Do We Know What Ails Us?

Tree of Hope, 2013 Julie Leuthold. The painting was auctioned to benefit the American Cancer Association.
From Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN.

Proper 16 (21), Year C
24 August 2025

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

In the first and in my second congregations I served I was part of a team ministry. In Abbotsford it was with our parish worker Gertie, in Winnipeg with my co-pastor Greg.
Knowing that the congregation in Winnipeg had a long history of conflict we were careful to do what we could on our end. Part of that was that we discussed council meetings beforehand to work out common positions before a meeting. However, neither one of us were terribly quick on our feet and when at one particular council meeting Greg spoke about a matter that may have had to do with the budget, Harry, a long-time council member, interjected. He said to Greg, “Pastor, over there (motioning toward the sanctuary) is your domain. This (referring to the board room) is ours.” The proper response would have been, “So you don’t need us here. Have a good night then.” Council meetings were always between three and four hours long and to have been freed from that obligation would have been a blessing.
But Greg and I were dumbstruck. There was not a doubt in our mind that if the Lordship of Jesus means anything, then faith relates to all of our life not just to what we do in the sanctuary, as Harry seemed to believe.

I remembered this as I considered the objection to the healing Jesus had worked for the crippled woman in our reading from Luke. The objection was the result of the same narrow and restrictive interpretation of the role of faith. The objection that was raised was the keeping of the Sabbath. Jesus knew the Law well and in his response he extrapolates from the lesser to the greater, “You frauds! Each Sabbath every one of you regularly unties your cow or donkey from its stall, leads it out for water, and thinks nothing of it. So why isn’t it all right for me to untie this daughter of Abraham and lead her from the stall where Satan has had her tied these eighteen years?”
In the first five books of the Bible there are two ways the commandment of Sabbath rest is reasoned. The first is found in Exodus 20, and it says that because God rested, we should as well. The second is found in Deuteronomy 5. Here the Sabbath is described as a practice of liberation. God’s people should keep the Sabbath because they once were slaves in Egypt. Slaves don’t get to rest, free people do. When Jesus healed the woman, he liberated her from her affliction and therefore her healing was congruent with the Sabbath commandment.

The form of religion we find repulsive is the kind of religion that speaks of mercy but does not practice mercy, that speaks of justice but guards privilege, and that draws its authority from power structures rather than moral integrity. Not surprisingly Jesus calls his adversary a hypocrite.

In a sermon on this passage, Otis Moss III, tells the story of the African American sprint athlete Wilma Rudolph. Rudolph won three gold medals at the 1960 Rome Olympics. She did so against the odds. Not only was she born into an impoverished family during segregation, was the 20^th of her father’s 22 children, was born prematurely, but she had also contracted polio when she was four, wore a leg brace until she was nine, and an orthopedic shoe until she was 12. Speaking of suffering polio, she later said, “My doctors told me I would never walk again. My mother told me I would. I believed my mother.”
Moss says that Rudolph had a praying grandmother. And what her grandmother said to her was this, “Your condition does not have to be your conclusion.”¹

Otis Moss is a bright mind, a great orator, and the successor to Jeremiah Wright at Trinity United Church of Chicago, the Obama’s old church. But I haven’t been able to find this piece about Rudolph’s grandma anywhere else. But perhaps it does not matter whether she said it or not, for it summarizes beautifully Jesus’ action and intent in the healing of the unnamed crippled woman. “Your condition does not have to be your conclusion.”

And yet, the context of our reading makes clear that this is not a fairy tale in the vein of “you can do anything you want” because Rudolph still lived in poverty and in a segregated society. That any child or any of us can do whatever we want is a the false narrative we have been living with, it is today’s opiate for the masses for it discourages us from addressing injustices. It is not unlike that narrative that because the economy will always grow that we do not have to do anything about inequities, because as the pie gets bigger, there’ll be a little more for the poor as well.

It is also not simply a story about Jesus being able to heal you or me, though it is that also. Rather, this healing story is set in an economic context. A few verses before, Jesus had mentioned the debtor’s prison.’ (12:58-59) This was followed by a story about an absentee landowner who comes to check on his vineyard. In the middle of the vineyard is a fig tree that bears no fruit. Fruit is a metaphor for justice. What is the cause of the fig tree not bearing fruit?

In 1973 the cultural anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote that our physical body can have universal meaning only as a system which responds to the social system, expressing it as system.² In other words, if the society we live in is sick, that sickness will manifest itself in our bodies.

Luke ‘the physician’, the author of this gospel and of the Book of Acts, often represents diseased bodies as archetypes of the unjust systems that generate and perpetuate disease.
For us to understand the story of the healing of the crippled woman, it is helpful to see it as part of a pair of healing stories, both taking place on the sabbath. And so we have the healing of the crippled woman in chapter 13 and the healing of a bloated man, the man with dropsy. (14:1-6) In the antiquities, dropsy was understood as related to avarice, and wanting more only aggravated the problem.³ Both characters have no names, they have no backstory, and they never speak, and we never hear of them again. Through them Luke shows us the sickness of the body politic: The bent-over woman is crippled by debt (remember the reference to the debtor’s prison and that in Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer we ask for the forgiveness of debt), while the bloated man embodies the social disease of ‘too-muchness’ (Jesus had just told the parable of The Rich Fool)⁴ These two characters are representative of what ails society. Sounds a lot like the growing gap between rich and poor, like an abundance of billionaires as the wage gap is growing, poverty is increasing while job security and wages erode, at least when adjusted to inflation. We remember again what Howard Thurman said almost 100 years ago: “when property becomes sacred, personality becomes secular.”⁵

And so, according to Luke and to Jesus, Otis Moss and Wilma Rudolph’s grandma are right, our condition does not have to be our conclusion, Jesus heals the crippled woman and allows her to stand and walk upright, and he heals the bloated man who suffers from having too much.

Today we celebrate Sia’s baptism. In baptism God grants us what God has accomplished in the death and resurrection of Jesus. God has taken the brokenness of the world and begun to heal it. The baptismal liturgy expresses that in words that speak of fallen and raised, born and reborn. It is not that there is anything wrong with Sia, it is that the world needs mending, needs redemption, and this redemption will not come via technology or human ingenuity, but it comes from the One who made us, and from the One who created Sia and knew her before she was made.

And so today we give thanks that Sia was baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, so that she can know that the world’s condition does not have to be it’s conclusion. God wills Sia’s salvation, and not only hers, but the salvation of the cosmos.

Amen.