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

August 22, 2004

Being a prophet has never been an easy task. Very few people like prophets, and a case could be made that most authentic prophets do not have good social skills. After all, to speak out loudly the message of God is generally not endearing, and most people would muffle their message a little in order to be gracious to others. A prophet has only one thing to say - God’s word - and it does not matter how rude that word may be.

One thing for sure we are reminded hearing the very beginning of Jeremiah’s prophetic calling: you cannot want to be a prophet. You can’t go to university to learn to be a prophet. If you want to be a prophet and thunder God’s judgment against the sinners and oppressors of society, it is probably a sign that you are not God’s prophet. God chooses prophets; there are no volunteers.

Jeremiah resisted the call because he was too young. Some conjecture he was a teenager when this word came to him, but teenagers were not accorded much respect in a traditional society that preferred the wisdom of the elder. No, you were a prophet because you were chosen and cannot do otherwise. “Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise” declared a 16th century prophet, Martin Luther of Wittenberg.

You could be allowed a sigh of relief: whew, I don’t have to be a prophet, and probably never was intended to be one. There were only a handful of legitimate prophets according to the Biblical canon. You and I are not left off the hook, however.

What Jeremiah does primarily as a prophet is to speak for or on behalf of God. Do you think you and I are not required to do the same thing? Our calling as human beings, plucked up out of the mass of humanity to follow the Christian Way, is to speak of God. It’s not a matter of choice. It’s just in us and it’s got to come out. We’ve got to speak of God so that others feel the warp and woof of that Word that keeps on keeping on.

We should be like Jeremiah and with fear and trembling balk at speaking because we are too young, too old, too ineloquent, lacking in courage, lacking in vocabulary that does justice to its topic. Yet, if you don’t say anything, who will? If you don’t utter a mumbling word, nobody else is going to mumble about God and the thought of God will be a murmur evaporating out of earshot. We’ve got to mumble before we start shouting.

Jesus was just teaching, not shouting, one Sabbath day in a synagogue. It’s a matter of interpretation, but this most likely means Jesus had read the Torah lesson for the week and then proceeded to expound upon it. He was teaching and also preaching at the same time. Whatever he was teaching, it was never meant to be a neutral bunch of academic ideas. The words were too important to be listed in cool order. They needed to be injected into our souls. No indication here which Scripture he was reading nor in which town this synagogue was located.

Into the synagogue limped a woman bent over with crippling discomfort, a spirit bending her over unstraight, 18 years thus far had been the crookedness. She might have entered the sanctuary late on purpose, to avoid being noticed. People bent over like her under the weight of the evil spirit were not received well by the good folk of the community. She had earned her crookedness, and after all these years, she most likely agreed with public opinion. After all, she was so bent over she could not look up to see Jesus in the first place.

But she couldn’t sneak in to sneak in a little bit of God. Jesus saw her and called her over right to the front of the synagogue, her worst fear, her worst nightmare.

He didn’t know her name - we don’t know her name - so he called her “woman.” We would consider that degrading and insulting, but the host minister probably thought to himself, “Good! Now he’s going to give it to her, this sinner who keeps daring to profane our holy place.”

“Woman, you are set free from your ailment,” Jesus spoke to her. Not a human set of words, but God’s word. And with the touch of his hands on her shoulder, she stood all the way up for the first time in nearly two decades. What else could she do but weep out words of praise and thankfulness to God who had spoken to her and plucked her up out of the mire of degradation and physical incapacity?

Now this is where we all have problems. The host minister, the leader of that particular synagogue, was furious, because Jesus had broken the most sacred of rules. This was the sabbath, the holy day of rest when no work was performed. The minister does not directly attack Jesus who did the work. Naturally, he goes after the woman who has been gracefully plucked up. “You know, there are six perfectly good days to come here and get healed, but not today. This is a holy day, God’s sabbath.” That’s as if the minister could have ever performed such a healing on any of the other six days of the week!

Jesus called the game, pure and simple. “You hypocrites! You feed and water your animals on the sabbath. You pull them out of hole when they fall in on the sabbath. But you won’t help a sick woman on this holiest of days. That’s what holy days are for! Today, the Sabbath, is the most fitting day to cure somebody of illness and degradation.”

What Jesus had done is to reinvent the Sabbath. No, that’s not really it. He had restored the sabbath to humanity. The sabbath is not the day to fear to move, to twitch a muscle lest it be interpreted as work. The sabbath is the day on which to give back life, to restore a crippled woman to wholeness, to stand straight up and make the rest of us marvel at the way God works. Maybe God is going to pluck me up out of my ditch into which I’ve fallen, and today could be the day!

That’s what it means to be a prophet, to speak for God to restore what religion is all about. Our religion is not meant to tell us what we can’t do, how incapable you and I are. The sabbath is the day to give us life, to remind and shake us up to the possibility and the reality of who we are. Today is the day “to build and to plant.” To stand straight up and speak of God to everyone around you.

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