Back To The Well: Martha And Mary

"Back To The Well: The Bent Over Woman"

Luke 13:10-17
July 11, 2010

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.

Most of us can spot the artistic work of Vincent Van Gogh instantaneously, and so I
suspect that the picture on today’s bulletin, even with the missing color and the
description I attached, was easily identifiable—that is how unique van Gogh really was,
both in his life and in his work—we know a van Gogh painting the instant we see one.
Of course, our Centering Words for today’s worship focus on his life, and the deep
suffering he lived through, emotionally and physically, as a troubled soul, and yet, so
much brilliance, so much life came out of what so many said was a crippled existence.
The painting on the cover of the bulletin is van Gogh’s painting entitled “Moonrise” and
it was created in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in France in 1889, after he arrived in that
area for some treatments for the various medical conditions he was suffering through.
We know that he arrived in that area on May 8, 1889, and was moved into a local
monastery for the regime of treatments he was about to undergo. “Peering through his
window, van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo [these words]: "I see an enclosed wheat
field above which I see the sun rise in all its glory." In another letter, he tells of working
in the wheat field on a painting that depicted a moonrise. In late September, he mailed
the picture to Theo. But during that summer, van Gogh had become severely ill and
didn't paint for 6 weeks. Historians hadn't known whether van Gogh completed
"Moonrise" before or after this hiatus. And so the question of timing has haunted art
historians: just when was this important Van Gogh piece painted? Well, the answer to
that question came out a few years ago when two scientists from Texas State University
determined the exact day and minute the painting memorialized and captured—July 13,
1889 at 9:08 PM. Computer calculations by the Texas researchers revealed five dates
between mid-May and mid-September 1889 when a full or nearly full moon would have
appeared over Saint-Remy. To narrow the timing, the scientists journeyed to the town,
looking for visual clues--the small house and overhanging cliff depicted in "Moonrise."
They found the site just southeast of the monastery. Observing the sun, moon, and
stars for 6 days, the researchers determined the altitude and orientation of the cliff with
respect to van Gogh's perspective. A refined calculation then zeroed in on two dates in
1889--May 16 and July 13. The colors in "Moonrise" provided the last clue. The wheat,
still green in May, would have looked yellow in July.

Exactly six 19-year lunar cycles have happened since 1889, and history [repeated
itself recently]. On July 13, 2005, the researchers note, "observers during evening
twilight [in Saint-Remy] [saw] a nearly full moon rise in the southeast, much as it did on
July 13, 1889, when van Gogh stood among the wheat stacks in the monastery field
and captured the scene in his remarkable 'Moonrise'." http://www.thefreelibrary.
com/Van+Gogh+painting+put+on+the+calendar.+(Timing+a+Moonrise)-a0105853351

It’s a remarkable feat, really, to be able to not just get the time and the place of an
event, but literally, get the exact minute the painting portrays, the timing with which this
masterpiece, this brilliant surreal snapshot of the moon had taken place. But timing
matters, it always has, whether it is for a historian wanting to know the date and an hour
of a historic event, or simply the timing of a series of coincidences around an event.
ESPN has been running a series on the What if…? of college footballs, one of which
was interest to me and that was what if Rich Rodriquez, the current Michigan coach,
had accepted the head football coaching position at Alabama in December of 2006,
something that almost happened? ESPN played out the various possibilities, but none
of were good for my alma mater, and thus I am glad that the timing happened the way it
did! We all have moments when the question of life’s timing comes into the picture, a
particular moment, for good or bad, changes everything, and if something had gone
this way or that way, we wonder how our life would have been different. Timing is
everything, they say, and maybe that true and maybe it’s not—but no one can really
argue that timing matters, circumstances matter, and our whole lives are often changed
because the timing wasn’t right for us or for them, and everything could have been
different.

Well, today, actually, we explore a moment of biblical timing, all in the context of the
sermon series I’ve been doing these past four weeks, this series focused on Jesus’
powerful and transformative encounters with women. Frances Taylor Gench has been
our guide and for this Sunday our gaze will rest upon a unique story, one found only in
the Gospel of Luke, and no other, in which Jesus is confronted on his lack of good
timing, confronted about his senselessness when it comes to the right moment to do his
work of healing with this bent-over woman, this daughter of Abraham. The story we just
heard has Jesus going to synagogue on the Sabbath, as was his custom as a faithful
Jewish man, and in the midst of that worship, he notices a woman whose body is bent
completely over, whose view of the world these past 18 years had been decidedly cast
downward. Interestingly enough, she is not said to have sought out his healing—it is
he who sees her and approaches her, though she remains nameless, something that
Luke rarely does with women, give them names.   First, he says that she is set free,
saying as if it had already happened, as if it had already happened in the present
tense, but then the actual physical healing comes, when he lays his hands upon her,
and she stands up straight, for the first time in so many years. You know, the
sequence of events really lends to an interpretation that this healing was a bit more
than just a physical healing—first, she has been set free, and then she is physically
healed. Perhaps what had kept her hostage those many years was more than her
body—perhaps it was culture that kept her a second class citizen, a culture that had
bound her, kept her captive, told her that as a woman she was nothing more than an
after-thought to both God and men. We all know that you can be held captive by more
than just your body, and your culture, and we also know that Jesus attended to both,
attended to the freeing of both our hearts and our bodies, in that time and day.

