I preached this sermon on January 31 at St. Lydia's as part of our exploration of the book of Mark. The text is Mark 2:1-12. Read it here.
I once knew a little girl who came from a family that moved all the time. She had lived in many countries all over the world. She had seen so many things and met so many people. But it seemed as if just as soon as her family had unpacked the last box, put the last book on the shelf, it was time to pack it all up again.
“I used to make friends,” she told me plainly, “but I don’t anymore, because we’re just going to move, and it’s just going to hurt.”
And so this little girl became paralyzed. Each time the moving truck pulled into the driveway, a little piece of her became frozen and motionless, and as she grew older, she became very cold.
I spent this week in Philadelphia taking a week-long course about complicated issues in death, dying and grief. All of us grieve losses of one kind or another. We loose people we love to death or to distance or to change. But we loose other things to. A lost job may mean a lost sense of identity. Becoming an adult means leaving childhood behind. Saying yes to a wonderful job means saying goodbye to some wonderful people. Or being involved in a new relationship means saying goodbye to a more independent way of living.
The class I took was about what happens when the losses we face become complicated or even debilitating. When the pain of loss is so great that we decide we’d rather not feel it. Or we’ll feel it acutely, every day for years and years.
Whatever the case, loss and grief have the ability to paralyze us.
To freeze us in time,
feeling or not feeling,
not moving forward
and not moving back.
We’re just stuck.
We’re just like the little girl
who decided she’d rather not have friends
than face the pain of loosing them.
Paralysis is a highly effective tool. It protects us from pain. But it also protects us from love.
Where are your frozen places?
What are you guarding from pain?
Where are you resisting love?
Our story in Mark is a very strange one. And one of the best examples I can think of that the writers of the gospels penned works imbued with layers of meaning. This story is crazy and comical. Jesus is teaching in a house, (maybe he’s back a Peter’s house) and the crowd is so thick that a couple of guys get the bright idea to dig through the roof and lower their friend through it.
What we’re talking about here is probably a small, one or two room house with a ladder up to the roof. Roofs were precious space in the ancient near east, used for all sorts of stuff like curing meat and probably drying laundry and herbs and whatever else needed to be done. And houses were made of frames made of long branches, and covered over with a sort of mud/plaster substance. So these four friends are literally digging through the roof to lower their friend through.
Can you imagine, Jesus sitting there teaching and little bits of debris starting to fall on his head as these guys destroy the roof of the house? It’s insane.
And it tells us that this story is more about digging through
than it is about digging through a roof.
And more about paralysis
than it is about someone who’s paralyzed.
In so many ways,
we are that man on the mat,
our souls and bodies locked in paralysis,
frozen from pain
and resistant to love.
We are that man, who,
though he can’t imagine that anyone could possibly care about him,
is lifted onto a mat and carried through the streets
by four people
who really, really, do.
We are that man
who needs more than to hear,
but needs to be touched and healed and forgiven,
and so chips away at the mud of the roof
until finally it cracks and gives,
and a dusty stream of light breaks through.
How difficult it is to chip away at that sturdy wall we’ve built.
And how terrifying to be healed.
For paralysis means a brittle, frozen safety.
But those first faltering steps mean
pain,
risk,
vulnerability.
My professor said something to me this week
that I thought was amazing.
She said that,
when we work through the pain of our grief,
when we allow it to touch us,
we grow.
We become richer, deeper people than we were before.
Pain and loss have the ability to paralyze us,
but they also have the ability to transform us.
Experiencing loss doesn’t have to make us less of who we are.
It doesn’t have to mean loosing part of ourselves along the way.
If we can learn to befriend pain,
it has the capability to enliven and transform us.
We tell a story of a man,
a healer and a prophet,
who was executed on a cross.
There were three long, dark days
that followed that Friday.
Three days of living in the very heart of pain.
But on the third day,
on the third day everything changes.
We can go down to the pit
and come back not just to tell a story of life that continues,
but to live a story of life transformed and renewed.
Life is blessings and burdens.
Let pain touch you and change you.
And take those first faltering steps
of risk and vulnerability toward fear and hope and love.
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