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Who’s Your Daddy?

The Rev. Canon George M. Maxwell, Jr.
The Cathedral of St. Philip
Atlanta, Georgia
26 August 2007
Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost – Year C

My wife tells a funny story about a young couple.  The first time he cooked dinner for her, he used a family recipe for that Southern delicacy know as “Coca-Cola ham.”  He brined the ham in Coke, rubbed it with herbs, cut off the ends and put it into the oven to roast.  She loved it -- but had one question.  “Why,” she asked, “do you cut off the ends of the ham before putting it into the oven?”  After speculating about the added flavoring from a higher sugar concentration and the delicate balance between the sugar and the acid, he finally admitted that he didn’t know.  He did it that way because his mother had done it that way.

When he took her home to meet his parents, she eagerly asked his mother the same question.  “Why do you cut off the ends of the ham before putting it into the oven?”  She didn’t know either.  She did it that way because her mother had done it that way.

Finally, the young woman got a chance to meet her boyfriend’s grandmother.  She couldn’t wait to pop the question.  “I love your recipe for Coca-Cola ham,” she said.  “But, I’m curious.  Why did you cut off the ends of the ham before putting it into the oven?”

“Because,” the grandmother answered, “the ham was always too big for my pan.”

I suspect many of us have been caught, at one time or another, doing things the old way without knowing why.  Most of us have had the experience of believing that something was important and then realizing that it really didn’t matter, or worse, didn’t even make any sense.  Sometimes this realization comes quickly – like the now famous slap on the forehead reminding us that we could have had something else.  But, sometimes it takes longer.  Sometimes we continue to stand behind the old rules until we come face to face with the pain that they are causing someone else.

It seems like the rules that are the hardest to change are the ones that create differences between us – the ones that we use to distinguish what is right from what is wrong and who is in from who is out.  They can be as simple as whether you wear seersucker after labor day or use middle names on your wedding invitations, and as sophisticated as whether your gender, skin color or sexual orientation is acceptable for your position.

This, I think, is what the healing of the bent woman is really about.  Jesus heals the woman on the Sabbath.  The Sabbath is a holy time.  It was not just a day of rest, or a day of prayer.  It was not just a day to forget about checklists or to take an afternoon nap.  It was a day to feast and to sing and to put on your best coat.  It was a day on which married couples spent time with each other.  It was a day to celebrate creation.   

It makes sense that rules emerged for remembering and observing the Sabbath.  We need rules to remember who we are.  They tell us things we need to know – things that our mothers and fathers spent years learning.  The Jews did things a particular way because they learned over time that doing things that way allowed them to grow in their relationship with God.  They learned that if they stopped creating things for themselves that they remembered more clearly that it is really God who had created them.  And, they weren’t hard hearted.  They understood the need for healing.  But, they came to believe that, if healing can wait for a day, then it should. 

The point of the story, then, is not that rules are bad, but that we often find ways of using even good rules to do bad things.  On the day that the community comes together to praise God, a misshapen woman is being isolated.  She doesn’t even have a name.  She is known only by what’s wrong with her – like a patient in the hospital known only as the “broken leg” in room 124, or the “collapsed lung” in room 312.  She doesn’t look like everybody else and can’t do what everybody else is doing.  Her back is so twisted by her burden that she can only see the ground in front of her.

Jesus has compassion on her.  In healing her, he loosens the bonds of her isolation, and frees her to rejoin the community.  She raises her eyes to heaven and praises God with everybody else.  She takes her place in the circle as a daughter of Abraham, an inheritor of the blessing, a beneficiary of the Biblical promise.  And, the people rejoice at her return.  She is part of the body and they feel the added strength of her presence.

The leader of the synagogue objects, but I suspect that he is acting out of fear.  He’s pretending to be concerned about the sanctity of the rules, but I suspect that he’s really afraid that some of the community’s burdens must be born by someone outside of the circle and, if it’s not her, then it might have to be him. 

Here’s the key, I think.  Creation is ongoing.  It is not just something that God did way back when.  It is something that God is continuing to do now.  And, to really celebrate the work of creation, we need to keep our eyes on that person barely visible just outside of the circle.  They are easy to miss, easy to overlook.   But, their faces will tell us if our rules are doing what they are supposed to do.  Their faces will tell us if the rules that we hoped would keep us on the straight and narrow are in fact bending us out of shape.  And, when we reach out to them, we will be saving ourselves.

Compassion is the guiding light of creation.  

Fred Craddock, who used to teach at Emory, tells of meeting a man one day in a restaurant.

“You a preacher?” the man asked.

Somewhat embarrassed, Craddock said, “Yes.”

The man pulled a chair up to Craddock’s table. “Preacher, I’ll tell you a story. There was once a little boy who grew up sad.  Life was tough because my mama had me but she had never been married.  Do you know how a small Tennessee town treats people like that?  Do you know the words they use to name kids that don’t have no father?

“Well, we never went to church, nobody asked us.  But for some reason or other, we went to church one night when they was having a revival.  They had a big, tall preacher, visiting to do to the revival and he was all dressed in black.  He had a thunderous voice that shook the little church.

“We sat toward the back, Mama and me.  That preacher got to preaching, about what I don’t know, stalking up and down the aisle of that little church preaching.  It was something.

“After the service, we were slipping out the back door when I felt that big preacher’s hand on my shoulder.  I was scared.  He looked way down at me, looked me in the eye and says, ‘Boy, who’s your Daddy?’

“I didn’t have no Daddy.  That’s what I told him in trembling voice, ‘I ain’t got no Daddy.’

“‘O yes you do,’ boomed that big preacher, ‘you’re a child of the Kingdom, you have been bought with a price, you are a child of the King!’

“I was never the same after that.  Preacher, for God’s sake, preach that.”

The man pulled his chair away from the table.  He extended his hand and introduced himself. Craddock said the name rang a bell.

He was the legendary former governor of the state of Tennessee.

Please note: I borrowed the Fred Craddock story from a sermon that William Willimon preached at the Duke Chapel on August 23, 1998, titled “What’s in a Name?”  Although Willimon doesn’t identify the name of the governor in the story, I believe it is Ben Walter Hooper, who was the governor of Tennessee from 1911 until 1915.

Comments? Contact The Rev. Canon George M. Maxwell, Jr. at: gmaxwell@stphilipscathedral.org

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