Thirteenth
Sunday after Pentecost
August 26, 2007
Sermon by Pastor Joy Bussert
The Holy Gospel according to St. Luke. (Luke 13:10-17)
Now Jesus was teaching in one of the
synagogues on the Sabbath. And just then
there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen
years. She was bent over and was quite
unable to stand up straight. When Jesus
saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your
ailment.” When he laid his hands on her,
immediately she stood up straight and began praising God. But the leader of the synagogue, indignant
because Jesus had cured on the Sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, “There are
six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and
not on the Sabbath day.” But Jesus answered him and said, “You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the Sabbath untie his
ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? And ought not this woman, a daughter of
Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage
on the Sabbath day?” When he said this,
all his opponents were put to shame; and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all
the wonderful things that he was doing.
The Gospel of the Lord.
Please join me in prayer.
Our loving and gracious God,
your mercies are new each day.
Give us a measure of wonder, awe, and hope,
that we might receive your loving kindness with thanksgiving.
Amen.
If you pay attention to the comings and goings of
ducks and ducklings, or if you have a small child who doesn’t miss a one of
them down by a lake, then no doubt Robert McCloskey’s classic children’s story,
Make Way for Ducklings, has also
crossed you mind more than once over these past summer months; or, better yet,
has made it onto your bookshelf as a treasure to keep forever, as the summers
come and go and your children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews grow from one
stage of life to another.
When the story begins, the mallards are flying over
the Boston Commons, searching for just the right place to build a nest. Every time they see a nice place, Mrs.
Mallard says that it is just no good.
They fly over
And finally the day comes when the ducklings all
hatch, and out come, first, Jack, then Kack, then Lack, Mack, Nack, Ouack,
Pack, and Quack, and they are beautiful.
They learn to swim, they learn to dive, they learn to walk, all in a
perfect row, right behind the very proud Mrs. Mallard. Until that day comes when, believing it’s time
to show them the city of Boston, she no sooner gets Jack, Kack, Lack, Mack,
Nack, Ouack, Pack, and Quack behind her, and they swim across and up the shore,
and they find their way all at once in the midst of busy, screeching, honking
cars and trucks. No amount of the little
ducks honking back up will stop traffic for the little entourage to make it
across. In fact, most of the cars and
trucks up high are so focused on where they are going they don’t see the
desperate Mrs. Mallard and all of her little ones below at all.
Just then, the good and benevolent and ever-so-attentive
police officer named Michael saves the day.
Running to their rescue, waving his arms in the air and blowing his
whistle so no one could miss it, Michael plants himself in the center of the
intersection, raises one hand to stop traffic up above, and beckons to the
mother and her little ducklings to follow.
Mrs. Mallard, now saved by the kind police officer, resumes her task and
safely makes her way across the street, with her nose in the air and an extra
swing in her waddle, as her little ones go right past the big cars, waiting for
them to follow right behind. And with
Michael’s help, she makes it all the way to the
In our Gospel lesson from Luke for today, we have an
exquisite story of Jesus’ benevolent and protective attentiveness to a woman
bent over, who has been coming to worship in a synagogue, with no one taking
special notice of her precarious circumstances for over eighteen years. In fact, the religious leaders of the
synagogue had not noticed her at all.
And not only have they not seen her, they have a whole busy and noisy
system of laws and regulations that keeps the people trafficking through the
religious system of the day, guaranteeing that no one will see her or stop to
notice her or attend to her—certainly not on the Sabbath, or any other day, for
that matter—at all.
The woman has no name. Her anonymity and her invisibility reflect
her status as a person of no regard and no concern to this busy synagogue
system. How she has made it, bent over,
to the synagogue in such a vulnerable and precarious condition at all, through
the streets, down roads, no doubt a dangerous trip for her to make for eighteen
years without anyone seeing or helping, is a miracle all its own. But she does, and obviously not for the sake
of the Sabbath law, or the religious system of her day, or the synagogue
leaders of the day. She appears quietly,
anonymously. In spite of the crowds, in
spite of the traffic, she makes her way to the synagogue, no doubt to worship a
God quite different from the character of God of the religious system of her
day. And this precarious situation for
her could have gone on for another eighteen years, had an itinerant preacher
not been there that day, just in the synagogue, and noticed her out of all the
comings and goings of the crowd. It
would be easy not to see her. But Jesus,
for some reason, does see her and stops everything in the middle of everything,
brings a halt to the traffic, the comings and goings of the people here and
there, and breaks the Sabbath law by attending to her and what she needs, which
is protection, safety, healing, and restoration.
Manifest in the ministry of Jesus is the restoration
of the God that she knows, that she has been coming to the synagogue, in spite
of the synagogue itself, to worship for eighteen years; the God recalled in the
affirmation of the psalmist in our Psalm 103 for today, a God full of compassion and mercy, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast
love. That she and her invisible,
anonymous devotion are at the center of the narrative, along with the
benevolent attentiveness of Jesus, rather than the noisy traffic of the
synagogue, tells us once again that the socially and religiously marginal lives
have a privileged place, as Luke understands the ministry of Jesus, for the God
she worships, the God on which she waits, in spite of the noise of the
synagogue, is a God of mercy, who sees her bent over, who hears her cries, who
attends to her need, and who lifts her up so that she stands upright and can
praise God along with the rest of the community.
