August 27, 2016

Bent Over Woman


Luke 13:10 Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. 11 And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years...

Whoever came up with the idea of having the story of the Bent over woman in August must have been a gardener over the age of 50! It’s easy to sympathise with her in these hot days when the weeds are high and thick, and the carrots need pulling, the potatoes need digging, the beans need snapping and the zucchinis need to be pulled before they become the size of a major league baseball bat.  If you need a zucchini, please let me know.  Seriously!

One of the things I noticed while pulling weeds this week is how limited our view becomes.  The focus narrows down to the chickweeds and the petunias.  There is no looking at the blue sky or a rose-colored sunset or the far horizon of a lake shore or the high peak of a mountain.  There’s just the dirt at your toes, and maybe the feet of people around you.  It’s an unpredictable world too, being bent over.  Rain storms may be overhead, or a forest fire on the horizon, but staring down means that these kinds of things can not be anticipated or planned for.  They just happen.

I’ve met a few bent over women; one was my husband’s grandmother who had debilitating osteoporosis and was quite debilitated at the end of her days.  Another was a lady struggling with muscular dystrophy.  She is a few years older than me, and her spine is quite curved.  I thought at first she was having a difficult time in her wheelchair as she sat far forward on it, but then I realized that her spine was so bent that she looked like she was maybe 5 feet, but was probably closer to six feet tall.  It took a team of 5 people to get her down into the lake to go for a swim.  And I often think of the woman whose husband reroofed the manse last July.  She was camping with her kids and saved them from a falling tree.  Our roofer had to leave several times to help out with the kids and to be there when she woke up from the medically induced coma to the news that she has lost the use of her legs for the rest of her life. 

But the woman I remember the most, who actually didn’t have a bent over back, but taught me a lot about disabilities, was a lady who I met in first year university.  She lived in a dorm room two doors down from me and was a year or two older than me.  She was a thalidomide baby.  In her case, she had arms that were maybe a foot long, complete with elbows and hands, but only about 4 fingers each.  It meant that she couldn’t do buttons but she could do zippers.  Winter coats had to be adjusted to shorten the sleeves, and mittens were awkward, to say the least.  She could hold spoons and pencils, loved skiing and swimming, but had no way to tie shoe laces.  Things that I took for granted, bike riding for example, or typing, were challenges that had to be figured out in a way that would work for her.  But one thing stuck in my memory of her.  She once told me that she didn’t mind looking different than others and having challenges.  She figured that everyone had some kind of disability, but some people’s disabilities were on the outside for the world to see.  Other’s disabilities were inside, and invisible even to themselves.  They are bent over, seeing only what is at their feet. They can’t see straight.

Jesus straightened up two people that day in the synagogue. He brought health and new horizons to the bent over woman, but also to the synagogue leader.  The leader had forgotten the reason for the Sabbath.  It wasn’t just about not working, a reminder that we are not slaves any longer, but it was about remembering to take time to be in relationship with God.  And the leader was narrow-minded in his assumptions.  In his eyes, the woman was crippled because she somehow had done something to deserve it.  That’s still a common thread I often hear, “everything happens for a reason,” or even, “I must have some really bad karma.”  He was also feeling threatened.

 I can imagine that he was going about leading his regular service in his regular way, and this Jesus fellow stole the show, made the worship service a little chaotic with his actions, and the people must have been full of excitement about what they had just witnessed.  Rather than leading the congregation in joining the woman to praise God, he carped about technicalities.  Things weren’t fitting into his comfortable, predictable box.  Jesus stepped outside the bounds by noticing the woman and empathizing with her.  He touched her in compassion, wishing to free her from her feelings of shame and isolation.  She didn’t ask for the healing, she was used to it after 18 years.  But maybe she wasn’t so used to being seen as someone worthy of the same respect and kindness as others who could stand up straight and tall.  Jesus didn’t just straighten her out, but reminded the leader that it’s about the bigger picture of God’s compassionate love for those who we would most like to dismiss and ignore.

There are so many people who are struggling, bent over with sorrows that cripple their relationships, their families and their very souls.  Some are too angry to come to church; sometimes it is the church where they experienced a sense of shame from a leader with too narrow a point of view.  They struggle from day to day, not hearing a kind word, a gentle touch, a moment of empathy.  We may not be able to cure their pain, but we can remember that they too are children of God.  And there are times we too are crippled up in pain both physical and emotional.  Part of my vacation was struggling with the pain of self-doubt and fear.  But when we gather together in a faith community, whether it’s here in Athabasca, at a church camp, or in a congregation hundreds of miles from home, we gather to hear the hope in Jesus’ words of love, “you are set free from that which cripples you.” May we remember that love and that hope.

