14th
Sunday after Pentecost; Yr. C, August 25, 2013
Isaiah58:9b-14; Psalm 103:1-8; Hebrews 12:18-29; Luke 13:10-17
Sermon
preached at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church
For our marriage blessing two years
ago a friend gave us a butterfly bush.
They’re beautiful bushes with bright purple brushes of flowers. I was excited to get it and enjoyed walking
around the yard to see where it might fit.
I finally planted it behind our garage in an area that had been covered
with violets. It did well into the fall,
and then like many plants lost its leaves for the winter months. In the spring I was excited to see how it
would burst back into life. I
anticipated those brilliant spires of color like I would fireworks on the 4th
of July.
But when spring turned into summer,
the plant failed to thrive. Each leaf
struggled forth from its bud and several of the main stems turned brown and
died. Afraid that my new shrub wasn’t
going to last the summer, I began watering it more faithfully and adding
fertilizer to give it strength. As the
long summer days faded to fall, it was still limping along … bent and
stubby. Blossoms were faded and
few. Clearly, its spirit was breaking.
This spring, I did some overhauling
in our gardens. Remembering the
butterfly bush, I began to seek out a new home for it in the yard. Clearly, it
wasn’t going to survive much longer where it was. More sun might do it some good. I dug it up, and planted it at the side of
the house near our mailbox. I trimmed
back the dead wood, leaving one stem and a few leaves. Within a short time new leaves started to
emerge, and new shoots began pushing forward from the stem. Because of where it’s planted I look at it
almost everyday. The blossoms right now
are plentiful. It’s not really thriving
yet, but I can see some potential there.
The light of the sun has given it strength, and that bent despairing
plant has displayed a new spirit for life.
Our bodies and spirits, the flesh
and the soul, are inseparable. The
Hebrews knew that. They never spoke
about one without understanding that they were speaking about both. A body without a spirit just didn’t
exist. That nephesh, that breath of God that enlivened the body was essential
to life. Without it, the body was
nothing but the dust from which it was made.
One day Jesus is teaching in the
synagogue, and it’s a Sabbath day. 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. (Luke 13:10) A
spirit had crippled her … for eighteen years.
Does that make any sense to us?
The idea of a spirit crippling someone?
My mother suffered from depression. When I was in middle school, I got my own key
to the house, because by then, my mother had returned to working outside the
home. She was a nurse, and worked
nights. Invariably, there were days I
would forget my key. I’d get home from
school and find myself locked out of the house.
Mom would be upstairs in bed, asleep.
Nothing could wake her. I’d climb
up onto the garage roof, and boost myself up onto the playroom roof to throw
small stones at her bedroom window. She
never heard me calling. In the end, I’d
wait for one of my brothers or sisters to come home with a key to get inside.
When it was getting close to
dinnertime, Mom would often still be in bed.
We’d draw straws to see who would go upstairs to try to wake her … to
ask her what we were going to have for dinner … and then to fight about who was
going to make it … because Mom just couldn’t get up to help. She was depressed, but we didn’t know any
different.
Then one day I got a phone call at
college. My mother announced that she
had gone to see a doctor. That he had
diagnosed her with depression, and she had started taking medication. “I have depression”, she told me on the phone
… like it was news. “Of course you do”,
I thought to myself. Shouldn’t that have
been obvious to us all? But it wasn’t. “So how’s the medicine working”, I asked. “Great!
I’m gaining some weight, which I’m not too happy about … but I feel like
getting out of bed now. I have so much
energy.” All it took was a little
knowledge, and the right medication.
Imagine that. My mother was a
woman bent for at least eighteen years.
Mental illness can do that to a person.
It can break your spirit, and keep you bent. I wonder sometimes what kept her from giving
up completely. I think it was her faith.
I think it was prayer.
We’re celebrating the 50th
anniversary of the March on Washington this month. We’re celebrating it because for decades in
our country, people of color were a people bent by the burden of
oppression. Even if they were brilliant,
they didn’t have access to quality education.
Even if they worked hard, they didn’t have access to jobs that paid well. Even if they were sick and dying, they
weren’t admitted to hospitals with the resources to heal them. Even if they had the money, they weren’t
welcomed in white neighborhoods.
Everything they saw in the white world bent them lower … and tried to
crush their spirits. Hate is a spirit
that can eat away at our soul like a worm.
Despair is a spirit that can cripple the strongest among us. These kinds of spirit can take away our will
to live.
But there is another spirit out
there, the Spirit of God. That’s a
Spirit that builds us up. The black
church is full of it. It has a long
history of looking to Jesus for healing and relief, a history of calling on
Jesus … as brother, as friend, as Lord … for strength and endurance. We see it in the hymns we sing in Lift Every Voice & Sing. In Have a little talk with Jesus, in O what a morning, in Sweet, sweet spirit. Our African American brothers and sisters
have leaned on the everlasting arm of Jesus for years, and that led them on the
path of nonviolent resistance when others wanted to use force. It awakened God’s spirit within people … and
two young men found the courage to sit at a lunch counter in a white restaurant
… and a woman named Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus … and a man
named John Lewis dared to lead a march from Selma to Montgomery … and a young
preacher named Martin Luther King, Jr. dared to stand up and speak truth in
faith … and white advocates began joining with their brothers and sisters of
color in protests in the fight for civil liberty. It was a spirit that lifted heads, and raised
voices in prophetic witness. It was a
spirit of freedom. It’s a spirit that
comes from God, a free gift for us all.
The woman who was bent low by a
spirit didn’t ask for healing, but Jesus offered it anyway. There’s no indication that the healing was a
reward either. It was pure gift. There are forces in our lives that threaten
to bend us right down to the ground, so that all we can see is the dirt and
hard gravel of bitterness and despair … but Jesus offers us a way to reach
upward toward the sky and breathe deeply again.
Through repentance and reconciliation, through forgiveness and mercy,
through love and acceptance … we can learn to stand together as people
committed to standing straight and tall.
We can respect the dignity of every human being, knowing that at one
time or another we have all found ourselves “bent” by a spirit that binds us. We can benefit from the wisdom earned in those
struggles, so that we do not, in our ignorance, bring others low. God sent Jesus so that we might have life and
joy in abundance. So that when we find
ourselves looking into the soil of sadness or grief or uncertainty or shame or
unworthiness or fear or anger … we can see in the dirt the loving lines of
Jesus traced there … and remember who we are.
We are God’s beloved creatures, valued beyond measure, and that is our
hope. That is the Spirit of truth.
Amen.
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