becoming fully alive (with help)

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

and St Martin’s, Duntroon

TWENTY FIRST SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (August 21^st) 2022

 

 READINGS:

 

Jeremiah 1: 4-10

Psalm 71:1-6

Hebrews 12: 18-29

Luke 13: 10-17

 

It was a fascinating adventure in the Gospel Conversation this past week, as I navigated a path between an emphasis on the demonic world of Satan and his minions and the personal and sociological dimensions of the encounter between Jesus and a horrendously crippled woman.

Let us not forget that for eighteen years this woman – unnamed as so many women are in the patriarchal world of the first century – has seen very little but the ground in front of her. The sheer physical pain, and emotional and psychological humiliation of her life is beyond words. Jesus, moved as he is so often in his ministry – moved to compassion, moved to the very viscera of his being, initiates a healing that is physical, spiritual, psychological, and even in a sense sociological.

Would that we could do likewise. I think of figures like the incomparable Fred Hollows – atheist yes dare I say it bearer of Christ – who likewise transformed lives, releasing them from physical, psychological, and spiritual demons. There are demons in society far removed from the stereotypical realm of beasties under the bed emphasised by so many in Christian circles. To say this is not to deny the existence of that which is beyond our post-Enlightenment and sometimes arrogant worldview, but nor is it to focus on the sensational and inexplicable that is dramatically over emphasised by some.

The woman of this story is never given a name. She is one of the massive majority of humankind, the majority of which are women, who slipped through history unmentioned or unnamed. Yet we glimpse both her suffering and her redemption, I say again, physical, spiritual, all-dimensional, as we hear this Jesus story. Jesus initiates heaven for this woman.

Jesus is a little less visible in our world than he was for the three brief years of his public ministry in first century Palestine. We, however inadequate, are called to be his voice and hands and feet. Dare we even ask how we might touch lives in our community? I might add that whenever I say this in a sermon I am almost inevitably spun into an encounter with someone in need.

I often fail, fleeing from their need. I remember with shame to this day the time I tiptoed past a person sleeping in the cold on the doorstep of my church. I tiptoed past him in the dark, frightened perhaps by his form in the shadows, but I later relented. I made a cup of tea and would have given it to him, but he was gone. I had let him down, and I had let God down. The demons of the world at least for a time maintained the upper hand in his existence. As it happens there is a happy end to the story of his life so far but I can in no way claim credit for helping him on the path to restoration. For me the lesson remains that I walked by on the other side.

Jesus in our vignette today, this glimpse of his ministry, becomes the Good Samaritan that I for one so often have not become.

In the end it is too rare that I or perhaps we serve successfully as the voice or hands or feet of Jesus Christ. Yet we can but ask that sometimes – just sometimes – we may touch a life with Christlove. We will never be a Fred Hollows, that atheist Christ-bearer, or a Desmond Tutu, that Christian Christ-bearer, but we can but ask that our lives may touch and transform the life of another human being this day, this week, this lifetime. I suspect you and I won't change the world, and God knows it needs changing, but we may be for some person the touch of the love of God, if we ask God to let us so be.

 “The glory of God is a human being fully alive” said Irenaeus in the second century. May we touch lives so that those lives may become signs of the glory of God. And may we likewise be touched.

Amen.