“Stand Up and be Free!

Karen Sloan 21/08/2022

Readings - Luke 13:10-17

I want to share something that I watched a couple of weeks ago, before I address the reading from the gospel today. 

Of course you all know how obsessed I am with the Camino and maybe how frustrated I am that Matt and I have not been able to get back there due to Covid.  However we now have plans for 2023!

Anyway a few years ago 2 friends walked the whole of the French way, 790 km from St jean pied de port to Santiago and made a film about it.  Now I say walk but that would not be totally accurate. One, Patrick,  walked ,and pushed the other, Justin, in a wheelchair, which   he has been in for sometime. Justin has  a progressive neurological  disease similar to motor neurone, although not as quick. They have been friends since child hood and decided not on a whim, for it took over a year to plan, that they would attempt this crazy feat.  As Patrick said to Justin, lets do this, Ill push you….

I want to show you the trailer to the film, and hope you get excited as I want to show it in full at the church in the next few months…

When I watch that trailer, and of course I have watched the whole film some things stand out.

The incredible warmth and love between Patrick and Justin, those moments when they sneak a little kiss, and a hug, not as lovers but as deep deep friends.

The other is when Justin talks about how hard it is to let go, and allow another to care for you, push you, and suffer for you.  But when he does,  it’s like he is standing up, letting go of a burden that shrinks us, reduces us.  By opening his heart, embracing the love of others, he can find the joy in life, and he does. Justin finds he can walk without walking, He stands up without standing up.

But what about Patrick, the incredible friend who want to do everything for his buddy, who is strong and capable and giving.  What you don’t see in the clip but rather in the full film, is as time goes on Patrick realises he can’t do it alone.  Part of the beauty and attraction of the camino is you join almost a secret society, a society of those who are seeking to broaden and deepen their lives, and who reach out to those who are also on that journey. 

By the end, there are many many people who help, who push, who pull, who laugh and who cry with them as they make the path.  What Patrick has to let go of,  is the idea that only he can do it, that only he is responsible.  He has to become vulnerable, and seek help when he needs it.  But it’s a hard reality to take in, when all his life he has been the achiever, the provider, the winner.  Yet by opening his heart to others, he also straights up, he also become free of his own expectations, and of those he perceives others have off him.  Patrick found he could stand not alone but with others and was released from having to be all things to people, having to do it all.

By the end of the film both are free in their own ways. 

So how does this link to the reading from today, because it was the reading that led me to these reflections.

Well, Jesus continues to be the radical and life changing person we follow.

In the reading which is only found in Luke, Jesus heals a crippled  women on the sabbath in a synagogue, much to the displeasure of the authorities.

The women was bent over, maybe partly physical but more likely for emotional and spiritual reasons, perhaps by life’s events. Luke says it himself, she suffers a spirit of weakness, has been crippled by a spirit and that Jesus’s healing releases the woman whom Satan has kept bound.  Luke never really uses the language of demon possession or exorcism in his gospel, rather here he is describing something we know today.  Life sometimes is so very hard and that our emotional responses to much of what happens to us can be reflected in a physical ailment.  This is not a story about a miraculous physical healing, but something a great deal deeper.  As most of the stories we find in the bible are about.

So the women enters the synagogue, and after 18 years of suffering, which is a profound number in its own right, Jesus calls her over.  The number 18 corresponds to the first 2 letters of Jesus name, and has been used in ancient times to emphasise Jesus and God.  Luke uses it twice here, and nowhere else in the New Testament.  So he’s making rather a strong point as to who is to be listened to!  

Jesus calls over the woman who is also crippled, hardly someone who is included in societies can do list.  He looks her in the eye, and with all the men and women in the synagogue watching Jesus declares she is set free. 

And the woman stands up.

Then, to top it off, Jesus calls her a child of Abraham, one of us, included in the community of faith.

What, the people are thinking! What is happening here!

What is happening is that this woman hears his voice, hears his call.

The call of the inclusive spirit in all of us to live with freedom and love, and she stands up and follows him into a different life, one in service to the kingdom of God. She shouts aloud, secure in the knowledge she belongs, praising the God Jesus is connected to and reflects. What Jesus is giving her is love and community.  He is the one to be listened too.

A pretty powerful moment. 

But not for the authorities, the pharisees, who complain he has healed on the sabbath!

Really, don’t they have better things to worry about.

Jesus is more pointed in his response. What was once a source of shame, being a cripple and a women, has been reversed and it is the pharisees who are shamed.

Just goes to show Jesus was not a shrinking violet.

Anyway, where does this leave us today. 

Let me read a quote from Frederick Buechner (an incredible writer and theologian who died recently) ---

“THE TEMPTATION is always to reduce it to size. A bowl of cherries. A rat race. Amino acids. Even to call it a mystery smacks of reductionism. It is the mystery.

As far as anybody seems to know, the vast majority of things in the universe do not have whatever life is. Sticks, stones, stars, space—they simply are. A few things are and are somehow alive to it. They have broken through into Something, or Something has broken through into them. Even a jellyfish, a butternut squash. They're in it with us. We're all in it together, or it in us. Life is it. Life is with.

After lecturing learnedly on miracles, a great theologian was asked to give a specific example of one. "There is only one miracle," he answered. "It is life.“

This miracle we talk about is life. And within that life is the spirit of God, never absent and always present in everyone  and everything.

And our lives have their days when we are burdened and weighed down, by circumstances, by injustices, by poverty, by grief, and by a myriad of things that seem to bend us over.  Expectations, illness, the list can go on.  Just naming them makes me feel smaller.

And then there are days when we are released.  When we stand straighter and more upright. When we are loved, when we are accepted, when we are comforted and when we are reminded we are all children of Abraham.  We are all children of God.  Sometimes that’s hard to believe but a community surrounding us, brings that truth to life in ways that are unexplainable.

Jesus releases the woman and he releases us to live differently, to open ourselves to those things that are life giving, for everyone, even in the 21st century.

  When we return to Justin and Patrick, we can see what has occurred for them and continues to occur.

Theirs was a journey of love, but also of self-discovery.  What makes us whole, what gives us fullness of life, whatever our circumstances.  Love does, not rules and regulations and expectations.  Sometimes we need to be less afraid to step out in faith. They certainly did. They were afraid but still stepped out in faith. And love and community followed them.

So what the friends are doing now. Building the kingdom not in a church but in the world.

Patrick quit his job, and they have now embarked on a new life together, offering their services to other disabled people who want to explore and be free in a way they have not done before.

But they are also  trying to widen their influence, doing things that we would say are part of the kingdom of God.

 You can go on the net to find out more.

But when we do, let’s celebrate what they have taught us, that there is always something more we can do whatever our circumstances, because with love anything is possible.

Amen