| Sermon for Sunday, July 24, 2005
RAISING THE ROOF FOR JESUS
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1 When he returned to Capernaum after some days, it was reported that he was at home. 2 So many gathered around that there was no longer room for them, not even in front of the door; and he was speaking the word to them. 3 Then some people came, bringing to him a paralyzed man, carried by four of them. 4 And when they could not bring him to Jesus because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him; and after having dug through it, they let down the mat on which the paralytic lay. 5 When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, "Son, your sins are forgiven." 6 Now some of the scribes were sitting there, questioning in their hearts, 7 "Why does this fellow speak in this way? It is blasphemy! Who can forgive sins but God alone?" 8 At once Jesus perceived in his spirit that they were discussing these questions among themselves; and he said to them, "Why do you raise such questions in your hearts? 9 Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, "Your sins are forgiven,' or to say, "Stand up and take your mat and walk'? 10 But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins"—he said to the paralytic— 11 "I say to you, stand up, take your mat and go to your home." 12 And he stood up, and immediately took the mat and went out before all of them; so that they were all amazed and glorified God, saying, "We have never seen anything like this!" 13 Jesus went out again beside the sea; the whole crowd gathered around him, and he taught them. 14 As he was walking along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax booth, and he said to him, "Follow me." And he got up and followed him. 15 And as he sat at dinner in Levi's house, many tax collectors and sinners were also sitting with Jesus and his disciples—for there were many who followed him. 16 When the scribes of the Pharisees saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, they said to his disciples, "Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?" 17 When Jesus heard this, he said to them, "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners." 18 Now John's disciples and the Pharisees were fasting; and people came and said to him, "Why do John's disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?" 19 Jesus said to them, "The wedding guests cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them, can they? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. 20 The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast on that day. 21 "No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak; otherwise, the patch pulls away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made. 22 And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but one puts new wine into fresh wineskins." 23 One sabbath he was going through the grain fields; and as they made their way his disciples began to pluck heads of grain. 24 The Pharisees said to him, "Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the sabbath?" 25 And he said to them, "Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food? 26 He entered the house of God, when Abiathar was high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and he gave some to his companions." 27 Then he said to them, "The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath; 28 so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath."
In last Sunday’s Post there was an article about the reaction to the new Harry Potter book from some church groups. The writer was saying that the criticism from most church groups about the Potter series seems to have died down now because many people have seen that the basic values of friendship and love and self-sacrifice that are in the Harry Potter stories are very consistent with Christian values. There was one exception from one church group that is troubled by the new book because they don’t like it that in this book, Harry Potter seems to be questioning authority so much instead of just being obedient and compliant. I thought about that comment when I read through this chapter in Mark this week because if that church group was troubled by Harry Potter’s attitude toward authority, they would be even more troubled by what Jesus is doing in challenging the authorities of his time! Last week, we saw Jesus begin his earthly ministry of teaching, preaching, and healing. In the town that became his home town for three years—Capernaum—he has gone to the synagogue and healed a man on the Sabbath, breaking the law about not working on the Sabbath. He has healed Peter’s mother-in-law on the same Sabbath. And he has touched a leper to make him well, another act of disobedience to authority because lepers were untouchable. Today he has crossed the religious boundaries again in what we just read. Jesus was irreverent! Jesus was not religious by the conventional meaning of what it means to be religious! I think of that occasionally when someone tells me what I heard last week when I invited a person to church. He said that he is really not religious and I thought, well some people would have said that about Jesus also—depending on what you mean by being religious. He was faithful in his prayer life and worship life—in the synagogue every Sabbath. But when it came to following each of the 613 laws about dietary restrictions and what you could or could not do on the Sabbath, he kept coloring outside the lines! Say it with me: JESUS COLORED OUTSIDE THE LINES OF CONVENTIONAL RELIGION! And he got into trouble for it! Let’s look at how he gets in trouble today and who he is in trouble with. The chapter opens with him “at home” in Capernaum. This small town on the north end of Lake Galilee is his hometown for three years! Did he have a home there or did he stay with his friends Peter and Andrew in this house that has been excavated and declared to be Peter’s house? We do not know. We know that Capernaum was his headquarters for his itinerant ministry of teaching, preaching, and healing. He is a healer. He wants people to be well and not ill and people come to him to be healed. We learned that last week and it is happening again, so dramatically that some people bring their friend to him and make a hole in the roof so the friend can he healed. We will talk more about this story in a moment, but what I lift up now is that when this healing happens, some people are very upset. Do you remember what Jesus does that upsets them so much? After this encounter with the hole in the roof gang, Jesus is calling more people to follow him, to become his disciples, and he calls a person who is a real outsider and outcast in 1st century Judaism. In this gospel his name is Levi; in other gospels, he is called Matthew and when Jesus invites him to come along, people are scandalized! Why is this? Because he is a tax collector, a tax gatherer. This is not what we think of today. Tax collectors then were Jews who had sold out to the Roman government and who gouged and cheated and overcharged their fellow Jews and got rich. They were seen as traitors, thieves, and liars. They were despised and were people without a country. They became very wealthy but it was at the expense of having a community and friends and respect. And Jesus befriends a tax collector. Does anyone remember anyone else in the Gospels who was a tax collector whom Jesus sought out and befriended and this person changed his ways? How about a little fellow in Jericho who climbed up a sycamore tree to see this famous Jesus and Jesus invited himself to this fellow’s house for lunch? He was Zaccheus of course. He was a despised tax collector also. And the people in that story were just as scandalized as this story in Mark because not only does Jesus befriend these two criminals, what else does he do that is even worse!! He eats with them. To eat with someone was to bind yourself to them forever. To break bread together was a holy thing. You were identifying with that person forever. That is what Jesus does after he has called Levi to follow him: he goes into Levi’s house and eats with Levi and some other outcasts. This makes some people very uncomfortable! Who was uncomfortable with this? The Pharisees. They were laypersons who were very dedicated Jews and were very observant. We often cast them in a bad light because they tended to be legalists and they never colored outside the religious lines. But they were earnest and sincere and were probably most like all of us here in their strict observance of religious laws. It is probably easier for most of us (including me) to be good Pharisees than it is for us to be followers of Jesus. The problem was, as Jesus saw it, that they let the laws and rules get in the way of doing what was most important in practicing our faith—that commandment is written on our back wall here in the sanctuary: love God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength and love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus said, if any of the lesser rules gets in the way of that, then we can overlook the lesser law. That is the philosophy that gets his disciples in trouble for not fasting like others do. It is what gets them criticized for walking through fields of corn and picking some of the ears of corn (harvesting it on the Sabbath) and eating. Jesus gives his Pharisee critics a story about everyone’s hero, King David, who also broke one of the religious rules about the consecrated bread because the rule got in the way of loving one’s neighbor. Also in this chapter, Jesus calls himself twice by the title that he most often uses for himself in the gospel of Mark. Did you notice what he calls himself? I don’t think he ever says that he is the messiah or the Son of God. He lets other people say that about him. What he calls himself is “the Son of Man” which is a messianic term, a label that means he is the one whom God has sent. He does that in the last story –“the son of man is Lord of the Sabbath”—and he does it in the first story, the healing of the man let down through the roof. This healing story is one of 18 miracles in Mark and it has many levels of application for us. Look at the importance of these four friends. Something else I like about the new Harry Potter book is a line where Professor Dumbledore, the headmaster of the Hogwarts school tells Harry that it is OK for Harry to share some information with Harry’s dear friends Ron and Hermione because we need to share confidences with friends because our friends can help us bear our burdens and we can lean on them for help. We need friends and this Markan story is, among many things, about the importance of friends who can carry us and who can help us get to Jesus! In that healing story where the friends tear up the thatched roof and lower their paralyzed friend in front of Jesus, do you remember what is upsetting for the spiritual leaders? This is not the Sabbath so that is not the problem. What does Jesus say to the man when he comes down through the ceiling and lands at Jesus feet? It is a powerful line from Mark: “When Jesus saw the faith of the four friends, he said, ‘Son, your sins are forgiven.” This is curious except when we remember that in Jesus time and even before, the idea was that if someone was ill or had a tragedy, the spiritual leaders thought that the person deserved it! Something bad happens to you, you must have brought it on yourself! So let’s figure out what you did so you can repent and be forgiven for it. There is a very famous book about this in the Old Testament when many bad things happen to a virtuous man and he does not deserve them but his friends try to help him by blaming him and telling him to fess up! What book is that one? Job, of course. I like the friends in Mark’s story better that the friends of Job. Jesus pronounces forgiveness of sins for this man, and some folks in the crowded house get very upset!! They are the Pharisees of course. What do they say? “Only God can forgive sin. This is BLASPHEMY!” And blasphemy, maligning God, was punishable by death in Jesus’ time. Jesus is just in chapter two of this story about him and already people see him to be so threatening, so irreligious, so dangerous to their conventional faith, that he should be killed. There are other, more troubling problems in this for us 20 centuries later. Jesus goes through this gospel healing people. He is a healer as well as preacher and teacher and messiah. How does he do that healing? We don’t know. In fact, there are lots of things we don’t know yet about healing. We know that medicines and drugs are sources of healing. We also know that faith in one’s physician is a factor in healing. Norman Cousins who was ill for many months and discovered the power of humor and laughter as a resource in his healing (his book of twenty five years ago is Anatomy of an Illness), Cousins says that all healing is faith healing. We must have faith in our healer for healing to happen. That is what Jesus notices in these four who carry their friend on a mat. He notices and remarks on their FAITH! When he saw their faith, then he pronounced the forgiveness of the man’s sins. We are going to hear more the next couple of weeks about faith. Faith is not thinking the right things about Jesus. Faith is not the opposite of doubt. You can question and doubt and still be a person of faith. The opposite of faith is mentioned in chapter four of Mark and you can look it up in the last verses of that chapter. One more thing about faith and healing that Norman Cousins tells about when he says all healing depends on some faith. He says we are very complicated beings and it takes a combination of medicine and doctors and prayer and faith for us to be well and whole and he says, we can see that because when studies are done about effectiveness of drugs, some people get better when they are just on sugar pills, placeboes! Why would that happen?? There is a connection between spiritual health and physical health. Time magazine had a piece a few months ago on the relationship between spirituality and health, and they told about a fellow with prostate cancer who has become more spiritually involved and how that has been a part of his whole healing process along with the medications and surgery. There is a copy of the article on the foyer table. Our health and wellness and wholeness are more that just biomedical. People need a WHY to live as well as medical resources. Remember the phrase from Dr. Viktor Frankl who survived a Nazi concentration camp? The person who has a WHY to live—a reason to live—can bear almost any HOW, any circumstance. If they do not see a future, have a purpose, they will not get better. AND ... People can be emotionally crippled –or paralyzed and even with the right medications, they still may feel so bad spiritually and emotionally that they remain stuck or immobilized. Does this make sense? Have you seen that? Have you known persons who feel so fearful or so guilty or so angry that their fear/anger/guilt has paralyzed them, immobilized them, kept them from moving forward in their lives? People can get emotionally stuck—paralyzed— and stay in a bad place until someone is able to do what Jesus does here—release them from that immobilized state so they can move ahead in their life. How does Jesus do that for the man in the story? He tells him he is forgiven. He releases the hold that guilt has had on him and sets him free Do these kinds of healings happen today? Yes. Have you seen it happen? I have. And I think part of our purpose as a church, as followers of Jesus is be a community where persons can bring their fears or guilt or rage—or let others bring them to us as this man’s friends did—and pronounce the words Jesus pronounced so that they too can lay down their mat or cot or security blanket and leave feeling liberated. Maybe this can happen when we worship regularly and offer each other the grace and peace of Jesus Christ. That is the last thing I want to say about chapter 2 of Mark. What Jesus does in this story early on in his ministry is to say that what God is about is grace and compassion and forgiveness. This is what God is mostly about—grace, not condemnation. So many people have been wounded by religion, a religion that is rigid and rule bound and portrays God as a finger-shaking judge who wants to condemn you and point out all your shortcomings and send you to hell. So many people grow up with the picture of God as the condemning judge. There is some of that in the Bible—there is accountability and high expectation from God. But what Jesus does very early in his ministry in Mark is to offer a God of grace. Son, he says, your sins are forgiven. Get out of here and go on with your life. Pick up your dirty old mat and move forward with God. Jesus says that today too. For anyone who is paralyzed, immobilized, stuck, held back from the joyous, productive life that God has created us for. Do you know anyone who needs that this morning? Could it be that you need that liberating word this morning so you can do what the man in the story does, get up and move ahead with your life. Jesus says that to you and me. Daughter, you are accepted and forgiven just the way you are. Son, you are accepted and forgiven just as you are. Loosen your limbs up; stretch them out. Pick up your tired and dirty old mat and move on into what I have created you for! This is the day for you to be well. Amen. |
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