Healing from What Cripples Us - Luke 13: 10-17

“Does God really want me to stay in this hospital bed forever, rotting away? Does He really want me not to be able to eat? Why won’t God answer my prayer?” I looked into the patient, who had become a good friend over the past two months, and I wanted to cry. I had watched her suffer without any known cause or reason. The conversation that emerged was gut wrenching for both of us. I told her that I didn’t have an answer to her question, but I know how badly it hurts when God doesn’t seem to be listening to us or meeting us in our deepest needs. We talked about how to express our anger over our suffering to God. And in the end we were left a little free-er from the thoughts that we had been struggling with internally, but without any relief for our physical suffering. However, we were holding hands, finding strength from one another.

See I knew this patient’s struggles all too well because they echoed my own. My questioning God about why I hurt so much. Those pains in my lives and the lives of those I love that make me become anxious to my very core at time. I stood aside helplessly when a child I dearly loved was pulled off of life-support after only eight short days of life. I became angry to the point of stagnation with a family who decided to stop treatment for their baby who could be cured, instead turning to hospice so they didn’t have to deal with him anymore. I walked with friends through the valley of seemingly endless depression and have tended wounds and cuts caused through self-harm. I cried with friends dealing with the emotional wreckage of abusive parents and ugly divorces. Sat and cried over infertility and miscarriages. And all the while feeling like the crippled woman in today’s passage – like the weight of the world was on my shoulders, pressing my eyes towards the ground.

I’d imagine several of us sitting here today know the weight of what this woman was bearing. She may have suffered for so long that she resigned herself to her present situation. When year after year of domestic violence, sexual harassment, self-loathing, desegregating marriages, living alone, unbreakable addictions, or physical and emotional pain build up there comes a point where the door to hope becomes shut and we learn to live, bearing the weight we carry.

This woman probably heard the dangerous message time and again that we have heard in our churches as well – “God’s timing is perfect” or “God’s idea of healing is better than ours.” Or “Have faith and God will provide.” These statements could be right and good for some people, but for those who deeply suffer, they are like the final knife severing hope. Why pray if God’s timing doesn’t seem to ever come? Why look for the light at the end of the tunnel if we feel that God’s idea of healing doesn’t match our own? What healing could even be asked for, let alone expected, with such messages being repeated time and time again?

Enter Jesus. Jesus knew this woman’s desires so intimately that he didn’t need to ask her if she desired to be healed. He knew that his voice could set free the power this woman held inside to heal herself. And so Jesus called out, “Woman, you are set free from your aliment.” The words caught her attention. She looked towards this man who had called to her, promising her the healing that she had sought after for eighteen years. Could it be true? Could she hope again? Jesus walked over to her, laid his hands on her, and what his voice had spoken his hands confirmed. She immediately stood up straight and began singing praises to God. She knew that only God could bring about such a miracle. Jehovah straightened her spine, but it was so much more than that. He gave her eyes that could see what was in front of her. He removed the weight of the burden she was carrying for so long. Her dignity – the thing that she had missed the most was restored. And the woman’s story ends. The next few verses speak of the controversy Jesus caused by healing her on the Sabbath, but that is for another day and another sermon.

For four years I drove past a little house located around the bend from the train tracks on my way back and forth from school. I was rarely ever alone, as I either took the bus or carpooled back from band or play practice with friends. Often as we passed that little house there was a woman outside, cleaning her sidewalk or going to her mailbox. She was bent over to the point of forming a 90-degree angle with her body. She moved slowly in all she did and she could not lift up her head in order to see what was in front of her. Instead she relied on her feet to shuffle her in the right direction and her other senses to point out danger. Almost every time we drove past her house, someone made a malice-laced comment either about her or to her; sometimes people even threw things out of the bus window at her. I hadn’t thought about this woman or her plight for many years until a few months ago when my younger cousin found a beautiful piece of wood that we wanted to shape into a cane. When asked who it was for, as no one in our family needed one at the time, he stated that he was going to leave it out by the mailbox for the woman around the corner from the train tacks – the woman who could not stand up straight. He did what no one else had thought to do over the years; he reached out to her in love. What’s ironic about this story is that my cousin considers himself to be agnostic, and those speaking badly about the woman identified themselves as Christians. He understood how to reach out and love those who are carrying burdens.

I cannot help but wonder if the woman in today’s story had similar issues with people shaming her, ignoring her, or worse shouting obscenities at her as the woman my cousin reached out to did. Did people label her a sinner – claiming that demons brought about her aliment or stating that God was punishing her? Did people walk to the other side of the street when they say her coming because they were afraid to catch whatever she had?

