Sunday, August 21, 2016 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

What’s One More Day?

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 71:1–6
Luke 13:10–17

In the future, when we no longer see, as we do now, only in part, I think many of us will be surprised by the capacious generosity of God. . . . We have case after case of Jesus pointing to a God who is larger than the conventional wisdom, who is not downsized by the petty pieties of those who would constrain him by their own limited knowledge and experience.

Peter Gomes

“I don’t understand why she could not have waited just one more day! Her healing would have still come. What difference would one day have made?”

That was basically what the religious leader asked that day. Of all the days of the week, why that day? Why did she have to come on the sabbath day, a day when no one was supposed to work but only rest and worship and remember the mighty, liberating acts of God? It is not like she had recently become disabled, bent over, unable to move very well, sit very easily, or look at people in the eyes. She had been dealing with that disability for eighteen years. What was one more day? The religious leader was genuine in his frustration. All she had to do was wait just a little while longer. Her healing would come eventually.

Have you ever felt that way or said something similar? Perhaps that kind of reaction bubbled up in some of us after one of the police shooting videotapes was released in the past couple of years. Maybe before viewing it, or even afterwards, some of us thought to ourselves, “We just need to let the authorities do their work. These young activists need to stop responding so emotionally and just wait until we know all the facts.”

Or maybe that reaction came to the forefront of your mind when the Black Lives Matter protestors took to the streets last Thanksgiving weekend. As they stood and blocked the entrances to the stores around the church on that shopping Friday, I imagine some of us wondered, “Why do something like that on a holiday? Why couldn’t they wait and stay home to celebrate like so many other Chicago families? They could wait to raise their voices and speak their anger another time, a more appropriate time.” As a matter of fact, when that protest happened, I heard people interviewed by the nightly news ask those kinds of questions, genuinely frustrated. It is not like one day or one week later would make that huge of a difference, they stated. Right?

I suppose the answer to that question depends on if you are a person bent over or not, in constant pain and struggle, or if you are a person whose stomach sinks every time your son, your brother, or your husband walks out the door of your house, sinks with fear they might not return. Yes, for the woman in our Gospel story for today, it had been eighteen years. And the religious leader was right: one more day was just one more day. But at the same time, it had been eighteen years, and one more day was one more day.

For eighteen years, the woman had not been able to stand up straight. For eighteen years she was bent in on herself, like a perpetual question mark of a person. For eighteen years she had not been able to look anyone in the eyes. For eighteen years she had not been able to see where she was going or how much the fruit and vegetables cost at the market or what the sun looked like as it set or the moon as it rose. For eighteen years, all she could see were her feet—her worn, dusty feet and the feet of anyone who came very close—an experience of intimacy that was rare. In those days, many folks assumed that since she was disabled, then that must mean either a demon took up space in her personhood or she had committed such an egregious sin that God was punishing her. Those erroneous but common assumptions led people to give her a wide berth wherever she was.

I imagine that was true even in her religious house. Perhaps whenever she went to worship the same folks who avoided her outside her holy space avoided her inside it, as well. It would not surprise me if even her religious leaders found quick and ready excuses not to engage her in honest conversation or to be in real relationship with this woman so long-suffering. We religious leaders can be just as full of fear and awkwardness as anyone else. Thus for eighteen years, no one, other than family perhaps, got close enough to her for her to see their feet in her visual field.

No one, that is, but Jesus. That sabbath day, as he taught in the synagogue about God’s liberating justice and love, she walked in. Maybe it was because Jesus noticed people scattering, or maybe it was because her disability made her hard to miss, or maybe it’s just how Jesus was, but he immediately saw her. He saw her, hunched over and bent, unable to see him or anyone else around her, and he immediately stopped what he was doing, called her over to himself, and healed her. It was an immediate reaction: as soon as he saw her, he set her free. He did not ask about her faith. He did not wait to hear her life story. He did not care that it was on the sabbath. He decided, then and there, the time was now to set her free. Woman, Jesus said, you are loosed. You are set free from what binds you. You are restored. But even as profound as that healing moment must have been, the fact that he healed her is not the only powerful thing to consider. Rather, I think the way he went about it is as powerful as the healing itself.

I am talking about what Jesus did when he set her free. Jana Childers is the first preacher who opened my eyes to the following possibility: It is hard for me, Jana preached, to imagine that Jesus stood above her and talked at her when he pronounced her healed. Knowing what we know about Jesus, that picture of a Jesus towering over this bent woman feels incongruent with who he is, incongruent with his kingdom message of mercy and his love. No, Dr. Childers and I think he went about her healing in a different way—a way that restored not just her body but also her soul.

I believe that after she walked over to him, Jesus walked up to her and made sure his feet were in her visual field so she would know he was there. So he could go ahead and begin to disperse the loneliness and the isolation she had carried in her bones for so long. But after doing that, I believe Jesus got down on his knees, craned his neck up, and looked at her, face to face (Jana Childers, sermon preached at the Festival of Homiletics). Can you picture that? This woman, bent over and in pain for eighteen years, socially invisible and religiously isolated, used to seeing only her own lonely feet for all that time, all of the sudden, she finds herself looking into the face of Jesus. She watches as he contorts his own body in order to be accessible to her, wanting not just to restore her physically but spiritually and emotionally too.

Yes, he could have waited for another day, but why? According to Deuteronomy, one major reason for the sabbath was to provide relief, even if only temporary, from any system that would deny a person—or any part of creation—a share of rest, peace, wholeness, dignity, and justice (Matt Skinner, www.onscripture.com). That is what Sabbath was all about, is all about. So in answer to the religious leader who was frustrated that the bent-over woman could not have just waited one more day for her healing, Jesus responds with “Why wait?” The value God places on wholeness, on justice, on seeing those not always seen, required Jesus to heal her on that sabbath day, right then and right there. He could not wait. She did not need to wait. It had been eighteen years. One more day was one more day.

