August 25, 2013 – The 14th Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 16C
© 2013 Evan D. Garner
She was the kind of
person that you don’t really notice. In fact, even if she were standing right
in front of you, you might miss her unless you were looking carefully. She made
a habit of blending in. Usually, when we saw her, it was while we were driving
in the car. She used to shuffle her way down the side of the street—even busy
streets without sidewalks—and cars like ours would scoot over a little bit to
give her enough room to make her way, one tiny step after another. In less than
five seconds, she was gone, shrinking in our rearview mirror, heading who knows
where.
We never knew her name.
She was just the woman with the hunchback. She didn’t really need a name since
her distinctive posture defined her. Once or twice, as we sped past in the car,
one of us would ask a grown-up to tell us about that woman. “What’s her
problem?” we would say. “What happened to her?” But the answers we got were
just speculation. Maybe she was born like that. Or maybe she fell out of a tree
when she was a child. Or maybe she contracted a disease that contorted her
body, forcing her to walk through life while staring at the ground.
We assumed that she had
no family because we never saw her with anyone. In fact, we never even saw her
acknowledge the existence of another human being. She spoke to no one. She
never turned her head as if to make eye contact. It was as if she lived in a
bubble made of a two-way mirror. Everyone on the outside could stare at her and
her deformity, but she just carried on, shuffling her feet with her body bowed
down, as if no one else existed.
One day, we were playing
in our neighborhood, running in between houses and hiding in azalea bushes. The
game didn’t have name, and we didn’t know who was “it.” We were just running
away from each other, laughing and screaming. I wasn’t as fast as my friends,
so I had to stay close to trees and bushes, where I could hide if I heard
someone coming. As I raced down a side yard toward the street, looking over my
shoulder at a friend who hadn’t spotted me yet, I turned back around to see
where I was going, and, when I did, there she was. At first I didn’t register
what was happening, but I knew instinctively that I had to slam on the brakes.
I skidded down onto the grass next to the sidewalk, and, when I looked up, I saw
what I feared the most. The bent-over woman was standing right in front of me.
It wasn’t that she did
anything threatening or represented any potential physical danger. Even as a
child, I knew I could escape her grasp. But being that close to her was
terrifying. She was strange. She was different. She wasn’t like us. And her
otherness was petrifying. Because of her hunched-over posture, she had been
labeled by decent society as unclean. Something was wrong with her—something
more than just her posture. We all steered clear of her—not only because of her
peculiarity but because we did not want to be associated with her strangeness. In
an odd way, as long as she was at a distance, she made us feel safer, more
secure, because she reminded us that something was wrong with her and not with
us. She made us feel normal.
I screamed and ran. I
didn’t turn around to see what she was doing until I had made it far enough away
to feel safe. By the time I did, she was well on her way down the sidewalk,
shuffling along as if nothing had happened. When my friends raced over and
asked me what was wrong, I pointed down the street and said, “I almost ran into
that hunchback woman. I don’t know why she’s in our neighborhood. I’ve never
seen her near here before. It’s just not right—for people like her, who can’t even
see where they’re going, to be walking down the street. Someone could get
hurt.” My friends offered sympathetic amazement in response to my story of the near-miss,
and then we went back to playing our game, and, by the end of the week, we had
all but forgotten what had happened.
One sabbath day, while he
was teaching in the synagogue, Jesus caught a glimpse of the bent-over woman
through the open front door. He stopped in mid-sentence, offered no
explanation, but walked down to the door and whispered something to the woman.
Then, he took her hand and escorted her inside, bringing her right into the
middle of the congregation. Everything happened too quickly for us to make
sense of what was going on. We couldn’t believe what was happening right in
front of our eyes, but we knew that something strange and powerful was
unfolding. Then, Jesus laid his hands on her and said, “Woman, you are set free
from your ailment!” and immediately the woman straightened up and lifted her
head toward the sky and exclaimed, “Praise be to God above!”
While we were still trying
to figure out what was going on, the boldest among us spoke up and said what
part of our hearts were feeling. “This isn’t right!” he said to all of us. “This
is the sabbath—the day of rest. There are six days on which work ought to be
done. Come on one of those days and be cured.” But Jesus looked at him and at
the rest of us and said, “You hypocrites! Who among you doesn’t take care of
his animals on the sabbath, untying them and making sure they have water and
food? Shouldn’t this child of God, whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be
set free from this bondage even on the sabbath day?”
And, in that moment, I
knew. When I heard the words of Jesus, I knew that he was speaking to me. I had
been the one to bind this woman—to keep her hunched over under the weight of
oppression. My words and my thoughts and my disgust at her twisted figure had piled
up on her shoulders, forcing her to bend over even further. And the further she
bent down, the closer her eyes got to the ground, the straighter I felt. We had
all done it. For eighteen years, we had all kept this woman on the outside so
that those of us on the inside could feel better. We sucked the life and joy and
dignity out of this woman so that we could have just a tiny bit more esteem. Every
time we stared at her and silently gave her a label that read “Damaged Goods,”
we were hiding the real truth—that every one of us was just as broken as she
was, but, as long as no one else could see it and as long as she remained the
source of our pity, we were safe.
But, when Jesus called
her a daughter of Abraham—a child of God—he did something that threatened all
of that. When he put his hands on her and said to her, “Woman, stand up
straight!” he showed everyone that she was just like us and that we were just
like her. The scariest truth is that each of us is just as bent over by the
burdens of this life as that woman. Whether by illness or disability or
unemployment or addiction or divorce or race or class or sexual orientation, we
are vulnerable to the labels that other people place upon us, and, because of
that vulnerability, we quickly slap a discriminatory label on someone else
before anyone notices our own weakness. Often, in the name of our religion, we call
that which makes someone different from the rest of us “unholy” and “wrong” and
“sinful” just because we don’t want anyone to notice what is “wrong” with us. Even
the most bent-over and broken among us would rather point a finger at someone
else in the name of what is right than admit our own vulnerability.
But Jesus changes all of
that. He takes the weakest among us and brings her right into the middle—the
place of power—and says, “Stand up straight! You are a daughter of Abraham! You
are a child of God!” And, when Jesus says that, no one can take it away. If you
are broken to the point of being bent over—even if it’s in ways that no one else
but God can see—know that God is still calling out to you in order to make you
whole. And, if you’re so worried about what’s wrong inside of you that you’ve
lost the ability to recognize the dignity of every human being, stop for a
second and listen to what Jesus is saying to them and to you. You don’t have to
be good. You don’t have to fit in. You don’t have to have your life in order.
Still, God is calling out to each and every one of us, saying, “You are my
child. You are my son. You are my daughter. Stand up straight!” Amen.
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