We All Count

Proper 19C                                                                                                      September 15, 2019

Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28
Psalm 14
1 Timothy 1:12-17

Children, do you have a favorite stuffed animal or soft blanket that you love? I invite you to draw a picture on the sheet in your worship bags of yourself holding your favorite soft toy. Be sure to read the words on the top of the sheet, too. [It says God loves me so much.] Adults, maybe you remember, as well, what your beloved childhood comfort object looked like? Felt like? Smelled like? Hold that image in your mind.

          My daughter had a cloth sheep as her comfort object. Besides sleeping with it, she carried it around with her everywhere so she could chew on the corner of its floppy ears. Luckily, her grandmother, who had given her the sheep when she was born, had cleverly procured a “twin” sheep. It was a mother’s dream--I could secretly switch the sheep out when one of them got dirty or lost.

One fateful day, though, I brought my toddler down to the basement laundry room with me. She was waking up from her nap and was cuddling her sheep in her arms. There, in the pile of dirty laundry, was the twin, peeking out from under some towels. She noticed it before I did. My daughter looked at the sheep in her arms—she looked at the sheep on the floor—and she looked back at the one she held. “One, Two,” she counted. Her eyes lit up in delight, and she squealed with pleasure! It was like Christmas and her birthday all rolled into one! What a celebrations! Grabbing both sheep, she hugged them tightly and beamed. From then on, she and her sheep formed one family in her mind. She had to carry them both wherever she went. She named them “Momi ‘n Peep,” and the three were inseparable. For her, safety looked like Momi ‘n Peep. Joy felt like Momi ‘n Peep. The completeness of her toddler world existed as Momi ‘n Peep. She no longer counted Momi plus Peep. They weren’t two separate things. Instead, they became what counted in her life.

          Around this time of year, we in the church do an awful lot of counting. We worriedly count attendance; we carefully count pledge cards; we anxiously count everything from the price of postage to committee members to children in Sunday School. Counting can help us to feel in control and on the ball. We use that strategy outside of church, as well.  We count the mistakes that other people make and compare them with the mistakes that we are making. We count the cool toys or clothes that other people have and compare them with what is in our rooms. We count the friends that others have and compare them with how many friends we have. We count our money and our IRA. We count our grey hairs and wrinkles. We count how much longer we have until we die.

          All the time that we spend counting, however, doesn’t give us new life. That’s what Jesus is trying to tell the Pharisees in today’s Gospel. Any control that counting and comparing give us is an illusion. Instead, what brings life is to know that we each count—that we are someone in someone else’s eyes, that we are a beloved child of God, that we have a meaningful place in this world. Do you ever feel like the lost coin? Squeezed under a crack in the floor? Or have you lost a part of yourself that you long to find? Or perhaps there is someone in this world that you take for granted? Perhaps there is someone, or a group of people, that you have forgotten? Today’s parable is about celebrating becoming whole again, in all of the ways that needs to happen.[1]

For God, we human beings belong together in the divine embrace. We are Momi and Peep. We are one, and we are each beloved. If one of us goes missing, God is inconsolable. When we hide under our pile of dirty laundry, God will do anything to dig us out. God wants to scoop us up in God’s arms and hold us, as tightly and as stubbornly as my daughter held onto those two stuffed sheep. Just a glimpse of one of us peeking out from under the shadows, makes God’s eyes light up with joy and delight.

At the same time, God wants that love and delight to flow through us into the world. Just as we count for God, God wants others to count for us. In Christ, God’s grace is constantly pouring over us as freely as the water flows over a tiny baby’s head in baptism. As soon as we let it, that love will enter us and flow through us out into the world. To be “saved,” as the author of the letter to Timothy shows us, is to let ourselves be given over to God’s work in the world, the work of love, the work of making everyone count. God blesses us so that we can bless one another. God forgives us so that we can forgive one another. God transforms us so that we can transform the lives of others.

