Text — Luke 13:10-17

Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath.  11 And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight.  12 When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.”  13 When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God.  14 But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.”  15 But the Lord answered him and said, “You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water?  16 And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?”  17 When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame; and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing.

Last week I poked a little fun at John Edwards’ message: “We can do anything if we only believe in ourselves.”  That can be a helpful message, but the truth is, there’s a lot of good luck and bad luck involved.  Life isn’t always fair.  The blessings don’t get spread around evenly. 

But I like John Edwards, and when I read today’s gospel lesson I thought of another phrase of his — the “two Americas.”  He says, “There are those who will never have any financial worries.  And there are those who live on the edge, who can never save or get ahead, and if your child gets sick or you lose your job, you fall off the cliff.”  That’s part of Edward’s standard stump speech, and while it’s an oversimplification it’s an idea that’s worthy of our attention, so this morning I have my own examples of not two Americas but three Americas.

The first involves a woman I’ll call Janice, who lives in a facility in Meriden for people with mental illness.  She has a lot of emotional problems.  She’s married, but her husband is a drug user and has totally abandoned her.  She gets no financial support from him and lives on her $575 a month disability. 

Janice is in this facility not because she is so disabled but because there is no space a available for her in a group home.  So she spends all day, every day, sitting around with people who are virtually totally disabled from traumatic brain injury, or dementia, and so on.

Janice got a toothache.  She told the staff she needed to go to a dentist, which in her case, because she’s on social security and has no other income or assets, would be the Community Health Center Dental Clinic, just like the one in Middletown.

The staff told her, we’ll put you on the list.  She said, “But my tooth aches now.”  They said, “We’ll put you on the list.”  Everyday, she kept telling them that her tooth ached, but a week passed, then a week and a half.  Maybe they figured that Janice was just a complainer.  Maybe they just didn’t care that her tooth ached.  This went on for a couple of weeks until Janice’s face started to swell up. 

A staff person at this facility, not a nurse but general care-giver named Bonnie finally couldn’t stand it anymore and decided to take Janice herself, on her own time in her own car, to a private dental clinic rather than have her wait to get into the community health center.  When they got to the walk-in clinic, the clinic said they wouldn’t treat Janice unless she first paid $300 still owed for previous work.  So Bonnie took out her credit card and paid $300 so the dentist would see Janice that day.

Unfortunately, because all this time had passed, her mouth was so infected with an abscess that the dentist wouldn’t dare to pull the tooth.  She had to go to the hospital because the infection had spread in her body, to her heart, so now she had endocarditis — an infection of the heart valves, that required a prolonged hospitalization that cost thousands of dollars and left Janice with damaged valves in her heart. 

This sort of thing happens all the time.  And its just one of whole range of sad stories that Sandra and I hear in our contacts with people who are poor, disabled, addicted, abandoned, and weighed down by burdens that most of us will never have to carry.  That’s a story of one America, to use John Edwards’ terminology.  

The other story comes from our office manager, Ellen Little, who used to work for Kuhn Employment Services, an employment agency for people with mental retardation.  One of the companies that hires Kuhn employees is Bristol Myers Squibb.  Bristol Myers has a fitness gym for its employees where Kuhn employees clean the locker rooms and do the laundry.  Bristol Myers employees also support Kuhn through donations to United Way. 

One day, Ellen’s job to go to Bristol Myers with a fold out display with pictures so the employees at Bristol Myers could learn something about the Kuhn employees who cleaned the locker rooms and who are helped by their United Way donations.

When Ellen was talking toward the building from the parking lot that day, she noticed the big fast lawnmowers outside cutting a broad, lush, weedless lawn.  Several men were following the lawnmowers around with those powered leaf blowers, but there weren’t any leaves on the ground, and the grass clippings were being collected by the mower itself.  So she wondered, what are those leaf blowers for?

Ellen entered the building.  It was a very grandiose, marble walled lobby with an articificial waterfall and so on.  She set up her display near the corporate cafeteria with all the vendors who sell jewelry, and flowers, and watches, and greeting cards, and cosmetics, and clothing, in most large corporate office buildings.  No one actually stopped to see Ellen’s display that, but she stayed there anyway, and later in the afternoon she took her display back out toward the parking lot.  The lawnmowers were finished but several men with the leaf blowers who were still out there.

So Ellen asked someone, “What’s the story with the leaf blowers on the lawn?  There aren’t any leaves out there?”  The answer:  “That’s to make the blades of grass stand up straight and erase the tracks made by the lawnmower tires.  The guy there in the corner office likes it that way.”

This story makes me wonder.  In a world where a poor person with a toothache has so much trouble getting to see a dentist that she ends up with an infection that damages her heart, how does blow-drying the lawn so the blades of grass stand up straight like a butch haircut become a priority? 

After I heard Ellen’s story I did some research.  I found out that the CEO of Bristol-Myers was compensated $8.5 million in 2003, plus Mr. Dolan has $3.3 million in unexercised stock options from previous years.  He does pretty well, but not as well as Jack Rowe, the CEO of Aetna, another part of our health care system, who was awarded $16.2 million last year, plus he has $74 million in accumulated unexercised stock options.

Henry McKennell the CEO of Phizer, another local pharmaceutical company, in 2003 made $28 million and has another $30 in unexercised options.  Reuben Mark, CEO of Colgate Palmolive, $148 million in 2004.  George David, CEO of United Technologies, makes $70.5 million.

Forty years ago, it was considered fair for the highest paid worker in a company to make 50 times the lowest paid worker.  Today, in these corporations the highest paid worker makes 1000 times or more than the lowest paid worker.

So we have these two Americas, the one up in the corner office, the world of manicured lawns and Gulfstream jets, and Janice’s America.  And between these two is a large, third America, middle America, where most of us live.  And the question is: how do we relate to these other two Americas? 

Much of the time we don’t pay much attention to either one of those other two Americas.  It’s easy to look away from both, for different reasons.  But in this story of the bent-over woman Jesus is in conversation with both of these separated worlds.

He challenges the high and mighty who always find a reason to postpone or ignore the heavy burdens that others carry.  The ruler of the synagogue and the obscenely overpaid CEOs believe in the system the way it is.  They’re interested in keeping it that way.

Jesus is engaged with these people and challenges them on their own terms.  What is the true meaning of the Sabbath?  Is this about maintaining some abstract purity or holiness, or is it about helping people?

And Jesus is engaged with the woman who is suffering.  He turns to her.  He has compassion on her and helps her.  For Jesus, this is the true meaning of the Sabbath.  This is what the Sabbath is for.  He honors her by calling her a “daughter of Abraham.”

One of the things Sandra and I notice is that whenever we bring forward the need of an actual person or family in crisis, we get an outpouring of offers to help.  This is how we step into God’s kingdom.

Bonnie, who put down her credit card so Janice could see a dentist doesn’t make $25 million a year.  I don’t know if she makes $25,000 a year.  But she is a person whose heart and life are rich in the way that really matters.