BENT OVER WOMAN Rev. Gregory Flint Luke 13: 10 – 17 August 22, 2010

While Jesus is teaching in a synagogue on the Jewish Sabbath, in shuffles an unnamed woman who is unable to stand up straight. What is this affliction that keeps her bent over? Osteoporosis perhaps?

My grandmother had osteoporosis and for the last dozen years of her life she could not see the sky. Her field of vision became limited to her own lap.

The teller of this morning’s story text knew nothing about osteoporosis. He attributed the woman’s condition to some spirit of bondage. Whatever it was, she was bent over for 18 years.

But she enters the synagogue where Jesus is teaching and stands at the back in the women’s gallery. Only men were allowed the seats in the front. Though I suspect it was in another sense not so very different from today, with the back of the synagogue being fuller than the front.

So it’s surprising that Jesus even sees her at the back. Or maybe not surprising, given Jesus’ propensity for seeking out and seeing those others don’t see, or look away from because they don’t want to see.

But there she is and Jesus sees her. Now he has a decision to make. Will he give her a healing blessing or not? Healing was technically defined as work which was forbidden on the Sabbath. So will Jesus violate the religious law pertaining to Sabbath and risk the wrath of the synagogue leaders? Or, having seen the bent over woman, will he heal her?

It would be easy to focus righteous indignation on the synagogue ruler who points out that the woman’s condition is not life threatening. Jesus could wait until tomorrow and then heal her. After all, she’s been bent over for 18 years. What’s one more day?

The Sabbath is for prayer and worship, reflection and rest. You make an exception for this woman and the next thing you know the Sabbath gets taken over by shopping and kids’ soccer, football and work emails. And a people without a Sabbath become a people depleted in body and soul.

The synagogue leader has a point – doesn’t he?

But Jesus can’t take his eyes off this bent over woman. And for Jesus, Sabbath keeping is also about active holiness – participating in some way in God’s healing of the world.

Jesus walks to the back of the synagogue, puts his hands on the bent back of the woman and says to her, “You are set free.” And she stands up…straight.

I don’t know how to explain that, except to say that when Jesus, as Christ Spirit, shows up, then and now, things happen that defy explanation. And this story makes me think of another bent over woman.

Annie was in her late seventies when I knew her. At least Annie was the name she used then. For she had changed her name, first and last, several times. “It makes life more interesting,” she said. “You ought to change yours at least once,” she suggested to me. I haven’t….

Annie grew up in the north woods of Minnesota, where her mother had a certain “profession” among lumberjacks and iron ore miners. Annie never knew who her father was. “He sort of got lost in the shuffle,” she said.

Annie dropped out of school early to take up her mother’s “trade” to support herself and a half-brother who was part Native American.

“The tribe didn’t want him because he was mixed race,” Annie told me. “And our mother didn’t want him because he was a bother. So I did, God forgive, what I had to do to feed us both.”

Mostly though Annie didn’t want to talk about her past, saying there was too much better left behind because it “wasn’t pretty.” She did tell me once about getting fired as a cook on a Great Lakes iron ore ship. “A deckhand made a crack about my biscuits sitting undigested in his stomach for a week. So I hit him with a gravy ladle and broke his jaw,” she related. The she added, “The truth is he was probably right about my biscuits, and I deserved to be fired.”

She also told me the reason she couldn’t stand up straight was because her back was permanently injured when her drunken husband threw her down a flight of stairs. “Actually, we were both drunk,” Annie said.

But it was in the hospital afterward that according to Annie, “Jesus found her.”

“Well, not that Jesus wasn’t there all along, but I finally let his Christ Spirit into my life,” she said.

Annie called that experience the “great healing,” though she would be bent over and in pain the rest of her life. It’s another one of those Jesus things I can’t explain, except to say that healing is different from a cure. For some things in life there is no cure, but there can be healing.

Annie left her husband, attended AA meetings two and three times a week, started a successful seamstress business, and joined the little church I later served in northern Minnesota. She had sold her business by then and most days I could find her volunteering at the storefront drop-in center for the out-of-luck deckhands, lumberjacks, and miners who lived in the old hotels nearby or on the street.

Rain or shine, 90 above or 30 below zero, Annie would walk her almost 80-year-old bent over frame downtown to the center, where she’d pour coffee, mend clothes, give haircuts, play cards, and dole out R-rated humor and compassion in equal measure.

“The trick is seeing the image of God in everyone,” Annie would say. “It’s there in every face, even in the faces of these who are rough around the edges. But you have to look.”

Understand how much effort that required – for this bent over woman to twist her torso enough to be able to look up and into someone’s face. But she did it because what she saw in the faces was worth the effort.

At some point Annie took in Max, a great hulk of a man who kept the flower beds at Annie’s house, cooked and cleaned for her, and silently answered the door when you knocked.

Max couldn’t speak. Something unspeakable had happened to Max, something that rendered him mute. Annie found him on the way home from the drop-in center one frigid night. He was huddled half frozen in a doorway.

“I was just going to make him some soup and send him on his way the next day. But we kind of got used to each other,” Annie said.

Annie and Max could carry on a whole conversation; have perfect communication with each other, using only their eyes. Often Max would get on this knees so they could make eye contact without Annie needing to twist and look up. It was extraordinary to watch. Whenever I saw Max do that I felt I was witnessing something holy….

When Annie didn’t wake up one morning, her memorial service was held in that storefront drop-in center. It was packed with societal outcasts who found in Annie something they’d not had much of in their lives – respect, mercy, love, a smile.

One of the speakers at her service was a man who looked like he’d lost most of the battles in life. But he stood straight as he ran a hand through his shaggy hair and tugged at the thrift shop tie he’d put on for the occasion.

“I’d come in here,” he said, “and this little bent over woman would pour me some coffee and give me a cookie and put her hand on my shoulder. And she’d do it in a way that kinda straightened you right up and made you feel like you’d been touched by Jesus himself,” he said as a great tear of gratitude ran down his unshaven face.

Now the woman in the text was able to stand up straight after Jesus touched her. Annie remained bent over, though her touch enabled some others bent over by life to stand up straight. And both the woman in the text and Annie proclaimed themselves healed by Christ.

I asked Annie once what her definition of healing was. “Oh,” she said, “healing is feeling the love of God in your bones and then doing something about it.”

After she left the synagogue that day, I wonder what the straightened up woman did about it…even as I wonder what you and I will do about it this week….