But Jesus did what others hadn’t done – he stopped. He spoke to her. He touched her. And he healed her. Eighteen years of pain and suffering were no match to Jesus’ healing powers. When others said that it was impossible to cure, Jesus reached out. When others avoided and ignored. Jesus, Jesus touched her.

How many of us today are looking for Jesus to reach out and touch us? And how many of us are wondering in our heads the questions that we are too afraid to let pass our lips, ‘does God really care about me?’ ‘Has God betrayed me?’ ‘Was I wrong about how powerful God really is?’ ‘Is God unfair?’ ‘Is God hidden?’ And ‘why is God staying silent as I cry out?’ We don’t ask our questions because we are afraid of how others around us will respond, how they will see us. We’ve heard the mantra, “Just have faith” too many times, so we see our questions as faithlessness. But I would wager a guess that over eighteen years, the woman from today’s passage had some questions of her own. But any questions that she would ask, we would ask, is not a sign of faithlessness. The questions themselves are in fact signs of faith, signs that we cannot give up on communicating with the God who we cannot see through the haze of our suffering. We are searching for a confirmation of our faith that we want to hang on to because at the most basic level it makes us who we are. We do not want to give up hope that the weight we carry will be lightened.

Phillip Yancey in his book Disappoint with God speaks of our faith confusion that has resulted from the statement, “Just have faith.” Somewhere along the way in our Christian journeys the idea has emerged that the best kind of faith to have is childlike, where a person faces the impossible and walked on, expecting a miracle. But for many people the miracle they want, what they have a hope in and are walking towards is a construction of their mind. Childlike faith is limited by childlike expectation that cannot grasp that God is bigger then what we expect, bigger than what we want. But there is another type of faith, the faith that leaves room for faltering without condemning, a faith that Yancey labels fidelity, which is best exhibited in the face of suffering. A faith that acknowledges that God is mysterious and we put our trust in this God who will not abandon us, even if that is how it appears to our eyes. It is the faith that believes, “Endurance is not just the ability to bear hard things, but to turn them into glory.” We need both kinds of faith, but too often we are condemned if we do not have childlike exuberance.

When the weight of what I’m carrying has pressed me down, I don’t want someone to tell me to suffer with dignity. Or that I need to just trust in God and know that I will get what I want. Or worse to tell me just to hand it over to God, as if it really that simple. I want to cry to Jesus. Let my tears fall and know that they are holy in the eyes of God. I want my questions to be blessed not because I kept them inside and told everyone else that I was trusting God with a fake smile on my face. No, I want them to be blessed because I had the courage to ask. I want someone to reach out and touch me in my pain to remind me that I am still connected to the body of Christ when I feel so far away. I want someone to sit Shiva with me – the Jewish custom of mourning that involves other coming to me, not to comfort me, but to just be with me in the pain of the moment. I don’t need someone to tell me what comes after I through the light at the end of the tunnel of suffering – I want someone to walk with me towards that light, as painful as that might be. And I want someone to be honest enough to take off their armor and show me the scars, telling me about how God brought them through too. For scars are a sign that healing has taken place, but what once was can never be forgotten. Scars, especially the ones that others cannot see, are a reminder that suffering is part of all of our stories. The question is if we will let those parts of our stories become part of our ministries.

The story of the crippled woman gives us so much to think about, so many different roles to assume in our lives. So what role are you in today? Are you the woman before Jesus called out to her – suffering for a period of time so long that you can’t remember quite how your pain started. Maybe you’re wondering if God even cares about you anymore. May you be blessed in those questions, and blessed in your desire to have the weight of suffering be lifted from you. Or maybe you identify with the woman after she is healed – praising God and wanting to live out of your healing. May you be blessed because you suffered. You now have a story to share and the compassion to walk with those who suffer through the hard times. Or maybe you are like Jesus, acting out of love and just reaching out and touching the person others seem to avoid or label. May your hands be blessed because there is healing in touch and being present with those suffering. Or maybe you are the unwritten characters – the neighbors around the woman who treated her unkindly. Or the religious leaders who criticized Jesus for not following the rules of healing. You quiver in the fear of secret shame and your own questions that have not been able to find voice, ‘how am I like those who suffer?’ ‘Why can’t we heal her?’ ‘What did we do to contribute to her suffering?’ May you be blessed with confidence to let your questions be freed so you can get past the ideals of healing to the gut-wrenching reality of it all.

So may we hold our suffering gently. May we be willing to ask hard questions and considered our tears as we cry out to Jesus to be blessed. May we be willing to share the stories behind our scars with others. May we reach out in love and touch the pain of another, just being present and sharing the weight of their suffering instead of admonishing them to “Just have faith”. And maybe most importantly may we give voice to our burdens, past and present, in order to be a bit free-er from what we are struggling with internally. For in the words of C. S. Lewis, “I have learned not that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.” Amen.