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What is it with Jesus and eating with Pharisees? As we travel to Luke’s house for the final time this summer we meet Jesus in a recognizable place. He’s been invited for another meal, this time on the Sabbath, and each and every time he eats with the leaders of the synagogue controversies follow: there are endless complaints that he eats with tax collectors and sinners; there’s the “sinful” woman who anoints Jesus; and now inappropriate healing – healing on the Sabbath.

There is a woman in Chicago who is working in a healing ministry and is giving hope to those who seemingly have very little hope. You wouldn’t think they would have much to sing about, but this woman has taught this group to sing. At Old St. Patrick’s Church in downtown Chicago, a chorus of voices fills the ornate sanctuary. On this particular day, the regular choir is joined by a group of women from the city’s South Side.

The environment they come from is very different from downtown -- vacant lots, abandoned buildings, poverty. But now the women live at the church along with their children. It’s a shelter for the homeless, the abused, and the addicted.

The woman’s name is Marge Nykaza and she has brought music into the world of the homeless by creating a group called Harmony, Hope and Healing. With a song, she wants to put these women on the path to healing and she trains choirs in a variety of shelters around the city. Some of those choirs perform in public, a place these women never thought they would find themselves.
Marge says when you hear these women sing you realize they are an instrument of God; that being in the choir is a way of living in harmony; being a person of hope. When you sing, she says, you’re feeling everything is right in your spirit, in your world, and with God.

Lori Williams and Gail Torres are both recovering addicts -- both divorced, both with children, but to be in the choir, it doesn’t make a difference if they can’t read the notes. What does make a difference is the choir puts in place a structure that helps them live without addiction; to fulfill their dreams; to be closer to God, to have a chance to live a dignified life, and to taste wholeness and healing (1)
Jesus gave the man with dropsy a chance to live a dignified life; to be an instrument of God, to taste wholeness and healing. In the midst of potential controversy,

A healing, even before the meal begins, brings a taste wholeness, a flavor of healing, a spice of restoration. Looking at the swollen and deformed body of the man with dropsy, we see the instrument of God that will bring the Pharisees to their knees.

Do you know what dropsy is?
Dropsy is no longer used in medical literature, but it’s a condition better known as edema and edema refers to the swelling of the body due to excess fluid. Arms and legs, neck and face are all puffed-up, inflated, distended, filled to the maximum with fluid. And dropsy can be an indication of congestive heart failure or kidney disease. So the man with dropsy is tremendously bloated and swollen, malformed and misshapen. He suffers terribly.

But dropsy has another meaning. In antiquity, the metaphorical use of “dropsy” is a label for the greedy, the rapacious, the predatory – much like the hawk-eyed Pharisees. The presence of the man with dropsy would constitute a vivid parable of Jesus’ socially elite Pharisaical table companions. Just as the man with dropsy stood before Jesus, so too, around the table, sat persons whose disorder was no less damaging. (2)

This summer I had an opportunity to teach a class at Rider University entitled Holistic Wellness Counseling. It’s a course for the Master in Counseling program. I was asked to teach the counselors-in-training about faith issues, religious beliefs and the role in healing and wholeness in therapy.

During the class someone asked the question, “Does the church have anything to say about suffering that could help us as counselors?” “Does the church have anything to say about suffering that could help us as counselors?” Yes, the church, through our Lord, has a great deal to say about suffering that helps us all.

As we travel to Luke’s house, Jesus by his actions, more than words, addresses suffering and healing as the redemptive work of God. Laws or no laws; healing is Sabbath work. And the man with dropsy is the one for whom Jesus breaks the Sabbath law; for whom the redemptive work of God cracks open the law; and for whom the Kingdom of God breaks forth. And before anyone can crash in with an argument, a controversy, a crisis-- Jesus lifts up his voice:
“If one of you has a child who has fallen into a well, will you not immediately pull your child out on a sabbath day?”
No one could say a word…

Right before our eyes we’re presented with a most startling juxtaposition: on the one hand, a man so misshapen and malformed so enslaved to his ailment, so bloated that he can no longer balance himself. And on the other hand a group of religious folks so misshapen by their own presumptions, so overly full of themselves, so distended and puffed up that they are imprisoned by the law and bent out of shape. They are all beloved children of God; all in need of healing.

Let’s go back to the Harmony, Hope and Healing Choir at Old St. Patrick’s Church in Chicago. The best medicine they receive for recovery is learning to embrace themselves as beloved children of God. At first Marge says, many of the women are reluctant to sing and many simply mouth the words to a song. But now it’s not about am I a singer? It’s about am I using my God-given instrument in a positive way and do I recognize God’s beauty within. When I look into the faces of the singing women, she says, I see God. I see God.

One of the choir members, Cherisse Ellis, learned to sing when she was three years old. As an adult, she became addicted to drugs and alcohol. She lost custody of her children, and she has suffered from cancer. But she has hope. She says “to be in harmony with myself when there was a time I could never forgive myself for the harm that I’ve done to my family, to my children, to myself, and to my body—O but there’s harmony today because I can hold my head up.” (4)
What stands against wholeness and healing, holding our heads up, are all the puffed up voices that tell us: you’re hopeless, you’re pathetic, you’re damaged, unworthy of love, you’re down deep in a well – beyond reach.
And the loudest of these voices may be on the inside.
Yet the Christ of the Sabbath says:
Nothing is beyond reach when you recognize your own.
And so we are.
And so is the world.

1- PBS, Religion and Ethics Newsweekly. Judy Valent, interviewer. Feature: Homeless Choir. December 30, 2005, Episode 918. Educational Broadcasting Corp., www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics.

2- Joel B. Green. The Gospel of Luke.. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 546-7, 1997. As quoted by Brian P. Stoffregen. Crossmarks Exegetical Notes on Luke 14. Proper 17, Year C. www.crossmarks.com.

3- Inspired by Miguel de Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life. Trans. J. E. Crawford Flitch. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1954, 133-139.

4- PBS, Religion and Ethics Newsweekly. Judy Valent, interviewer. Feature: Homeless Choir. December 30, 2005, Episode 918. Educational Broadcasting Corp., www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics.