 | The New England Church PulpitNew England Congregational Church UCC |
"With a Little Help . . . ." | Mark 2: 1-12 | February 23, 2003 |
(On February the 9th our service focused on the Beatles. Denise Tracy who organized the delightful service, complete with a band, provided readings and reflections on the development of themes in the Beatles music. All of the music was from the Beatles which included all of the congregational singing.)
Truly this church is committed as we say in our mission statement to allowing the Divine to appear to us in surprising ways. And we also affirm the right of each of us to not look for the Divine in some places. Let me tell you of the wondrously funny, moving, curious view I had of the congregation of this church–young and not-so-young, singing together “I get by with a little help from my friends.” Of course it was–is–true! We do get by with a little help from our friends. We affirm the value of community when we gather here each week. We have programs to help incorporate new people among us into the friendship of the church. And then I almost broke into laughter as I heard and watched us sing “I get high with a little help from my friends.” I don’t think we meant what the Beatles may have meant when they first sang the song or what many Beatles fans in the sixties meant when they sang those words through a smokey haze. But what we sang was true. We do find that our joy, our delight, our celebrations are indeed enhanced by sharing them with friends. Furthermore it is Biblical. Do you remember Jesus’ parable of the lost coin? What did the woman do who had turned her house upside down to find the shiny disk of money and finally found it? She called her friends, her neighbors in to celebrate. The lift, the high of celebration needs to be shared with friends.
Clearly at the other end of the emotional spectrum we find that we do “get by,” get through, endure and survive sorrow with the help of our friends. I saw this most powerfully just after my mother died suddenly. My father was devastated. The man who had been the rock of strength and stability in my life was suddenly bereft and diminished. Then at the visitation at the local funeral home as his friends gathered to share our grief and offer their love and support I saw his spirit renewed. Indeed we do get along with a little help from our friends.
We see this demonstrated in today’s reading from the Gospel of Mark. Jesus’ reputation as a wonder worker, a healer is spreading. The first verse of the text signals the effectiveness of the gossip network which spread the news that Jesus was at home. (By the way, this is Capernaum–I thought Jesus’ home was Nazareth, maybe this was his lake side condo.) Four friends of a man who is paralyzed decide to take their friend to Jesus. Did they all have the idea at the same time? Did the Paralytic ask them to or did they think of it on their own? Did they have to talk the paralyzed man into it? We are not given those details. What we are told is that there was a crowd where Jesus was. There was a crowd so big you couldn’t even get near the door for the press of people. Here is where we see “a little help from my friends” turn into a big help from my friends. Rather than saying “Oh dear, we’re too late. We’ll have to come back tomorrow and we need to leave a lot earlier.” They execute a plan. They go up on the flat roof of this house and remove enough of the tiling to lower the man, mat and all, to where Jesus is. They literally drop the man in Jesus’ lap. Jesus is impressed, moved by their faith. Not by the condition of the paralytic, not even with his hope and faith but with the faith (one possible translation is also “loyalty”) of the friends. Loyalty to Jesus? Loyalty to their friend? Probably both. Jesus says to the man “Son (note this announces that this man is now a part of Jesus’s kinship group) . . . Son, your sins are forgiven.”
People in Jesus time thought that illness arose from people’s sins. They had thought this for a long time. Check out Psalm 41 which prays “Heal me for I have sinned.” Leviticus (21:16-24) specifies that among other physically challenged people, a lame person may not approach to offer bread to God. So to our ancestors in the faith, the physical condition itself was not as serious as the social consequences; exclusion from God’s holy community. Some medical anthropologists offer the distinction between disease as a biomedical malfunction that afflicts an organism, and illness as a disvalued human condition in which social networks are ruptured and life’s meaning is lost.
Many of the diseases that roamed the earth in ancient times, devastating all who crossed their paths, have now been tamed. Having conquered many of them, it seems we will conquer all of them. Perhaps now we will have a world without illness, we think to ourselves, and then a new one comes along to terrify us. Or we fear an ancient scourge like smallpox as a terrorist weapon. Still we have confidence: a cure is possible for anything if we just put enough research and enough money into finding it. And so we walk and bike and run for the cure. We give to the various foundations and funds. We no longer give up on the sick, no longer isolate them, no longer believe that they have brought their illness upon themselves. That’s ancient history. “Or is it?” Barbara Crafton asks. Consider the history of HIV and AIDS. There was a veil of secrecy and shame for ten years before we faced it as a public-health problem. “Consider the devastation that secrecy continues to cause in Africa and Asia. For reasons of politics and public relations, government after government has refused to admit that AIDS was a problem in its country until it became almost insurmountable. The numbers are staggering: 40 percent of the adult populations of some African nations may be infected. Half the children may become orphans in the next five years, with no healthy adults left to care for them. Denial has proved fatal.
