You Are Already Free
Dear Friends,
Today, in our reading from the Gospel of Luke, we find Jesus teaching in a synagogue when a woman appears “with a spirit that has debilitated her for eighteen years.” For eighteen long years she has been “bent over and quite unable to stand up straight.” Eighteen years, a lifetime within a lifetime.
When you think about the 18-year “lifetimes” within your own life, what comes to mind? How did each bear fruit, yield experiences, lay the groundwork for goals and destinations? A lot can happen in eighteen years! We can take up new callings, relinquish what limits us, learn from mistakes, become more fully ourselves. As I look back at my own 18 year “lifetimes,” I travel the journey from birth through college, from young adulthood through a career in banking, to marriage and parenthood. And then through middle age to my years in seminary and ordination to the priesthood, and on to my years in parish ministry and my time here with you, at St. John’s. What comes next? Hopefully, another journey into the rolling fields of older age with untold discoveries of learning and loss. Perhaps, like me, you have also learned that there are generous opportunities for multiple beginnings and endings within a single lifetime.
The woman whom Jesus encounters in this week’s gospel has been bent over, half herself, for one of her entire lifetimes. She has adapted to her condition, accommodated her diminishment, for so long that she probably forgets to hope for more. But Jesus doesn’t forget. When he sees this woman in the synagogue, he calls out to her, just as he calls to you and me. Listen: “You are free.” Not after, but before he helps her to stand up, Jesus says this. You are already free.
Even before we reach out for it, the gift of freedom has been given. Even though we forget, healing is possible—from whatever it is that bends us and keeps from standing upright, be it shame or grief, a critical spirit, pride or continual comparison, or losing our sense of self in the exhausting race to be thought better, or less, than others.
Especially after two years of pandemic and global upheaval, we can get so used to hobbling around with bent and broken spirits, to being less than we truly are, that we sometimes forget we can stop being only half ourselves. But the God who Jesus came to reveal insists that we can come back into our life, beckoning to each of us to ask some important questions. From what suffering do you “forget” to expect healing? How have you experienced God saying, “You are free?” To what are you being called in your next “lifetime” of years?
A new and different world awaits. All we need to do is stand up and receive it.
In Christ,
Amelie+
