Isaiah 58:9b-14
You shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am. If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday. The LORD will guide you continually, and satisfy your needs in parched places, and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail. Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in. If you refrain from trampling the sabbath, from pursuing your own interests on my holy day; if you call the sabbath a delight and the holy day of the LORD honorable; if you honor it, not going your own ways, serving your own interests, or pursuing your own affairs; then you shall take delight in the LORD, and I will make you ride upon the heights of the earth; I will feed you with the heritage of your ancestor Jacob, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.Luke 13:10-17
Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God. But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.” But the Lord answered him and said, “You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?” When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame; and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing.
Who here has a body? Who would say they have a positive self image of their body? Who would say they have a negative body image? Raise your hand if at some point in your life you received a negative message about your body. Raise your hand if you can remember the first negative image you received. Who or where did it come from, how did you internalize it, how has it hidden itself in you so that even today you carry it with you, though the event may have happened ten, twenty, even forty years ago?
Well, here’s the good news: today there is healing for those broken body images. There is healing available if we choose it—but I warn you that old wounds die hard and you may not be willing to give this one up. Not only have you had it for a long time, the media has been feeding off it for a long time. The media preys on those places in us where our self esteem is low. Just keep those things in mind: there is healing here for you today if you want it, but you may not be ready to let it in and that, my beloveds, is also OK. There is never only one opportunity for healing. They come around all the time—we just have to be open to the opportunities.
Okay, now we are ready to enter into today’s scripture.
Isaiah 58:9b-14 says, “You shall cry for help...." We just did that—in summoning up a place of woundedness we collectively just cried for help. "And God will say, Here I am." So look around you. God is here. Say to each other, I see the Divine in you, I celebrate the Divine in you. “You shall cry for help, and God will say, Here I am. Remove the yoke from among you,” So keeping in mind that fragile body image, close your eyes for a moment. I want you to imagine removing the yoke—the voice, the criticism. I want you to imagine in your mind's eye removing it and offering it up to the Holy Spirit, letting it evaporate into thin air, allowing the wings of God to carry it away from you.
Now roll your shoulders back, take a deep breath and see if you don’t feel even just a little bit lighter.
See, I am focusing on body image right now, but the scriptures are directing us to focus on the Yoke or the crippling spirit which we ourselves have chosen to bear, over and over again, despite the invitations to healing that have happened along the way. Now I am going to say more about that in a moment, but I want you to do something else for me around body image because I am a firm believer that if you open up a space in your heart—if you go about healing a space in your heart—you had better fill that space with positives before the negatives have a chance to grab hold again. So, I want you to think of three things about your body that are worth praising God for this morning. Three things, and I want you to turn to your neighbor and share those three things. Because we have been blessed with these bodies and sure as we lift off the yoke of oppression of old wounds, we had better return praise to God for the gifts that these bodies offer us on a daily basis. So turn to your neighbor and don’t be shy: I want you to give thanks for three things about your body. And when you have shared your praise, I want you to affirm one another for what you have just shared together.
Because the scripture is clear this morning that if we lift the Yoke and move into a posture of feeding others with spiritual nurturance and care, all we have to do is lift our yoke and reach out to someone else in the name of healing, then “our light shall rise in the darkness and our gloom be like the noonday.” So step one is to recognize the place of pain, and ask God to be there in it with us as we lift the Yoke and offer it to God. Step two is what you just did in turning to one another, sharing what is worthy of praise and affirming one another. So we are right on track here for some healing.
And our God says if we do these things, if we lift the Yoke and if we support one another, then “The LORD will guide us continually, and satisfy our needs in parched places, and make our bones strong; and we shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail. Our ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; we shall raise up the foundations of many generations; and we shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in.”
You see, it begins with us. The healing has to begin with us, and it starts with something as basic as the way we feel about our bodies: the external and internal pressures we put on ourselves to conform to unreasonable and irrational standards of worldly beauty. Face it: we live in a culture that is obsessed with being richer, thinner, and younger. So where does that leave those of us who are none of the above? It leaves us wanting, it leaves us yearning for an answer to that 20 pounds we carry around, to those wrinkles around our eyes, to our menopausal, cranky, hot flashy, moody peri-, mid- and post-menopausal issues, to our balding, to our inadequacy as we have been taught to perceive it. If we could find a magic pill for all these “issues” we would. And that is why we as a culture spend millions of dollars on plastic surgery when there are babies in our country that go to bed hungry, that is why we diet and diet and diet again when inside our souls are starving for nourishment of a different kind, for the healing that only God in community can bring. Over and over again we are told by the images in the media that the younger and thinner we are, the happier we will be. Well let me tell you that is simply not true. And incidentally, one out of three young people in the United States will suffer from an eating disorder by the time they reach their twenties, so they are certainly not living the high life. They are being taught that right from the get go they are already not enough: not thin enough or tall enough, dark enough or light enough. We are creating a generations of young people who have not learned from our mistakes—who have not learned that thinner is not better, it is just thinner—that the pursuit of the best body or the best clothes or the best whatever is not going to replace the need for soul food—is not going to take away the craving that longs to be touched by love and compassion, by companionship and care. Relationships do that; diets don’t. So your Yoke: God says take it off, ask for help and support and I will nourish you in the ways you long to be nourished. There is healing here this morning, friends, for you and for me.