In this story from Luke’s Gospel, Jesus is reminding all of his followers, with his actions and his words, that every day is the right day if one is going to act in ways that further God’s restoration of all people, God’s justice for all people. There is no day that is the wrong day for that kind of kingdom work. It might very well be the Friday after Thanksgiving; it might very well be the day of sabbath rest; it might very well be a Wednesday in the middle of what feels like an extremely long week, but if suffering and injustice are at play, it is the exact right day to act in holy opposition to those forces of captivity.

I preach that, and I believe it. But I realize it’s one thing if we are talking about each of us, as individual disciples, deciding that waiting one more day to act in ways that further God’s restoration and justice is one day too long. But I also know it is another thing, a more complicated thing, if we are talking about all of us, as a collective body, a religious institution, deciding to act in ways that further God’s restoration and justice. Over this past year, some of you have lovingly and appropriately challenged my own caution in leading us as a collective body into stepping out there into some of the brokenness of our city, particularly around issues of race, community and police relations, and violence.

I am cautious. Partly that caution comes because I have wanted to make sure we are grounding ourselves in worship, in prayer, in honest discernment about the ways we might use our historic privilege and power as Fourth Presbyterian Church. Partly that caution comes because I firmly believe we have needed to wait for our invitation to sit at some of the advocacy tables alongside women and men, faith communities and other nonprofits, who have already been extremely involved for decades in some of our city’s most broken neighborhoods. We cannot make the mistake, even if it is out of good motives, of swooping in like we have the answers. We don’t. At least, I don’t.

So that messiness, that complexity, of needing to be honest about our system’s privilege and the danger our ignorance of it could bring, has made me quite cautious. Yet at the same time, the temptation that I fight in my soul as your pastor and one of your leaders is that if we are not vigilant, appropriate caution and preparation can subtly morph into “Can’t we just wait one more day? What’s one more day?”—a kind of fear-based complacency. A complacency more easily stomached by those of us who are not the ones bent over or afraid to leave our house, but a complacency not easily stomached by Jesus. “Ought not this woman, this man, these children of God, bound for decades, centuries, be set free from bondage on the sabbath day?” he asked the religious ones.

Now we, as an institution, have fought against this kind of complacency before. These past few weeks, I’ve been rereading some of our Fourth Presbyterian Church history, in particular The Gold Coast and the Ghetto, by former staff person James Wellman. In his accounting of our history, he openly acknowledges that we, as a church, were not involved in the early civil rights movement. We did not collectively show up or institutionally respond when Martin Luther King Jr. came to Chicago. Wellman reports we made no comment on any of the unrest of the spring and summer of 1966. But Dr. King’s assassination changed us. Any complacency we might have collectively shared was shattered by that act of violence and hatred, and in mid-April of 1968, our Session formed three different responses in our attempt to be a part of God’s work of restoration and justice.

One of those responses was a desire to develop leadership in conjunction with leaders from the West Side of Chicago for those neighborhoods. Here is how we put it in our Session minutes: “There is need for us to become acquainted firsthand with the problems to be dealt with not as those who are going in to solve them but as those who are willing to be there to work with others already engaged in the tasks.” Our acquaintance with the real struggles of our brothers and sisters of the West Side led to the building of Atrium Village, affordable housing for a racially and economically integrated population, as well as the beginning of the Summer Day program with youth from Cabrini-Green, a program that continues to flourish (James Wellman, The Gold Coast and the Ghetto, pp. 135–137). In those spring days of racial unrest and economic segregation, we collectively decided one more day was one day too long until we acted.

And now, in 2016, we have an opportunity to get reacquainted with some of our city’s struggles. As you have already heard, on September 10 we are hosting, in conjunction with Princeton Seminary, a forum that will intentionally continue some of the conversations Vicky Curtiss, our Multicultural Committee, leaders of Adult Education and LEAD ministry, and others have helped us start in these past two years. The forum is entitled “A Critical Conversation on Race, Theology, and the Church.” Dr. Yolanda Pierce, the Associate Professor of African American History and literature at Princeton Seminary as well as the Director of the Center for Black Church Studies, will first present a keynote focusing on racial justice and the vocabulary of faith. She will help to remind us why, as people of faith, one day more is one day too many. Immediately following, a panel discussion will take place with leaders from this congregation, Trinity United Church of Christ, the Apostolic Church of God, and the Urban Lab program at the University of Chicago. I hope we pack the place out. Please come if you are able.

Later that afternoon, the panelists, along with other Chicago leaders from McCormick Seminary and other South Side ministries, will hold a private consultation, a more extended conversation, about possible ways that churches, seminaries, and nonprofits might pool our energy, imagination, and resources, to make a difference in the cycle of violence and intergenerational poverty in our city. How can we all come together in order to say even one more day is one more day too long for God’s people of all races and creeds, of all neighborhoods and economic situations, of all abilities and disabilities, to hurt and be bound by injustice, oppression, and the continuation of hopeless violence?

Is there a way for us, as parts of this city, to take cues from Jesus and to contort our own collective body in order to really see those folk directly affected, some of whom are a part of our Fourth Church community, and to be of use in God’s healing, God’s restoration, God’s movement towards justice? Those are the kinds of questions we will be asking. But I must admit to you, I still feel cautious, because I don’t know exactly what will emerge from these conversations. All I know is that I don’t want us to make the same mistake that religious leader made so long ago and keep asking for just one more day, because for all those bent over, for all those scared, for all of us who want to follow Jesus, for the sake of God’s kingdom, one more day of privileged waiting for some is one more day of real suffering and injustice for others. In the face of that reality, Jesus would probably say the time for waiting is over. Amen.