Emmanuel Baptist Church
275 State St. Albany, NY 12210
(518) 465-5161
Click here for directions
Minister: Rev. Kathy J. Donley
Extreme Makeover: Jesus Edition
Rev. Kathy Donley
2/12/2012
Scripture Lesson: Mark 2:1-12
Last Sunday, at the FOCUS worship service, the good folks serving communion accidentally overlooked a woman when they passed the bread trays. She was missed because she was not sitting in the pews and therefore, not in the plan for how they were serving. It was heartening to see another person notice that she had been missed. This person was frantically, but quietly, trying to signal the pastors who were just about to invite everyone to partake. At the last moment, one of the servers stepped forward to serve the woman who had been overlooked.
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In a different church, in another state, I was part of a committee that met in people’s homes. One member of this committee was hearing impaired. Meeting in someone’s living room with dimmer lighting and conversational voices made it especially hard for her to follow the meeting. More than once, at the end of the meeting she would complain that she hadn’t heard a thing. After we recognized the pattern, a friend and I agreed that we would reserve a seat for her where she could see everyone’s lips, that we would check in with her about what she was hearing, and that we would remind people to speak up. That worked for a while, but despite our best intentions, my friend and I would get caught up in the conversation and we would forget to check in with her, forget to ask people to speak louder. And the woman would leave the meetings, angry and frustrated that the rest of us didn’t seem to care.
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After one of my moves to a new region, the area minister invited me to a monthly clergy meeting. I drove 30 or 40 minutes to get there, finding my way over unfamiliar roads and then into the room in the church building where they were meeting. It was a small group, but they were deep in conversation with each other. These were pastors, people used to greeting newcomers and making them feel welcome, but even after they had clearly noticed me, no one said hello or introduced themselves for several minutes.
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The paralyzed man in our text is probably used to being overlooked or left out. He probably lies on his mat most of the day, maybe begging for food, dependent on his family or friends to move him wherever he wants to go. I wonder if sometimes he wants to go somewhere, but no one will take him. And maybe sometimes he doesn’t want to go where people choose to take him. He does not speak a word in this story. We have no idea what he is thinking or feeling. Maybe it was his friends’ idea to bring him to Jesus and he had no way to stop them. Maybe he just wanted to be left alone, like he often was.
But these friends make sure that he is not overlooked. They carry him to the house where Jesus is and when they cannot get through the crowd, they come up with Plan B. In Mark’s language, they “unroof the roof.” The roof was constructed of wooden poles with mud and grass layered over them. The friends cut through that dried mud, pushed aside one of the beams, and lowered their friend down to Jesus.
This process took a bit of time. The people inside would have noticed the dust and dirt falling down on them and the noise above them. I imagine Jesus just stopped talking and watched and waited to see what would happen.
When the man is lowered down, Jesus’ first words to him are “Son, your sins are forgiven.” Again, the man doesn’t say anything, so we don’t know what this means to him. Are those the words he most needed to hear? Is that what his friends were hoping for when they went to all this trouble for him?
In Jesus’ time, people believed that suffering and illness were related to sin. Sickness was one way that God supposedly punished a person for his/her sins. We are not so comfortable with that idea now. When we hear that someone has been diagnosed with a serious illness or that they’ve been hurt in an accident, our first thought is not that God is punishing them. But we are more aware today about interactions of body, mind, and spirit with health. We know that the way we think and the ways we behave can affect our overall well-being. Sometimes, when bad things happen, our first question is “Why me, God?” Even if we don’t think God is punishing us, we may internalize a sense of guilt or shame. Someone loses a job and can’t find quickly find another one and starts to say to herself, “I have no skills. I’m a loser.” Someone’s marriage breaks up and in the midst of that pain, he starts to believe that he is unattractive and unlovable, that he will always be alone.
Who knows what this paralyzed man believed about himself? Maybe he thought he deserved his suffering, that he was such a bad person that God had just paralyzed him. Maybe what he most needed to hear was that his sins, whatever they were, were forgiven. Jesus called him “Son” which was a way of bringing him into relationship, of recognizing his worth as a human being. Maybe this man was so used to being overlooked and left out that what he most needed was for Jesus to stop what he was doing and see him and speak to him and recognize that he mattered.
