February 19, 2006

“CARRY ON”

2 Corinthians 1:18-22   Mark 2:1-12

A Sermon by the Reverend Odette Lockwood-Stewart

Epworth United Methodist Church of Berkeley

This morning’s reading from the Gospel of Mark tells of Jesus’ healing of a paralyzed man.  It’s a story most easily remembered as the time when four of the man’s friends cut a hole in the roof to lower the man down to get to Jesus.   The image does kind of stick in your mind.

But this morning I want to talk about one tiny but important detail in our gospel story that goes by so quickly it’s easy to miss its importance.  It is the meaning contained in the phrase, “when Jesus saw their faith …”   They carried  their friend to the roof, cut the hole in the roof … they’ve lowered their friend down into the presence of Jesus.  And that’s where the phrase appears. “When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the man ‘Son, your sins are forgiven.’…  ”When he saw their faith” … Whose faith? … It says “their faith”, not “his faith”, so he can’t have been speaking of the paralyzed man alone.  It says “their faith,” the faith Jesus saw was the faith of the friends and the paralyzed man they carried to him … the friends who, when the crowd was so dense they could not get through, made an opening in the roof to bring their friend to Jesus so that he might be healed.   “When Jesus saw their faith he said, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”  It was the faith-filled effort of friends carrying and carried that was enough to bring healing of body and spirit.

All of us are in need of God’s grace.  All of us need to be healed, all of us need to be forgiven.  All of us need to be given grace to survive, courage to care, and love to share.  And all of us … from time to time … in ways we’ll never be able to anticipate … need somebody’s help.

This congregation is a blessing to me … and to many.  It has been a blessing through the years.  In a time and in a culture that includes among its segregations the separation and isolation of generations from each other, one of Epworth’s gifts is the beautiful mix of ages.  This morning we say a formal farewell to two people who have been a part of Epworth in varied generations of their own life and one of whose gifts to Epworth has been the presence of multiple generations of their own family.  This morning is Ray and Hazel Cayot’s last Sunday at Epworth before their long anticipated … and long delayed … move to Quincy.  Hazel and Ray were here before Epworth was here.  They were part of the former Northbrae Methodist Church at this site that merged with the former Epworth-University Methodist Church on Durant near Telegraph to form Epworth Methodist Church over 50 years ago.  They have served this church in every conceivable role, and always with a willing and generous spirit that built us all up.  We’ll send them forth later in the service and then celebrate and wish them well this morning at the Coffee fellowship …  but I wanted to add this personal word of gratitude at this time, and also lift them up as just two of many whose lives and whose gifts offered in love and faith, have deepened the life and extended the reach of this congregation.

Faith is most deeply experienced in community.  I believe that God gives us each other so that all people will be healed and made whole.  God gives us each other so that we can carry each other when we fall.  God gives us each other so that we can believe for each other when we doubt.  God gives us each other to break through the barriers that keep us from receiving the power that heals and sets us free.  God gives us each other to climb ladders, to lift stretchers, cut through roofs, to take doors off hinges, to help us experience healing and freedom in our deepest self for the sake of the world that God so loves.

Joe Driskill in his book Protestant Spiritual Exercises, writes of James Finley’s describes that

our deepest self, … our true self … is like having a great house or mansion, more beautiful, more magnificent than we can imagine.  This mansion has a vast yard in which there is a tent.  The tent is where we actually live.  People come along and see the beautiful mansion.  We take them up to stand on the porch, saying, “Isn’t this great!”  Then we walk around the outside and peek in the windows.  People “ooh” and “aah” and say how tremendous the mansion is.  They know enough not to ask if they can go in … and we don’t offer.  Before saying goodbye we thank them, and if we know them well enough, we admit that, unfortunately, we don’t have a key that allows access to the mansion.  Then we go back to the tent we have pitched in the front yard, happy to know that the mansion is ours.  And yet … we have a deep sense of yearning because we haven’t yet discovered how to enter it, our deepest selves.   (p. 36)

How sad, and how poignantly true.  We live outside our own magnificent dwelling places, our souls, because we do not have the key … and because most of the time we don’t even search for it.  We settle for just living when abundant life waits within our own lives.  We settle for wading in the shallows when we are invited to dance in the depths of life and faith.

God gives us each other to help us find the way in.  And when we stretch and grow, and reach and release … when we carry each other … and rely on each other, amazing things happen.

“When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralyzed man, ‘Son, your sins are forgiven.” … “And the man stood up, and immediately picked up his 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.’”

Whether it is in a moment of our own need, or a moment in which we become instruments of another’s care, or a movement in which we struggle for justice, our lives are transformed as we open them to the luminous presence of God.

Toyohiko Kagawa was a Japanese Christian evangelist who challenged the spiritual emptiness of the materialism he saw in both capitalism and communism.  He asserted the importance of a social Gospel; and the responsibility of people of faith to care for the workers, for the poor, for victims of violence, for children.  And with this deep social awareness came an abiding conviction that the way to responsible living passed through the journey from brokenness to healing to wholeness.  And for Kagawa, the key to wholeness, to that sacred space, to the mansion that is our truest self -- is meditation, prayer.  He wrote,

I have found that the door to meditation and prayer is open everywhere and any time, at midnight or at noonday, at dawn or at dust.  Everywhere, on the street, on the train, in the waiting room, or in the prison cell, I am given a resting place of prayer, wherein I can meditate … on the Almighty God who abides in my heart …

We don’t know much about the friends who brought the paralyzed man to be healed.  But we know they acted boldly in faith.  We don’t know what helped them to recognize the promise that was contained in Jesus’ presence.  We don’t know if they always got along with each other.  We don’t know if they were old friends or new ones.  But we know they faced obstacles and overcame them together.  We know that together they said “yes” to God’s “yes” in Jesus.  And in the miraculous, freeing, healing moment that followed … the people proclaimed, “We’ve never seen anything like this before.”’

We are given two great gifts … the loving presence of God who comes to each of us if we will but open the door … and the presence of partners who rely on us when we are strong, and who hold us up when we are weak.  And in this beautiful and miraculous alliance of weakness and strength, of longing and fulfillment, of brokenness and healing, we bear witness to the enduring power and promise of God.

And all who see … and we ourselves … will be amazed at what God… can do… with us.