God Helps Those Who….
First Congregational Church – Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
13th Sunday after Pentecost – August 26, 2007
Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.
[texts: Hebrews 12:18-29/Luke 13:10-17]

There is an old saying, “God helps those who…” [allow time for response] Correct – “God helps those who help themselves.” From where does this saying come? If you’re thinking the Bible, think again, though I’ve heard people attribute it to Scripture on more than one occasion. It comes from that great aphorism maker, and lapsed Congregationalist, Benjamin Franklin. It’s a saying that sort of typifies our American way of doing things – hardy self-reliance, do-it-yourself ability and dogged stick-to-it-iveness. We are a nation who wants to help ourselves, but really want someone else to help us do it. Let me explain.

If you walk into any bookstore what do you think one of the largest sections will be? Self-help. We buy books, listen to tapes, watch videos and television shows or go online in search of the latest guru to help us to be better organized, have better health, be better people, and the list goes on and on. We analyze ourselves to a fare-thee-well and then wonder why we still feel so bent out of shape. Perhaps, however, Mr. Franklin has been misinterpreted, because it’s not entirely about self-reliance or self-help. God doesn’t help those who help themselves. Rather, God helps those who turn to God.

The woman in the gospel story today lived in a world very different from ours. We look at her and her bent-over posture and begin to wonder if she’s suffering from osteoporosis or has done something to her back. As theologian and storyteller John Shea reminds us we live in a “medically saturated” culture. Everything we go through should have some sort of therapy, some pill or some procedure that will ‘cure’ us. So we come with our medical mindset to the stories of scripture and, even if we do believe that Jesus could heal people, we wonder what happened and how it happened. However, the story isn’t concerned about the specifics of diagnosis and treatment; and while it comes out of a different approach to culture, it still speaks to us today.

The woman who went to the synagogue on that long-ago day lived in a culture that was as saturated by theology as ours is by medicine. Everything in the world she and Jesus shared had a theologically based explanation. When Jesus works the healing of the woman – and remember that healing has to do with the whole person as opposed to cure which deals only with a specific instance – it serves a symbolic function. The healing of the bent woman symbolizes the oppression under which she, and others, had been living for generations. Not because God had sought to oppress them in the giving of the commandments, but because their interpretations and attempts to systematize the commandments and rituals had brought them to that point.

Luke tells us that the woman was suffering “with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years” and recounts Jesus saying, “And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the Sabbath day?” We’d most likely say that her suffering was psychosomatic, self-induced because of her situation, or inability to deal with it. However, oppressive spirits can come in many forms. Walter Wink, a Scripture scholar, has pointed out that in the biblical vision every reality has an inner and an outer aspect. As John Shea summarizes Wink’s argument, “The outer aspect is its material shape and organizational structure. The inner aspect is its spirit that determines the purpose, direction and meaning of the outer aspects. If a social reality is part of the Domination System, those institutions that oppress people, its inner spirit is evil and is often called Satan. Therefore, evil spirits and Satan are not disembodied spiritual realities who freely roam about looking for prey. They are always embodied in individual and social realities; and they can invade people when people enter the arena in which they are embodied.” In other words, even institutions originally formed to do good can end up being “possessed,” if you will when they become instruments of domination and oppression.

This is even true of our Congregational movement. The colonists of Plymouth came looking for religious freedom in 1620. The Massachusetts Bay folks embarked on their “errand into the wilderness” in 1630 for much the same reason. Both groups ended up doing what -- making sure that there was no opposition to their approach to religious faith, especially if you were Roman Catholic or Quaker. The seekers after freedom ended up as oppressors.

I came across something from an author named Bruce MacKenzie that I think may make the point. He asked a group of women: "What in your own experience might cause a woman to be bent over for eighteen years?" A woman in the crowd quickly replied, "Her children! Eighteen years is the minimum sentence parenthood brings." Another woman spoke up and said: "Don't forget her husband. She was probably permanently bent over from picking up his dirty socks for thirty years." Still another woman said: "Maybe she was tired of working like a slave for minimum wage or even tired of working like a slave at home for no wages at all." "Or, perhaps, every time she held her head up and tried to be somebody, the people around her--both male and female--did all they could to deflate and diminish her again." None of these relationships are evil, but isn’t it interesting how people can find the things that bend them out of shape, that oppress them in the experience of others?

Jesus reaches out to this woman and brings her healing. Whatever was oppressing her Jesus released and at that moment he came face-to-face with yet another oppressive system. The synagogue ruler didn’t see a healing; he saw a violation of the Sabbath. The essence of the Sabbath rest, God’s gift of healing and wholeness for creation, flies right out the window in the face of a broken rule. As Christians we may want to say that we’re a whole lot better about this than our Jewish sisters and brothers, but we’d be sadly mistaken. The witness of history shows that we started making rules and regulations pretty early-on as well and the media never lets us forget that we’re still making – and breaking – the rules we make.

Again, this is an almost automatic side of organizational life. For societies to function we need systems and rules – so we make them. Unfortunately, we often exalt the rule to the exception of the reason for which it was made. John Jewell, former minister at Plymouth Church-Racine and a teacher at Dubuque Seminary, tells this story of an experience he had in an emergency room.