August 18, 2016

Juggling our Lives



Luke 10:40-42  New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.”  But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things;  there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”
 
If we measure our worth by how much we can juggle in our days, how many meetings and appointments we can cram into our lives, then Martha is going straight to heaven! She’s a capable woman, able to quickly put together a dinner party for Jesus and his twelve disciples at a moment's notice, and is seen as not only the head of the household, but also as a deacon, one who serves.

She knows that Jesus talks about taking care of others, especially our neighbors.  The Good Samaritan was a story she had just heard and she knows that our actions are important.  She knows that our faith without actions is empty.  She is determined to show that she has figured it out, that she understands what Jesus is getting at.  Hospitality to those less fortunate.  Well Martha knows how to do hospitality.

Or she would if her sister would pitch in and do her fair share.  And as Martha juggles getting the side of lamb out of the oven at the same time as the vegetables are done, with the setting of the table and making sure that everyone has a chair, she reaches the breaking point.  Can’t you just hear the things she’s telling herself? “If that Mary wasn’t wandering around with her head in the clouds, she’d have the flowers in the vase by now.  She can’t even remember that the salad fork goes before the dinner fork.  And if I’ve told her once, I’ve told her a thousand times, the blue napkins go with the best dishes, not the green napkins!  How that girl will ever survive this world without me I’ll never know.  Honestly!”

There are a lot of Marthas out there, juggling the wine menu with the meat and the Prada shoes with the Gucci handbag.  I knew a lady at city hall who spent $500 on a pair of blue jeans, and always bought matching toenail polish whenever she bought a new pair of sandals. 

I met a mom who has spent her life so filled with driving her kids to hockey and soccer practises that she gets panic attacks when she wonders what she will do now that they are leaving home.  I saw a dad barking lessons at his son while the little boy ran in the children’s triathlon yesterday, like he was an Olympic coach determined to have the boy win the race and who would slack off if he didn’t hear dad’s push to ignore his body and push through to the end.  We have to constantly teach our children to juggle more and more things so that they don’t become, well quite bluntly, thugs and addicts.  Heaven knows what they might do if they have too much time on their hands.

So Martha explodes at Jesus, and uses some of the nastiest tricks of female bullies in every century, triangulation, pressure cooking and shaming.  Triangulation is when we complain about someone’s behavior behind their backs.  It’s gossip and slander, and can be very destructive to family and church.  There’s pressure cooking where you collect tiny grievances into a pot and simmer it until it explodes and rather than deal with the issues when they are tiny, you dump them all over the victim in a hot mess.  And there’s my personal bugbear, public shaming.  Nothing can beat it for making someone feel terrible.  So, Mr. Jesus, my rabbi, what do you think of my lazy sister here who isn’t helping set the table?  Teacher, tell her to be a proper female, and get back to her place in the kitchen with me.  Why should she get all the attention? I need help with my juggling and she should help.  Look at how hard I am working for the kingdom, sacrificing my time and my energy to serve you, and she should be more like me, shouldn’t she?

I cringe when I remember times when a family member would recount my personal shortcomings at a party in public.  I also realize how incredibly sexist it is.  Rabbis at the time of Jesus were having heated debates about the propriety of having female rabbinical students who could one day preach or lead a synagogue. 

It still goes on today, popping up when I least expect it.  At the Strawberry tea this month, a lady stopped me and said, “that handsome man there waiting tables, is he the minister here, dearie?”  “No,” I said, “He’s the minister’s husband.”

It’s not just me.  I’ve seen grown men cry when they recount their parents bullying them to be more, do more, run faster, and shaming them in public.  I got a letter this week from our president of Alberta Northwest Conference saying he was told that he speaks English real good for someone of his race, and another who said aloud in his presence, “the church needs to put that fat black boy in his place.”

Enough! Our best man at our wedding was what some people call ‘pakki’, and an elegant, beautiful soul; he does not drive a taxi in Mill Woods, but has a PhD in Pharmacy and lives in Ottawa.  The racism is here in this building, this town, this country.  It leads to so much anger and resentment and rage that people shoot police, murder 5 year olds or drives trucks into families out to watch fireworks.

We need to stop all the juggling and pretence.  Our works are not going to help us get into heaven when we die.  Shaming others will not save their souls! Jesus told Martha, you are full of worries.  Stop it.  Come and sit with Mary and let me help you get your priorities straight.  Stop juggling. Rest. Breathe.  Remember it’s about loving.  Loving yourself as much as you are loving others.  Love God.  The Samaritan was able to do what he did because he first loved God.  Put that first before all the doing.  Love, Martha.  Love.