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.