Unbent

Obviously I don't preach much any more.   I can think of a handful of times since I retired.  

I'm starting my second year as steward of the chapel at MTS.    

It wasn't a job I applied for, it just landed in my lap.  

Things like that happen in a place where there's many tasks but few laborers. 

It's really been a gift, though.  

It touches the worship/liturgics side of me that has been largely dormant since retirement.  

Crafting liturgies.  

Presiding the Table.  

Collaborating with faculty and guest preachers to create a worship encounter of meaning.

Sing a little?  (I've largely lost the voice, but let's make a joyful noise, shall we?). 

Setting the space as needed.  

Have mercy, I did all that every week for 33 years.  And it's indeed fulling.

This year I've found that the opportunity to preach is one I'm taking up when the schedule (I send a spreadsheet out to my colleagues asking them to claim a chapel or two to preach) isn't filled.   

And so, I've started working again on crafting homilies using the lectionary cycle as a guide.  As a Lectionary preacher most of my career, I'm finding this revisitation with these texts interesting, familiar, yet profoundly challenging.  I am not who I was when I've preached these texts previously.  Not at all.  And being out of practice from the rhythm of preparation and the practice of preaching I had once honed, these initial efforts feel earnest, but clunky.  

I'm not preaching this text any place but here.  It may be as much for me to put stuff here as I exercise atrophied homiletical muscles as it is anyone to read it.  But here goes:  

Unbent

Luke 13:10–17  + The 14^th Week of Pentecost Year C
Rev. Dr. Jonathan L. Jeffords

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Luke 13.10-17  (NRSVUE)

¹⁰ Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath. ¹¹ 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. ¹² When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” ¹³ When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God. ¹⁴ 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.” ¹⁵ 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 to water? ¹⁶ 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?” ¹⁷ When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame, and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things being done by him.

It may not seem so, but rules are not the problem.

At their best, rules are gifts.
They give shape to our life together.
They guard against chaos.
They show us how to honor God and our neighbor.

I think of John Irving’s novel The Cider House Rules — and the film adaptation with Tobey Maguire, Charlize Theron, and Michael Caine. In the story, the orphanage run by Dr. Wilbur Larch, played by Michael Caine, has its own bedtime ritual. Every night, as he tucks the children in, he says tenderly:

“Good night, you princes of Maine, you kings of New England.”

It’s a rule — a ritual — spoken again and again, not to crush but to lift.
Not to keep the children down, but to remind them of their dignity and worth.
That kind of rule is a gift.

But later, when the children grow up and work in the apple orchards, they find another set of rules — nailed to the bunkhouse wall by owners who never lived there. The rules tell them what they can and cannot do. Most of the workers can’t even read them. Here are a few of those rules:

1. Please don’t smoke in bed.
2. Please don’t operate the grinder or press if you’ve been drinking.
3. Please don’t go up on the roof to sleep. (No matter how hot it gets.)
4. Please don’t go into the cider house after dark.
5. Please don’t eat in the cider house.
6. There should be no smoking in the cider house.
7. There should be no drinking in the cider house.
8. There should be no playing of cards in the cider house.

After hearing them read aloud, one of the men laughs and says, “Those rules ain’t for us. We didn’t write them.”

That’s the difference:
Some rules bless us.
Some rules bind us.
Some rules lift us into freedom.
Some rules keep us bent low.
And rules can be oppressive.
Sometimes they bless us.
Sometimes they bend us down.

Now, think again of the Ten Commandments.
Given at Sinai, they weren’t arbitrary restrictions.
They began with freedom:
“I am the LORD your God, who brought us out of the house of slavery.”

This Decalogue defined the identity of God’s people.
They reminded Israel — and showed the world — who God is,
and who we are called to be.

Walter Brueggemann, one of the most influential Hebrew Bible theologians of our time, whom we’ve just most recently lost,  puts it this way:

“Rather the commandments, each and all of them together, constitute a picture of what a counter-community of neighbors might look like.”¹

But as time went on, ten became many.
Through interpretation, application, and expansion,
the covenantal words of freedom multiplied into hundreds of detailed, case-by-case rules.

