Bent Over People
Luke 13; 10-17
August 22, 2010
Rev. John Wesley
I believe I know this woman that appears in our text this morning. She was my grandmother. It was not an affliction that bothered her all her life. But in later years my grandmother began to bend over severely. I don’t know what caused this but would suspect it was osteoporosis. She lived to be ninety and I remember that every year for the last few years of her life, someone would cut about a half inch off her chain because she was bending closer to the ground. She was a small woman to begin with, but by the time she died she could only stand just a bit over four feet. Being a bent woman meant that my grandmother didn’t see very well. Oh, she’d had cataract surgery and wore those Pepsi bottle glasses. That hindered her sight, but a person who is bent over, even if they have 20/20 vision has a hard time seeing. Their eyes are restricted to that little patch of ground beneath their feet. It is a chore, near and impossibility for a bent over person to look up and see what’s happening down the street or across the room. They are prisoners, in some ways, to that little bit of turf beneath their feet.
I believe I know this woman Jesus spotted in the synagogue one Sabbath day. She looked a lot like me a few months ago. Not physically, of course. I know my posture is not that good, but I’m far from being bent over. But in a spiritual sense I’d spent a lot of years looking at the same bit of turf. Ordained forty years ago this Fall, I’ve spent most of my Sabbaths behind the pulpit. Hopefully I’ve been faithful to the call I received when I was a teenager. But over the years, the routine of daily life has a way of bending you down and restricting your view. You get to the place where all you see is the little bit of life that is right around you, and you begin to think the rest of the world must look like your little piece of turf.
I believe most of us know this little woman who came to the temple to pray, this bent over woman. Many of us, for as long as we can remember have made our way to worship every Sunday. We’ve listened to the sermon and we’ve offered our prayers, and we’ve made our offering. And then we’ve come to the table of Jesus and shared the bread and the wine. For us much of what it means to be a Christian has been defined by this little bit of turf located here on State Street. What we’ve seen of God’s kingdom has been limited to this little bit of turf we call our church.
But this summer something has happened. All of us have been touched by something called Sabbatical. Each one of us will have to decided for ourselves whether this touch was really from Jesus or not. I choose to believe in my life that it was God’s hand that provided all of us an opportunity to raise up from our routine, to lift our eyes from the normal way of seeing and being, to stand up and see beyond our own little turf of holy ground. The focus of this Sabbatical has been the Lord’s Supper. The congregation has been able to look through the eyes of eight different preachers and teachers, to see this holy meal in different ways. A Sunday School class has devoted twelve weeks to looking historically at how the Lord’s Supper has been treated by the church through the Christian Era. And people in the church have been called upon to look at communion experiences in their own life and invited to share with others moments that felt like holy communion moments. The church has had an opportunity to look at how the table we gather around each week might be shared with the community, not just by inviting others in but by taking the table out. You’ve given $60,000 to build a Habitat House for the Watkin’s family and, Mark Whitley, who built our beautiful communion table, is at work on another table, this one to sit in the house the church has built.
On this Sabbatical the church has been allowed to stand and see a little differently. And for those who have taken advantage of this gift, I hope things will never be the same.
While the church has been given this opportunity to look at a larger piece of turf, I’ve also been blessed to look beyond this wonderful table to a host of other tables. (Show slides 1-9) From a very simple communion service at a small church in Scotland that ministers to many of the poor and immigrant populations of Glasgow, to a service at Iona Abbey where we shared the symbols of an Agape feast with people from around the world who had been living together in community that week, to a communion service at St Gregory’s in the Mission District of San Francisco where we danced to the table to joyfully receive the gifts of God and then returned on the following Friday to give away food from around that same table, I’ve experienced some different turf. That meal that calls us into fellowship, that meal that invites all to come and share continues to be a powerful force in those churches willing to make it central to their life.
Now I didn’t just see beyond our table to other tables set in our world. I also got to meet several new people and talk to them about the church past and present. I learned from a minister in Glasgow about a new church in England that didn’t have a worship service in a traditional way. A minister started baking bread on a Saturday afternoon, and people began to come to help and to take the bread when it was done. And as they waited for the bread to rise they talked. And as they waited for the bread to bake, some gathered in a quiet room and prayed. And a church began.
I met a young man from Missouri name Brian Perry who graduated from Mid-continent Bible College several years ago. He married a friend of my cousins in Switzerland and has lived there for 14 years. He spent parts of two days with me helping me see the Reformation as I’d never seen it before. In the churches he showed me I felt like I was walking through 1500 years of history, seeing the faces of people who had lived, and believed, and some died for their faith.
In Rome the lady who helped run the B & B we stayed in pointed me to Pricilla’s catacombs off the beaten path and there, in images 1800 years old I felt I touched some of the faith of those early Christians.
And in San Francisco I met an author and a minister who were not satisfied with what they had been taught to believe as children. The author, raised an atheist had not only embraced Christ but began one of the most amazing food band ministries I’ve ever seen. And the minister, raised in a non-instrumental Church of Christ in Texas was an Episcopal priest and was leading his congregation to dance around the communion table with joy each week.
