Our Bent-Over Spirits

Our Bent-Over Spirits

Luke 13:10-17
August 26, 2007

Now he 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 the Lord 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.

Some years ago I was reading an article about the economic status of male clergy and
their gradual slippage out of the professional middle class—all very discouraging if you
happen to be male clergyperson—but one of the statistics they pointed out was that
ministry still remains primarily a male profession. 94% of clergy are still men, which is
shocking to me, to be honest. When I was in seminary, probably half of my seminary
class were women, so I guess really was really surprised that professional ministry still
remains such a male dominated profession, even if you take into account that it will
take many years for women to catch men in terms of sheer numbers. I had a friend in
seminary who was an extraordinary woman, very gifted in so many ways, as a pastor,
as a person, but she reminded me a lot of the woman that we meet in this story from
Luke, the story we have before us today. She didn’t have a physical ailment, but she
most definitely had a spiritual and emotional one, because she had felt the crushing
blow of sexism, a spirit of sexism, to use Luke’s phrasing here, in her constant battle for
respect from her United Methodist clergy colleagues for her ministry. Though that
sexism is not particular to United Methodism—we too struggle with it in the UCC, but I
remember the stories she told me, stories that still send me into a mild shock, of men
who verbalized to her face the lie that she certainly couldn’t be called to be a pastor,
because, of course, she was a woman, and we know, right, that God doesn’t call
women into pastoral ministry. She had been an early pioneer, an early female
clergyperson in Georgia who had gone through the Methodist lay ministerial program,
and now she was finishing up her Master of Divinity at Emory, which is where I met her.
I remember how angry she was, how bitter she was, and I have to admit, I can’t really
fault her for that—I mean, I’ve experienced some discrimination myself when it comes to
the pastorate, but not for my gender, of course—I, at least, sadly enough, had my
gender going for me. Another friend of mine, who graduated as a senior from seminary
when I was finishing up beginning year came back to school to visit the campus and
some friends, and she shared with me that the local ministerial association in her rural
town in Kentucky disbanded itself rather than admit her to its ranks, which would had
been an automatic courtesy given to all her male predecessors. They simply did not
believe that women were called to the ordained ministry and so rather than insult the
congregation she pastured, they simply stopped meeting rather than welcome her to
their ranks.   I remember my mouth just dropping open on hearing that from her, and I
was so surprised at how she laughed it off, as if it wasn’t any big deal.

Now, I can’t know whether she was being completely honest in saying it wasn’t a big
deal, but you know what? It would have been a big deal for me, if I was her! I can’t
imagine that it didn’t eat her up a little inside, knowing that she hadn’t been judged by
her skills, her gifts, but had been dismissed because of her gender!   The woman I
spoke of earlier, that early pioneer of female Methodist clergy, she really did carry
some of those bruises with her, the spiritual bruises, and the emotional scars of having
to battle with others over the truth that God calls women as well as men to serve the
church as full equals, despite the fact that most of the church hasn’t caught up to what I
think God has been saying to us for centuries. But for my friend, there is only so much
that you can experience without it having it beat you down, without its effect being
inserted into your marrow and it becoming a part of who you are, flowing through your
veins and becoming the stuff that poisons parts of your life, the stuff that bends your
spirit. I think she had struggled with that, because her righteous and just anger was
deep, and the sense of betrayal by the church would sometimes spill into our
conversations. She paid a heavy price for paying attention to God’s call and calling the
church to do its work of justice towards those whom the rules and regulations had
excluded.

You know, I have no doubt that the woman that we see in this story before us today is
physically sick, that the spirit that has broken her back really did manifest itself in her
bent over body. But I also suspect that the spirit she was struggling with was the spirit
that kept saying to her “no, know your place, you don’t matter, you will never matter,
people like you don’t get noticed by people like Jesus, people that matter like Jesus.”
She was a nobody in a world that loves somebodies, a world no different than our own,
a world that said to her that Jesus can’t be calling over to you, that God isn’t interested
in you because you’re a second-class person, a woman, someone defined ONLY by
your relationship to a male—husband, father, brother, even. “You’re a nobody,
woman,” this demonic spirit kept saying to her, and when you get that message day-in
and day-out, is it any surprise those words have literally bent her body, as it had
probably done her soul?   When you get beaten down, when someone tries to fell you
with their fists, when they want to put you on the ground, when they want you to eat
dust, they’ll probably get their way eventually, right? Well, she may not be there yet, on
that ground, but the cost has been heavy and the beatings, the emotional beatings
have taken their toil, so much so that her eyes no longer faced forward, but now were
forced to look at the ground, at the ground people had expected her to eventually take
place in.

