…the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful
things being done by him. (Luke
13:17b)
Sue
and Paul[i] were family friends back
in California. They were a comfortable middle-aged couple living in a
comfortable development in a very comfortable home where they slept in separate
bedrooms. This arrangement was not because of any lack of marital affection between
the two, but because Sue suffered from fibromyalgia, was often in chronic pain,
and rather desperately needed her sleep. Paul snored like a Chevy El Camino
with a broken muffler, so his beloved needed a quiet space to catch her own
z’s. They’d wish each other good night, and Sue would retreat to her room where
she often worked on some of her literary projects well into the night. In the
morning Paul would wake her and bring her a cup of tea.
One
morning Paul came to wake Sue as usual and found her lying on the floor. She
had suffered a cardiac event during the night and had been dead for several
hours. Paul had been asleep when it happened.
I
was doing my internship with a congregation in New York when this tragedy
occurred. Paul asked if I’d fly back to California to preside at Sue’s
memorial. I remember sitting with him on the back patio of his home, and he
told me of the sense of isolation he felt. Everything in the world seemed
absurdly trivial in the face of his loss, and he experienced a profound sense
of separation. He told me with no small amount of bitterness, “People tell me
they know how I feel. Well, they don’t.”
Isn’t
that the truth?
When
we experience a serious, life-changing loss the whole world seems to slip away
from us. We enter some kind of invisible bubble from whose interior we can see
the rest of the world and all the people in it, but we no longer feel any sense
of connection to it or them. Grief and pain isolate. And it’s not just our own
feelings, but the rest of the world tends to sneak softly away from our
suffering. What do you say to someone who has just been diagnosed with cancer? How
do you approach a couple whose child just committed suicide? Is there a proper
way to comfort the neighbor who has been out of work for almost a year and has
needed to rely on the SNAP program to feed his family?
The
anguish felt by the woman in the Gospel lesson for Pentecost 11, Year C in the
Revised Common Lectionary (Luke 13: 10-17) may not be only the orthopedic
ailment which has crippled her for years. It might also be the awful sense of
“otherness”—a sense of not being part of a community. It’s significant, I
think, that this unnamed woman did not approach Jesus. Rather, Jesus saw her,
knew she was suffering, and called out to her. He broke through that invisible
bubble which kept her at a distance from those who understood illness and
infirmity only as God’s punishments for some kind of disobedience. Note, too,
that the cowardly leader of the synagogue lacks the spherical opulence to
condemn Jesus for doing the work of healing on the Sabbath. Rather, this
morally pusillanimous hypocrite chastises the woman, the one on the outside
of the society, when she didn’t even ask Jesus to heal her!
I
can’t help but wonder what the woman was feeling when she came to the
synagogue. She certainly didn’t come seeking or expecting the guest rabbi from
Nazareth to make her ailing back straight again. Did she come just to be in the
presence of the sacred, to hear the words of comfort from the scrolls? Did she
stand in the rear, not mixing with the other women, keeping her eyes on the
ground, accepting that her infirmity was her permanent burden to bear?
The
work Jesus performed on this particular Sabbath was a work of restoration. By
restoring this woman to wholeness, Jesus restored her to the community. She was
able—and quite joyful—to enter into the praise of God with all the
others who had come to that holy place of worship. Jesus was quite clear that
the disability which had afflicted this poor lady for eighteen years was not
a sign of God’s frowning judgment. She was bound by the Adversary[ii], not by God. He went on
to call her a “daughter of Abraham”—further establishing her as one of the
family, re-connecting her, and breaking the bubble of suffering which had made her
a pariah.
This
is the joyful blessing of the Sabbath. It’s the ability to gather as community.
I must confess that, in the pre-COVID-19 days, I thought the internet would be
as wonderful a tool for the Gospel as the printing press had been in Martin
Luther’s day. But I was wrong. There is absolutely nothing to substitute being in
the company of your church family on the Sabbath. Our need for warm,
interpersonal contact is both nourishing and healing. Yes, there are those who
fear betraying their emotions in the sacred space. Perhaps they worry that
their anxieties, fears, or griefs will intrude on the devotion of their fellow
congregants. I say if such frailties are not excused and embraced by a Christian
community that community isn’t doing its job. We don’t always have to know how
to approach a hurting brother or sister. We’ll do 90% of our care by simply
showing up.
I
agreed with my friend Paul those many years ago. Many will claim they
understand when they really don’t. I know I didn’t. But that’s okay. You don’t
need to understand someone in order to love them. We can all do that. And whenever
we gather for Sabbath worship, we can look to the one on the cross. He
understands us all.
I
truly appreciate you for taking the time to read my blog this week. Please
remember the Sabbath day and be in the company of your Christian family. They
need you.
No comments:
Post a Comment