Text: Mark 2:1-12
Speaker: Mark Rupp

When we were planning ahead for this worship series on our Vision for Ministry, I noted that it would overlap with the end of our month of VBS activities and wondered if there was an opportunity to bring both themes together. Our vision for ministry, which you can read in full at the top of your bulletin, is a continuation from last year as we continue to focus on issues of “accessibility and inclusivity.” It was not a far leap to bring these themes together with Vacation Bible School when I realized one of the stories we would be looking at during VBS was the passage from Mark’s gospel read earlier. 

During VBS our kids got to meet Dr. Knowitall and her assistant, Rose, who were always working together on wacky experiments in their attempts to change the world. From pop-up houses made out of paper that could make sure everyone had a place to live to friendship bridges that would help people who are different come together, Dr. Knowitall and Rose had lots of good ideas even if their experiments weren’t working out quite like they expected. Even their Changemaker 5000 had to go through a number of revisions, and I’m not sure they ever got it working like they wanted. 

But along the way, they met different characters from the Bible. They talked with Nicodemus about the importance of asking questions. They met Peter and heard about how an odd vision helped him make a new friend. They talked with an Israelite woman who told them about Isaiah’s message from God to dream big about how the world could be. And they also met Candace and Theo, two friends who went to great lengths to make sure their other friend could get to see Jesus.

All of these characters helped Dr.Knowitall, Rose, and our kids think deeply about what it means to be a Changemaker. Throughout our weeks together, we learned that Changemakers ask questions, they work together to solve problems, they build bridges, and they create a new kind of world. 

Our theme song for the week, which you may remember I introduced a little over a month ago during Children’s Time, had a refrain that was a call and response with questions and answers. I know we have some VBS pros out there today, so you can help me with this:

Is changemaking easy? (Sometimes not!)

But how do we do it? (We do it with God!)

And how does God do it? (God does it with love, love, love…)

It’s not enough to just be changemakers. We are called to be changemakers in the way of Jesus, doing everything with love, love, love. And I appreciate that our song recognizes that it’s not always going to be easy. Sometimes changemaking is hard work. Sometimes it asks us to stretch ourselves, to step into the unknown, to ask hard questions, and to tear down long-standing structures in order to build something new. 

Candace and Theo were fictionalized characters, names given to the people in our story today who carried their friend to Jesus and then tore open the roof to make sure he could get to Jesus. On the face of it, this is the perfect scriptural story for a series exploring accessibility. And while I do think it has a lot to say on the topic, I also think it requires some nuance as we consider specifically what it means to make our communities accessible for those people living with disabilities.  

The miraculous healing stories found in the Bible can be quite fraught for people with disabilities for many reasons. Not least of which is that the people receiving the miracles are often unnamed and rarely seen as active agents with any autonomy or input in their own healing, at least in the narratives as we have them. This has perpetuated notions that people with disabilities are mere object lessons within the Church, people whose only value is what their disability has to teach us about God. This story is no different in that neither the paralyzed man nor any of the friends who brought him to Jesus are named, nor are they offered the chance to speak directly about their hopes and desires. 

And so our task as interpreters of these texts is to imagine these unnamed characters as fully realized people with hopes and dreams as well as faults and shortcomings. This helps us remember that all people are complex beings that cannot be summed up by one aspect of who they are any more than you or I can be. 

These characters are left unnamed because the main focus of this passage is on Jesus and his relationship with the religious authorities. This is the first in a series of so-called controversy stories in Mark’s gospel where Jesus is receiving pushback from the authorities over theological matters. Here the issue is over Jesus’ authority to forgive sins. This pairing of the theological question with the healing narrative raises a second way that these stories can be fraught for people with disabilities. Too often, the disabling conditions of the biblical characters are tied directly to spiritual conditions. The assumption was often that people’s disabilities were the result of sin, their own or someone in their family. 

So when the man is lowered through the roof and Jesus’ first response is to say “Child, your sins are forgiven,” we are meant to be shocked. Forgiveness is something only God can do, and there are specific ways that forgiveness is mediated to people. But note that Jesus doesn’t tie the forgiveness of sins directly to the miraculous cure he offers a few verses later. It is only after he overhears some of those present mumbling about blasphemy that he says to them: “Which is easier: to say to this man, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and take your mat and walk’?” 

Jesus first offers the man forgiveness of sin and only later does he offer to use his miraculous power to allow the man to get up and walk away. Once again, we don’t know anything about this man. We don’t know what “sin” he may have been carrying within his heart. Perhaps the forgiveness Jesus is offering is not about anything specific, but about the way all of us fail to fully live into our divine humanity. Perhaps this forgiveness is less about any specific offense and more about reminding this man–and us–that despite whatever failures we have made, we are all loved and valued and held in God’s grace.

Jesus establishes that foundation of forgiveness and grace as the first and most important thing he has come to do, but then he does go on to cure the man’s paralysis. Which brings us to one more way that these miracle stories can be troubling for people with disabilities. These miracles can give the impression that the characters who live with various conditions are not whole until Jesus shows up. For many people, a disability is simply a part of who they are, and when we allow our interpretations of scripture to focus so heavily on the miraculous cures, we can send the message that being disabled makes a person inherently broken or an incomplete person.

These kinds of interpretations can also perpetuate a false notion that people with disabilities do not have enough faith or else they would be cured. Many of you are probably familiar with the extremes of this approach and have seen televangelists and other so called faith healers convince people, often those who are most desperate and most vulnerable, that their illnesses and disabilities can be cured with just the right kind of faith, or just the right amount of donation.  