          Transforming lives, you might note, is theme of our stewardship work that begins today. So let’s not expect to do that hard work on our own, by counting and comparing. Let us instead show one another that each and every soul counts, both in our building and out into the world. I challenge us to approach the road ahead like Momi ‘n Peep, carried in the arms of the One who loves us beyond all imagining.

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[1] Amy-Jill Levine and Sandy E. Sasso, Who Counts? (Louisville: Westminster John-Knox Press, 2017.

Lifting the Burden

Proper 16

Luke 13:10-17

Have you seen those t-shirts about the “evolution of humanity?” They show a series of creatures with the words “Somewhere something went terribly wrong” written underneath. First, you see a small ape. He’s followed by a larger ape-like creature, standing a bit straighter. Then there’s a prehistoric human, standing tall and carrying a tool. Then you see a man stooping a bit over a garden hoe. Then there’s a man deeply bowed down under the weight of grueling work. Then, finally, you see a person totally hunched over a computer desk, just as bent over as the ape. The only thing that’s missing from that shirt, of course, is a person with a cell phone! Last week, I spent my vacation walking through New York City bent over my cell phone, eyes glued to Google Maps as if it were leading me to buried treasure. And I wasn’t alone. The whole mass of humanity pushing down those bustling Manhattan sidewalks proceeded with bowed heads and cradled phones. No one looked to the right or to the left or up into the face of another. Their attention was on their tiny screens. Is the old t-shirt design accurate? Are we indeed turning into a hunched humanity?

It’s no accident that the woman described in today’s Gospel is suffering from a disease that causes her to be bent over, as if by a mighty burden. Technology might feel like a burden to old fogey’s like me, but the truth is that there are many kinds of loads. No matter what the century, we human beings all know what it’s like to be bent over, face to the ground. We can stoop from illness and age, but also from less concrete burdens. Work, worries, hopelessness, rejection, stress, addiction … they can all cause us to bow our heads to the ground and to stoop our shoulders in shame or resignation. Some of us shoulder small burdens, and some of us are bent double with our weighty loads. Some of us weigh ourselves down—with unreasonable expectations, with over-commitment, with worry that we are not enough unless we carry the world on our backs. Others have burdens thrust upon them: illness, grief, poverty, injustice, racism, war, oppression.  In the Hebrew Scriptures, the poor and marginalized--the widows, the orphans, the foreigners--are called the “anawim,” or the “bent over ones.” God cares for them in their vulnerability, and God calls us to join in lifting their burdens. When we’re bowed down, we can’t look up to God; when we’re bowed down, we can’t look into the loving eyes of others. Such an existence is not God’s desire for any of God’s beloved children.

How our God must constantly yearn to lift those weights from each of our shoulders.  “Come to me all ye that travail and are heavy-laden,” Jesus offers in the old translation, “and I will refresh you.” “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light,” Jesus promises. What would it be like for Jesus to take whatever is weighing on you this morning and to lift it from your aching back? Can you imagine the surge of hope, the amazing freedom of movement? Can you feel what it would be like to stand straight and tall for the first time in years? To look others in the face as an equal? To share a loving glance? To see the blue skies and the tops of the trees? To lift your head in song? In prayer? That’s what happens to the woman in our Gospel. She has been cursed for 18 years with a heavy spirit, a burden that oppresses her, that holds her down. For 18 years, she has hasn’t been able to lift her head or make eye-contact with another human being. Jesus sees her in the crowd. He touches her and sets her free. He takes her burden from her. And finally, she can lift her head. She can stand up straight, a full human being. And she can sing her praises to God.