But she’s not there just yet, she’s still standing, and her back may be bent, the burden
of those words, those low expectations, those words that dismissed her, they are heavy
, but she’s not out yet, she’s still standing. And while she’s still standing, broken but still
upright, she does the unthinkable in her culture, she breaks the rules by responding to
the invitation of a man who says to her to come over to him, a man that is not her
husband, or her nearest relative, or even her brother—only the last three had an right
to interact with her—otherwise her culture considered it an incredible taboo, this
response to Jesus she gives by coming over to him. Jesus sees her, sees her for what
has been done to her, the spirit that she has carried on her back all these years, the
spirit that said she was a nobody, its claws burrowing deep in her spirit, he sees the
whole of her, and he sets her free from that demon, from that death dealing spirit with
its words meant to break her back. And it’s interesting here—notice that he has to
touch her to make the healing actually happen. He says the words of freedom, but
unlike other miracles, ones that don’t require his actual physical touch, just his words,
this one requires him to touch her—again, another scandalous thing, another rule that
Jesus was breaking in order to set her free—no woman was to touch a man that is not
her relative. Oh, the scandal of it all, but if you’re going to set people free, you may to
have break the rules, right?

And yet, those rules, the rules that had beaten this woman down, the rules that had
excluded my female colleagues from the ministry for so long—and still do, in most
churches in this world—it is actually those rules that have caused so much damage to
the ones on the other side of the fence, the ones who the rules were meant to keep
out. And it’s the rules that Jesus challenges here, in this passage, not only in the
interaction he has with her, not only in his incredibly brazen act of actually TOUCHING
her, but in the words that he says after this act of healing. Another man sees what
Jesus has done for this bent-over woman, and he challenges Jesus’ right to heal on
this day meant for rest, the Sabbath day, that day where God has called the universe
to rest, to pull back, to enjoy the life one has been working for during the other six days
of the week. But the rules, the rules had become stifling for people, what one could
and could not do from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown, to the point of absurdity.
It was as if people missed the point of rest, and instead people spent most of their
energy on the Sabbath day making sure they didn’t break the detailed laws about what
they could or could not do on this particular day. And what principle, even the good
principle of resting, would deny this woman a chance to heal?! If the principle was
missed but the rules kept—what good was the point of Sabbath in the first place, at
least at that point? It’s like obsessing over a blade of grass and forgetting the yard, so
to speak. It’s thinking that the rules were the point and not the principle. And
sometimes even the principle can be wrong, as we see with some of the sexism in the
Bible, principles rooted not in the Spirit of God, but rooted in the soil of prejudice and
false assumptions made by the assumers, and in that case, men.

And so there Jesus stands with this now upright woman, a woman no longer bent over
by the rules, and now both stand together as rule-breakers, dangerous people who
had questioned the lack of logic behind the regulations that didn’t match people’s own
needs and people’s own experiences in this world. They are outsiders now, looking in
from the outside together, lumped together by the somebodies as nobodies who didn’t
play by system’s rules. And the truth is that when rules are unjust, when they don’t
reflect reality, or they simply don’t help humankind, but actually hurt us, then they will
be broken, the rules will be broken, and God’s hand will be in the breaking. And so
God spoke to Antoinette Brown, the first woman to be ordained since the New
Testament times, in 1853, an ordination that took place in our own Congregational
tradition, it was God who did the breaking, who touched her life, and freed her to do the
work she had been called to do.

Now, I don’t know how the world has bent your spirit, how it is has dismissed your gifts
and I don’t know what demons you struggle with, and whose claws you want to wrestle
free from, but know this: the One who spoke to that woman some two thousand years
ago also speaks to us, in whatever posture we find ourselves, and he tells us, over and
over again, that we have been set free. The rules were meant to help us, not to hinder
us, and the moment we realize that the rules have become instruments of death, then I
can guarantee you that those rules are no longer the works of God’s hands. My friend
from years ago, she knew it, she knew that the truth she had experienced, that call
placed on her life by God, it trumped every negative word she had been told by some
of her colleagues. It even trumped all the rules she had been handed as being divinely
given by God. The struggle continued for her and she still had to deal with the
bitterness of being dismissed, but, in the end, she finds herself in good company, she
finds herself next to the one who first called her over, and set her free. He too knew
what it meant to be called a heretic, a blasphemer, a dangerous man. Freedom is a
difficult gift, freedom from the clear and easy rules, and sometimes it is even a burden,
but the yoke of Christ’s freedom is light, and it will not break our backs, or break our
spirits. Love of God and love of neighbor are the only rules Christ actually leaves us
with, and now everything is to be filtered through these two simple commands for this
woman, for us, for all who follow after the way of Jesus. Woman, you have been set
free, he says to an unnamed woman thousands of years ago, but he says this not only
to her, but to all of us in this place, to me and to you, and to a world in desperate need
of such beautiful words.