What is amazing is that someone took Jesus to task for this gift, this gift to this woman,
who was freed from her burdens, and this person was a religious man, a leader of the
synagogue. He objects to Jesus’ actions on that day, and at that time—Jesus should
have waited until after the Sabbath, until after the day of rest God has appointed for all
of creation, a concept we’ve been exploring here in our church this past year. It must
be clear here that he wasn’t objecting to the healing itself, but to timing of it—“There
are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and
not on the Sabbath day” is what the leader said. Now, typically, this is often preached
with a slightly anti-Jewish bent, where we Christians are cast as the heroes and Jews
are cast as the villains, which is ironic, since Jesus himself is a Jew doing a very Jewish
thing—going to synagogue to worship. But it must be noted that what the synagogue
leader says here is not without merit—why couldn’t Jesus have waited a few more
hours, until after sunset, to heal this woman, since she didn’t have a life-threatening
condition at that moment?   What is important here is that when Jesus replies to this
synagogue leader, he doesn’t start to tear down the Sabbath, something he absolutely
seemed to believe in and something he practiced himself personally. No, what
bothered him was the hypocrisy with which some had practiced the Sabbath—why was
this daughter of Abraham not as least as important than the ox and cattle that these
same people often untied and led to water on the Sabbath? For some reason, it was
OK to violate the Sabbath rules against work of any sort in order to take care of
livestock, but one couldn’t heal a woman during the Sabbath, so goes the thinking of
the leader of this synagogue. That seems to be what is galling to Jesus, not this man’s
respect and love for the Sabbath. The argument was over timing—this man was
wondering why Jesus couldn’t have just waited until the sun had gone down to do this
good deed, while Jesus couldn’t imagine not doing this act of healing at the very
moment when the need presented itself?

But that is always the issue, isn’t it—the issue of timing, when is the right time for this or
that decision to be made and acted upon?   In every time and in every place, the issue
of timing always comes up, especially if it is around the setting free of others, the
emancipation of others, the doing of justice for those on the other side of the tracks, by
those in power. Certainly women in this country know the arguments often used
against them, against their right to vote, against their right to have control over their
own reproductive processes, or against the need for equality of pay and opportunity.
So often the argument has been around timing—that one should wait to give women
the vote, wait to allow them control over their bodies and their finances, wait until men
get comfortable with women as coworkers and bosses, before we do anything drastic
and make those needed changes a reality. It’s a question of timing, isn’t it? But it is
always been a tactic of forces who want things to stay the same to say that the timing is
just not right, even if the cause is just, and so one must delay the justice in order to wait
for the heart to catch up to the law, with the head. But, of course, it’s nothing more
than a delaying tactic really, this call to wait, wait until sunset and the Sabbath ends,
wait until sexism is gone, wait until racism is gone, or wait until homophobia is finally
eradicated and then same sex marriage can be a reality. The arguments for waiting to
racially integrate the army in the late 1940’s are the same ones being used against
allowing lesbian and gay people to serve openly into the armed forces—wait until
people get used to it. Wait until men get more comfortable with women as pastors, or
as their boss at work, or being a Senator—don’t force it down their throats, these
forces keep telling us, wait until sunset.

But, of course, the sunset comes, and the Sabbath is over, and, of course, you realize
that it was never about waiting, it was never about “not now” but was in fact, always, a
“no, a never.” Martin Luther King, Jr, writing from a jail in one of my all time favorite
cities, Birmingham, Alabama, said as much in his letter to the clergy of Birmingham who
were saying to him to wait, wait until everything calms down, wait until white people get
used to it, wait until they stop being violent in reaction to this nonviolent push for racial
equality. King wrote these words from that Birmingham jail:

For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with
piercing familiarity. This “Wait!” has almost always meant “Never!” We must come to
see…that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given
rights…Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of
segregation to say “Wait!”

King also debunked a tragic misconception about time, “the strange irrational notion
that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills”:

Actually, time is neutral [King writes]; it can be used either destructively or constructively
…Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless
efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself
becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively in the
knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. (Gench104)

And that is what Jesus did in that moment: he saw that the time was right to do right,
and what this woman in that synagogue needed was a healing that was no longer
delayed by sunsets, but was needed right then, at that moment, and on that day, that
day of Sabbath. All throughout the Gospel of Luke and the book of Acts, which the
same writer wrote, you find Luke using the word “today” like no other storyteller of
Jesus’ life ever does. For writer of Luke, the good news of God, the good news of God’
s salvation for all, the good news of God’s liberation for all, was not something that was
to be put off tomorrow, for your children, and my children, but was something that
happens right here, and right now, something that must be worked for today. Timing is
everything, you see, and the time for our being set free from a burden that goes
deeper than our bodies, deeper than our bones, so deep that it burdened this women’s
spirit, so deep that it was attributed to diabolical forces—Satan—the time for doing what
needs to be done is now, right now. Certainly that is true for doing the right thing to
promote equality for women, for people of color, for the gay, lesbian, bisexual and
transgender people, and for all who hear the sting of the words: wait, later, after this,
tomorrow. But it’s even more personal than that, though the work of justice is always
personal, of course: the reality is that we can put off so much of what we need to do in
life because we think that the timing is not right for action, that if we wait until tomorrow,
we can do what needs to be done then, when, in reality, the time is now, and the place,
the place is right here, wherever “here’ is for you. When Jesus looked across that
crowded synagogue and saw that women, that bent over women, that daughter of
Abraham—a title given to no one else in the Bible, I would point out—he knew that time
for her healing, both inside and out, was then, was that day, was that very moment.
What needs to happen now doesn’t need to wait for tomorrow—time will not always
open up a perfect moment for us to do what needs to be done, open up a perfect
moment for the perfect action. Certainly it could be argued that Jesus seized the wrong
moment to do the right thing, to do what he did in healing that woman—it probably
could have waited until sunset, this healing—but he didn’t wait, because he knew it was
the right thing to do at that very moment, for her, for him, and for everyone in that
crowded and hot synagogue. The time to do right in our lives, personally and
otherwise, is always right now, and always should be done right away. Amen.