Sermon

February 19, 2006

A Sermon Preached at St. Stephen’s on Feb. 19, 2006, by the Rev. Cork Tarplee

This is a sermon about three modes of healing, three ways human lives are blessed by the presence of God. You can see the three modes in the story we read this morning from the Gospel of Mark:

A man who is paralyzed wants to be healed by Jesus, but the crowds are so thick around Jesus’ house that the man’s friends can’t carry him in. So the friends take the man to the roof of the house, cut a hole in the roof of the Son of God, and lower the paralytic down. That’s healing mode number one. We get a little help from our friends—and sometimes at the cost of the roof of the house of God. Sometimes the things that paralyze us in life are too much for us and we need the friend that will keep on listening to us no matter how depressed we are and we need the testimony of fellow alcoholics in AA. We get burned out of our homes like our friends here from IHN this week or our lives get wiped away by a hurricane like our family members this fall and we need love in the form of food and shelter. The remarkable thing about this mode of healing is that it heals the healers while it heals the ones in need. As Dorothy day put it, “We reach out to help others as a statement of our own need for help. We are all beggars and sinners…when I offer bread to the hungry, I am feeding my own soul’s hunger.”

Mode of healing number two: When the cloud of dust from his destroyed roof settles, Jesus looks down at the man at his feet and smiles at his moxie. He says to the man, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” Garret Keizer , in his book, Help: The Original Human Dilemma, points out that Jesus rarely delivers the kind of help people think they want. He says Jesus never gives the three kinds of help you and I are most often called on to give. “He never donates money, gives advice (in the specific sense of ‘Here’s what you ought to do’) or offers support (in the uncritical sense of ‘Everything you’re doing is perfectly fine.’” Instead, Keizer points out, Jesus reaches out to those who are marginalized “to remind them that they, too, have a place in the kingdom of God .” In this story, I doubt that the paralyzed man came to Jesus to have his sins forgiven. But this may be exactly what he needed. Who knows how many human ills are rooted in our crushing sense of being unworthy? Maybe a lot of our paralysis and greed and piggish-ness and laziness comes out of our need to know down in the depth of our being that our sins are forgiven and that we can do something worthwhile in this world.

And finally, the third mode of healing: The religious professionals hanging around Jesus’ house are bummed out because Jesus has the presumption to forgive the man’s sins. After all, only God can forgive sins. So Jesus poses this fascinating question: which is easier, to say “Your sins are forgiven?” or “Get up and walk?” Among us ordinary mortals, anybody can say “Your sins are forgiven,” and nobody will know the difference; whereas, if you tell the paralytic to get up and walk, and he does, then you’ve really accomplished something. However, on some deeper and more fundamental level, the really hard thing to do is to take away someone’s sense of sin. Ask a priest or psychotherapist how persistent is the human sense of brokenness. Whether it is the hard thing or the easier thing, Jesus heals the man’s paralysis and he gets up and walks.

We have then three modes of healing: healing at the hands of friends and strangers, healing in your soul by having your burdens lifted, and healing in body by the grace of God. And we have a question: “which of these is the greatest work?” I suspect that we’d each answer the question according to our own experience. Which seems like the greatest may depend on what we experience as most important.

Our friends from the American Legion are here today to commemorate one of those events in life that focuses our response to this same question. In February of 1943, a torpedo struck a troop carrier, the Dorchester , which began to sink. Four chaplains on board offered comfort and courage to the frightened young men on board, and finally gave away their own life-jackets to help the kids who had lost their own. After the ship went down, some 200 survivors were plucked from the icy Atlantic by the grace of God. They remembered the example of the four chaplains and started the commemoration we observe today. I see in the story three modes of healing: the help offered by friends and strangers, the physical rescue by the grace of God, and a deeper kind of rescue offered by four kindly men for whom the lives of the others mattered so deeply.

Which of these is the greatest work? All of them, I think. To be a friend that helps another into a life jacket—or to an AA meeting or a shelter is no small thing. When we give or receive help we are touched by God. To know the miraculous deliverance from accident or disease or disaster is a blessing that brings us to our knees. And that last, that forgiveness thing? Isn’t that in a sense what the other two modes of healing are trying to tell us: nothing we have ever done and nothing we can ever be can keep us out of the kingdom of God ? That, in the end, is what all this healing is about: God’s word to us, “Child, your sins are forgiven.” AMEN