{"id":668,"date":"2010-09-01T18:52:31","date_gmt":"2010-09-01T18:52:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=668"},"modified":"2017-08-26T15:26:29","modified_gmt":"2017-08-26T19:26:29","slug":"the-bent-over-woman-lori-unger-brandt-aug-22-2010","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/?p=668","title":{"rendered":"The Bent Over Woman – Lori Unger Brandt – Aug. 22, 2010"},"content":{"rendered":"
View Archived Sermons <\/a><\/p>\n
Luke 13:10-17<\/strong><\/font><\/font><\/h5>\n<\/div>\n
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\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026There are moments when the world as we know it changes on a dime \u2013 like a kaleidoscope of mirrors, where the whole picture explodes in new expressions of movement and colour with a twist of the wrist.\u00a0 The familiar patterns of daily living have disappeared and something new is required.<\/font><\/font><\/div>\n


After 9-11 I saw a video documenting people\u2019s response to a world turned upside down by the attacks on the world trade centre \u2013 people of all faiths searching for answers, in the face of an inexplicable tragedy.\u00a0 Most striking to me, distinct amongst those who attributed their rescue to God\u2019s providence or a loved one\u2019s death to God\u2019s ultimate plan, was a response by an atheist who was visibly flattened by the attacks.\u00a0 \u201cI rejected the idea of God,\u201d he said, \u201cbecause I knew that humans were basically good and could be relied upon to come through for each other in the end.\u201d The horrors of 9-11 had taken even that from him, and he was left with nothing.\u00a0\u00a0 The world had changed, the kaleidoscope had turned, nothing was the same.<\/font><\/font><\/div>\n

Sometimes the reordering of the world is such that it requires something different from us, that our usual patterns of behaving and relating to each other are no longer relevant, when the rules we cling to and live by ring hollow.\u00a0 Something new is required of us in these moments.\u00a0 And so it is with the kingdom of God.<\/font><\/font><\/div>\n

Our story this morning reads like a typical conflict\/healing story similar to others found elsewhere in Luke.\u00a0 Jesus heals some anonymous person \u2013 maybe she is bleeding or maybe he has dropsy (whatever that is), or maybe he can\u2019t walk \u2013 and gets in trouble for it \u2013 trouble he was probably looking for. Why else would he perform this healing in the middle of the synagogue – on the Sabbath, no less, when such work is explicitly prohibited?\u00a0 Oh Jesus was spoiling for a fight, all right, and the bent over woman makes the perfect foil. The real story, it would seem, is about the conflict between Jesus and the religious leaders, and the healing simply provides its subject matter.\u00a0 As usual Jesus wins the verbal sparring match and the leaders are publically shamed.
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I\u2019ll suggest this morning that there\u2019s more to the story, though stopping there does no violence to it.\u00a0 On first reading, the Sabbath seems to be what\u2019s at stake \u2013 what\u2019s ok and what\u2019s not ok to do on the Sabbath.\u00a0 The Sabbath, ordained by God at the beginning of time as a day of rest, a day to replenish one\u2019s energies from the work of the days before and to prepare for the work that is to come.\u00a0 A day to charge one\u2019s proverbial batteries, to set down one\u2019s burdens and take time instead for worship and spiritual nourishment.\u00a0 The Sabbath, not arbitrary or irrelevant, but set out for a purpose for the benefit of God\u2019s people.\u00a0 <\/font><\/font><\/div>\n

Among religious observances, it ranks pretty high \u2013 it\u2019s number four of the ten commandments found in Deuteronomy 5, right after taking God\u2019s name in vain and right before honouring your father and mother.\u00a0 Most striking is the attention given to this instruction, with more ink than any other commandment.\u00a0 Listen:<\/font><\/font><\/div>\n

Read (Deuteronomy 5:12-15)<\/font><\/font><\/div>\n

To put all of this in perspective, among the Ten Commandments, murder, adultery, stealing, and bearing false witness each gets one line a-piece.\u00a0\u00a0 You shall not murder.\u00a0 Period.\u00a0\u00a0 Something more is at stake with the Sabbath, having to do with a deep sense identity and calling.\u00a0 Keeping the Sabbath holy enacts a remembrance of God\u2019s saving work among their people.\u00a0 Remember \u2013 you were slaves in the land of Egypt and God brought you out with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.\u00a0 Therefore, you must remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.<\/font><\/font><\/div>\n

And keeping the Sabbath holy\u00a0 involves not working one day per week.\u00a0 Not you, not your sons or daughters, not your slaves, not your animals, not even strangers among you, so that everyone in your community gets to rest on that day, not just you. <\/font><\/font><\/div>\n

Naturally, when it comes down to brass tacks, it\u2019s hard to get a group of people to agree on what exactly God meant by the instruction to keep the Sabbath day holy, what is involved when it comes to not working.\u00a0 We\u2019re still trying to figure this one out.\u00a0 I knew of Mennonite families in southern Manitoba for whom it meant cold Sunday meals, prepared on Saturday, eaten in dark kitchens on dinnerware set out the night before.\u00a0\u00a0 For other families, it means children do their homework on Saturday so they can have one day in the week when the pressures of school and work can abate and they can breathe for a moment.<\/font><\/font><\/div>\n

