When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.”

Freedom is a special and powerful word in our nation and in our culture. Everyone is in favor of freedom, at least until the freedom of others infringes upon us or offends us or scares us or just ticks us off.

That’s why we get caught up in so many arguments over freedom and what the limits are, if there are any: What does freedom of speech mean in a foul-mouthed, ugly thinking, talk-radio society? What does the freedom to bear arms mean in a technologically advanced age that can produce weapons that Madison, Jefferson and the others would never have imagined? And of course, most currently, what does freedom of religion mean when the religion wants to build a place of worship in a place that others consider inappropriate?

And today Luke brings us a story about faith and freedom.

For eighteen years a woman had been living bent over, shuffling painfully through life, until this particular Saturday when she had come to the synagogue, expecting to go through her normal rituals and then shuffle her way home again.

Perhaps she had heard that the young teacher, Jesus of Nazareth, was in town and maybe she wanted to hear what he had to say, to learn what the fuss was all about.

I doubt she expected to have him single her out, call her over, proclaim her free from her ailments and then, with a touch, allow her to stand tall and straight for the first time in almost two decades!

And that is a nice story, I’m glad to hear that the woman was able to straighten up and walk, but I think there’s something more here that just that.

And it isn’t so much about her physical healing, after all we have all known any number of people who have had long-term afflictions, many for more than this woman’s eighteen years, and we haven’t got a clue as to how to make them better and the story doesn’t help with that.

Luke just tells us that she got better and he leaves it there

When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.”

And that’s the end of the story, or almost the end of the story.

Except for thee things that Luke slips into the story and they may have gone unnoticed, but they shouldn’t.

First of all she stood straight and began praising God.

I missed it, earlier in the week when I was working on this sermon, and I’ll bet that most people miss it when they read or hear this story.

Think about people, whom you and I know, with a problem, an illness, a job loss, a failure or disappointment of some sort. And include those people who are getting ready for something good, couples planning a wedding or awaiting a birth, something like that. In the time leading up to the crisis, or the celebration, it is not unusual for them, for us, to be anxious and quite willing to include God in what is going on. Prayers abound for healing or blessing or health, individual worship attendance improves, then the moment comes and the attention to God starts to fade, doesn’t it?

But this woman praised God after the healing.

It was her first reaction and it came so quickly that Luke includes it in the same sentence as the gift of freedom itself: she stood straight and began praising God.

When you and I are set free from whatever – we recover from an illness, or a cloud of worry is removed from us, or we are freed from a lifetime of loneliness by the love of a spouse or a friend, or when we are freed from the emptiness of life by the birth of a child - that is the time when our prayers should begin and that is too often the time when our prayers end.

You see freedom is not a disentanglement from life, it is the ability to choose our entanglements and that choosing works best when the first and foundational choice is to entangle ourselves with God.

Or, to put it better, when we choose to recognize that we are entangled with God, because all people are God’s people, whether they know it or not, and therefore all people are in a relationship – unique and sacred – with God.

Those who recognize that relationship respond with praise, and are able to see the other choices of life clearly. Those who don’t try to make their other choices as if their hearts are not connected to the heart of their creator, and good luck with that. So here is the first thing to be said about the living of a life of freedom: it begins with praise and commitment to God.

she stood straight and began praising God.

And then immediately she had to deal with those who didn’t want her to be free.

After all, it was the wrong day for curing people.

The leaders of the Synagogue kept saying that, but people knew better and when Jesus called the leaders out on it the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing.

Now, of course, that’s an easy one for us to make fun of, in our tradition we aren’t like those ancient Jewish leaders, we are so much more sophisticated than that, we understand that people come before rules.

Or do we?

Who are the people that we don’t want free?

Even here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, aren’t we a bit uncomfortable with those whose freedom offends us?

Freedom from illness, or freedom from conformity to society, is always going to make life different, and different means things change and things changing means – well, change is the product of God’s work in our lives and our job is not to ignore or stifle that work, but to recognize it, assist it and celebrate it.

