Relieved of the Weight of the World

Relieved of the Weight of the World.
A Sermon Preached by the Reverend Peter De Franco at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Clifton, New Jersey on August 26, 2007

Two years ago, my mother, my sister and two of my nieces all came to the rectory for a Mother’s Day celebration. It was a great event for us all to be sitting around the table, enjoying a good meal and better company as we celebrated the lives of four mothers across three generations in the family. Since my mother lives with my sister in Browns Mills, which is close to Fort Dix in central New Jersey, they could not make it to the Holy Eucharist. But if they had, you would have had the opportunity to meet my mother. All of us are proud of our mothers and I feel very proud of my mom. At 87, she has survived two heart attacks, two children, four grandchildren, five great grandchildren, three episodes of Congestive Heart Failure, and the usual ailments of old age such as arthritis, numbness in her fingers and high blood pressure. If you sat next to her, she could carry on a conversation on almost any topic since she reads the news paper daily is a student of the Television news and is an avid fan of Oprah Winfrey.
But when she stands to walk, it is then that you would notice that she has a most debilitating case of osteoporosis. Her back is so bent that when she walks, all she can see is her feet. It pains us all to watch her go from her room to the living room since she takes the slowest steps to move from one place to another. So you would understand that when today’s gospel makes its round in the three year cycle, that my thoughts would go to my mother. For if ever I want an image of what the woman whom Jesus cured looks like, all I have to do is to think of my mother. When she walks, her torso is at a ninety degree angle to her body. She bears the weight of a disease that cripples her.
But she is not the only one whom I remember. I also think of other women whom I have seen. I think of the woman whom I meet in hospitals who keep vigil for a family member who is seriously ill and everyone imagines the worst as they wait for news from the doctors. When these women walk to get a drink of water, their backs are usually a bit bent over. I think of the women who come into the pantry for food. Many of them hold their heads high, but many also have a hard time lifting their heads since they are bent over by shame and embarrassment that they cannot do what mothers should do for their families – provide them with food. I think of the women I have seen at funeral homes who carry the burden of a life without their husband, the women who have children who have become addicted to drugs and who do not seem to have a way out of their addiction, the women whose husbands abuse them with words, hands or emotional manipulation.
I think of the women who think that all about their lives is a failure, their job is not what fulfills them, their earnings barely make ends make, and their relationships leave them empty and unfulfilled. I think of the weight that all these women carry and how their backs are bent over.
I think that these women are bent over, but more than bent over. When Luke describes these women in the gospel, he writes that she was bent together, bent in. All these women are bent together, bent in, so bent under the weight of what they carry that they can no longer distinguish between themselves and their burden for they have become their burden. And their burden has become them, like the women we meet every day who are so burdened, the women many of us are, the person so many of us have become, bent over with care, crippled with anxiety, doubled over with pain. It is to this bent and twisted woman that Jesus comes.
Notice that the woman does not come to Jesus. Jesus comes to her.
It was Jana Childers who first helped me to imagine what that encounter between Jesus and that woman was like. Let’s remember this unnamed woman always walks like my mother, looking at the ground. Her vision of the world is dirt and sand and her dirty feet.
Into that world of dirt and sand and dirty feet comes the face of Jesus. Yes, Jesus must have bent down to that woman, bent down to see her, bent down in the dirt and sand and looked up at her with eyes of utmost compassion. Perhaps tears feel from his eyes as he saw her pain; perhaps those tears touched her feet and washed some of the dirt away.
Undoubtedly, she felt Jesus’ love as he said to her: Woman, you are set free from your ailment. She felt Jesus love lift the burden of whatever had crippled her for those eighteen years, lift that burden of emotional pain, of estrangement from her family and community, of separation from her own heart.
Such is the God whom we have, a God who gets into the dirt and sand of our lives, into those places where the burdens of our lives have crippled us and bent us over, into those places of the heart where we feel so unlovable, so abandoned, so alone and washes our dirty feet with a tear of compassion and invites us to be free from the burdens that weigh us down. Such is the God whom we have in Jesus. Such is the God who comes to you this day, who touches you where you are bent like a pretzel, who brings you that love you so desire and yearn for. Such is the God whom we have in Jesus.

