« God’s “A” List | Main | The Devil Can Cite Scripture for his Purpose »
Crippled Spirits
By Administrator | September 10, 2007
Crippled Spirits
Luke 13:10-17
August 26, 2007
Alicia S Rapp
I. Clark Scott called me on Monday.
Some of you will remember Clark and Cynthia.
When they were members of our church,
they attended the contemporary worship service.
Clark, an ordained pastor, also was an essential part of
the training team of our Stephen Ministry program.
Then Clark received a call to pastor a church in his
own denomination in Port Orange and they
moved.
Now you may not remember Clark’s face,
but you may remember his name,
because a few months after they moved,
he appeared on our prayer list where he remained
for over a year.
Clark was quite unexpectedly—
and when do we ever expect these things in life—
diagnosed with a brutal liver disease.
Weak and bedridden, Clark was forced into an early
retirement.
The saddest part of all was that people forgot
Clark Scott and who he had been.
They forgot the man who literally built Palm Bay Christian
church from the ground up,
the founding pastor who saw that church through
almost 20 years and three building projects.
They may not have even known the man whose heart was
large enough to share a gospel across many diverse
denominations, from the quite conservative to
the often liberal.
Or the preacher who knew when it was time to sit back
in another church and find healing for himself and
his family.
No, Clark simply became for us
“that pastor on our prayer list with the liver disease.”
It happens all the time.
Someone will ask,
“What’s that woman’s name who had that car
accident?
You know, we prayed for her and her son last week.”
or
“Who is that man who had cancer surgery last
year?”
or
“You know what’s-his-name—can’t hear,
can’t see, has a cane, and a no-good
daughter?”
Okay, I’m making some of that up, but you get the point.
And I’m not picking on anyone.
But we do tend to forget the person
in the midst of the suffering.
We mark people by their burdens,
their disease,
the tragedies of life.
We so easily forget all they have done and achieved,
the life they have lived,
the people they have touched.
II. Jesus would not let it be forgotten.
The story we are told in Luke is that Jesus was teaching
in one of the synagogues on the sabbath.
A woman walked in who had been crippled for eighteen
years.
It may be that she was physically bent over,
that her back was misshapen,
her spine twisted so that she could not even
stand up straight.
It may be that Jesus,
in the middle of his teaching,
looked across the crowd of men and
saw this hunched-back woman walk in.
It may be that he interrupted everything he was doing
to call her over,
put his hands on her back,
and straighten that spine.
It may also be that this story serves beyond the healing
as a teaching for us,
a metaphor about the burdens we heap on one
another and never allow to be released.
It may be a story about how we can cripple one another or
how we can bring healing.
III. This woman walked into the synagogue,
this gnarled woman,
crippled for eighteen years,
and I have to imagine that Jesus saw two things.
First, he saw the woman she had once been.
There are some of us who have lived long enough we’d
like to take eighteen years off our lives.
There are others who’d rather not go back in time.
While Jesus apparently didn’t know this woman,
he knew that she had seen better days.
Perhaps he looked in her eyes and saw something sparkle.
Could he see the infant that had once rested in
her mother’s arms,
alive with possibility?
A child dedicated in the temple,
even as we baptized (Brock/Dominic)
this morning?
Who can let that go?
Some of us, I suppose.
Not Jesus.
Maybe he saw her play at her mother’s feet,
with that free spirit only children seem to exhibit,
the easy laugh,
the willingness to take a risk,
learning to walk,
to run,
to try something new.
Perhaps he new how she had first fallen in love,
trusting her heart to another.
Did he know how she had carried water twice a day for
the family,
how she went to the market to shop for them,
cooked their meals,
cooled their brows when they ran a fever?
Had the prayers that she lifted to God,
that brought her into the male-dominated
synagogue that day,
made their way to Jesus?
Who knows what had burdened her,
what disease or terrible circumstance
had sent her to the prayer list.
We’re not told.
Jesus must have seen something in her
bent-over spirit, though…
what she had once been,
and something else, even more important…
IV. Jesus must have seen what she could yet become.
We baptize two young boys today.
The waters stand as a symbol of many things:
entrance into the church,
the faith and family of Jesus Christ,
our recognition of the love of God already
rooted and growing in a person’s life,
and a sign of new beginnings,
resurrection.
Even as we consider Brock and Dominic and imagine
the young men they may grow to be,
Jesus was able to look at this woman crippled by
eighteen years of suffering and
see a future for her with head held high,
this same woman walking tall and straight.
Does the church envision that kind of almost miraculous
transformation in people’s lives?
Or do we, God forbid, become yet another place of
judgment and shame,
heaping such burdens on people even so as to
slowly cripple them,
or else prevent the very healing God intends?
There in the synagogue, on the sabbath day,
Jesus opened the door to new possibilities for
this woman.
Yet the leader of that holy place
pitched a fit and stirred up a political controversy.
It is sometimes difficult, it seems, for us to allow people to
become a new creation, even in the church.
We have rules about these things.
The right songs must be sung,
the proper liturgy observed.
There is an order.
And there are people who are acceptable and
those who are not,
those who are less fit for the kingdom
than a pack animal, an ox or a donkey.
Even in the church,
we can be guilty of keeping the broken poor,
the sick weak,
the busy exhausted,
and the guilty shamed.
To do otherwise would be to break the rules,
to go against the order set by the world,
to defy the teachings of commercialism,
consumerism,
and capitalism.
These keep us all in our rightful place,
a few at the top of the heap
and many crippled at the bottom.
The ways of Jesus move us into Godly places,
good places, healing places.
The ways of Jesus remind us who we have been and
who we can yet become.
V. Clark Scott called me on Monday.
He and Cynthia have again joined a United Church of Christ.
He’s preaching this morning while the pastor’s on
vacation.
It seems Clark, or someone, has broken the rules.
This man, once crippled by his disease,
is now standing tall and straight again.
Topics: Uncategorized |
WordPress database error: [Can't open file: 'wp_comments.MYI' (errno: 144)]
SELECT * FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_ID = '14' AND comment_approved = '1' ORDER BY comment_date