I was waiting my turn to see the emergency room doctor when a young mother came through the doors with her child, maybe three or four years old. The little girl was crying and the woman who, I took to be the child's mother, was holding a bloody handkerchief over the little girl's mouth. She looked around frantically for someone to help and rushed to the desk and said, "My daughter's been hurt and I need to see..." She was cut off in mid-sentence, "You need to take a seat and wait for one of the clerks to sign you in." "But my little girl was hit in the mouth by a..." She was interrupted again. "Please take a seat ma'am, someone will be with you shortly." Just then, the ER doctor walked in and said to the woman at the desk, "Shame on you... this little girl needs help right now!" He motioned to the woman and the little girl and led them to an examining room. Briefly, (and guiltily) I wondered when my turn to see the doctor might come, but -- if I live to be a hundred years old, I wonder if I will ever see another time when a person's pain so clearly wins out over the system's protocol. "Shame on you!" I love it! The physician was looking at a child's pain. The clerk was looking at the hospital's procedure.

What Jewell recounts is precisely what happened in that synagogue long ago. Jesus saw the woman’s pain and the procedure no longer mattered. What he did in that moment was precisely what God has been doing all along – freeing people from what oppresses them.

When Jesus healed her he was acting in a manner consistent with the Exodus event, he commands that God’s people be let go from their bondage – whatever it may be.

Luke tells us that Jesus laid hands on her and “immediately she stood up straight and began praising God.” Now that she is no longer oppressed she could live and offer praise in an authentic manner. When we experience the transforming love of God in our lives, when we open ourselves to be straightened-out, no longer bent out of shape by preconceptions or rules or theological positions or anything else, but touched by God we offer praise and that praise is genuine. Fred Craddock, who is one of my favorite preachers and teachers of preaching, tells a story of liberation and genuine praise. I don’t have his Southern accent, but the story goes like this:

One day he met a man in a restaurant. “You a preacher?” the man asked. Somewhat embarrassed, Fred said, “Yes.” The man pulled a chair up to Fred’s table. “Preacher, I’ll tell you a story. There was once a little boy who grew up sad. Life was tough because my mama had me but she had never been married. Do you know how a small Tennessee town treats people like that? Do you know the words they use to name kids that don’t have no father? Well, we never went to church, nobody asked us. But for some reason or other, we went to church one night when they was having a revival. They had a big, tall preacher, visiting to do the revival and he was all dressed in black. He had a thunderous voice that shook the little church. We sat toward the back, Mama and me. Well, that preacher got to preaching, about what I don’t know, stalking up and down the aisle of that little church preaching. It was something. After the service, we were slipping out the back door when I felt that big preacher’s hand on my shoulder. I was scared. He looked way down at me, looked me in the eye and says, ‘Boy, who’s your Daddy?’ I didn’t have no Daddy. That’s what I told him in trembling voice, ‘I ain’t got no Daddy.’ ‘O yes you do,’ boomed that big preacher, ‘you’re a child of the Kingdom, you have been bought with a price, you are a child of the King!’ I was never the same after that. Preacher, for God’s sake, preach that.”

God helps those who. . . turn to God. God helps those who open themselves to God’s presence. What that boy experienced when the preacher touched him and told him he was “a child of the King” was exactly what the woman in the synagogue experienced when Jesus gave her a healing touch. Each one of us has something that is oppressing us, bending us out of shape, keeping us in some sort of bondage, even living here in the comfortable suburbs of Milwaukee. It may not be a physical ailment or some sort of social stigma, but it’s there, it’s real and God wants us to be free of it. God’s will for us, God’s desire for us is that we live as the Lord’s free people and to know spiritual wholeness. When we turn from trying to help ourselves to the healing, freeing presence of the living God we will receive what God promises and God offers to us again and again.

Now, does that mean we will always “feel” good or “feel” liberated? No. Back in the fourteenth century an anonymous author would pen a work called The Cloud of Unknowing. The author talks about how sometimes the only way we can get to God is through a cloud which veils our experiences from God. We pierce the cloud, we are told, with the “short, sharp darts of love.” A hundred or so years later the Spanish Carmelite mystic, John of the Cross, would describe “the dark night of the soul,” a period of aridity or spiritual dryness that plagued him for years. The cover article of this week’s Time magazine and an article on the second page of this morning’s paper tell us of the dark night endured by Mother Teresa of Calcutta. For decades she continued her work to the poorest of the poor with no affective sense, no feeling, of God’s presence or reality to her. Nevertheless, she continued to labor and believe through doubt. She was a child of the King, one who knew the promise, even when she didn’t feel it.

This promise is precisely what the reading from the Hebrews is telling us, that the new covenant, made real in the life, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus is there for us. Even Jesus went through a dark night, through a feeling of abandonment so that our lives might be joined completely to his and to the Father’s. As Hebrews says, “Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us give thanks, by which we offer to god an acceptable worship with reverence and awe: for indeed our God is a consuming fire.” The best worship we can offer is to live lives in tune with God’s life, to live as free people, as children of the King. Maybe, in conclusion, we should reference another of Ben Franklin’s aphorisms? “Well done is better than well said.” Our faith, our worship should show in how we live because God helps those who. . . . turn to God in loving trust.