A man once bought a donkey from a preacher. The preacher told the man that this donkey had been trained in a very unique way. The only way to make the donkey go was to say, "Hallelujah!" The only way to make the donkey stop was to say, "Amen!"   The man immediately got on the animal to try out the preacher's instructions. "Hallelujah!" shouted the man. The donkey began to trot. "Amen!" shouted the man. The donkey stopped immediately. "This is great!" said the man.  So, with a "Hallelujah," he bought the animal and rode off very proud of his new purchase.  To get home the man had to travel for a long time through some mountains, and he found himself heading towards a cliff.  Worryingly, he had been going for so long without a break that he could not remember the word to make the donkey stop. "Stop," said the man. "Halt!" he cried. The donkey just kept going.  Getting more desperate he yelled "Er... Bible!....Church!... Oh, please Stop!!" But the donkey just kept on trotting, getting closer and closer to the edge of the cliff.  With no other hope of survival, the rider turned to prayer. "Please, Lord, make this donkey stop before I go off the end of this mountain, AMEN."  And the donkey came to an abrupt stop just one step from the edge of the cliff.  The man breathed a sigh of relief, turned his eyes to heaven and cried "HALLELUJAH!"

Let me ask you a question.  Are donkeys more important than people?  Silly question.  Of course, not.  Human beings are the pinnacle of God’s creation; we believe that God created human beings in his own image.  We bear the likeness of the Creator.  God became incarnate as human being, not a donkey or any other species.  But, some people have thought otherwise.  For example, in 2003 a woman named Dorothy Little of Galashiels, Scotland died with no relatives and left three million pounds ($4.5m) to horticultural and animal charities, including a donkey sanctuary.  She left not one penny to any human being or any charity that benefits human beings.  Again, the British tabloid the Daily Mail ran this headline a couple of years ago: “A heart rending dispatch from Ethiopia” – this a country in which 75,000 children are suffering from severe malnutrition, 73% of the female population undergoes mutilation, only 22% of the population has access to a proper water supply, and only 13% to adequate sanitation.  But none of that worries Liz Jones of the Daily Mail: “What I will remember most about my trip to Ethiopia is the sight of the grain market, held just outside the small town of Hosanna, where mules are used for the terrible task of carrying grain because they are bigger and stronger than donkeys.”  Around her children are dying of malnutrition and what she will remember most is the mules.  But even worse than that, I suspect, is this example of thinking donkeys are more important than people.  On January 26 2003, terrorists booby-trapped a donkey and sent it towards a group of people at a bus stop south of Jerusalem.  The following month Ingrid Newkirk, president of the animal rights group PETA wrote to Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat: "Your Excellency, If you have the opportunity, will you please add to your burdens my request that you appeal to all those who listen to you to leave the animals out of the conflict?"  She was then asked by the Washington Post whether she would also criticize the attempt by the terrorists to kill civilians but she said it was not her business to do so.

Is a donkey worth more than a human being?

Well the Pharisees in today’s Gospel reading thought so.

So this morning’s event from the life of Jesus sees the doctor Luke reporting on two of his favourite subjects – sickness (Jesus meets a person who has been disabled for eighteen years), and women (the patient is female).  Now, the establishment figures are the baddies of the piece, as they often are in the Gospels.  The religious leaders had dehumanized this suffering woman.  They saw her as unimportant – in fact they complained that it was the Sabbath, and the Scriptures forbid people to work on the Sabbath, so therefore it was against God’s word for Jesus to heal this woman.  You can see how their thinking went.  Their error was not their logic, but their absence of any hint of compassion.  And Jesus cuts straight to the point and says to them, “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?  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?”  In other words, you will ‘work’ on the Sabbath if it means taking care of your donkey, but you disapprove of helping human beings on the Sabbath?  Huh?  Are donkeys more important than people?  And Luke concludes with the statement, “When he said this all his opponents were humiliated.”  I bet they were.

For the Pharisees religious correctness was more important than this human being.  After all, they reasoned, she was only a woman, and a disabled woman at that.  They dehumanized her – made her less than human.  But Jesus sees her true humanity, her value in God’s eyes, her dignity as a creature made in God’s own image, her immense worth to God as a precious child of his making.  Jesus saw right past her gender, her disability, and her circumstances, and saw the child of God.   He understood that it was not her disability that dehumanized her, but the Pharisees.  They who saw her as less important than a donkey.

Jesus calls her to the center of the synagogue, symbolically challenging the traditional role of women on the margins of religious life.  He touches her, which was a risky thing to do for a rabbi because it could have potentially made him ritually unclean.  Then he calls her "daughter of Abraham".  That phrase is never used in any Jewish literature before this.  Jesus recognizes that she is God’s child in her own right, and not by virtue of having a Jewish father or husband.   Then he heals on the Sabbath. Enough said. And finally he states that her suffering was caused by Satan, and implies it was not punishment from God.  This single act that took a few seconds was pregnant with reasons why good traditionalist religious types would be a bit upset.

