Our reading today from Luke tells the story of a woman commonly known as “the bent woman.” She is given no name. We are simply told her condition has crippled her for eighteen years causing her to remain bent over.
Jesus heals her and that’s fantastic, but the story moves
away from the woman herself, and shifts focus to the hypocrites in the synagogue
who condemn Jesus for healing her on the Sabbath.
I’m always amazed when, in these situations, Jesus addresses
the naysayers at all. That must have
gotten old, real quick. How exhausting
to continually have to explain to people what it means to show grace and mercy
and kindness, that such things cannot be bound by the law, but are only bound
by God’s love for His people.
In our Monday group, we read the section of my book “Your Light
Has Come” which tells the story, as I imagined it, of the bent woman who I named
Rachel. My story of Rachel makes her a
witness to Jesus’ miracles. And at one
point I weave Rachel’s story in with the Beatitudes, illustrating each with
people that Rachel meets as she follows Jesus.
Throughout “Your Light Has Come,” I tell the story of people
who were healed by Jesus, but more importantly, I share their imagined lives
before they met Jesus and, for the most part, I tell the story of people who
had people in their lives, had family or found family, had a community that
they were a part of.
I spent all afternoon on Monday, watching my former
community at work, looking out after one another, taking care of each other
when torrential rains dropped two feet of rain on areas of Brevard County,
Florida.
Specifically, I followed a man named Mike, from Mike’s Weather
Page. I have watched Mike for many
years. When I lived in Florida, he was
who I turned to when hurricanes began forming deep in the Atlantic. He started as a small weather hobbyist but
has become someone who is now featured by the national news, CNN and Fox when
storms impact Florida.
He is based in Tampa, but on Monday took his very large
truck and headed to the east coast to document the flooding.
I watched him for hours.
He was streaming live. At one
point he stopped, got out of his truck, waded through a foot of water over to
where a bunch of cars had been left abandoned in the flooded street. He was gone for some time, and we couldn’t
hear what was going on, but when he returned, he had an old man with him. The
old man’s car had stalled in the water. Mike
lifted the man up into his truck and then drove the man through the deep water
to his development and then to his house where his wife was waiting anxiously
at the front door.
Later, Mike helped another woman push her stalled car out of
the road and onto the grass and safety.
Every time he passed an abandoned car (and there were
hundreds), he checked carefully to see if anyone was trapped inside.
Mike’s goal in coming out to Brevard County was to document
the weather event. He is a storm chaser,
but I like to think he is a lot less reckless than some. Though I was getting anxious watching him
drive through some of the water, not because I thought his truck would stall
out, but because you couldn’t see the road and I knew how narrow those roads
were. You could be on the road and then
neck deep in a ditch before you knew it.
And yes, Mike had a call into Fox news during his live
stream.
But wherever he could help, he stopped to help.
I don’t think he would call himself a hero and I don’t call
him a hero.
What I call him is something that seems so rare today,
especially in our socio-political climate … Mike is simply a decent human
being.
They do exist.
And he’s not alone.
In fact, I would say most human beings are decent human
beings. It’s just that what we are
exposed to on TV, on social media, is generally the worst of the worst.
But Mike was not alone yesterday in helping people. A friend of a friend was stuck in her car,
swept away by flood waters, unable to get out until two good Samaritans (and the
fact that we call strangers who help strangers Good Samaritans based on one of
Jesus’ parables should tell you everything you need to know about the hidden
and unspoken kindness that is in our very nature), but these two men helped get
this woman out of her car.
Because no one knew how high the water would get, if you
found yourself in a house that was beginning to flood, you needed to get
out. And so neighbors helped neighbors,
kayaking down streets, air-boating down streets.
I saw a video of a couple trying to save a fish who most
definitely did not have “flopping around on the sidewalk after a flood” on his
bingo card that day.
Jesus helped the bent woman because she needed help.
That was it.
She needed nothing else.
She didn’t need to know Jesus personally. She didn’t have to be some distant cousin on
his mother’s side.
She needed help.
It didn’t matter it was the Sabbath.
She needed help.
And Jesus helped her.
If only we could have even a fraction of that Jesus courage,
to be brave, to do the right thing independent of what society tells us is
right.
To love without condition.
To love with grace.
To show mercy.
To be kind.
May we all remember that today.
Amen.
