Isaiah 58:9b-14 Psalm 103:1-8 Hebrews 12:18-29 Luke 13:10-17
I have spent some time with the woman in this morning’s gospel passage in recent months. Let’s call her Sally. She was living in one of the elderly care homes I visit. Her daughter had called to ask if I could visit her mum. She felt Sally was reaching the end of her life and, to use her words, she ‘needed some help to get there’.
The first time I met her she was bent over, on the lounge in her dining room… Her neck was elongated, contorted, and her face was turned right inwards, to the floor. She couldn’t raise her head. I wondered how long she had sat like that. I didn’t get the warmest of welcomes that first visit! She offered one-word answers, and I wasn’t sure if she was glad I visited or not. As I left I asked if she would like to be brought to our next communion service and she decided she would.
I talked at length with Sally’s daughter, who wasn’t surprised by the curt replies. I assumed her head was bowed low because of her dementia, or another medical condition, but I discovered it occurred after the death of her husband and was, in part, due to grief and shame and memories she carried heavily on her shoulders. Literally laid low, bent double.
Sally was there at our next holy communion service, and the one after, and, she began to open up. She would hold my hand and slightly lift her head. In the last few days I saw Sally often and she told me she was scared of dying because she didn’t know how, nor what would happen. We spoke about her capacity to choose, and about how beautiful I believe death will be. And then, she looked me in the eye and asked me, ‘you promise?’ and I could confidently say, yes, I promise.
The day after I saw her for the last time she looked up, right up, at the corner of the room she had only seen the floor of, for many years, and with an undeniable look of bright recognition on her face she smiled as she transitioned to her eternal life. Fully healed, and free. For someone who said she was fearful, because she didn’t know how to die, she managed it beautifully and with such dignity. And many of these words are those I shared at her funeral.
I thought of Sally a lot when I read this morning’s gospel reading, and those verses from Isaiah have been significant on my faith journey many times. But when we read them together, as our lectionary allows us to today it makes me ask, Why on earth did this woman walk crippled over for eighteen long years. How had help not been extended to her before, when Isaiah’s words are so clear?
Her community knew those words from Isaiah. They would have read his words week after week in the synagogue. “Break the yoke, feed the hungry, satisfy the afflicted.” They could quote the scroll. They believed it. And yet — for eighteen years, she remained bent double. And that really challenges me, really unsettles me. They did know. They just didn’t act on it. Their heads knew it but their hands didn’t do it.
And, the unsettling thing is, aren’t we quite similar? We know the words of Jesus. We know the call of Isaiah. We know what love looks like. And still, we walk past people weighed down with poverty, grief, injustice, isolation. Still, we find excuses for delay. We might even dress it up as being the right or wrong thing to do, like the people in the temple that day.
It took eighteen years… but it didn’t need to. Isaiah’s writings are clear: do it now. And then Jesus puts flesh on them and shows us: do it now. Set free the ones who are bent down. Lift the burden. Repair the breach. Don’t wait. Because the good news is this: however long the shadow has lasted, God’s light can rise in an instant. That is the gospel.
And the gospel is clear: where there is brokenness and pain, or exclusion and isolation, be the one to carry the freedom and healing and wholeness of Christ into that situation. Don’t argue about the law or wait for a committee. Don’t say, “Perhaps in eighteen years things will be different.” Christ lays his hands on her, and she is set free. And that is what we are called to do.
Friends, it is so easy for churches to say: “One day. When the time is right. Not today”. And, meanwhile, another 18 years pass. Another generation. Another war, another death by suicide, another child taken into care, another thing that we might have been able to rescue or help or stop or heal, if only we had reached out our hands and offered healing and wholeness. The hungry are waiting. The oppressed are waiting. Creation itself is groaning, waiting. The bent over, weighed down woman is waiting. It has been eighteen years. It does not need to be nineteen. May we never be the ones who choose law over love and doctrine over grace.
Maybe some of us feel bent low today. Not necessarily with a physical affliction, but with burdens you can hardly carry — anxiety, grief, exhaustion, loneliness. Maybe the weight of the world’s pain has you stooped over, unable to lift your eyes. Maybe you have waited a long time for healing, or for the healing of your family. Maybe your prayers feel unanswered, unheard even. The good news is that Christ is coming. However long the shadow has lasted, God’s light can rise in an instant.
So, my friends, let’s not wait another eighteen years.
Isaiah says: do it now. Jesus shows us: do it now.
So that is what we are going to do.
For the next few minutes, as the choir sings, I invite you to come to this rail and receive healing. Healing from whatever it is that bends you low, weighs you down. You don’t need to say what it is, just receive an anointing from God and the invitation to be set free. It doesn’t need to take another 18 years – not for you, or your family, or this world – not for the causes and situations that lie heavy across your shoulders. Come and bring whatever it is and lay it down and then stand, lift up your head and see the face of Christ shining on you. Amen.
Holy Adventures 