This is an extreme that deserves plenty of scrutiny and condemnation for the ways it exploits vulnerable people, but in her book A Healing Homiletic, theologian Kathy Black points out that a deeper issue that many Christians wrestle with is an understanding of the difference between healing and curing. Black writes, 

Cures, in the sense of recovery from disease, or restoration of physical health, do occur occasionally, but are not ordinary events, nor the central message of the gospel, nor the point of our faith in Jesus Christ. A central message of the gospel, however, is that we can be restored to spiritual wholeness. Much of Jesus’ active ministry on earth was aimed at the restoration of spiritual wholeness, which he offered to the entire community, not just to those who were sick or disabled.

Jesus cures the man’s paralysis through his miraculous power, but the healing he offers is more about the restoration of this man’s place within the community. “Child, your sins are forgiven” may seem like the easier thing to say, but this assurance of grace means that nothing can separate this man from God’s love and thus neither should anything be allowed to keep him from this community. Jesus does not place any prerequisites on the healing and forgiveness he offers this man. In fact, it seems as though the only prerequisite the man faces is full and uninhibited access to the presence of Jesus. 

When Jesus asks the religious authorities which is easier to say, I think we are meant to interpret that the forgiveness of sins is easier. But for the Jesus of the gospels who carried miraculous power within his very being, I think the charge to “stand up, take your mat, and go to your home” is the easier thing. Jesus has already demonstrated his miraculous power in a number of ways, which is why the house is already jam-packed with people trying to get to him. 

In her commentary on this specific story, Black writes, 

But which was easier, curing a few or changing the personal and social attitudes and structures of all? Even today, sometimes it feels like performing a miraculous cure for an individual would be more feasible than changing the social values and negative attitudes of the society at large…Since alienation from human relationships is more painful than the physical disability itself, there will not be real healing until the societal structures and attitudes are changed.

When Jesus says, “Child, your sins are forgiven,” it may be the easier thing to say, but it is the more difficult thing to bring to fruition because it requires a deeper healing, a healing that requires not just miraculous power from one individual but the greater miraculous power of a community of individuals responding to one another in love. This greater miracle is not always as flashy or even as noteworthy, but whenever and wherever it occurs it is just as awe inspiring. 

Around the same time that we were preparing for this worship series and I was preparing for VBS, I was having my weekly call with my mother. Often these calls are mostly one-sided with me rambling on about what’s happening at work or what trip we are taking next or any other mundane details of life. My mother lives with Multiple Sclerosis and experiences issues with mobility, so often she does not have a lot to report from her end about her week-to-week. 

But this week she was excited to tell me about her trip to church. It wasn’t until she arrived that she found out that the elevator was broken. This is the church I grew up attending, an older building whose sanctuary requires going up multiple flights of stairs to access without the elevator. I asked what she did when she found out the elevator wasn’t working, and she was excited to tell me about how a group of men carried her in a wheelchair up to the sanctuary. 

I had a number of gut reactions to this, including a bit of initial fear for her safety. But I remembered that most of the men in that congregation are also volunteer firefighters for our small town. Once I felt mostly ok that she wasn’t going to be dropped, I allowed myself to revel in this small miracle because that was how she was experiencing it and retelling it to me. She felt honored that they would do this for her. She felt loved and important. Of course they weren’t going to just turn her away on Sunday morning. Of course they were going to do what they could to make her feel included even though the sanctuary was inaccessible to her. 

Of course my mind went to the story of the people finding a way to get their friend to Jesus, even going to the lengths of dismantling a roof. 

But when I called the next week and asked if the elevator was fixed and found out that she had been forced to be carried into the sanctuary again, I began to have different feelings. Elevators break. Lots of churches are older and inaccessible. But we cannot allow these challenges to keep us from doing what we can to create communities that are both accessible and maintain the dignity of all. Being carried into the sanctuary every week is no more sustainable than dismantling a roof week after week.

It was a miracle that the man in our story had a community willing to go through the lengths they did to get him to Jesus’ side. But if we keep creating communities where people have to break down the roof to get to Jesus, we are missing the point. The more difficult healing that Jesus offers is not a miraculous physical cure but an invitation for all of us to create the kind of world where everyone’s inherent worth is honored, where both the architecture and attitudes of our communities reflect a commitment to loving all. The more difficult healing requires us to recognize that we cannot fix everything the way Jesus did, but we can sit with people in the hard places, we can walk together through the sorrows and the joys of life, we can build communities where all are able to experience in uninhibited ways the small but mighty miracle of grace. 

These small miracles may not be as flashy or as noteworthy as the miracle stories we find in the scriptures, but they are no less awe inspiring because they reveal the presence of God with us. Anywhere that the attitudes and the architectures of our communities begin to reflect the grace of God is a place where miracles are happening.

The healing Jesus offers and calls us to is both an inner and an outer healing. A move toward spiritual wholeness and social justice that transforms our being and our doing. It is a call to be changemakers. 

Is changemaking easy? (Sometimes not!)

But how do we do it? (We do it with God!)

And how does God do it? (God does it with love, love, love…)

And so, my wish for us, my friends, is:

• That we would have the same determination as those who tore through a roof to get their friend full and uninhibited access to Jesus
• That we would recognize that the deepest healing Jesus offers is a miracle we all get to participate in bringing to fruition
• And finally, that our vision of accessibility and inclusivity would inspire us to be Changemakers who ask questions, who work together to solve problems, who build bridges, and who create a new kind of world.