Jeremiah 1: 4-10

Luke 13: 10-17

August 22, 2004

Elizabeth Macaulay

I want Sophie Kegley to know in the deepest, most bedrock place of her soul that God has known and held and loved her from a time more vast than we can know.

I want her to hear the love song of her God on this day, when she is so visibly held and loved by her parents and this, her church community as we together experience the sacrament of her baptism.

In years to come, I want her to sense the breath of God when she falls in love and when she speaks of her love for another.

I want her to breathe the strength of God when her heart feels broken and when she wonders about the rightness of her life and her decisions.

I want Sophie to know, as the prophet Jeremiah did, the call to holy relationship that is hers and hers alone to live into. And I want her to know that God is with her. Always.

I want her to know these things because as she is baptized, she is living into the dance she will share with God and with her world. Her parents are bringing her on this day to seal a covenant begun even before Sophie was formed.

So, I want Sophie to know these lessons of God’s call and constancy and I want us each to know them and claim them as we experience her baptism.

We are, each one of us, washed in the love and the forgiveness and the power and presence of the Holy.

It is our gift. On sun drenched days when answers and joy are easy, and on moldering and painful days when we feel so very small in the face of what life asks of us.

I want us all to know the power of our baptism. The promise of presence.

I want that particularly today, because I am leaving right after worship this morning to attend a funeral in Duluth.

It is for a woman who was 51 years old. She was a member of my church and her son is my daughter Leah’s best friend and

She took her life on Monday night.

She had struggled for so long with challenges we little understand and she could bear being a bent over woman no longer and so her children and her husband and her friends will go through life wondering how it is so much pain is possible.

The pairing of the story of the bent over woman, the death of Sue, the call of Jeremiah, and the baptism of Sophie Elizabeth have so much to say about the ways we are called to live together as followers of Jesus.

Listen. For eighteen years the woman who was healed walked with her eyes downcast. She had to have struggled to look into the eyes of her community, the place of soul, as she went about her daily life.

You know that there are bent over women and men aplenty in our world. People wracked with the pain of addictions that will not give them peace and relationships that are barbed with pain and personal shame for decisions made and all of these afflictions are such that so often we find ourselves bent over to hide the soft underbelly of our wounded and aching and shame stunted hearts.

We think to protect ourselves from the judgement of others by closing the world out. Unable or unwilling to meet the eyes of others, perhaps because of our own sense of shame, we become crippled and alone.

To such a one, a woman afflicted by a spirit – whether her affliction was physical, or whether it was spiritual matters not, the binding was eighteen years of anguish. To such a one, Jesus reached out.

And he was chastised by the powers that be. How could he break a sacred law, the law protecting the Sabbath, for one such as she? One likened to an ox or an ass. How could Jesus reach out to a nameless woman shrunken into herself and not only heal her but enfold her into the community by calling her a daughter of Abraham?

They wanted to know: how could Jesus do this?

His answer? How could he not? Seeing the pain of a woman so bent by pain, how could he not extend the touch of healing, the grace of being claimed and called into the community of the healed, how could he turn from such pain? What could be more important than the reminder to that woman so tightly bound that she too is known and claimed and beloved by God, has been, even before she drew her first breath. His touch of healing for her was a reminder of who she was called to be. Not a woman bent by pain, but a child of God unloosed from all that would bind her.

Sometimes, dear friends, we have to be reminded. And that is why we are church together.

Sophie will need to be reminded. I need to be reminded. Sue needed to be reminded. Each one of us depends on the grace and the encouragement it sometimes takes to look each other in the eye and see there a welcome. An acknowledgement of our relationship as followers of Jesus. A reminder that we are a people called to live the courage and grace it takes to stand and see the pain and joy in the eyes of those we encounter.

We are called to share a challenge when we loose our way and a blessing when we find our way back home. And we are called to compassion for each other always as we bumble our ways through.

We live these things together. Birth and baptism, death and resurrection.

We are the people of Jesus.

Let nothing keep us from reaching to the places of bent over pain with the balm of our presence and compassion.

Let us live in such a way that Sophie will know our touch in her life.

God has called us each by name.

Let us stand, look each other in the eye, and greet each other with the healing peace and promise of Christ Jesus.

Amen