There are people in the room who don’t want Jesus to speak this way. When Jesus says, “Your sins are forgiven,” he is not the one forgiving the sins. Rather he is announcing God’s forgiveness. In the sequence of the story, the man is forgiven while he is still paralyzed. His relationship with God is not dependent on his health or illness. Jesus is challenging the notion that sin caused his paralysis. He conveys the truth -- that God is in the forgiveness business, not the punishment business.
The people in the room who don’t like what Jesus says here are probably concerned for a couple of reasons. First, they don’t think he has the authority to declare God’s forgiveness. That’s the job of the temple priests, the ordained clergy. They don’t want Jesus to upset the right order of things by taking over the clergy’s job. And they probably still aren’t convinced that this man should be forgiven – after all, he is paralyzed. In their minds, the world was working as it should when he was left out and overlooked.
And so, to demonstrate that he has the authority to announce God’s forgiveness, Jesus also commands the man to get up and go home, which he does. Jesus makes over this man’s entire life. He is no longer paralyzed. Whatever he thought about that, his thoughts have to change because his life has changed. He can’t lay around waiting for people to help him any more. He will go where he wants to go when he wants. He will have to find a way to make a living. His entire life has changed.
I want to go back to that earlier part of the story, the part where Jesus looked up and saw this man being lowered through the roof. The text says “When Jesus saw their faith, he said, ‘Son, your sins are forgiven.’” Their faith – which could mean the faith of the four friends or the faith of the friends and the paralyzed man, but it doesn’t mean just the faith of the man alone. Jesus saw their faith. How did he see it? He saw it in their actions. He saw that they had gotten together to bring this man to him, bearing his weight for as long as it took them to get there. He saw it in their persistence and determination to overcome the obstacle of the crowd, their creativity in cutting through the roof.
Jesus saw their faith. I wonder if Jesus would see that sort of faith in me and you. We live in a different world. We take sick people to the hospital, not to the resident Holy Man. Jesus of Nazareth no longer walks around in a human body, performing miracles. Our church isn’t overcrowded – no one needs to cut through the roof to get to Jesus. We say that everyone is welcome, and we really mean it. We may make mistakes, but we try hard to see that no one is overlooked or left out. But the thing is, people are being left out. There are a whole lot of people who don’t know a thing about Jesus, or if they do, what they know is incomplete or distorted.
So this is the question I’ve wrestled with this week: In the world we live in, where Jesus is no longer physically present to make the lame walk and the blind see; in the pluralistic world we live in, where competing truth claims are accepted as equally valid for different people; in the world we live in, where scores of young people have good reasons to believe that Christians are judgmental and hypocritical and discriminatory; in that world, why should we help people get to Jesus? I have wrestled with that question in light of this text and so far, I can offer two answers.
The first answer is that we should help people get to Jesus because he tells the truth. “Your sins are forgiven” is a truth about God. It announces that God is in the forgiveness business, not the punishment business. It says that no matter what you think of yourself, God loves you. It says that no matter you what you have done, you are not beyond God’s ability to redeem and restore and make-over. We should help people get to Jesus because he tells a truth about God that many people have never heard.
The second answer is that we should help people get to Jesus because the truth he tells brings healing and wholeness. Where we are stuck in our guilt, our loneliness, our addictions and fears, Jesus offers us a way to get unstuck. When we are convinced that we deserve our suffering, Jesus says “Believe that your sins are forgiven. God is not punishing you.” When we might be paralyzed by our circumstances, Jesus tells us to pick ourselves up and walk.
Sometimes we are the ones who bring our friends to Jesus and healing occurs because of our faith. On the other hand, sometimes we are the ones brought to Jesus by our friends and we lean into their faith because it’s all we have at the moment.
There was once a pastor named George who had a crisis of faith. He no longer believed in God like he once had. Finally, he decided that to remain true to his conscience, he should resign from the church and leave the ministry. But his church would not let him go. They told him to stay and preach as much as he believed. So he stayed. Gradually, as he pastored that church, he was able to deal with his doubts. He leaned into the faith of his congregation until his own faith was restored.[1] And one day he wrote the words to a hymn you may know, “O Love That Will Not Let Me Go.”
You might find yourself in George’s shoes, needing your faith community to sustain you. You might find yourself on the pallet with the man in our story, feeling paralyzed by your suffering or overcome with guilt. Or you might find yourself with the opportunity to be a friend, to help someone get to Jesus. Wherever you find yourself today, hear the good news –“Our sins are forgiven. God is in the make-over business. Get up and be on your way.” Amen.
[1] Bruce C. Salmon, Storytelling in Preaching (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1988) , p. 66-67