"Tender Listening" | Liz Harlan-Ferlo | Sunday, August 24, 2025

Grant, oh merciful God, that your church, being gathered together in unity by your Holy Spirit, may show forth your power among all peoples to the glory of your name. Amen.

That was today's collect, in which we prayed for the unity of the church. Now, I don't know if you were here last week, but last week we heard Jesus say, “I come to bring fire to the earth. You think I have come to bring peace? No, but I tell you, but rather division.” So, I'm wondering how we find unity in that.

If we look for models of unity in the secular world, we don't find much help. Our country's government was designed specifically to avoid tyranny through democratic majority rule, and the unity required to get that majority, though, is often achieved by one leader called the whip—the person whose task is to push the members into voting the party line. And anyone awake to the original American sin of slavery may indeed wse at that title.

On the internet, a popular YouTube channel hosts debates set in a brick-walled warehouse. In these spectacles, one person with an incendiary view is surrounded by 20 people with opposite but equally incendiary views. The circle is certainly unified, and you can guess what kind of behavior ensues in that environment.

In both of these models, unity requires that some are bent into submission and whipped into weakness so that others emerge victorious. Never mind what or who is maimed or wounded along the way. Surely this is not the unity that we seek in our collect this morning.

In today's gospel, Jesus heals someone on the Sabbath. This is the third time that Luke describes Jesus breaking the law of the Sabbath, the one day held apart from worldly labor. But in this time, Jesus doubles down, performing Sabbath healing not out on the public street, but in a synagogue—a holy space.

Honoring the Sabbath is also an issue of unity for them. Jesus belongs to a community that is living under an oppressive state government. If we can't unify behind the sacred laws, the synagogue leader argues, how can we live in community together, let alone present a united face to our oppressor? That he oversteps this rule in a sacred place underlines the taboo in Jesus's act.

During this time of turbulence and distrust in the secular world, some argue the same about this sacred space. They say it should be a place where we do not highlight divisions. Indeed, in our liturgy today, we speak prayers and the creed in one voice. We sing in unison and in harmony because, Trinity, we all face the altar. A sacred space can seem, on its face, like a place where everyone is in lock step.

Now, I am a preacher’s kid, and I have spent a lot of time in sacred spaces—sometimes for worship, and sometimes just as a place to wait for my dad. And wait. And wait. And wait for him to finally be done with work. I also grew up primarily in rectories, which meant that I could often hear the opening hymn from my very own kitchen.

The January of my freshman year of high school, we moved to a new parish and a new rectory. The school I attended was affiliated with a Quaker community. That school remains the oldest continually operating co-ed school in New York City. And at its center is a traditional 19th-century meeting house of the Religious Society of Friends—Quakers. All students attend Quaker meeting as part of their school day.

Now I want to paint this picture for you because it still amazes me: 200 New York City adolescents, none of them Quaker by birth or practice, few of them even religious, sit on gray benches on all four sides of a monochrome high-ceiling room, facing into the center. There's no decoration except for the morning light pouring into plain six-foot windows. There’s no music but for the capricious city outside: ambulance sirens, engines accelerating down Third Avenue, the voices of people on the sidewalk, trucks beeping as they back up for deliveries. All of these are absorbed into the shared silence.

The 200 adolescents keep silence for 25 minutes.

Here is one formal description of Quaker meeting: it is that friends gather in silence, seeking communion with God and the opening of their hearts. During the meeting, individuals may feel moved to speak if they are led by the Spirit, in which case they will stand or come to the front. The call to ministry may come to any worshipper. The idea is that the more they listen, the more they become aware of and are able to follow spiritual leadings. It's important to listen tenderly to all messages, even those that may not seem to speak to one's own condition.

To listen tenderly to all messages, even those that may not seem to speak to one's own condition.

When we were teenagers at meeting, some of us were sleeping. Some of us were staring into space. Some of us were freaking out about an upcoming math test the next period or taking the opportunity to put an arm around a beloved. But we were practicing listening. We practiced silence to practice listening. Whether to the Spirit, or to each other, or our own hearts, we weren't all hearing the same thing. But we were all listening.

One way I have come to understand the concept of tender listening is the experience of talking with someone who speaks a heavily accented English or doesn't speak English well. I may not understand or align with their ideas, but I carefully attune the quality of my attention to work to catch the meaning of what they are trying to say. Or I might imagine a tender listening like hearing an eager preschooler describe something completely without context, or sharing at length a big nonsensical plan. The listening is founded on deep respect, not necessarily for what the words are being said, but for the dignity and love of that human being.

Silence and tender listening are also how Quakers come to decisions as a whole community. Quakers have no clergy, no hierarchy. They listen for what's called the sense of the meeting—that is, a perception that all are willing to support a course of action, even if every person is not equally enthusiastic about it. Listening for the sense of the meeting takes time—a lot of time—and it is a precious tool that is best reserved for major decisions. And it is also called being in unity with the decision.

Being in unity with the decision.

In today's gospel, we hear: Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath, and just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for 18 years. She was bent over and quite unable to stand up straight. When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up and began praising God.

One theologian asks us to consider that a spinal condition can actually limit your sight. If this woman has been bent over for years, it is only with difficulty that she may look all the way up at the sky, or even directly into the eyes of someone speaking to her. Thus, by this healing, Jesus heals her not only from a physical infirmity, but a social one—a literal position of subservience. Jesus demonstrates how liberatory healing can create sacred alignment of body, of soul, and of community understanding.

It is not an accident that Isaiah exhorts the listener to feed the hungry and help the afflicted, and then follows that immediately with a call to keep a holy Sabbath. For both Isaiah and Jesus, connection to the oppressed is the same as connection with God. Ought not this woman, says Jesus, a member of our community who has been suffering for 18 years, be set free from bondage on this Sabbath day?

God wants to set us free—not just from physical disfigurement, but also from the pain of only seeing half the world. God wants to free us from how we have bent and been bent, trying to fit ourselves into this human world of power.

The Sabbath, Jesus preaches in his actions, can release us to standing upright. It is a time to rest from the great pressure of the cruel society that weighs us down. Our own sanctuary, our community, can be a place to practice this tender listening, to practice attending to each other with the grace and love that Jesus shows us.

And although our Quaker siblings might say we have a long way to go to share their care for simplicity, we do share the values of peace and respect, what Quakers call the inner light of God in each of us.

When we pray for unity, my friends, we must be ready for transformation. For when we are raised up, we will see the world in a different way. Thus, we implore God to bend our bent spirits so that we may see each other and God face to face. We must ask no less than this, both in our Trinity community and in the whole human family.

Lord, hear our prayer. Amen.