulders curled and straightening the lower spine first, gently and smoothly, then uncurling the upper back one vertebra at a time, or as close as you can manage. Finally, let the shoulders un-hunch, falling softly back and down, while the head floats up. And let a fresh breath of air fill your lungs. Haah. That’s different, isn’t it? How are you? Did anyone get stuck? I hope it feels better to you to be un-hunched than to be hunched, because otherwise it kind of spoils the sermon. What we just did was to act out the gospel message for today. We reminded ourselves how it feels to go from being burdened to being unburdened, from being bound to being unbound; how it feels to go from being lonely and sad and cut off to being open and comfortable and set free. What does God want for us? -This kind of movement. What does God want us to offer the world? -This kind of movement. When I arrived at Napa Valley Lutheran Church, one of the members of the congregation who welcomed me was a woman who was permanently bent over, almost in half. I never asked her why. Maybe it was the same osteoporosis that curved the shoulders of my grandmother, or maybe it was something else. I’ll bet some of you knew the explanation. If the writer of Luke’s gospel had ever seen Helen, he probably would have said she was oppressed by a spirit or bound by Satan—which is what he said about the woman in today’s Gospel story. And who knows? In Helen’s shoes, I might sometimes have felt he was right. I say, “I might have,” because I don’t know how Helen felt about being bent over. Maybe she was more vexed by some other challenge she faced. We tend to assume that people’s biggest challenges are the disabilities we can see, but sometimes the toughest challenges are invisible. The first time I saw Helen sitting down, I wasn’t sure I recognized her! Sitting down, she didn’t look bent-over; she looked just like anybody else. I could look her straight in the eye, and all the strain seemed to be taken out of her neck. In those moments, I couldn’t see her disability. It’s like I told the TURTLES youth group this week: I think most of us have disabilities; it’s just that some of our disabilities are more visible than others, and some are only visible in certain situations. One of my disabilities is usually invisible. It’s vision-related. Many of you know I’ve had a cornea transplant in my right eye. I’ve said this before: if I didn’t have access to specialized medical care, and if I couldn’t get together a thousand dollars to spend on these special contact lenses I wear, I wouldn’t be able to get around very much, and I couldn’t do a lot of my job. Now, some folks prefer not to use the term “disabled” to describe themselves or others. Some like to say they’re “differently-abled”, because they realize that the deepest challenges we face in this world may not be my eyesight, or your bum hip. Depression, physical paralysis, intellectual disabilities, and physical illness may not always be our biggest problems. No. What is most in need of healing are our greed, our selfishness, our violence, fear, and general hard-heartedness. Whatever it is that makes us point our fingers at somebody else and say they’re weird or wrong or they’re the problem—maybe that’s something that needs healing. Whatever is it that lets us allow thousands of people to live in poverty and starvation—that needs healing, too. In today’s Jesus story, the synagogue leader and even the Gospel writer Luke himself say that Jesus “cured” or “healed” the woman from her bent-overness. But Jesus himself keeps talking, not about curing or healing, but about “loosing”. He talks about things that are bound, and things that are loosed from bondage. If you have an animal, he says, don’t you loose it—don’t you untie it—from its bondage on the Sabbath, to give it a drink of water? Rest wouldn’t be rest if we weren’t set free from what binds us. Think about that. . . . And about the woman, Jesus says, she is a full member of the community, an inheritor of the promise, a daughter of Abraham and Sarah. When he addresses her, what he actually says, in the original Greek, is, “Woman, you have been loosed from your infirmity.” -As though it had happened already, before he even spoke, maybe before they even saw each other. And then he lays his hands on her, and she begins to show in her body the thing that Jesus declared had already taken place: she is unbent. What follows is a disagreement about how to keep the Sabbath well. Both Jesus and the synagogue leader agree that Sabbath rest is a holy gift and needs to be kept; but Jesus points out that Sabbath can’t be fully lived out until those who suffer are released from their suffering. He says to the worried synagogue leader, “Yet this being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan bound lo eighteen years, was she not bound to be loosed from this bondage on the day of the Sabbath? (Greek translation by Mark Davis) Of course the Sabbath is a perfect day for being loosed from bondage, because this is the true meaning of the Sabbath: to remove the yoke of oppression from among you, as Isaiah says, and while you’re at it, stop blaming people and speaking evil of them. Sabbath calls us to offer our food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of anyone who is afflicted. In the twentieth century, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote that the Sabbath is a day when “we try to become attuned to holiness in time” and to “face sacred moments.” It’s meant to orient our whole lives. I wonder what would happen if we all let those things happen on our Sundays, and not just in church. I think the whole world is bound to be loosed: that’s what the kindom of heaven looks like. Jesus proclaimed that the Great Loosing had already come, and called upon his followers to live it out. Sometimes we do, and sometimes we don’t. Sometimes, instead of loosing, we burden, bind, bend, and blame. For example, in our church’s Old Town neighborhood this week, a meeting was held to air homeowners’ complaints that there have been a number of break-ins and thefts lately, and that some people’s yards have been trampled by people who were maybe drunk or high. Some residents think that if services like the Hope Center or the Salvation Army were moved out of the area, then poor and homeless people wouldn’t congregate downtown, and the problems would abate. What do you think of this? We could point the finger at the poor and homeless people or at the not-in-my-backyard residents, couldn’t we? But many of us haven’t walked even a day in the shoes of the poor or people with addictions. On the other hand, if there were strange people making noise in my yard at night, I might be frightened and upset, too. What we need at times like this is to unbend, unclench and retract our pointing fingers. We need to sit down together face to face, and listen to one another, and find a way to give everybody a chance to unbend and stay together in community. These are skills we’re learning from our involvement in broad-based organizing through Common Ground, so I think our congregation has something to offer our community—something that it needs, right now. This-- (movement) is what the Holy One offers to the heart of each of us, even if our spines won’t cooperate. This-- (movement) is what God is already doing in us and in the world. And it is what we are called to do: unbind, unbend, release, loose, and set free.
Posted on: Sun, 01 Sep 2013 00:26:19 +0000
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