“To Be Set Free” based on Psalm 103: 1-8 and Luke 13:10-17

I’m going to preach on Luke. But, before I do, can we take just one more moment to be grateful for the Psalm? It is magnificent. The words echo throughout history, “Bless the Lord, O my soul.” It contains those universal truths that God’s steadfast love endures forever, that God is a healer and forgiver, that God is satisfying and satiating. It is pretty rare for me to read scripture and not fight with it, to instead just sigh with relief to hear good truths. This is one of the texts that does so for me. It is truth-filled, grace-filled and wise. If it is what you need today, you may want to just pick it up and read it over and over letting the wonder of it flow through you. 😍

Now, Luke.

The story seems simple. Jesus was teaching in a Synagogue on the Sabbath, and a woman showed up who had been crippled for 18 years. She was unable to stand up straight. “When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, ‘Woman, you are set free from your ailment.’ When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God.”

And, just like that, I have a lot of questions. I think the biggest one is: why her?

It seems impossible that she was the only person struggling who was there that day. Groups of humans always include people who are struggling, including with health. Was she the one who struggled the longest? The most severely? The most visibly?

Or was it just that she was the one he was ABLE to heal? Was she “ready” (whatever that might mean)? Was she open to it? Were his particular gifts well matched for that particular healing?

Or did she grab his attention in some particular way? Did she smile at him? Did she grimace so quietly no one was able to notice? Was it that she was there in the community of faith despite it all? Did he know her from before? Was it how others responded to her that he could tell if he healed her he’d heal then all?

That’s the thing about healing, they’re even larger than they seem. The diseases and illnesses and chronic pains of life separate people from their communities, and from the fullness of their lives. When a person is healed of any of it it not only heals their bodies but their whole being and heals the community they’re part of.

Maybe the whole community needed healing and by healing her he could bring them all to wholeness. Maybe that’s why it was her.

We aren’t going to know. But we are allowed to wonder.

I also end up wondering: what ails us? What has bent us over and kept us from being able to stand upright for all these years? If Jesus were here and ready to heal us, what would Jesus pick to heal here?

Maybe it would look the same… an injury, an illness, a chronic pain. But maybe those end up being the easy ones and Jesus would look more deeply. Maybe the healing some of us need is forgiveness. For something that happened years ago that we’ve been guilt-ily dragging along with us ever since. Perhaps Jesus would be looking for places healing would be in the capacity to let go of the guilt, and live in the now.

Maybe we need healing from the nagging worry that we’re not enough: not good enough, not kind enough, not something or another enough. Perhaps, then, the healing would be Jesus reminding us that we’re Divinely-made, Divinely-loved, and not required to be or do anything to earn it. A time of being able to “rest assured” that the God loves us and we’re not alone.

Maybe the healing we need is from grief that aches in us for years on end without changing. A healing that would help us move from simply aching to also remembering the sweetness of who or what we lost.

Maybe the healing Jesus would offer would be the hardest kind of all – the healing of the traumas we hold. To hold us safely and tenderly and heal us from the inside out, starting with the hurts that are most tender and long-held within. I think that kind of healing would make the crippled woman standing up seem mundane. To reassure those of us who have experienced the unthinkable that it wasn’t our fault, that we didn’t do anything to deserve it, it didn’t taint us, that we are perfectly lovable as we are, and we are really and truly safe.

Imagine how that could impact our lives and our community, if the deepest, most traumatic wounds we carry were healed! Some among us might be unrecognizable with the burdens lifted off their shoulders. Hmmm. I guess they might be able to stand up straight, for the first time in a really long time.

I am under the impression that God is pro-healing. I am so under the impression that healing is much harder than any of us wish it was, including when it comes to the guilt, emotions, fears, and traumas we carry.

So I invite us to imagine. To take this story as our own, and imagine Jesus here, teaching away, blowing our minds with his loving insights, and then one by one turning to each of us with God’s own love for us and setting us free from our ailments. What would Jesus chose to free you from so you can be whole, reconnect more fully with your community, find and share peace?

[Pause for pondering]

Perhaps some of the answers we’ve named in the silence of our hearts ARE things that we are ready to let go of and able to be healed from. Others of them them are just bigger than our capacity to let go at this point. But what would it feel like to take seriously God’s wish for us to be well? To be whole? To be freed from what we carry? And to consider how that might impact others around us?

Perhaps, as well, it makes sense to focus on the ways Jesus acted to heal the community, even by healing one person in it. Maybe we need healing as a whole community too. Healing from the pain of being in homophobic denomination for 50+ years. Healing from the pain of misdeed and abuse from clergy. Healing from the pain of misdeeds and abuse of fellow church members. Healing from disagreements and dis-enchantments and ways we mistrusted or misused each other. Healing from the pain of being able to see what the world is supposed to be and what it is. Healing, maybe even, from the times when the church seemed strong and powerful and full and now doesn’t. Or, on the contrary, the pain of yearning for others to be at peace with the miracle that is church now. There is plenty of shared communal pain.

What would it be like to see the love of God transforming that pain, freeing us from it, letting us stand strong? What would it mean for us to hear God calling and hear Jesus tell us we are free from our communal ailments? How might we respond differently? Where might there be more flexibility, more patience, more joy, more hope?

I often fear that there is a pain in churches in America in the 21st century that relates profoundly to decline. There were many people in pews in the 1950s are there is a fear that the fewer people sitting in them now is a sign of failure (of some sort.) Having looked at it historically, I don’t think that’s the case, but it is a place I hear Jesus calling us to healing and freedom anyway.

In this community of faith, we tend to rather love science. Most of us are inclined to trust doctors and medicines too, although plenty of have concerns about some aspects of Western medicine while we’re mentioning it. 😉 Nevertheless, we may struggle to understand what it means that Jesus healed someone’s crippled back with his words. That question may distract us from other meanings of the passage.

One of the most important facets of Jesus’s healing was that by healing the physical ailments of individuals he healed whole communities. He took away what separated people from life-giving relationships. He re-united them. He took seriously the needs people have to connect.

The ancients didn’t separate body and mind like many of us have been taught to, which is probably good because they were likely right! Bodies and minds and spirits are all intermingled and impact each other – just like all of us impact each other along the way. Healing a body, or a mind, or a spirit heals the person and the people around them. Healing has ripple effects.

We also can hear in this passage and all healing passages God’s desires for our wholeness and well being. Which is where I think we are led today. God yearns for our healing, our wholeness, our well-being. Likely, for most of us, there are things we can let go of and be free from and thereby be healed. Let today serve as an invitation to to hear, “beloved child of God, you are set free from your ailment.” And know that as you are freed, so too are we all.

Thanks be to God. Amen

August 24. 2025

Rev. Sara E. Baron 

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady 

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305 

Pronouns: she/her/hers

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