In the case presented to us in Luke 13, the norms for Sabbath observance had been set generations earlier and when it came to healing, the norms were these:\u00a0 healing on the Sabbath was expressly forbidden except in life and death situations.\u00a0\u00a0 Life and death.\u00a0 The woman in this story is simply bent over \u2013 had been for 18 years and has no reason to fear for her life on account of her ailment.\u00a0\u00a0 You can see how it looks like Jesus is spoiling for a fight!?!\u00a0 He seems to expect opposition and isn\u2019t surprised when the leader opposes him, saying \u2013 there are six days on which a person can easily come and be healed \u2013 such work is not to be done on the Sabbath.\u00a0 Jesus expects this response and his answer is ready, quick and cutting \u2013 don\u2019t every one of you untie your ox or your donkey and lead it to water?\u00a0 Why would you not extend the same courtesy to this woman, bound these 18 years, and set her free from her bondage?\u00a0 These words shame his opponents and the crowd rejoices.<\/font><\/font><\/div>\n

Jesus\u2019 lesson seems clear \u2013 rules of the Sabbath mean nothing if they do not attend to the wholeness and restoration of others.\u00a0 If the dignity of another is undermined in the process of keeping rules that exist for their own sake, those rules are best broken.\u00a0\u00a0 The Sabbath is made for people, not people for the Sabbath \u2013 this he\u2019s said before, demonstrating his point by breaking Sabbath rules publically.\u00a0 <\/font><\/font><\/div>\n

But the plot thickens, especially when we turn our attention away from the conflict between Jesus and the leaders of the synagogue, away for the moment from the debate surrounding the Sabbath, and focus our gaze on the woman.\u00a0 I think she is unaccustomed to being looked at.\u00a0 For one thing, she is a woman in a synagogue, and while a synagogue might be
\na place where a man might go to have his voice heard, a woman was likely there to listen.\u00a0 Her back is bent, and those around her probably knew exactly what that meant.\u00a0 In a world where physical characteristics were often thought to reflect one\u2019s moral character, a weak back denotes weakness in moral fortitude, a condition most often associated with women and especially derided in men.\u00a0 Our English language still reflects this bias \u2013 a youth who shows promise can be described as a \u201cfine upstanding young man.\u201d Funny, even as I say it, how the maleness of such good moral fibre comes through.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Betrayed by her body, this woman epitomizes this weakness assumed by her stature, for she \u201cwas quite unable to stand up straight.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 Indeed, she had had a \u201cspirit of weakness\u201d for eighteen years (a better translation option, in my opinion, for \u201ca spirit had crippled her,\u201d v. 11).\u00a0 <\/font><\/font><\/div>\n

Jesus is teaching when he sees her, and, seeing her, calls her, touches her, heals her, right there in front of everybody.\u00a0 Immediately she stands up straight and begins praising God, surely the only possible response after a lifetime of looking at her toes, unable to lift her head to the song of a bird in a tree (where\u2019s Lena?); the only possible reaction after a lifetime of living under the stigma of weakness.\u00a0 For this woman, standing up straight for the first time means more than simply being able to lift her head to a breeze \u2013 her straight back restores her honour and dignity among her people, enabling her to, so to speak, hold her head high. Says Jesus, is the Sabbath not the perfect moment for such restoration to take place?<\/font><\/font><\/div>\n

But there\u2019s more.\u00a0\u00a0 Jesus, immediately after calling his opponents hypocrites, calls this woman a daughter of Abraham.\u00a0 At first reading I was uncomfortable with this pronouncement.\u00a0 What if she hadn\u2019t been a daughter of Abraham, hadn\u2019t been a member of the community, however peripheral?\u00a0 Certainly Jesus is here naming her forgotten dignity by recalling to his listeners her central place in the community, but does this not further emphasize the closedness of the group to outsiders?\u00a0 Would she have been worthy of such a healing had she not been a \u201cdaughter of Abraham?\u201d<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the rub.\u00a0 There\u2019s no such thing as a daughter of Abraham.\u00a0 Really none.\u00a0 Nowhere in the vast collections of Jewish or Christian writings had anyone anywhere called a woman a daughter of Abraham.\u00a0 Sons of Abraham, certainly, but not daughters.\u00a0 Except in one document, written in approximately the same time frame as Luke\u2019s gospel, give or take a century.\u00a0 The reference occurs in 4 Maccabees, a Jewish text, in which a woman becomes \u201cthe daughter of Abraham\u2019s strength\u201d (4 Macc. 15:28) on the basis of her willingness to suffer and die for the sake of her faith.\u00a0 <\/font><\/font><\/div>\n


Echoes of this Maccabean woman may just have resonated in the minds of Luke\u2019s first hearers.\u00a0 In our text, Jesus imbues the bent over woman with the strength of Abraham, not that she has become a daughter of Abraham now that she is healed, but that she has always been Abraham\u2019s daughter, fully incorporated with pride of place within the community of faith, bent back notwithstanding.\u00a0 Her straight back makes evident what Jesus could see all along.<\/font><\/font><\/div>\n