Michael Walzer, American political theorist and professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study warns:

“The crowding of detailed, case-by-case law upon covenantal law is one way of turning the law of liberation into the law of burden.”²

Or to put it plainly:
When the Ten Commandments — given as covenant, as words of liberation — became surrounded by hundreds of detailed rules, something shifted.
The law of freedom began to feel like a law of burden.
The very gift meant to set us free could, in its weight, bend us down.

Not for nothing, but making it a law for them to be displayed in schools and government buildings is pretty much the opposite of their purpose.
How is it possible that we’ve made an idol of the very thing that says, “yeah, don’t do that.”

We all know people who live by the rules.
We take them seriously.
If we have to follow them,
then so does everyone else.
That feels fair.  That sounds right.

Others among us respect the rules,
but we’ve learned there are moments when rules don’t help.
Moments when the rule bends us down instead of lifting us up.
And when that happens,  something has to give.

And sometimes it’s more than that.
Sometimes rules are manipulated,
weaponized,
used to retain power.
To keep us small, silent, bent down, and that’s where our text finds us today.

Luke is the gospel of the least, last, lost.

From Mary’s song to the women at the tomb, Luke shows us:
the lowly lifted,
the outsider brought in.

This story falls in chapter 13, as Jesus journeys to Jerusalem.
He’s just told parables of seeds and yeast — God’s reign growing quietly, powerfully.

And then this:
On the Sabbath, in the center of worship, a woman long bent down stands tall.

Luke’s message:
The reign of God will not wait for permission.
It will not be held back by rules that keep us bent low.
It breaks in — here and now.

The kingdom of God looks like the bent ones standing tall.

That’s the tension we carry into today’s Gospel.
Because sometimes keeping the rules honors God.
And sometimes keeping the rules obscures God.

Jesus is teaching in the synagogue on the Sabbath.

And there — almost invisible — a woman.

Bent over.
The Greek says sugkuptousa (soog-KOOP-too-sah) — “completely bent together.”
Not just stooped.
Her whole life folded in on itself.

For eighteen years.
Staring at the ground.
Watching the world at knee level.

And then — Jesus sees her.

He calls her forward.

Every eye turns.

And he says:
“Woman, you are set free from your infirmity.”

The word is apolelysai (ah-po-LEH-loo-sai) — “loosed, untied, released.”
The same word used for untying an ox or donkey on the Sabbath, something that first hearers would react with their version of “Aw, Snap!”.

If we’ll break our rule to show mercy to an animal,
why not break it to show mercy to her?

He lays hands on her.
Immediately — she stands tall.
And she praises God.

The synagogue leader protests:
“There are six other days for healing. Not today.”

And here’s the thing: he isn’t trying to be cruel.
He believes he is honoring God by honoring the rules.
He thinks he is protecting the Sabbath.
In his own way, he is doing what he has been taught to do.

But in his zeal for the letter, he misses the spirit, and as a result, how he holds and honors the very laws he’s defending bends his viewpoint. So, he can’t see the freedom God is bringing right in front of him.

The Sabbath is liberation.
The Sabbath is mercy.

So when Jesus heals — he isn’t breaking Sabbath.
He’s fulfilling it.

I think about the poignant scene in the film Hidden Figures.

Katherine Johnson — one of NASA’s brightest minds — bent under segregation’s rules.

One day her boss confronted her:
Harrison: “Where do you go every day?”
Katherine : “To the bathroom, sir.”
Harrison: “For forty minutes a day?”
Katherine: (bursts out)
“Yes, sir! There are no colored bathrooms in this building. I walk half a mile just to relieve myself.
My uniform, my heels, and a string of pearls I can’t afford.
And I drink coffee from a pot none of you will touch.
So excuse us if we have to go to the bathroom a few times a day!”