As I lived with this marvelous picture over the past
several weeks, I could not help but recall the observation of Ralph Waldo
Emerson, who once said that “Every person that you pass on the street is
likely to be living a life of quiet desperation.” I could not help but remember the wise words
of former Dr. John Brantner, of the University of Minnesota Medical School, who
said years ago that “The greatest gift that you can give to
a friend is to simply acknowledge the legitimacy of their pain.” And I could not help but recall the picture
of that wonderful reformer and slave turned activist, Sojourner Truth, who
stood up at a voting-rights convention in Ohio in 1851 and said, “I have borne thirteen children, and seen
most all sold off into slavery; and when I cried out with my mother’s grief,
none but Jesus heard me.”
Time and time again, to those throughout history, in
a world indifferent to those like this woman bent over, the Bible gives us an
alternative picture of the God that sees and hears. He even hears the cries of Hagar in Genesis
16; sees and hears the sufferings of the Hebrews in
There is an old Talmudic saying that goes: “The deeper the sorrow the less tongue it has.” And we see from the anonymous, silent woman
bent over in the crowd that the God she worships is that very God of ancient
Hebrew tradition of the Isaiah and of the Psalms, restored in the ministry of
Jesus, who especially notices the unnoticed, who seeks out the voice of the
voiceless, makes visible the invisible ones, and not only protects but restores
and lifts up those bent over and burdened.
The little ones that the rest of the world does see are allowed to walk
upright and be restored to human community once again.
This is the season when we get ready to send our
little ones off to kindergarten for the very first time, to get out that
backpack, get on that big yellow school bus, or back to elementary or middle or
high school for yet another year. Some
of us will be driving long distances to drop off a college student into an
educational system that, from kindergarten all the way through high school and
even into the college years, can sometimes seem confusing, and overwhelming,
and unpredictable, and even cold. In any
case, it can seem at first to be so big and so heartless and indifferent to
just one or two or three of our precious little ones.
And so every year, as parents drop off the treasures
of their lives at a bus stop, or a classroom, or even at a university, this is
the time to honor with immense gratitude those exceptional educators and
teachers who are preparing, who are waiting to receive our little ones, and not
so little ones, with an extra measure of attentiveness and care.
Often as we approach the beginning of a new school
year, I check out again and again and watch again and again that classic,
award-winning film, “Mr. Holland’s Opus,
an exquisite picture of one educator who made a difference just by
acknowledging the silent suffering in one young person’s life. The movie, Mr. Holland’s Opus, gives us a span of about thirty years of Mr.
Holland’s teaching career as a high-school band teacher. We see how often, without knowing it, many
educators and administrators, although they don’t mean to, they—in the rush to
make rules and schedules work in our schools—often have little time to care
individually for the students that they serve.
In the movie, there is a villain principal, a school board sort of out
of touch in its priorities. And at the
end the arts and humanities budget is cut, and the favorite of all favorite
music teachers is cut out of the budget just a few years before he is to
retire.
Early on in the movie, there is marvelous scene where
in the middle of a busy school day, with the comings and goings of the crowds
of the students in the hallway, with lockers slamming and bells ringing, we see
Mr. Holland off in a quiet music room, attentively working with a young person
who just can’t get how to play the clarinet.
She is one of those determined types who tries and tries so hard, and
she just can’t get it. Her fingers won’t
move, the notes won’t come, it squeaks and it screeches. But Mr. Holland does not give up on her. He waits; he knows. There is some pain deep inside holding her
back, keeping her down, preventing those notes, that music, from getting off
the page and soaring into the sky.
Finally, in the middle of this lesson, she breaks down, and in the middle
of her tears she blurts out volumes of pain:
“My mom can do this; my dad is
good at this; my sister can do this. And
I can’t do anything!” Mr. Holland
stops and lets her cry, a good cry, all the way to the end. And then when she is all done, he asks her
quietly, “When you go home and look in
the mirror, what is the one thing that you like about yourself?” “My red
hair,” she said. “My father says it is as beautiful as a
sunset.” “Then close your eyes,” Mr. Holland says, ever so gently, “pick up your clarinet, and play that sunset.” And she does.
She does play that sunset. And in
playing the sunset, she plays the music, she plays beautifully, and not just
from the notes, she plays from her soul.
She is free, and the music is free and lifted to the sky.
In the midst of the busy traffic of life, in the
midst of the madness, the busyness, the systems, the crossroads of our comings
and goings, God sometimes breaks in with a divine love that knows no time and
no space of our making. God breaks in with
a divine love, unexpectedly, when we are bent over, needing to be lifted
up. It could be an unknown itinerant
preacher in a synagogue, a teacher who points the way, a friend who shows
mercy, a stranger who offers a hand. And
if ever you have been the recipient of such mercy, then you know what real
worship is all about. It has a gratitude
and a space and a time all its own.
Amen.