See, Jesus isn\u2019t just breaking rules in order to make a point.\u00a0 He\u2019s not picking fights in order to shame his opponents.\u00a0 He\u2019s got a whole new thing in mind, a whole reordering of priorities and a restructuring of the community,.\u00a0 He\u2019s giving the kaleidoscope a twist, unsettling those whose place has been assured and envisioning a new world where those excluded are given pride of place, where pedigree extends to everyone, where the presence of God is discerned in the least likely of places.\u00a0 Luke is unabashed by this new thing, proclaiming through John the Baptist at the very beginning, \u201cDo not begin to say to yourselves, \u201dwe have Abraham as our ancestor,\u201d for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham\u201d (3:8).\u00a0 <\/font><\/font><\/div>\n

That\u2019s what the cross did \u2013 broke all the rules \u2013 the very bonds of death – in order that we all might be reconciled to God and to each other.\u00a0\u00a0 Indeed, restoration and reconciliation are Jesus\u2019 entire program embodying a Sabbath reinvented to fit the coming kingdom.\u00a0 Jesus is about Sabbath-making rather than Sabbath breaking.\u00a0 Give this woman a rest already!\u00a0 Not only from her own infirmity, though it\u2019s been a long 18 years.\u00a0 Give this woman a rest from her own invisibility, from the bondage that has made her less than a full participant.\u00a0 The kingdom of God, folks, exceeds everyone\u2019s expectations.\u00a0 See, it\u2019s like a mustard seed planted in a garden that becomes a tree where birds can come to rest.\u00a0 It\u2019s like a persistent gardener who refuses to cut down an unproductive tree, but notices instead that all it needs is fertilizer and tender loving care in order for it to thrive.\u00a0 In the kingdom of God, the bent over woman is already a daughter of Abraham \u2013 the kaleidoscope has turned and the order of things Is upsidedown.<\/font><\/font><\/div>\n

This happens \u2013 the moment of realization that the ground has shifted causing us to perceive the world entirely differently.\u00a0\u00a0 I know of a mother who watched in resigned horror as her son, whom she had raised to be respectable and good, began to grow his hair, leaving the house with torn jeans all unkempt, various pieces of jewelry hanging from his face.\u00a0 He was a good kid, but his personal grooming was beginning to reflect poorly on her mothering.\u00a0 She didn\u2019t know how much she had changed until one day, driving down a downtown street, she saw a young man with long, unkempt hair and ripped jeans, piercings all over the place.\u00a0 And she noticed that her first thoughts, rather than contempt or derision, were that \u2013 this was someone\u2019s son, and he\u2019s probably a good kid.\u00a0 The kaleidoscope had turned \u2013 and she was able to risk looking beyond the limitations of her perceptions.\u00a0 <\/font><\/font><\/div>\n

Mennonites do pedigree really well.\u00a0 Just ask any non-ethnic Mennonite in any Mennonite congregation.\u00a0 So do wealthy people.\u00a0 So do educated people.\u00a0 So do married people.\u00a0 So do able bodied people.\u00a0 So do men.\u00a0 So do heterosexual people.\u00a0\u00a0 We abide by so many rules which order our community and so many of them exclude and deny rather than include and build up.\u00a0 Our worlds get locked into soothing and predictable patterns and in the meantime the bent over woman passes invisible in our midst.<\/font><\/font><\/div>\n

How can we tell when our best attempts at living faithfully fall short of Jesus\u2019 kingdom vision?\u00a0 What do we do with our own internal rules that construct walls of propriety around us, including those who fall within our comfort zone and excluding difference (albeit politely and with a smile that hopes someone else will extend the welcome). Transgressing our familiar and familial boundaries is risky \u2013 It\u2019s takes loving someone, risking relationship, even across your own personal boundaries.\u00a0 It takes noticing who sits on the periphery of our community, and wondering how we can acknowledge the fullness of their participation as sons and daughters of God.<\/font><\/font><\/div>\n

And it might be painful.\u00a0 <\/font><\/font><\/div>\n

But it\u2019s easier when you consider it\u2019s not you who\u2019s reordering the world.\u00a0 The world has been reordered.\u00a0 The kaleidoscope has turned.\u00a0 The kingdom has come, even as it is still coming, with or without us.\u00a0 The bent over woman is already a daughter of Abraham, Sabbath healing or no.\u00a0 What will it take to get us to notice? <\/font><\/font><\/div>\n
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View Archived Sermons Luke 13:10-17 \u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026There are moments when the world as we know it changes on a dime \u2013 like a kaleidoscope of mirrors, where the whole picture explodes in new expressions of movement and colour with a twist of the wrist.\u00a0 The familiar patterns of daily living have disappeared and something new is required. After 9-11 I saw a video documenting people\u2019s response to a world turned upside down by the attacks on the world trade centre \u2013…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sermons-a-worship-audio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=668"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4000,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668\/revisions\/4000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}