The Faith Life 4: excuses, excuses

Jer. 1:4-10, Luke 13:10-17

August 26, 2007

(Volunteers – one from each side, to act out woman and Jesus)

As we listen to the story today, I invite you to imagine the feelings of the people involved: the woman, the leader, Jesus.

Summarize with movement

Jesus cares about people who are hurting, who can’t see well, or who are different,

and wants us to be like him and care too.

We’ve been talking about faith all month….now here’s a woman of faith! She has a sense of God as its foundation, to her faith IS a deep part of her life, and her faith MEANS something. Amongst whatever else faith means to her, it means faithful attendance at worship and study; her faith brings her, week by week, to the synagogue, even tho she cannot see the leaders, cannot look into the eyes of those who attend with her, can only see the dusty floor and shuffling feet. She kept showing up in spite of her circumstances.

Many of us get hurt and we quit. We make the hurt our excuse, but not this woman. Despite her diminished state, and distorted perceptions, she comes anyway, not willing to give up on God.

Now, just before this, Jesus had clearly challenged the prevailing belief that suffering is a result of sin. What we’d call this woman’s osteoporosis, they said was possession by an evil spirit. Even Jesus says ha satan, the adversary, (not Satan with a capital letter) was her problem. But Jesus also knows that opponents of wholeness, whether they are people, evil powers, or illnesses, need to be challenged, so they do not have the primary power.

He sees her, he acknowledges this woman whom others probably ignore with an embarrassed looking away. He even greets her.

You know, just being acknowledged can be very healing. A recent visitor to our church commented how significant it was that Chip greeted them coming in and going out – a handshake is a powerful action of hospitality, yes, but is it also an acknowledgement of unity, of equality. Yet sometimes, inside the church we excuse ourselves from greeting people, especially people we don’t know, and definitely people who look different.

Some of US are this woman – bent over with hurt or worry or fear. Who will see us, speak to us, touch us?

There are people in the pew, in the playgroup, in the classroom, at the workplace, so bent over with hurt, or poverty, or injustice, or even ignorance and prejudice, that they have given up anything but their limited perspective and stuck vision.

Safe Journey or Sanctuary House force some of us to ask:

How many women cannot live their lives like we can, standing up straight and looking into the future without fear?

How many men at Francis Center?

How many children at Community Lutheran Ministries?

Who will see their hurt and respond without excuses?

One of our BTW ministers told me that a woman at SH asked her, how come you bother to come here for the likes of us? People bent over don’t feel worth very much.

But God proclaims, as to Jeremiah, "I will make you worth something", and Jesus claims that for this woman, by acknowledging her and touching her, he made her worth something.

Last week we talked about ‘looking to Jesus’ and ‘looking LIKE Jesus’: the life of faith for the Christian, as it was for Jesus sees hurt

addresses it

The bent over person needs someone to see us, notice us, lay hands on us, lead us to a new perspective.

Emily McNeil is doing that to me; with her experiences shared from her time in Palestine, I am seeing things from a new perspective…

Friends in faith will do that for our youth, take them along their faith path so they can stand tall and straight in a world that bends them over with violence and drugs and worry.

SS teachers do that for our children, and when they come to worship regularly too, they find new perspectives for themselves as well that then help them to look and see the children with eyes of divine love.

People who invite a neighbor to church, or to an activity like our neighborhood picnic in 2 weeks do it

But the leader of the synagogue wasn’t that interested in this woman’s dis-ease, or God’s grace. Like many of us he was quick to lash out with his tongue when his toes were stepped on, when his authority was challenged. His authority was twofold: his position, and the Bible, and he used them as excuses, just as Jeremiah used his youth as an excuse not to do what God wanted.

But Jesus had his own authority, his faith foundation in the God of grace, so he had courage to step out of the box.

Like Jeremiah, who had the authority of the God of justice, he had the guts to confront injustice. And to do it now.

In last week’s bulletin I had made a mistake in the texts for this week: I had only printed one verse from both Jeremiah and Luke, so it looked as if the texts for this week were:

Now the word of God came to Jeremiah and now Jesus was teaching in the synagogue on the Sabbath.

One faithful soul called me on Monday to get it right! I made lots of excuses for what had happened, then it struck me. If I had to preach on those two verses only, the one key word that jumps out is NOW. As someone said at Spiritual Lunch Break, ‘no helpful deed that we can do today should be postponed till tomorrow’.

NOW.

So often when we, like the synagogue leader, are dealing with systems and rules, ‘now’ never happens: how long it is taking for our Foodshelf to deal with governmental rules on their purchase of their place? How long will it take victims of Katrina to have their churches and homes rebuilt?

Fortunately, volunteers NOW are delivering food; workers are NOW organizing mission trips.

There will always be forces that work against faith in action. "them" in Jeremiah were those who didn’t want to hear a word of justice, "them" in Luke were the good worshippers concerned with the rules, and the leaders who were more concerned with their religiously political position.

There are always opponents, ha satan, to the faith way that looks to Jesus for its example. It is entirely possible that people with religious or political status will be threatened by our new perspective, our Jesus-behavior.

And sometimes the opponent is within us, providing us with excuses too.

We have both synagogue leader and Jesus within us, and within Christianity:

the biblical literalist and the biblical interpreters

the status quo excuser and the no excuses actor

I heard a supposed Native American tale of a child asking his grandfather why he sometimes felt and did wrong things. Grandfather said, we all have within us two wolves, both hungry. One wants to love and lick its young and care for the pack. The other wants to rip and tear whatever gets in its way.

The boy asked, but which one will win grandfather?

The one you feed, son, the one you feed.

As individuals, as a congregation, as a denomination, as Christians, we must feed the one that looks like Jesus, the one that sees and addresses hurt, not the one that hides behind excuses and calls them reasons.

If we look to Jesus, we find he followed God’s word to Jeremiah: Do not be afraid of them, for I will be with you.

With that kind of power behind us, we have no need of excuses. As Jesus would say, go and do the same. Amen.