“Or consider mental illnesses. The New Testament people assumed they were caused by demon possession. We don’t think so today. Or don’t we? . . .When psychiatric illness grips its victims in behavior that isolates them and frightens those around them, we compound the misery by treating it like a failure of nerve or a character flaw. People are ashamed to admit they or someone they love has it, afraid someone will find out they’re in therapy or that they take antidepressants–as if their illness were really a sin. . . . Research on cures for mental illness lags far behind that for other illnesses in urgency and funding. There are no telethons for schizophrenia, although 2.2 million adults in America are afflicted, compared with the 250,000 who live with muscular dystrophy, another incurable disease.” (Barbara Crafton, Christian Century 2/8/03)
Jesus deals with the social outcast status of the paralytic using the language of the time–your sins are forgiven. The process of restoring meaning to the life of a sick person and that person’s family and community is known as healing. William Willimon tells of a women he knows who was struck down in mid-life. She was paralyzed from the waist down, confined to a wheelchair. The doctors told her they had done all that medical science could do. But she said, “I wonder what God has in mind for me now. Now that I can no longer use my legs, I wonder what else God wants me to use. I’ve got to figure out where God is calling me now.”
She took a computer class. She began a business designing web pages for charitable organizations. Even though she began her business as a means of helping others, she was very successful, and the business was very profitable.
“Some said it was a miracle.” Willimon writes, “Some said that, though she never got a miracle of healing, she was still given a true miracle.” He continues, “I think she did get a miracle. A miracle called inspired imagination, a miracle called faith. When I hear the phrase ‘faith healing’ I always think of her first.”
Faith as inspired imagination. Isn’t this the kind of faith that Jesus saw in the activity of the paralyzed man’s friends? To expect better from life, to long for more, to reach out–Isn’t that faith? Faith is the ability to imagine something more. The paralyzed man’s friends had that kind of faith.
We all need supporting friends who can help us imagine something more at those times of our lives when we face new development which is accompanied with vulnerability. Those times range from the growth of beginning school, through the turmoil of adolescence, the mid-life vulnerabilities that accompany success and responsibilities, commitments as well as achievements followed by the promise and peril of aging. We need people who will love us tenderly. Didn’t the prophet Micah tell us that what God asks of us is to “act justly, to love tenderly and to walk humbly with . . .God”?
Surely the paralytic’s friends love him. They hated what his illness and pain was doing to him. Love was the force that propelled them forward into such extreme action. It made them brave–foolish, some onlookers might have said, but brave. Anne Lamott in her book Traveling Mercies describes a month where she was in the pit of despair. A romance had ended badly, one of her favorite friends had died–a dear lady at the little church who would press Baggies of dimes into her hands–and a week later a relative whom she loved was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Anne describes her condition this way: “My heart was broken, and my head was just barely inhabitable.” She got a call from a long time friend who suggested they go for a walk. The walk ended in a marsh which began to get more and more boggy as the tide changed. Trying to get out and away from the swampy quick sandy sucking noises, Anne lost her overpriced walking sandals and then the path led to a stumpy wet slope. Their attempts to get up the slope led to both of them falling into the mud. “It was odd,” she writes, “to be so old and to have gotten so muddy, to have such dirty drawers and no angry parents around, and no more face to save.” And they collapsed in laughter.
When she and her friend finally stopped laughing and got up to go, Anne says, “I was still sad, but better. This is the most profound spiritual truth I know: that even when we’re most sure that love can’t conquer all, it seems to anyway. It goes down into the rat hole with us, in the guise of our friends, and there it swells and comforts. It gives us second winds, third winds, hundredth winds.”
The good news from the Gospel today is that God still sends patient care givers, dedicated researchers and physicians, devoted family and friends to walk with the ill through their painful journey, whether it be a journey toward cure or a journey toward a fuller life. Such people are sent from God whether they know it or not. God sees to it that we get along with a little help from our friends. Amen
Joe Dunham
| Copyright © 2003 by Joe Dunham. All rights reserved. |