Hooked on Hope

Hope on the End of a Hook
A Sermon preached by the Reverend Peter De Franco, Interim Rector of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Clifton, New Jersey on August 12,2007

Every once in the while, even while we enjoy the beauty of summer, events crowd together that erode the joy of the season we all want to enjoy. News from the mine in Utah is pretty grim as efforts to reach the trapped miners comes up with little hope. Yesterday, three churches in Newark conducted funeral rites for three young people gunned down in what appears to be a senseless robbery gone bad. On Friday night as many of us tuned in the late night news, we heard that the New York City police stepped up security measures in search of a dirty bomb that an Israeli website claimed would be brought into the city.
Such events make us pause and reflect on the deeper pattern at work in our world.
Is there any reason that we can assume that things are getting any better? Sometimes we feel tempted to give in to that tugging sense of despair that borders on hopelessness. It is at times that these, when caves fall in and we can hear no sound from the outside, when promising young people are gunned down, when the threat of violence knocks on our neighbor’s door, it is at such times that we come upon a set of readings that lift our hearts and give us reason for hope.
“Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” Do not be afraid, little flock. In those opening lines to today’s Gospel, Jesus invites us yet again to surrender our fear of the events that seems to indicate that the world is falling apart and look deeper into the world to see that God’s hand is creating, even in the midst of disasters, a new world, the place we call the kingdom of God. We can hone our ability to see God at work in the midst of disasters when we hope. When we look beyond the crisis at hand to the hand that is leading us out of the crisis, then we are learning the skill of hope.
At the start of today’s reading from the letter to the Hebrews, we heard these words: “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
Faith in the assurance of things hoped for.” When I heard many people talk about faith, they speak about the beginning level of faith: they believe in the existence of God. For many of us, our faith consists in believing in God, in affirming that a reality exists that lies deeper than our experience of the world we see.
For most of us our faith lies in the second part of the definition of faith we heard in today’s second reading. Our faith is about the conviction of things not seen. We believe in God, even though we do not see God. We are convinced of the presence of Jesus even though our eyes do not behold him. We are sure of the presence of the Holy Spirit as sure as we are of the love that is in our hearts. We are convinced of things that we do not see.
But faith is more than that. “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” “Faith is the Assurance of things hoped for.” There is energy in faith that directs us to look into the future, to seek what lies ahead, to long and pine for a reality that God is preparing but is not yet in front of us. I think that such a desire is implanted by God in our hearts so that we can move to that place where God is working and where God is establishing the city in which we will dwell: the reign of God which ever lies before us.
I recently read a story about Harold Russell. When he heard about the attack upon Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Harold signed up with the US Army on December 8th. An accident turned around his dream to fight for his country. He didn’t know that the an explosive he was handling for a training film had a defective fuse which went off as he touched it. When he woke up on his bed after surgery, both his hands were missing. All hope seeped out of his heart. His entire life seemed to me nothing more than a tragedy. He was filled with despair.
At that moment, he received a visit from Major Charlie Mc Gonegal who also lost both his hands in an accident. Charlie encouraged Harold to conquer his greatest enemy: his own fear, his own bitterness, his own hopelessness. “How can I get along in life,” Harold asked, “as a cripple?” “You’re not a cripple,” said Charlie, “you are only handicapped.”
Harold was fitted with two hooks for hands and went on to Boston University.
While studying, he was featured in an army film, Diary of a Sergeant, about soldiers recovering from loss of limbs. Director William Wyler saw that film and cast Harold as a recovering soldier in his movie, The Best Years of our Lives. Harold won the academy award as best supporting actor.
Such is the character of Christian hope; God creates a new world where we thought the old world had fallen apart. As we pray this day for the dawn of God’s kingdom among us, let us go to those places in our heart where we find the circumstances of our lives challenging our faith and pray that our eyes may be opened to behold the new city that God is creating for us to live in. For God is always at work creating new possibilities. We only have to open our eyes to behold God in all God’s creative work.