Sermon preached by The Reverend Robert Atwell at St Mary’s, Primrose Hill 26 August 2007

Isaiah 58.9-14; Hebrews 12.18-29; Luke 13.10-17

If you want a picture of the way Jesus transforms people’s lives, there can be few better illustrations than the story recounted in this morning’s gospel.

Jesus is met by a middle-aged woman who is bowed down with illness. She is virtually bent double and has been so, we are told, for eighteen years. Perhaps she was suffering from spondolitis; perhaps her condition was caused by osteoporosis. Whatever the case, she was severely disabled and in constant pain. Jesus lays his hands on her and she stands upright for the first time in years, and is overwhelmed with joy.

As so often is the case in the gospels, what is described here is not just a physical healing – important though that is – but a spiritual and psychological reality. In her encounter with Jesus and her movement to stand upright we are given a picture of human restoration. Being bent over was a physical condition, but it is also symbolic of what life and other people can do to us. We can be weighed down by problems and anxieties, some real, some imaginary, some of our own making. Poor self-esteem can oppresses us and makes us hang our heads low. We can find ourselves the constant butt of people’s frustration or prejudice or anger, and feel we can never do anything right. We can feel dogged by a sense of inadequacy or failure, and end up feeling ashamed of even breathing.

Jesus comes along and says, ‘Let me take that knapsack off your back, all that clobber you are carrying around, so that you can stand upright’. God does not want us to be psychologically bent over, as if we are constantly looking for pound coins on the pavement, but to walk tall and free. In St Paul’s words, God desires to experience ‘the glorious liberty of being a child of God’.

I remember when I left my monastery ten years ago and started to rebuild my life feeling absolutely wretched and pretty scared. I had thought I was meant to be a monk there for life and I was wrong. Instead I found myself re-entering life in middle-age with virtually no money in my pocket and a pile of out of date clothes that looked as though I had been specially kitted out by Oxfam for the occasion.

Eventually friends in Cambridge kindly offered me hospitality in their spare bedroom. It was a lovely old house, except that the bedroom at its highest point was 5’ 10” tall. I’m 6’ 1” and I spent my entire time walking around with my head bent over or clunking my head on the beams. I remember my therapist saying, ‘Get out of there. However nice your friends are, you need to be somewhere where you can stand upright, hold your head high, and let all the accumulated anger inside you out.’

God wants us to flourish, to walk tall, and that may require us letting go of a lot of accumulated baggage. It may involve us switching off the deep freeze button inside and allowing ourselves to feel again. It may involve the healing of painful memories, restoring broken friendships, saying sorry, learning to forgive and be forgiven.

We human beings are complex animals, and just as disease is complicated so too is healing. It is more than a physical reality: it is about recovering a sense of ease with ourselves, so that mind, body and spirit are in harmony and not at war with each other. It’s why Christians prefer to talk of ‘wholeness’.

It would be good to think that the healing of the woman bent over in the gospel was met with applause by the onlookers in the synagogue. But alas, no. The president of the synagogue went around murmuring against Jesus, saying that the healing was an infringement of the laws which govern the keeping of the Sabbath.

Jesus rightly pointed out their hypocrisy. ‘Ought not this woman,’ he cries, ‘this daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the Sabbath day?’

Religion should be a life-giving enterprise, but for so many of his contemporaries, the framework of Judaism which was designed to liberate the spirit, in the end constrained, repressed and quenched it. God got lost in a welter of rules and regulations. Jesus cuts through all this to put things in their right perspective. It is just one more illustration of his recurrent cry, ‘The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath’.

The people’s refusal to celebrate the healing of the woman also illustrates something nasty about us human beings. Sometimes, for all that we say, we don’t actually want people to be healed. We prefer them to remain shrivelled up, because it’s more convenient for us that way. One less strong person around the place is a relief. That sort of attitude is something we all need to repent of.

None of us are as free as we like to think. In some sense we are all that woman bent over in the synagogue. The legacy of sin affects us all. But when we come in trust to Jesus, when we enter into conversation with this healer of souls, the Holy Spirit gives us once again the freedom to live a life according to God’s will. Jesus creates a new kind of fellowship, a relationship with himself that is going to be stronger than the deep currents pulling us towards sin and self-destruction. St Paul calls this a ‘new creation’. In other words, we are able to start over again.

In the life of Jesus, the completeness of divine love still breaks into our world, a world in which we human beings hurt one another and rebel against God’s love. By approaching his death on the cross as an act of love for human beings, as a sort of payment to the powers of evil that will release people from bondage, he ‘opens the kingdom of heaven to all believers’, to use the words of very old Christian hymn. The entrance ticket has been paid and it is ours for the taking.

Let me finish with a story – a true story as many of you who are long-standing members of the congregation of St Mary’s know. When Fr Buck was vicar here he had a young black South African curate by the name of Winston Ngudane. The Church of England had an enlightened policy of spotting talented young black South African priests and bringing them to England on a scholarship for a theology degree, which was not possible under apartheid regime. And so it was that Winston, who these days prefers to be known by his African name of Njongokulu, or Njongo for short, came with his wife to London, to study at King’s College, and to be curate here at St Mary’s.

Following his graduation the then Bishop of London offered him a permanent job here in the diocese, but Njongo opted to return home, feeling that in spite of the deteriorating situation in South Africa it was there that he was meant to be. Not long after returning home his wife had a bad nose bleed. Nothing special except that they couldn’t stop it. Njongo drove his wife to the local hospital to seek help, but because she was black the A&E department refused her, and directed them to a nearby hospital that did treat black people. On the way in the car she drifted into unconsciousness and subsequently died. She had bled to death.

A lesser man would have been consumed with anger and hatred for white people – and certainly Njongo had every justification for being so. But he refused to allow this terrible injustice to oppress him or sour his heart. Instead he channeled his grief and anger into working for a multi-racial peaceful South Africa, where people of whatever colour, ethnicity or sexual orientation can walk tall and without shame.

Today, as many of you know, he is the Archbishop of Capetown in succession to Desmond Tutu. I tell this story because it illustrates the power and grace of God to convert hatred and animosity into love and acceptance and welcome. This week let’s carry with us in our mind the picture of that woman in this morning’s gospel whom Jesus enabled to stand upright. Let that form a prayer for ourselves that God may set us free to walk tall in his kingdom and to his glory.