From the Pulpit: Working for God

Who do you work for? Archbishop Jeremy Greaves of Brisbane, Australia, says it might not be who you think — or shouldn't be. 

Preaching from the Gospel story of Jesus healing a crippled woman, Archbishop Greaves said we are called to work for God, reaching those who, like the woman, are bent over with suffering:

And he lays his hands on her and immediately she stands up straight and tall praising God. And so if that’s a story that paints a picture of what it looks like to work for God, it might mean bending down to see those bent over by life’s burdens, bending down to see people crushed by poverty or illness or loneliness or injustice or despair.

It means standing with those who have been bent over for so long, excluded or marginalized, and doing that even when it disrupts our comfortable routines or challenges our assumptions.

Because most of us know what the darkness of being bent over feels like. Most of us have been in that place at one time or another, weighed down by everything that’s going on around us. We know the weight of deep division and uncertainty. We know the weight of all that is going on in our world and our lives, the weight of the climate crisis, the weight of housing, affordability and homelessness of racial injustice. And under the weight of that, so many of us are bowed down and feel tired and anxious or unheard or invisible. And in that place we can begin to feel afraid.

Fear is such a powerful force. Fear makes us grasp for certainty and control. It leads to building walls, drawing lines, and holding tightly to traditions and power in the church. It can turn us into a place of exclusion instead of welcome.

Jesus shows us a better way, a way of hope. And the woman is not only healed, but she stands straight and and tall and is able to praise God. She goes from that posture of brokenness to one of freedom and joy. And this is the hope that Jesus invites us into again and again and again, hope that begins in darkness, but insists on resurrection.