Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost: August 24, 2025 | The Rev. Nat Johnson

Readings: Jeremiah 1:4-10 | Psalm 71:1-6 | Hebrews 12:18-29 | Luke 13:10-17

We don’t really know much about the woman in our Gospel reading today. We don’t know her name, or where she comes from. We don’t even know why she appeared, “just then,” in the synagogue on the Sabbath day that Jesus was there teaching. All we know is that for 18 years, she had been crippled by a spirit, “bent over and quite unable to stand up.” I wonder if you can imagine the scene – an assembly gathered, listening to a teacher offer words of wisdom and insight into a passage just read from the sacred scroll. One by one, the crowd begins to shift their attention from the teacher to the distracting shuffle of a woman who enters, walking with her face to the ground. Perhaps some feel annoyed at the distraction, perhaps some shift their gaze quickly back to the teacher, barely giving the woman a second thought. Instead of plowing on with his lesson, the teacher stops, sees the woman and calls to her. He speaks a word of liberation to her and places his hand on her and suddenly, she is upright and praising God!

I suspect that for many of us, this scene seems a bit outlandish, a bit far-fetched. We are not accustomed to seeing the ill and the injured freed so immediately from their ailments. Moreover, in our progressive-leaning context, we are weary of stories that suggest any kind of connection between illness or disability and the satanic or demonic. Disability theologians remind us that differently abled bodies are not broken or in need of salvation, that they embody the full dignity and worth of human beings and have full-fledged gifts that the community both needs and ought to value. People living with disability remind us regularly that they don’t need to be healed from their blindness, their deafness, their paralysis, or whatever their “ailment.” In this context, I wonder what value stories such as those in our gospel reading today have for us in our present moment? What are we to make of this story of healing and liberation of a woman who doesn’t even ask for healing?

However else we might answer this question, I think we must begin by observing Jesus. When the woman enters the synagogue, Jesus sees her. Here is a woman who lives in society’s shadows, cast out from the center and marginalized as unimportant – at best, an inconvenience in moments of encounter and invisible the rest of the time. But Jesus doesn’t just note her entrance and move on with his teaching. He sees her and stops. He calls her to him. He brings her back into the center of the community. Then, “he laid his hands on her, and immediately she stood up straight and began praising God.” What initiates this chain of events is Jesus’ gaze, his seeing this woman the rest of the crowd (or, at least, the synagogue leaders) failed to see.

Here at St. Peter’s, where we strive “to be a welcoming and fearless community” who “provides an inclusive, caring space for reconciliation and transformation,” we know a bit about this “gaze” of Jesus. I suspect most of us are here today because we have experienced such a look from Jesus, because we have experienced his liberating hand placed on our shoulder and felt the depth of his knowing gaze. Our experience has compelled us to see the world in a particular way, to see those wearied by the changes and chances of this life as those worthy of love and dignity. We want to be a place where folks like that can find the liberation they need so that they too can “stand up straight” and “praise God!” Our mission and the values we hold so dear keep us oriented toward the disenfranchised, the marginalized, the oppressed and we stand ready to see them for who they are, to receive them as they are, to acknowledge the ways that the world (and sometimes even the Church) cast upon them the weight of shame, judgement, invisibility, and discrimination and to proclaim that at least here, in this place, we stand ready to extend our hand of friendship, love, and care. In this sense, we strive to follow in Jesus’ footsteps, to see those who are forgotten by society, to notice those who are relegated to the margins.

Let’s return, for a moment, to our observation of Jesus. The woman walks in, and Jesus notices her. But he doesn’t just see her, he calls to her, he offers a word of healing, and he does all of this without regard to proper sabbath decorum. One of the religious leaders becomes indignant. Jesus’ gaze, his healing word and touch, disrupt the regular pattern of the assembly. In our present moment, we tend to paint the synagogue leader as the “bad guy.” Many of us have been conditioned to do so by countless sermons that paint the Pharisees as perpetually evil antagonists. But nothing in the text suggests that his intentions are evil or even that his concerns are without merit. Jesus doesn’t condemn his concern for right worship or for keeping the sabbath, or for wanting to obey God’s laws. Jesus actually affirms all of these things but he does so by reminding the religious leader that it is compassion at the heart of God’s law, of the sabbath, of their tradition. In his exchange with the religious leader, Jesus makes a claim about the inbreaking of God’s kingdom and about the nature of God’s desires for the world: God’s reign, at the very core, is about a love and compassion that restores people to community, that liberates them from the weight of the world that keeps them bent low to the ground. And this liberating love and compassion is not constrained to timetables that suit our needs or desires for tradition, decorum, or propriety.

In this observation, I notice a couple of things that I think have bearing on us as a parish today. First, Jesus didn’t just notice or see the woman. He called to her. He invited her to come to him. You may recall from earlier in Luke’s Gospel that Jesus aligned himself with God’s mission as being sent to proclaim release to the captive, liberation and healing for the oppressed, to declare the day of God’s favor. It was for those, like the bent-over woman who walked into the synagogue, that Jesus came and for her that he was sent to preach the good news and offer freedom. This mission required Jesus to do more than just notice what was happening in the world about him. It required him to speak words of invitation, to offer words of healing, to extend his hand in acts of restoring people to community. Second, Jesus was open to the surprise of God’s timing. Though he was, by all Gospel accounts, a “good and observant” Jew, Jesus was open to following the Spirit where she blows, to expect the unexpected, even when that might put him at odds with the social, political, and religious decorum of his day. His observation of the law and the tradition was grounded in his awareness of God’s heart of compassion and mercy and love.

The invitation, the challenge, that this gospel passage gives us today comes from these final observations. We are a community who sees the world around us, who notices the disenfranchised, who hold deep and abiding convictions about the immorality of the humanitarian crises that infect our community, our country, our world. But we are invited to do more than just notice – we are invited to speak out, to call to those bent-over from the weight of injustice, to speak a word of liberation and reach out a healing hand to restore the daughters and sons and children of the living God to their rightful place in loving community. We cannot become so comfortable with our mission to be a place of reconciliation and transformation that we forget we are a people sent to bring that word of reconciliation and offer that hand of transformation beyond the threshold of our building. Each of us as individuals and all of us as a community are ministers of God’s mission of reconciliation in the world. Earlier we prayed that God would enable us to show forth God’s power among all peoples – that power of compassion and mercy and love already exists within us, we are already enabled and empowered for this mission by the indwelling Spirit. Our job, our task, in this moment is to be open to the surprising ways that Spirit leads us, to the surprising places the Spirit draws us, so that we can faithfully embody the reconciliation God has accomplished in Jesus Christ.

Let us accept this invitation with boldness, let us embrace the compassion of God and discover the ways we’re called to loose one another’s bonds, speaking words of freedom and healing that enable all we encounter to “stand up straight” and praise God. This is how we will show forth God’s power to all the peoples! Amen.