And it isn’t only on broad cultural issues that God is at work. God is there in the changes of our families. Our young people, as is true for every generation, are getting older in a world that their parents neither know nor understand; our older folks, as is true for every generation, are aging into a world that is increasingly frustrating, as minds and bodies betray and society ignores; and those in the middle years, as is true for every generation, are burdened with the bills and obligations and pressures of the everyday existence and it is so hard for any of us to find the time to step away and see the bigger picture of God’s working in our lives.

I hope you each had a chance to do that, that’s what the next two weeks are about in my life, because I know that it is there. The bigger picture is there especially in the changes and the growth.

It doesn’t come according to our careful schedules but it does come according to God’s plans and dreams for our lives.

It comes when we set ourselves, and those whom we love, free from yesterday’s sins and errors, free from tomorrow’s fears and darkness, free to live this day as the people we are on this day.

No, your children, your parents, your spouse, your friends and your Church are not what they used to be, they and you are free from all of that.

Nor are they what they are going to be, but that story will be written in the time to come, and they and you are free from worrying about that.

But we are all here today, as we are today, free to live and to love and to be loved.

And if you start each day with a prayer of gratitude to God for your freedom you will find ways to understand the freedom of others. When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.”

So she used her freedom to praise God and to deal with the people who didn’t want her to change and that brings us to the third thing.

She took her freedom, she stood tall and she went back to her life, never to be heard from again except among her own circle of friends and family.

But how differently she must have lived!

We can’t know for sure, but I don’t think it is hard to imagine what her life became.

No longer bent over in pain, no longer limited in what she could do, she took her freedom into her day to day existence with a new energy, a new commitment demonstrating what God’s love and freedom could mean in the life of a single person.

That’s what Isaiah was talking about in words that need to shouted around the world, around our nation, in the power offices of Trenton and Washington, in the valleys of Wall Street, in the offices and factories and in the classrooms and faculty rooms and at the kitchen tables, here is what God wants from you and me and us together: loose the bonds of injustice, undo the thongs of the yoke, let the oppressed go free, share your bread with the hungry, bring the homeless poor into your house, cover the naked, remove the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil and your light shall rise in the darkness, the Lord will guide you and satisfy your needs and make your bones strong. If you honor the Sabbath, not going your own way and serving your own interest, or pursuing your own affairs, then you shall take delight in the Lord and ride upon the heights of the earth.

Are we listening to that? Remove the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil. Are we listening to that?

Or are we so anxious to be right that we have forgotten how to do right?

I don’t care what they are saying these days in Washington or Trenton or on Wall Street, as my old friend Bruce sings “I got no time for the corner boys, down in the street making all that noise”, I don’t have time for arguments about where to put a Mosque, I want to hear what God is saying in Isaiah, because here’s where I find what what God promises and there has not been a political or economic leader who can promise and deliver this:

You shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail. Your ancient ruins – all those old dreams and visions and realities and relationships - shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in.

That’s freedom.

It starts with praise.

It teaches us to live with those who don’t want us to be different, those who don’t want us to be freer than we were, freer than they are.

And it gives us an energy and joy for life that is the true life, the life that we have been created to live.

So what is it that is holding us back?

What do you and I need to be set free from?

What are the disabilities that we need to be set free from?

What are the prejudices and blind hatreds that we need to be set free from?

What are the fears of illness and aging and death that we need to be set free from?

What are the insecurities about our appearance or intelligence or ability that we need to be set free from?

Whatever it is that is holding us back, Christ is calling us over, to this table, to heal us and to set us free.

And then, once we are healed, we need to follow that woman.

We need to praise God.

We need to move beyond those who would hold us back.

We need to go into our lives, no longer constrained by our weakness but empowered by God’s strength.

This is what it means to be free.

Free from all those bad choices we have made in the past.

Free from the weariness of life, day-to-day.

Free from all that those future fears that haunt us.

When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.”