Luke 13:10-17: “Now Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years.” Now, I want to make it very clear here that the scripture says there was a spirit crippling this woman—a spirit of an evil nature. It does not say that she had MS or some other debilitating neurological disorder that was causing her to bend over. This is not one of those hocus pocus kind of healings where someone walks down the aisle and is miraculously cured in an Alleluia kind of tent revival sort of thing. No: Jesus walks into a room and senses that this woman is being oppressed by some sort of hellishness that is so heavy on her that she is all but dragging on the ground. “Now, when Jesus saw her,” the scripture tells us, ”he called her over and said, 'Woman, you are set free from your ailment.' When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood upright and began praising God.” Now I’m not gonna spend much time on how everybody around Jesus got all up in his business for healing on the Sabbath—suffice to say it took them awhile but eventually they came around. No, I want to stay on our theme here—the Yoke, remember, the healing and the nurturing, because here is the thing: this woman did not ask Jesus to heal her. She did not ask him; now imagine that! Imagine that, we say. as our own backs are bent over to the point of barely being able to lift our heads from the pain. How is it that she did not look to Jesus for his help? He was right there in front of her, wasn’t he? But she didn't ask—the same way we don’t ask.
She didn’t ask because then she would have had to deal with her own transformation. She didn’t ask because the devil she knew, well at least that was the devil she knew and who knows what kind of potential hell healing will bring? It would put some industries right out of business, wouldn’t it? But you see, God wants our freedom, God is drawn to and leads us to places of freedom. And that is why this God of ours is so worthy of our praise: because God is all about freedom. And all Jesus has to do is take one look at this poor child to know that it is time for her to get free. And like the bent-over woman—who in my mind I have named Maria, hence the sermon title—not all of us will ask, so sometimes Jesus just has to get in there and break it down for us.
Some of you say to me, I don’t know why I am here, I am not sure what drew me here. I just keep coming back even though the way I am growing, the way I am changing, well, it makes me uncomfortable sometimes, and sometimes it makes others uncomfortable, and I don’t know why but I just keep coming back. Well, don’t you doubt for minute that the hand of Jesus is upon you. The hand of Jesus is calling you to freedom because there is somebody here today who needs to get free. There is somebody here today who is ready to take off that yoke of inner oppression and get free. There is somebody here today who may not have started out this morning asking Jesus to walk with them, but surely as the sun will set they will end this day thanking God for their freedom.
The mistake we make about our own crippling spirits is that we assume we have to hide them in the shadows. We have let ourselves be so manipulated, so shamed, that we actually believe that if we can’t handle those crippling spirits on our own, there is something wrong with us. So we don’t ask for help from our pastor, from our neighbor, from our therapist, from our doctor. We don’t ask because we are afraid of being found out. We are afraid of being perceived as weak.
Well, there are no weak people here, and there is no shame in asking for the help we need when we need it. Different life situations call for different teams of helpers. God gave us each other that we might lean on one another, that we might bear one another's burdens, that we might listen to and care for one another, until we are strong enough to be in an upright position instead of dragging around our souls in the dirt.
My Mamma used to say you know you're doing God’s work when the devil tries to stop you at every turn. So make no mistake about it: there will be all kinds of people who have something to say about how you are dealing with your crippling spirit. All kinds of things to say about how no one in our family has ever gone to a therapist, what will other people say?—about how if you can’t solve it yourself you're not a real man—about how asking for help is a cop out. Well, take off your yoke, let Jesus put his hand on you this morning. Don’t worry about what others are going to say or think—let God deal with them—just let Jesus put his hand on your shoulder and call that crippling spirit out. “Our light shall rise in the darkness and our gloom be like the noonday.”
You see, freedom begets freedom, freedom is attracted to freedom, and where there is freedom love can flow freely, between us and God, between us and one another. Maybe for you that crippling spirit is around body image, the weight of many years of suffering that you wear like a shield. But it is time to get free of your own judgment about how you do or do not fit society's image of sexy; it is time to heal those hurts and get healthy, whatever that looks like for you. If it means you never loose a pound, but you get enough sleep and you eat right and you exercise and feel good about yourself, then you have let Jesus heal you. Your crippling spirit may be the guilt of a failed marriage; the empty hole left by the loss of someone who was your everything; stress about financial worries; poor health; a child who has run away, physically or emotionally. Perhaps you are the victim of pain and oppression caused by being marginalized by the church or in the greater community. Let Jesus lay his hand on your shoulder—let yourself embrace the healing that comes when we lean into our own freedom. Close your eyes and feel the hand of God just there on your shoulder. Reach out for a moment and take another person's hands and say my freedom is attracted to your freedom, let's get free together. And in all things give praise, honor and glory to the one who created us whole, healed, upright, and free. Amen.