"Finding Our Place in the Son"

When I was living in New York, I would walk by homeless people every day. Sometimes they were people we knew or recognized, like the woman who slept under the scaffolding of the seminary where we lived.

But mostly they were people we did not know - nameless faces and bodies hunched over or curled up sleeping on cardboard pallets. People fighting demons and addictions and life stories that had knocked the wind out of them - leaving their shoulders bent and shrouded with too many layers of warm clothing, even in the summer heat - like they were building up an extra layer of insulation against the coldness of the world.

And every day as I would walk by these homeless people, I never felt like I knew what to do. Or how to act. Nothing ever felt good.

But there were other times when I would just walk by. Just walk on by and not say or do anything - because I was in a rush, or on the phone, or checking Facebook, or the baby was fussing in her stroller. And to be honest, to make a completely honest confession of my sin to you: it was the times when I was so absorbed in myself and hardly noticed the bent over person lying on the ground right beside me that I felt the least bad. It was easier for me not to see them.

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I have a feeling that the bent-over woman who came to see Jesus teaching in the Synagogue that Luke tells us about in our gospel text - I have a feeling that she was also someone that folks were more comfortable ignoring.

The scripture tells us that Jesus had already begun teaching in the synagogue when this unnamed woman appears. Maybe it was her custom to arrive late. Avoid the meeting and greeting with neighbors. Perhaps she preferred to go unnoticed, to shuffle along the wall until she found her usual place in the back.

Unlike so many of the healing stories in the gospels, this woman does not approach Jesus for healing. She doesn’t have a relative or family member beg Jesus on her behalf. She may have heard about this powerful healer and thought she just might come to check him out, but she would have also been observing the Sabbath along with everyone else. And she probably assumed that no work of healings would be done. The leaders of the synagogue certainly made it clear that that was their expectation.

But maybe there were other reasons this woman didn’t ask for help from the healer. Maybe she felt that after 18 years this was just the way life was going to be. Maybe going 18 years so bent over you can’t even look someone in the eye does something to you. Makes you think you might have more in common with the dirt on the ground than with the people around you. Makes you think you’re unworthy.

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Or at least that’s what the spirit that’s crippling her would want her to think.

Jesus identifies the spirit as Satan. He tells the Synagogue leaders criticizing him for the healing that it isn’t old age, or scoliosis, or any number of ailments that have left this woman bent over for so long. But it’s Satan himself.

And it makes sense really, if we look at who or what Satan is. Before Satan was interpreted as a demonic being, Satan was not a person really but a way of being - or a role. In the Hebrew of the Old Testament ha-satan meant literally The Accuser. To be The Satan was like being the prosecutor in a courtroom, charged with bringing accusations against people so that God’s justice may be served.

And, to keep our courtroom analogy going - if Satan is the Prosecutor, trying to nail us down for our sins, then Jesus is the great Defender, setting us free from those past transgressions.

So what was this woman’s sin? What kept this woman bound and bent?

The Scripture doesn’t say. All we see is the result of 18 years of constant and persistent accusation. Accusations that have long surpassed whatever sins this woman may have committed. Accusations that have kept her bent over with shame.

And shame - shame is the life-sentence that Satan wants to bind us in.

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Dr. Brene Brown who researches shame tell us that: “Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.”

Guilt is the feeling that you did something wrong, but shame is the feeling that you ARE something wrong. And feelings like that are truly crippling. It’s painful to experience. And it’s painful to watch.

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One hot summer day in the city last year, when I was pregnant with Vivian, and Andrew and I were meeting up-town for a birth class, Andrew came up to me and told me that on the way to the class he had seen something horrible. He was jittery and seemed really rattled.

Apparently there was a homeless man on one of the side streets he was taking who - perhaps because of illness, or substance abuse, or because he was older and couldn’t get to a public bathroom in time - he had soiled himself and was frantically attempting to clean himself up, crouching there for cover between two parked cars.

And it wasn’t the physical mess that was so jarring. It was that moment when this man who so desperately was trying not to be seen, it was that moment when this man looked up and saw Andrew. And their eyes met in the heat of the evening. And in that moment Andrew saw this man experience an overwhelming shame.

And that shame, my friends, that shame is hard to see. We don’t want to see it. We avoid it at all cost.

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Because seeing someone else’s shame brings up all our own feelings of shame. We all know too well what it feels like to be convicted by Satan’s accusations of unworthiness. To be given a life sentence with a shame story that we keep bottled up - praying it will never see the light of day.

I think that may be the real reason that seeing another person’s shame is just so painful for us. Because we all have shame. We all have feelings that we are not worthy, that we’ve done something so wrong or so disgusting that no one can possibly love us.

And then we hide those feelings and those stories away. And we pray that we won’t be reminded that they’re there.

And when someone or something DOES remind us?

We run away. We look away. We try our best to pretend they aren’t there. Because those bent over people are us - and we are they.

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That Synogogue, like this church, was full of bent over people. Some of them better able to disguise it than others.

But the good news, my friends, is that as much as we try to hide there is someone who always sees us. Someone who sees those crippled pieces of our souls even when they show up late, shuffle along the back, and try their best to blend in.

There is someone who sees those parts of us with laser focus, someone who calls them over, brings those pieces to down to the front, right here before the altar, and says: You are set free.

And friends, when you feel that. When you feel that in your depths of your souls. When you encounter a LOVE like that, there is nothing left to do but stand up straight - to feel the sunlight on your face for once - and to begin praising God.

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May it be so. Amen.