 Of course Jesus heals the bent woman on the Sabbath, for such healing is a deepening of Sabbath, rather than a transgression of it. The judging Pharisee was forgetting the true meaning of Sabbath when he attacked Jesus for breaking the rules. In Judaism, the Sabbath is a day set apart to mend our tattered lives, to fill them with good things and to delight our souls with pleasure, resting in God. It is a day for personal rest, but it is also a day of rest for society and for creation itself. Sabbath includes a rest from buying and selling, a rest from wheeling and dealing and making a profit off of the backs of the poor. It’s a day when no one has to work, a day when all have the same freedom. The wider concept of Sabbath includes fields that must lie fallow for a season in order to replenish their soil with nutrients. It includes farm animals who need rest. It includes the Jubilee year, when debts are forgiven and the poor can find hope to start anew.  By touching and healing the bent woman, Jesus is giving her the things that Sabbath is meant to give to us all: freedom, fullness of life, wholeness of body, and a welcome back into the strengthened community of her brothers and sisters. 

Miracles like hers still happen today. I recently heard the story of women who survived the killing fields of Cambodia, during the horrors of the Pol Pot regime.^[1] These survivors of terrible violence were languishing in a refugee camp, oppressed for years by a heavy spirit, bent in two under the weight of their traumatic memories. They could only crouch in their tents. They couldn’t take care of their children. They couldn’t interact with others. They couldn’t look up to face the future. One of them, however, was strong enough try to help her fellow refugees. She used beauty to lift the burden of shame and despair from these abused women. She invited them to relax their broken bodies in tents of warm steam. She gave them manicures and pedicures. And then she taught them to give one another manicures and pedicures. You can be bent over and still do nails, can’t you? You don’t have to be able to raise your head. You don’t have to be able to stand and look someone in the eye. But you do have to touch another human being, gently, on the feet and on the hands. You have to give them a gift, the gift of feeling beautiful. Through beauty and gentle human touch, these bent and broken women learned slowly to trust again, to touch again, and finally, to stand up straight again. They stayed together and opened a home for orphaned children. They loved and were loved, and they were free. They were no longer bent over. They had fullness of life, wholeness of body, and a welcome back into the strengthened community of their sisters. 

I think that we Americans could use more healing Sabbath in our lives these days, as well. There is so little rest, so little time for praise and joy, in our frenzied modern lives. I was talking to a young mother just yesterday who spoke with passion about the short glimpse of Sabbath that she experienced at a child’s birthday party with her daughter: in just one tiny instant, the sun was shining, a cool breeze was blowing, and children were out on the lawn giggling with delight in getting their faces painted with beautiful colors. “Suddenly, time stopped,” she sighed. It was just one of those brief moments, all too few and far between, when a parent’s burdens are lifted, life is full, community flourishes, and love flows. Those are the Sabbath moments, whether they happen on Sunday or a Monday or a Thursday night.

A few years ago, I met with a refugee from the Congo and asked her what she missed most from her home country. “I miss the Sabbath,” she said. As a maid at a hotel, she does not have control over her schedule, and she desperately needs her job for her family to survive. She has no say in when she will work, no real choice in how she can provide for her children. She does not mind hard work, and she is grateful for her job, but she spoke to us with some indignation. In her home culture, she explained, no one works on Sundays. Sunday is a day to spend in worship, in time with family, in rejoicing and delight. It is a pause in the back-breaking grind of poverty, a breath of freedom in lives filled with hard work. “In America,” she said with disdain, “there is no Sabbath. There is no time for God or for one another.” For her, the Sabbath is not a duty; it is a life-saving way to stay upright amid the pressures that our society heaps upon the backs of the anawim.

“O God of the Sabbath, this is the day and this is the hour when [men and] women long oppressed learn to stand with dignity, when your healing escapes our desire for control: may your joy stretch the fabric of our hearts and inspire us to loose each other’s bonds; through Jesus Christ, the shamer of the powerful and the raiser of the dead. Amen.”^[2]

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[1] “The Refugees,” found at https://themoth.org/story-transcripts/the-refugees-transcript.

^[2] Steven Shakespeare, Prayers for an Inclusive Church (New York: Church Publishing, 2009), 103.