A STRANGE THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO CHURCH

August 26, 2001

Luke 13: 10-17

What did you expect to happen when you got up, dressed and drove to church today? Singing? David preaching? Communion? Seeing friends? Did you expect God to do something in you? Did you anticipate that God would speak to you in some way? That God would move in your life and make you different? If we were honest, I would expect most of us did not think any of those questions. It is Sunday morning; we go to church like any other Sunday. We expect that we will be comforted and strengthened by being in God’s house and given some good thoughts for the coming week. But did we really come anticipating that Christ would change our lives? Confront us? Challenge us? Heal us?

For 18 years this woman had been going to the Sabbath services. For 18 years, probably all her adult life, she had done everything stooped over. Getting water, cooking, bathing, and talking with friends at the open market. Going to the Sabbath service that day was like any other day. It is what you did on the Sabbath.

But before we get too far into this, there are two aspects of this story that we see differently than what the original readers knew. We live in a different world and those need to be highlighted.

First is the issue of the Sabbath. In Jesus’ time, keeping the Sabbath was the most holy and sacred thing a Jew did. On a weekly basis, a 24 hour period was set aside be a special service to honor God. No work was done in that period, except basic maintenance of animals and emergency aid. Honoring the Sabbath was honoring God. Built into that was the element of rest; everyone needs rest from regular hard labor, even slaves and animals, and especially women from house work.

Though Jesus challenged the rigidity of the Sabbath rule keeping, he did honor the Sabbath as a time set apart for honoring God. I don’t have to tell any of you that the sense of keeping the Sabbath (whether Saturday or Sunday) is not a high value in our culture these days. Soccer games, baseball games, traveling to Seattle for the day or taking a day hike in the mountains frequently takes place on Sunday mornings. Car salespeople will say that Sunday morning is a busy time for people to go out looking to buy a car. True, some churches hold services on Saturday evening or Sunday evening, but the importance of setting aside time for worship, let alone an entire day, is not a value for many. Does that say something about the importance of God in our lives? Putting prayer back in public schools is not the answer to culture’s problems – getting parents to set priorities where God is important in family life is more important.

Second, we probably didn’t even think about it because it is not an issue for us, but this story of the crippled woman is also a story about Jesus including women, about making women equal to men in the Kingdom, the Reign, of God. There is a parallel story in Luke 14: 1-6 of a man with an illness which has similar comments. Jesus saw women equal to men in a culture that considered women as inferior to men. Even the language of the 10 Commandments reflects this attitude: "You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor." Jesus saw a woman, proclaimed her as a daughter of Abraham and set her free. Because of her condition she may not have been married, probably no children therefore considered even less than a woman. Believe, me, this was a powerful statement of inclusion and equality of women for that time.

The role of honoring God on the Sabbath and the equality of women are important themes, I believe the story of Jesus healing the crippled woman points to another central theme. I have said on numerous occasions that I believe that as human beings we cannot separate the physical from the emotion and spiritual. We are whole beings in which the parts of us are intertwined. One element affects the other. If we are emotionally distraught then we will be affected spiritually and very easily physically by the situation. If we get into an argument or tense situation with a person at work, our body responds by getting tight, getting stomachaches, headaches, ulcers, etc.

A woman came in for counseling. She was just a few months married; she loves her husband dearly. However, she cannot bring herself to be touched intimately, sexually. She so desperately wanted to enjoy this part of loving her husband but there is a block so strong that she cannot enjoy intimacy with the one she loves. The relationship was in trouble. In talking she revealed that as a young girl her uncle who lived in the house with them sexually abused her. That experience was so traumatized her that it affected her as an adult. She hadn’t received any counseling or help as a child. In claiming and dealing with her hurt, anger, guilt, she blossomed into a woman full of love for her husband.

I encountered a man one time who, as a child, was forced to go to church. His father was considered a leader in the church, but at home he was a tyrant, physically and verbally abusive. It was a strict fundamentalist church that pounded in to him that God is love but all they talked about was fear and Hell fire and damnation. Years later he would have nothing to do with church because if God as a heavenly father is anything like his earthly father then he didn’t want anything to do with it. He was wounded, scared.

We can be crippled and bent over in more ways than just physically. Fears, prejudices, hurt, anger, resentments can cripple as severely as arthritis or scoliosis. We carry anger and prejudice around that cripples our ability to see others different from us as children of God. We carry resentment around that hardens our hearts to the possibilities of restored relationships. We carry guilt around so thick that our self-esteem is at the bottom of the charts and we have a hard time looking at ourselves in the mirror. We carry insecurities and inferiorities around that cripple our ability to use the gifts God has given us.

It frequently starts out as something small but it grows and grows to the point that we get use to carrying it around and it becomes comfortable. We get comfortable with our prejudices, our hatreds, our anger, our fears. We assume that since we hold resentments towards others that it is normal and natural and soon we begin to justify it as the way of God. We get so use to carrying around guilt that we begin to think that God wants us to be this way. So we experience physical pain, broken relationships, divided communities, and racial prejudice.

This woman had been going to Sabbath services for 18 years all crippled up, for whatever reason. She had become so accustomed to living stooped over that she knew no other way. She had accepted it as her lot in life. She went to the worship expecting the same old thing that always happens. But that day Jesus saw her in a new way. Jesus saw a woman being bound by whatever it way and proclaimed that she was set free.

It is not God’s desire that we spend our days being crippled by fears, prejudices, hurt, anger, hatred, guilt, low-esteem, jealousy, resentments. That is the work of Satan; Satan’s goal is to divide, to bind, to separate people, to instill fear, anger, prejudice, guilt. It is God’s desire that we be made whole, that we be set free to enjoy and celebrate life in the fullness of all its beauty.

God wants you to live life to its fullest. The person of faith went to worship that day not expecting anything to happen, but Jesus saw someone who was bound and he set her free.

What did you expect when you came to worship today? What cripples you from becoming your full potential but it has become so much a part of you that you assumed you had to live with it? From what do you need Jesus to set you free?