Straightening Up
Jeremiah 1:4-10; Luke 13:10-17

August 26, 2007


In a way, the Biblical story for you and me does not begin with Creation in Genesis chapter 1 or even with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Those are events so far in the past that we are no longer able to experience directly what happens when God called the worlds into being or when Eve and Adam were fruitfully seduced to abandon their innocence. Instead, the story begins as it did for Jeremiah, only a boy with no particular place to go.

Perhaps the greatest of the major prophets of Judah, Jeremiah’s initiation is typical. The first word spoken was not Jeremiah’s, but God’s. He was apparently a young lad, an adolescent, who knew what he couldn’t do. It wasn’t that Jeremiah had no qualifications for the task of being God’s mouthpiece. His qualifications did not matter. You don’t earn the right to be a prophet, and with hindsight seeing how Jeremiah was attacked and beaten and imprisoned for his divinely inspired words, being a prophet was nothing to be proud of or to seek out. In fact, if you are proud of being a prophet, conscious of your human power as God’s spokesperson, then you aren’t really a prophet after all. Being a prophet is never a matter of choice; it is a matter of having no choice but to speak what you have to say, even if you are only a boy. There are no excuses if God gives you something to say.

Jesus was simply teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. Nevertheless, Jesus had a sabbath problem - just about every time the Gospel narrator reports the activities of Jesus on a sabbath day, it ends up with Jesus getting into really hot water with the authorities. The commandment to honour and keep holy the sabbath seemed to be the only thing that really mattered in contemporary Jewish society. Since so many rules were devised around the sabbath to keep people from even thinking of working, it was a rare human being who would not make a mistake and do something that counted for work and was then condemned. For the religious establishment it was easy to be superior and righteous since basically they set up and interpreted the rules.

Jesus never did anything bad on the sabbath: he healed people and his famished disciples picked their own food off the stalk. Jesus cared about suffering and hunger, not about the day of the week., for after all, every day is God’s day. The sabbath was the religious establishment’s day and there is a difference between the two.

And he saw her standing there. Standing is the problem verb, for the woman was noticeable painfully by all as one who was bent over so much that she had not been able to straighten up for 18 years. She was a fixture in the community, a public embarrassment sad to say, for the dominant view was that someone beset by such an unexplainable burden was obviously paying for a great sinfulness in her past. There was no helping her.

Jesus saw and smelled pain, and was drawn in that direction. His first response was a word, “Woman, you are free from your infirmity.” Then unusually, he also touched her and immediately she stood up straight - and she praised God.

The ruler of the synagogue all but cursed in the name of his God, the God of the Sabbath, which Jesus had once again violated. He goes on a familiar rant that there are six days for work and to be healed, but healing is not allowed on the Sabbath. Jesus knew this was not only outrageous theology, but that the ruler’s rules were absolutely hypocritical, so Jesus names his game out loud.

“You’d have no problem untying your cattle and taking them to water on the Sabbath - and that can be a lot of work - but you’re going to deny that a human being tied down by Satan all these 18 years can be unloosed and allowed to stand up straight finally simply because it’s the Sabbath? You and your religion are a fraud!”

The synagogue leaders were almost laughed out of the building, their fraudulent faith exposed and their status humiliated. Everybody else rejoiced at the glorious things done by Jesus. Of course, no matter what century Jesus doesn’t get away cleanly with such a triumph of words and deeds. There will be those in the mob before Pilate on that Good Friday and perhaps some at Golgotha who are remembering bitterly how Jesus embarrassed them on that day, mocking their Sabbath.

Nobody is asking you and me to repeat and imitate Jesus’ healing touch. It is not our prerogative to control and demand such a gift. It may happen, but not because you and I know what we are doing; only when God decides to act through you just that one time. Yet before he laid hands upon that bent over woman, he spoke words of freedom to her, words that declared and affirmed that she was a real person, worthy of being a daughter of Abraham, that she was not a sinful person but a child of God. You and I don’t say that enough to those who are hurting, and while the results usually are not as physically dramatic as here, something is straightening up inside a person’s beaten down soul. Don’t hesitate, say it.

Say it because that’s when you are being called to be a prophet. Oh no, not then, I was just offering a word of encouragement. I am not a deeply spiritual person. I don’t have eloquent language to bandy about and inspire people. Certainly, that all may be true, but what do you think Jeremiah was doing when he complained, “I am only a boy”? I have no qualifications, no eloquence and poor grammar, no life experience that amounts to anything.

Yet just how are you able to say to someone suffering and labouring - “you are free” - without it coming out of you from God? You say the word that needs to be said to someone who needs straightening up, and sometimes you are the one who needs straightening up. Are you listening to yourself? John Wesley used to say that he preached and preached the Gospel so that he finally might hear it himself. To that I can say Amen - I have to keep preaching salvation so that I might be saved, that I might finally be free, that I can actually straighten up in order to be able to look people in the face, which the bent over woman could not do for 18 years.

When you tell someone suffering “you are free” it can be unwittingly a deeply prophetic word, for it is the truth that shall make you free, and truth is not popular in many quarters. By an innocent, cheerful world you can collide head first with the gloom and anger and self-interest of the Sabbath-industry as did Jesus. By telling someone poor and struggling with all kinds of impediments that she can now be free, as did Arthur Verrall for so many decades, the powers-that-be which do not appreciate that kind of freedom can be unleashed. Do not underestimate the simple word of encouragement and freedom, a prophetic gift. It may turn the order of the world upside down and get you into a heap of trouble. It could free you too.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan