Preached by Winton Boyd on Sunday, October 25, 2009
Text: Mark 2:1-12 (New International Version)
Healing stories in the gospels are common but often curious. For while they usually involve physical healing, they often raise other questions too. This story, which includes both the healing of the paralyzed man and a dialogue about sin and forgiveness, is like many others in the gospels which show Jesus using healing moments as teachable moments; launching pads for further discussion and reflection. The focus of the teaching may be about his role, sin/forgiveness/grace, the power of God, etc.
The reason we keep returning to these stories is that in addition to being the witness of God’s people, they are also in some way our stories. In that spirit, I would love to ponder this story to see what it opens up for our lives and our faith; to explore whether Jesus’ teaching moment from 2000 years ago might also be a teaching moment for us today in regards to our own journey with issues of health, care giving, identity and faith.
Like the gospels, our stories and experiences of health and healing are both common and complex. All of us, at one point or another, face surprising, or at least unexpected, if not unwanted, health issues. If not for us, then for someone we love. Interwoven with the experiences of our bodies are complex issues of identity, relationships, faith, and ultimately our trust in the goodness of God and the universe.
A visual tool that will help us are the familiar Russian nesting dolls. As a symbol for our lives, nesting dolls remind us how interrelated our lives are and how the different layers of life inform and shape one another. In a sense, they represent some of the questions we live with and their inter connectedness to each other.
Outer layer of the nesting doll:
At this layer, we have the amazing and sometimes complex circumstances and relationships of life. In the gospel story, we face questions such as what made this man a paralytic? Who were these friends? How did they relate to him? How long had they known him? How did they hear about Jesus and what prompted them to think Jesus could heal their friend? What was it like for the man to accept the help of his friends? Was he grateful, embarrassed? Was this a new paralysis, a gradual slide into paralysis, a lifelong paralysis?
While we can’t know the answers, we know that the exchange between the friends, the man, the community and Jesus was rooted in them. Jesus’ understood the sacrifice, the love, the bond that was there. He understood that this man’s circle of family and friends was shaped by the conditions and nuances of paralysis.
So too, in our lives, at a fundamental level, issues of health and healing affect our extended family and community of friends. I remember friends that Tammy and I met in our mid twenties. Jim and Shelby were about our parents’ age and were dear, caring, giving people. Jim was the classic “big teddy bear” of a person, a retired school administrator. But when he developed early onset Alzheimer’s in his early 60’s, he and Shelby treated it as a family event. First together, and later with their children and even later with their circle of friends, they strategized for ways to keep Jim active and involved, to adjust those involvements as the time and disease necessitated. They didn’t hide his condition, but recognized that just as they had been deeply committed to relationships all their lives, this new twist in their lives should also be lived out within those same relationships.
I’m quite certain that any of Jim’s friends would have lifted roof tiles and lowered him on a stretcher if that could have helped his memory. Shelby and Jim’s attitude allowed others to participate in Jim’s health in so many ways, not the least of which was his incredible spirit through his decline. By living out the health issues of their lives with others, they gave the gift of honesty, hope, dignity and joy to others. They also created a defacto circle of support for Shelby when Jim did die a few years later.
I lift them up because Jim and Shelby understood that his Alzheimer’s affected their whole network of relationships. As people of deep trust and gratitude, they engaged what was a tragic and swift end to an amazing life as time of learning, sharing, teaching, and loving.
Next layer of the nesting doll:
As we peel away at the layers of the gospel story, or as we go one doll deeper, we see in ways that are both confusing and revealing, the introduction of questions identity and personality. While the interplay between sin and paralysis is strange and confusing, I wonder if it is still possible to see this story as an invitation to reflect on our own questions of identity that are affected, shaped and challenged by health changes and/or crises.
What are our circumstances revealing about our identity? As we listen a bit more attentively and watch more closely that which is going on within us and our loved ones in the face of health challenges, do we not bump up against our long held understanding of our role in the world, our self defined identity?
I heard a story this week of a woman going through chemotherapy for cancer. She eventually began to lose some of her gorgeous, rich, hair. She had a 14-year-old grandson who joined her in the ritual of shaving her head, he shaving his to be in solidarity with his grandmother. She reflected that after getting her head shaved, and putting on a wig, she was driving this grandson to his 8th grade school where he was to give a speech in front of a large gathering of students. Thinking about the incredible risk he was taking by standing up bald in front of his classmates, she asked him, “should I take off my wig and so we are both bald?” His response, “it’s up to you grandma.” She took the wig off, put it over the gearshift in the car, and drove him to school – two generations of baldness. The grandmother told the story because she realized through her grandson that the chemo was not only challenging her physical health, it was also inviting her to consider what her own identity and self-image was in the world. In the relationship with her grandson, in the circumstances of cancer, she was given a new sense of personhood, a new level of gratitude for her life, her body, her hair or lack thereof, and of course, her relationships.
The issue, of course, is not wigs or no wigs – but an openness of spirit that allows us see ourselves in a new way, maybe a more “un-cluttered” way, a more pure way.
Another layer of the nesting doll:
If we open the story up to yet another level, Jesus moves swiftly and definitively to the issue of God’s grace and goodness. When challenged as to how he can forgive sins, Jesus turns the challenge on its head and puts the emphasis back on the man. Not only are your sins forgiven, but also you are healed. Get up, take your mat, and go home.
Jesus is reminding everyone that the grace of God sees us in our moment of need and vulnerability and seeks to touch us with healing and hope. The man, however long he had been paralyzed, saw himself as a new person in the eyes of God. While the issue of sin and forgiveness and healing seems foreign to our ears, what is familiar is the interweaving of despair, confusion, faith, grace, prayer, and hope. For Jesus, the final word is not being right before his critics, it is not even healing the man’s illness, it is the demonstration of grace and faith in the face of unbearable situations. In fact, more important than the faith of the paralyzed man is the faith of his friends – which Jesus acknowledges and honors.
In our own lives, the deeper we go into our own issues of health and sickness, the more we are faced with the question of who are we in the eyes of God? What is it that makes us a child of God? What is the meaning of grace, healing, hope, and trust? How do we make sense of confusion and unanswered prayers? On whom can we trust and depend in our weakest state, our most frustrated time of care giving, or in the moment we are watching a loved one struggle. Just as the paralytic may have been surprised by his own ability to walk, so can we be “surprised” by the healing, hope and peace that comes to us, even in the deepest struggle, the point of greatest unknowing. In our pilgrimage of life, these are the moments of incredible import. These are the moments when we come through feeling more grateful – even amidst our grief – or more despairing.
The story’s characters remind us too of the incredible power of community to have faith when we cannot. To see hope when we won’t. To pray on our behalf when we have forgotten how.
Inner layer of nesting doll:
And finally, the story ends with everyone praising God, saying, “We have never seen anything like this!”
Those in that house were changed by what took place. The ripping up of tile, the commotion, the conversation, the healing, the atmosphere of conflict and reverence changed them in ways that caused them to tell and retell the story, invite others to see this man Jesus.
How does our journey with healing and pain, living, dying, care giving and grieving bear witness -not only to the grace in our lives, but grace of others, the universe and the Divine? Is there something redeemable, something life giving amidst the struggle and hard circumstances?
In a lovely song I used a couple of months ago when I showed slides of our favorite places, Peter Mayer penned these words
When I was in Sunday school
We would learn about the time
Moses split the sea in two
Jesus made the water wine
And I remember feeling sad
That miracles don’t happen still
But now I can’t keep track
‘Cause everything’s a miracleWine from water is not so small
But … the challenging thing becomes
Not to look for miracles
But finding where there isn’t oneRead a questioning child’s face
And say it’s not a testament
That’d be very hard to saySee another new morning come
And say it’s not a sacrament
I tell you that it can’t be done
If Mayer is right, that the challenge is to not find miracles, then it was just as true 2000 years ago as it is today. It means that amidst this one healing, there were all kinds of miracles that day, all kinds of ways God’s grace appeared to encourage, redeem, restore and renew those involved and even those on the edges of the story. We’ll never know the whole story. In the same way, we’ll never know the whole story of our lives, but the gospel invites us to live in trust, heart wide open to the possibility of grace. May it be so.