That’s what unjust rules do.
They bend us down.
Wear us out.
Tell us we don’t belong.

And what did Harrison do?
He grabbed a crowbar.
Smashed the “Colored Ladies Room” sign with the line,
“Here at NASA, we all pee the same color.”

He broke the rule — because the rule itself was unjust.
And Katherine stood tall.
Her brilliance shone unhindered.

That’s what Jesus does in the synagogue.
That’s what he still does for us.

It's hard not to miss: her liberation is not a one-off.
She is one of many women Jesus lifts, honors, and frees from the tyranny of religious and cultural restriction.
In Luke, he welcomes Mary of Bethany to sit at his feet — an act of liberation, since women were not permitted to sit as disciples at a rabbi’s feet, but Jesus affirms her as a true disciple (Luke 10:39).
In John, he reveals who he is for the first time to a woman, and a Samaritan woman at that(John 4).
He heals the woman with the flow of blood (Mark 5:34).
He defends the woman who's a stones throw away from calamity for being caught in adultery, while letting the self-righteously indignant know "I see you." (John 8).
He honors the woman who anoints him (Mark 14:9).
And in Luke’s own Gospel, it is women who remain at the cross and who are first at the empty tomb.

The pattern is clear: Jesus bends human-made restrictions so that women — and all the bent ones — know they have value, dignity, worth, agency.

Sadly, the self-righteously indignant still proof text scripture to keep women bent.  You know, when you use the Bible as your preferred weapon of choice to abuse women, to abuse any body, there's a special place in hell just for you!

As feminist theologian, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza reminds us:

“The patriarchal use of biblical texts has served to legitimate oppression and must be critically dismantled so that the Word can be a source of liberation and empowerment for women and all marginalized peoples.”⁴

This is why we cannot be satisfied with rules that look holy but leave people bent over. The liberating Word of God calls us to discern when law lifts us into life, and when law obscures God’s mercy. That is our work as the church.

Friends, this is the Gospel.

The same Jesus who saw her — sees us.
The same Jesus who loosed her — looses us.
The same Jesus who straightened her back — can straighten ours.

Because God’s very nature is to break the rules that keep us bent.

That liberating Word calls us not only to receive freedom but to practice it. If women have been bent low by distorted uses of scripture, then the church is called to proclaim again that Christ sets them free. If unjust rules have silenced voices, then the Spirit urges us to lift those voices high. The work is not finished until all of us — together — can stand tall.

It’s the same spirit that moved in Rosa Parks.
When the rules told her to move,
she stayed seated.
She was unbent.

She's reported to have said,

"I had no idea that history was being made. I was just tired of giving in.”⁷ 

She did not act alone.
She was part of a community, tired of being bent down,
who rallied around her courage.
Her single act of resistance sparked a movement that said,
“We will no longer be bowed.”
And in that act of defiance and faith,
we found the courage to stand tall together.

We need some more Rosa’s and Katherine’s today, because there’s an ill wind blowing.

So too today, when we resist rules that obscure God, when we embody mercy over regulation, when we declare with our lives that all are made in God’s image — then we live as the unbent people of God.

So this Sabbath — stand tall.
Lift our heads.
Be unbent.

And then go.
See the ones bent low.
Break the rules that bind us.
Stand with them until we stand tall.
And let our whole life be praise.

In the name of the Father,
and of the Son,
and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.

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·       

           John Irving, The Cider House Rules (New York: William Morrow, 1985); film adaptation The Cider House Rules (dir. Lasse Hallström, 1999), starring Tobey Maguire, Charlize Theron, and Michael Caine. Quoted lines from film script.

      Walter Brueggemann, The Ten Commandments: Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1997).

·       Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 56.

·       Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1983), xv.   

·       Hidden Figures, directed by Theodore Melfi (2016), starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monáe, and Kevin Costner. Quoted dialogue from the film.

·       Rosa Parks with Jim Haskins, Rosa Parks: My Story (New York: Dial Books, 1992).