“Our Past and God’s Healing”

Original sermon given on Sunday, August 24, 2025, written and delivered by guest preacher Rev. Dr. Chad Lakies at First Saint Paul’s Lutheran Church.
Rev. Dr. Chad Lakies is the Vice President for Ministry Engagement with Lutheran Hour Ministries. His work centers around helping the church become more outreach focused by empowering it to share the Gospel with non-churched individuals at more personal levels.

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“Our Past and
God’s Healing”

Luke 13:10-17

Luke 13:10-17

In the name of the living God and the risen Christ. Amen.

Two people: a striving synagogue leader and a crippled woman.

Five keywords: deformed, striving, our past, grace, beautiful.

I recently saw a video of a young couple who were walking down the street. They were being filmed by somebody with a phone. It was staged situation to some extent, but it seems that only one member of the couple was aware someone was filming them. As the couple was walking, the man put his arm around the woman and in the process, he stuck a note to her back that read “please tell me I’m pretty.” Soon after, a handful of people stopped the couple just to pay compliments to the woman. She was stunned and surprised, placing her hand on her chest as if such compliments were taking her breath away. She was unaware of the circumstances that produced such a moving sense of surprise and genuinely good news.

First, we have the woman in the gospel today. Eighteen years she was hobbled by a crooked spirit, unable to stand up straight. She likely experienced both physical and social pain every day. Physical because her posture made work, sleep, walking, etc. difficult. Social because people in her day were no different than people are now — we’re all tempted to distance ourselves from those who seem in some way abnormal and not like us. For eighteen years this was her life. This long season of her past shaped who she was. Perhaps she had run out of hope that she would ever live differently. Perhaps she imagined that she might die deformed, bent in a way bodies shouldn’t be. Then one day, Jesus shows up and heals her completely. She didn’t deserve it. There was nothing special about her suffering compared to anyone else’s. Jesus simply just acted out of his love for her, the same love he has for us all.

 We too walk through life deformed with marks of abnormality. Perhaps it’s our sinfulness, our unfaithfulness to what God calls us both to do and not to do — this is an obvious one for us Christians. Spiritually speaking, we are deformed, bent inwardly, focused on ourselves and our own needs. For this we are constantly called to repent. We’re also abnormal in our weirdness, our eccentricity. There are things we like, habits we have, thoughts we think that make us wonder “Am I the only one?” We often hide these parts of ourselves, trying to play it safe in order to avoid social rejection. And we’re abnormal in that perhaps we struggle with long term physical, mental, or emotional traumas that haunt us daily due to difficult times we’ve endured before, the memories of which constantly lurk in our past. Perhaps it’s been eighteen years, perhaps more, perhaps less.

Then we have the synagogue leader who watched Jesus heal this woman on the Sabbath. One has to wonder what lurked in this man’s past, especially as he tries to shame Jesus for healing the woman on the Sabbath. Jesus puts him in his place of course, but it seems clear he was trying to appear righteous in that moment, as someone who knew what rules to follow. In trying to follow them, he seems to be drawing attention to himself, signaling his virtuousness in that moment by unwittingly calling out the Lord of the Universe. Like all of us, he just wanted to be right, and for everyone around him to know it.

We too struggle with such striving, but maybe not exactly like the religious leader. Rather, we simply struggle be right — in our arguments, in the positions we adhere to, in our beliefs about the world, in our efforts to explain ourselves when people confront us. In all these things, we want to be right.

What’s more, we all struggle with feeling like we are worthy, that we are enough. This is a common human struggle. The man was trying to show he was enough. The woman may not have been sure she was enough, worthy of the healing she received. We’re no different from them. As the writer David Zahl puts it,

You hear about people scrambling to be successful enough, happy enough, thin enough, wealthy enough, influential enough, desired enough, charitable enough, woke enough, good enough. We believe instinctively that, were we to reach some benchmark in our minds, the value, vindication and love would be ours — that if we got enough, we would be enough.

This striving signals that we believe we haven’t arrived. That we aren’t enough.

Our efforts to be enough are like pinning signs to our back asking for compliments, affirmation, acceptance. The long tail of history we carry in our bones is in part the very struggles of life in which we’ve wrestled with ourselves. We just want to be enough. To be seen, and treated as worthy, like Jesus did with the woman.

Here’s the good news: God has given the fullness of himself, becoming more than enough for all of us. Jesus Christ, the very Son of God, shed all the privileges of his Godhood to give his life for you, pushing aside the wrath of God and making clear the path for us to receive the love of our Creator. The exhaustion that’s generated in you by all the striving to simply be enough or show your worth can finally come to an end. You can rest in this good news.

When we finally hear and believe the Gospel, it’s as if we’re the woman in the video who experienced all the compliments. The writer of Ecclesiastes says that God has made everything beautiful in its time. Embracing the Gospel is like receiving the greatest of all compliments, and we’re left awestruck. Really? Me? Beautiful? Worthy? Are you serious? Discovering the good news of the Gospel, of God’s exceedingly abundant grace for us, is like being told over and over again how beautiful we are, except the compliments aren’t about our outward appearance — the part of us that everyone else sees — but the inner life constituted by our past, our histories of foibles and failings, our traumas, our shame, guilt, selfishness, pride, and regret.

The writer James K. A. Smith describes the grace of God we encounter in the Gospel as something we should imagine not as “a retroactive magic that makes evil good… Grace doesn’t justify evil,” he says. “Grace overcomes it.” The light of God’s grace does not erase the shadows cast by our past. Our past, our history is still with us — in a way it’s not even past because our history is what we’re talking about when we talk about “us.” This kind of grace is what the woman in our story experienced when Jesus healed her. She’ll always be the woman who was hobbled by a body bent out of shape before Jesus came along. That would always be her story.

Our past doesn’t change when we experience God’s grace. What changes, Smith says, is “who is with us and what God can do with our suffering” and our histories. “Shame,” he says, “teaches me to look at my past and see something hideous that makes me regret my existence. In grace, God looks at my past and sees a sketch of a work of art that he wants to finish and show the world. In the hands of such and artist … all my weaknesses are openings for strength, the proverbial cracks that let the light in. Even my sins and struggles hold the possibility for compassion and sympathy. Only such a God could make even my vices the soil in which he could grow virtue.”

The work of Stephen ministers is nothing other than an extension of the healing grace of Jesus that we witness in our Gospel for today. Stephen ministers come alongside us in our struggles — whether we’re talking about our striving to be enough, or the long-term pains we carry in our bones, lingering from past traumas and difficulties — all are marks we bear today that will always make us who we are. Stephen ministers will play the role of Jesus in helping us to discover that God is nevertheless at work in and through us, his grace making every part of our lives something like a beautiful work of art. Their compassion will help us more strongly embrace that truth, because their very work with and for us is itself a glimpse of God’s work in our lives.

Smith comments that, “The grace of the Gospel is not a time machine nor a reset button.” So there is no going back. Rather, grace is a restoration, one only possible in the hands of the maker of all things, the one who knows our back parts and sees beauty in all the possibilities of our future.

Made you’ve heard the good news sneak up behind you again today. If you struggle to believe it, ask God to help you trust him, to help you truly embrace the Gospel. It’s the best news we’ll ever hear. It’s changed everything for us and for our future. And it’s a story given to us to steward and pass on. Tell it to your children and grandchildren. Share it with your friends and neighbors. Let them know, as it were, that they’re beautiful. May the Good News of the Gospel of Jesus go out from us always until Christ draws all things unto himself.

God grants this to us because of Jesus.

Amen.