Yet Jesus is not afraid of what people with think of him.  He loves.  And his love is not deterred by other people’s disapproval.  He reaches out and he heals.  I came across this wonderful piece of writing that tells this event through the eyes of the woman.  It’s by Mark Trotter who is a pastor in Ohio.  “I feel as though I live in a plastic bubble. It surrounds me, but it cannot be seen. I see everyone around me, I hear them speak. Behind their words, they hide from me. They look at me and think they know me. But they don't see my bubble; they don't look long enough to see it. I try to talk with them, to share myself, but my words return, unlistened to. And nobody hears.

I move through the days insulated in my protective bubble. I reach out to ones that I love, but they don't notice. They don't feel my need. When I extend my hand, no one takes it. Heavy hearted, I withdraw it, vowing never to offer it again. I call to those around, I beg, "Please, help me. Please touch me. Please love me." And nobody hears.

Though not made of plastic my bubble is real. It is comprised of many things. The sting of harsh words, spoken thoughtlessly. The heartache of love unrequited. The disappointment of a trust broken. The guilt of mistakes past. The terror of, again, being rejected. These things envelop me, isolate me; in my torment I scream, but it is silent. And nobody hears.

I sought escape from my invisible prison. I looked for someone, some person who would see my bubble and free me of it. I searched for years, to naught. And then, when all seemed hopeless, I turned my eyes in a new direction. There he stood, arms outstretched, beckoning me. He spoke to me. He touched me.

Then I understood what I should have always known. Through all the empty years and broken dreams, I never had been alone. He was always there, just waiting for me to call. I closed my eyes and whispered, "God, please help me. Please touch me. Please love me."  And he heard.”

I wonder if any of us here are in a bubble, and needing God to release us.

Today, as we look around the world we can see so many things that dehumanize.  These are things that take this wonderful, complex, beautiful, unique, God-like thing called a woman or a man or a boy or a girl, and try to turn it into something that it less than that.

Here are a few obvious ones:

·         Political regimes.  Totalitarian states where a person’s freedom to worship or speak freely or assemble are denied fall into this category.  These regimes see human beings as disposable in the pursuit of a greater state, or where people are less human because of their ethnicity.

·         Some employment practices around the world and also at home.  Workers are robbed of their dignity as they become a commodity to be used as management thinks fit, to be exploited like a piece of machinery, or downsized for the sake of making shareholders wealthier.  And there’s the dehumanization of global markets, which have created a sense that people are just pawns in some giant chess game that we don‘t understand and can’t influence.  So some powerful person makes a decision in Wall Street, or Tokyo, or London and someone in Fremont loses their job, or their mortgage becomes unaffordable.

·         Consumerism, I believe, is another dehumanizing thing.  That all we are shoppers.  That’s our purpose.  We exist to buy things.  Our needs are only material and they can be met by the latest technology.  Buy and enjoy, and when it wears out or becomes less fashionable or is superseded by even better technology or something more stylish or glamorous throw it away and get the new one.  But our spending power and our stuff do not define who we are – and if we let it then we go along with the dehumanizing process.

·         Then there’s the rat-race.  The effects that an increasingly mobile world has upon families, communities, and individual people.  There’s a kind of zombification in the commuter who goes to the city each day.  People surrounded by 5 million others in a big city can be the loneliest people on the planet.  All in the interests of getting on, working a bit harder, earning a bit more, getting a bit of promotion, so they can get a bigger house, so they can work a bit harder, earn a bit more, get a bit of promotion, get a bigger house.  But at what price?   Their humanity; as they become drained of love, community, imagination, creativity and all the other things that make us human. 

·         Then there’s the vast and tragic catalogue of self-destructive behaviours that we live with.  There are addictions – the ones we classically identify and diagnose like alcoholism and narcotics, gambling, shopping, eating, sex.  But those other compulsive behaviours that we all have.  The compulsion to be popular, to succeed, to be acceptable, to anything actually.  Those pressures we feel – sometimes from the culture around us and sometimes from the frailties within us – to obsessively pursue something that will give us a rush, and make us feel loved and powerful and alive, even if it is only for a few brief minutes.  Now please note I’m not criticizing people who suffer from compulsive behaviours – partly because I believe just about everybody has compulsive behaviours, and partly because that would be what the Pharisees did.  No, I’m pointing to the things that dehumanize, not the victims. 

I wonder if you’re feeling in need this morning of a touch from God.  Are you feeling dehumanized by life?  Well, come to Christ this morning and experience him restore your humanity.