I must also say that I’ve been blessed to see more beauty this summer than one person has a right to see in a lifetime. I was reacquainted with a word I learned years ago in seminary. It’s the word panentheism. It is the belief that God can be found in everything. And I believe it must be true. (show
I don’t want to leave the impression that all the new things I saw and experienced were full of grace and glory. I went to Europe to follow the trail of the Reformers back to Rome, to see if and how the Lord’s Supper impacted their lives. I went having read books about the Reformation and having a pretty positive opinion of what happened when John Calvin and Martin Luther said the church had to change, and when it did not they began their separate movements. I focused my attention on that part of the Reformation out of which the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) was birthed, John Calvin in Geneva, Huldrych Zwingli in Zurich and John Knox in Edinburgh. When they spoke of change the church acted a lot like the leader in the synagogue when Jesus straightened up an old woman. They condemned those who saw the church in a different way, and had they been able to get to them, these Reformers would have lost their life. The Reformers did away with the practice of selling indulgences which shortened a person’s stay in purgatory, they began allowing ministers to marry and they changed how the Lord’s Supper was viewed. No longer would the people just be given bread, but they would receive wine and bread. The Lord’s Supper would just be offered occasionally and when it was the Reformers would teach that the bread and wine did not turn into the physical body of Christ. To this point it seems the Reformers were up to lots of good stuff. But what deeply disturbed me was how quickly those who wanted to bring about change in the church quickly became just like the powers they replaced. The scars of the Reformation are still seen in Europe from where altars and pictures and stained glass were removed to where murals were plastered over to where organs and other instruments were taken out of the church to where tens of thousands of people were killed because they believed differently that the Reformers. The Reformers in Switzerland set up a theocracy much like Iran today, and a council of ministers essential ran the country, killing, imprisoning, and exiling those who disagreed with them. These Reformers who wanted change didn’t want to give up power, didn’t want to include women, didn’t want to allow for greater public freedom, and they continued to use guilt, shame and condemnation just like the medieval church had done.
Sometimes when you finally get straighten up, sometimes when you take your eyes off that little bit of turf under your feet and you begin to look around, sometimes when you begin to see, really see, you know what happens? What you see has a way of bending you over again. What you see if you honestly look isn’t always pretty or just or good. What you see when you really look around can make you not want to look around very much, can make you want to just keep your eyes focused on what’s right in front of you.
When I was on Sabbatical I saw a lot of beggars on the streets. The most disturbing were in Rome where so many of the beggars appeared to have been maimed. Some had twisted limbs or large abscesses or mental challenges. After awhile I just tried not to look. I didn’t know what to do and it seemed they were everywhere. So I began just looking down at my feet or looking away when I passed. It was too painful for me to deal with my own inability to help them.
I understand why the leader of the synagogue was upset with Jesus. Jesus was changing the rules about the Sabbath. He was taking away the security found in old rules and old ideas and the leader didn’t know how to respond. He wanted the safety of his little turf. And so do we.
It can disturb us to see old things in new ways. It can frighten us to see new things that threaten old ways. But if we’ve learned anything this summer I hope we’ve learned that we can’t just keep our head down. The reason we can’t do that isn’t so much about us as it is about this young teacher who came to the synagogue a long time ago and straightened up a bent over lady. He taught us that our lives count, that we have something unique to offer to world, something that if rightly used can not only make a difference but can bring God closer to our world. When we straighten up and look beyond our little turf we will see things to celebrate. We will recognize that God isn’t just in the little box we’ve tried to put God in, but that God is visible in all the world around. And we will also see, through those disturbing, frightening images in our world where the love of God needs to be shared, where the table of the Lord needs to be set.
My travels in Europe ended in Rome and though disturbed by some of the things I saw there, it was in Rome that I really began to find a new kind of peace and joy. I didn’t have a meeting with the Pope, and even though I visited the Vatican, that wasn’t where things begin to come together again in a way that renewed my faith. There were two places I visited that touched me deeply, that continue to speak to me. Both places were very old. One was found under St. Cecelia’s Basilica. There a large home has been partially uncovered. It was a large home, a small palace belonging to a senatorial family. Cecelia was the wife and she became an early convert to Christianity. This was in the days when Christianity was illegal and there were no public churches. But Cecelia opened up her home and allowed it to be a place of worship. Slaves and freemen, senators and poor widows, all gathered there to worship and to break bread in the name of Jesus Christ. I walked on some of the tile floor that has been unearthed and stood in the room where Cecelia was reported to have been beheaded by the Roman’s. It seemed she said to me, “Following Christ is about opening up what you have to others for the glory of God.”
And the other place was Priscilla’s Catacombs, a place away from the beaten path of tourists in the northwestern suburbs of Rome. There beneath a church and a convent lies a large network of tunnels where early Christians were once buried. Priscilla was wealthy enough to have given money to buy this old mined out area so Christians would have a place to lay their dead. The rock is soft and easily dug out, but when exposed to air it becomes hardened. So a crept would be hued out of rock just large enough for a body. As I walked through the passages I wondered what these people, these early Christian’s believed about God as they lay their loved one’s to rest. I didn’t have to wonder long. I soon began to see the frescos painted on the walls and the ceilings. They may have been required to bend over to get through some of the passageways, to come into the area from outside, but once they were in they could straighten up and look. And when they looked there high on the ceiling they would see this image of the Good Shepherd, young and strong and beautiful, carrying and leading sheep. And along the walls they could see stories of faith that spoke of God’s ability to deliver. And they could see a scene of disciples breaking bread, seven of them, with one being a lady, and they could remember the fellowship they found when they broke bread together in someone’s home, in their grief would not bend them over, but with faith they would straighten up and look into the eyes of God. If this God could bring Jesus back from the dead there was nothing too great, nothing too difficult. With God’s help anything could be faced.
I come back from Sabbatical believing more than ever that church happens not just when we gather to worship but when every one of us go clip through that entrance back into the world and go out to live faithfully as God calls us to do. I hope this little place that calls us together each week isn’t a place that bends us over and puts more burdens on our backs, but is a place that helps straighten us up so we can see the world in new ways. The table isn’t so much about remembering the One who died on the cross as remembering the one who rose from the grave and is present among those people who welcome and greet one another in his name. We are not to be a bent over people. Jesus has raise us up!
