The Unmistakable Mark of a Christian Man: A Meditation on Luke 13.10-17

I'll begin with a disclaimer: The core exegetical content of this blog comes from the sermon, "Women, We Are Bent," preached by Kyndall Renfro, pastor of the Covenant Baptist Church in San Antonio, which you can read and hear in full here. Pastor Renfro makes the key observation that this woman - and it matters that she is a woman - is bent over; she occupies less space in the world than God intended. Renfro goes on to make the point that our society - including, too often, the community of faith - kinks women into permanent question marks and insists that they question their right to fulfill the Creator's full purpose in them. "Women," she declares, "take a long time to learn how to stand tall, how to square our shoulders, how to lift our chins, how to take up our space." 

She's right, too. Consider two stories I found almost at random in the paper the past couple of days. Actress Anna Gunn plays the character Skyler White on the television drama "Breaking Bad." I've never watched the program but it concerns a high school chemistry teacher who, upon discovering he will soon die of cancer, determines to put his job skills to use cooking meth so as to leave a decent nest-egg for his family. By the time he goes into remission, he has become hooked on the easy money and lavish lifestyle his new trade affords and decides to keep going. Skyler, the protagonist's wife, apparently functions as the voice of morality, a sort of anti-Lady McBeth who calls her mate out on his descent into decadence. Here's the kicker: While fan sites tend to empathize with the husband, entire websites devote themselves to hating the wife. Gunn reports that some of the vitriol extends to her personally. "My character," she muses, "to judge from the popularity of Web sites and Facebook pages devoted to hating her, has become a flash point for many people’s feelings about strong, nonsubmissive, ill-treated women." 

Women, we might say, who stand up. 

Next story: Women at the Wall, a group of devout Jewish women who want full access to pray at the Western Wall of the temple in Jerusalem, reacted with scorn when Israeli authorities erected a sort of scaffold that would allow men and women to pray together. What these women want, as far as I can determine, is the ability to wear prayer shawls and phylacteries and to read Torah and sing while praying at what may be Judaism's holiest sites. A court ruling recently granted them this access, but the ultra-Orthodox have crammed the area to keep the women out, cursing and spitting on them at times. 

Anat Hoffman, leader of the women's group, declares, in language particularly suited to our text, "“We have to be vigilant and fight for every centimeter." 

And now for what I consider the greatest gift of Pastor Renfro's sermon: the part she didn't preach. "I wish I knew what to tell the men about a story like this one," she says, "but I don’t." And although she then goes on to tell men something very valuable and very affirming, I am still grateful for the window. (Good sermons, I think, should leave lots of white space for congregational glossing - the way Jesus' parables do.) 

And here's what I want to write in the margin of this excellent sermon; here's what I want to tell men about a story like this one: The mark of a Christ-like man is that the women who come into contact with him stand taller. 

This is the part of the article where radical feminist and womynist theologians would insist that the story remains flawed because the protagonist still needed Jesus - a man, forsooth! - to set her free. We'd probably get a lot of gender stuff about re-jiggering the names of the Trinity, too. But to me it's simple: A woman encounters Jesus and walks away taller. I'm not saying that women can encounter Christ only in men. I am saying that women can encounter Christ in men, and that if they do, this will be the result.

You can flap the pages of Paul's epistle to the Ephesians in my face all you want to. If your reading of that text doesn't result in you on a cross and your wife on a roll, you've mangled it. You can quote all the hairy, chest-thumping popular books on "Christian manhood" you want: The mark of Christlikeness is not white water rafting but a joyous, active, straight-shouldered, full-throated, tall community of women in your immediate vicinity. 

Sitting once at a Lord's Supper service, eyeing the congregation around me in an admittedly abstracted, undevotional kind of spirit, I noticed a man take the trays of Baptist shot-glasses and Pharisees' teeth, remove a set for himself, then hand each element to his wife and daughter. Liturgy is enacted theology, and that was an entire chapter: There may be one mediator between God and man, but there are two between God and woman; one of them is the man Christ Jesus, and the other is the man you married. I watched two women get shorter that day.

If the women in your life get shorter around you, if your enacted theology kinks them into commas that pause before speaking, or quirks them into question marks that make every declaration a request for permission, then they are not encountering Jesus in you. But if the marks steadily climb the pantry door of your relationship with wife, daughter, colleague, or friend, and - perhaps this is the best test - if well-positioned men around you get "indignant" at you for it, then maybe Jesus showed up in the synagogue.

Seventh Day's the Charm Fourteenth Sunday After Pentecost August 25, 2013 Luke 13.10-20

            In 1836 a bill came before the English parliament aimed at enforcing strict blue laws on Sundays. Novelist Charles Dickens, under the pseudonym Timothy Sparks, fired off a little pamphlet opposing the legislation. In the opening lines of "Sunday Under Three Heads" he carps that:

Menial servants, both male and female, are specially exempted from the operation of the bill. 'Menial servants' are among the poor people. The bill has no regard for them. The Baronet's dinner must be cooked on Sunday, the Bishop's horses must be groomed, and the Peer's carriage must be driven.

           The law, Dickens sneers, requires leisure on Sunday for those already at leisure and sanctions labor on Sunday for those who have labored all week.

            Jesus has something of the same beef with the application of the Sabbath laws in his own day: They free the healthy to remain healthy and the sick to remain sick and, as a bonus, free the healthy from doing anything to heal the sick. A rich man can order his servant to untie his ox but God cannot order His Son to untie His daughter. Jesus argues that God's Sabbath frees the strong to heal and the weak to praise.

                        Jesus attempts two miracles here: to untwist a woman's spine and to untwist a ruler's mind. Only the first one really comes off. To be fair, the woman's backbone had only been corkscrewed for eighteen years; early training had doglegged the official's thinking from childhood.

            The counter-argument about coming on a different day falls pretty flat: This woman had gone 0-for-6 through eighteen years of Sundays-through-Fridays. The synagogue held no healing until the synagogue held Jesus. That may have been what really bugged this official: He'd rather Jesus not heal on the Sabbath day because he knew that he himself could not heal on any day. Dallas Willard insists that one dimension of The Kingdom Among Us is "power to work the works of the kingdom," and that "the world we live in desperately needs such works to be done."

            Perhaps if we follow Jesus so assiduously that a word spoken in His name will undo decades of demonic damage, we will no longer need laws that prevent soccer leagues from scheduling games on Sundays. Perhaps if we view worship as freedom of the strong to serve the weak, people will come without compulsion.

Fast and Loose,

Doug