Epiphany 7 February 19, 2006

Today’s gospel is a great story, one that lends itself to all sorts of dramatic possibilities.  The priest at my former parish tells a wonderful tale from his childhood about this passage.  When Mac was 10 he spent a summer with his grandmother in a small Alabama town. During that summer he went to church with his grandmother at one of those venerable Southern churches where the preaching was the main event.  As the main event, it often extended long past the time that preadolescent boys could sit still.  So one summer Sunday when this passage from Mark was scheduled  as the text for the week, Mac and his friends decided that they would liven things up a bit.  Borrowing some supplies from home they met on Sunday morning and hid themselves in an unused balcony at the back of the church. When the preacher began reading his text for the day, the boys went into action.  There was the sound of some scuffling from the back of the church and the preacher looked up.  Seeing the expression on his face, the congregation soon turned to follow his gaze, and what they saw was Mac, stretched out on his grandmother’s ironing board, being lowered into the church from the balcony by four of his friends using ropes tied to the ironing board. To increase the dramatic effect, other friends tossed down handfuls of plaster chunks and dust from his grandmother’s attic, all of which showered down on the unsuspecting congregation, dressed in their Sunday best.  Needless to say their reception was not as warm as the reception for the paralytic man when Jesus saw him. In fact, Mac reported that he did not get up and walk; when he saw his grandmother’s face, he got up and ran.

 It’s easy to imagine that those who were with Jesus in the house in Capernaum were equally astonished, and  perhaps just as annoyed to see a bed being lowered into the house—why are they coming in through the roof?  What a mess!  Boy, are they going to have to pay for that roof!  But not Jesus.  Jesus saw their faith.  Note the wording here, because it’s important.  Jesus saw their faith, and this moved him to heal the paralytic, telling him that his sins were forgiven and that he should pick up his mat and go home.

“Faith” is a word that we are all familiar with, and use easily.  But I wonder how often we think about what exactly we mean when talk of our “faith” or what we “believe” (which comes from the same Greek root).  In our 21st century world, faith and belief usually connote something internal, a psychological cognitive and affective assent to something that is true.  We make this assent—we accept the “truthfulness” either because logically we can see it to be so, or because we accept the credibility of its source.   So for example we believe what we read in a chemistry or physics text even if it is not logically obvious to us, because we accept the authority of the authors.

In the first century Mediterranean world, this connotation, this understanding of faith as cognitive assent was not absent, but it was rare.  In the world of Jesus and his followers, faith referred more often to a sort of social glue that held a community together. Rather than being something internal, faith was manifested externally, socially in behavior that demonstrated loyalty, commitment and solidarity.  For Jesus, then, faith might connote a cognitive assent to his power and his divinity, but more likely faith connoted loyalty to Jesus and his teachings, commitment to his cause, solidarity with him and his followers. This loyalty would b expressed in behavior—something external rather than just internally. 

When Jesus saw four people lowering a bed through the ceiling, he was moved by THEIR faith. It’s not clear whether that plural “their” includes the paralytic or not.  It is clear that the behavior of the four people bearing the bed was significant to Jesus.   Their behavior demonstrated their faith—their loyalty to Jesus and his teaching AND their loyalty to the person whom they were bringing to be healed were so great that they went to great lengths to make sure they had contact with Jesus, and this contact meant that the person they brought was healed.

Often in the gospels we hear about individuals whose faith is so great that they are healed just by coming to Jesus, even in the case of one woman, just by touching the hem of his robe.  Jesus is moved by the faith of these people and their determination to seek him out.  But in this story, we don’t know anything about the faith of the person who was healed.  We don’t know if he wanted to see Jesus, if he asked to be taken to Jesus, or if he was taken there unwillingly—after all, he was paralyzed and there wasn’t much he could do about it.  But you know what?  I don’t think that matters.  Because he was carried by the faith of his companions.  And that was enough.

The last few months here you’ve heard me preach a lot about being the Body of Christ in the world.  For us to truly act as the Body of Christ requires that we all participate, that we all engage in ministry, however we define that; that we all come together for worship.  But there is another dimension of being the Body of Christ in the world that today’s story touches on, indirectly.  And that is the dimension of community.  When we are united as the Body of Christ in the world, we are also part of a community that is larger than ourselves.  It is a community of faith that comes together for a common purpose based on shared beliefs.  We may not always agree on the details of those beliefs but what we share is the common glue that holds us together—faith in the sense that it was understood in the 1st century world; faith expressed externally in our behavior as well as internally with our cognitive and affective assent.

That community held together by the glue of faith is important for all of us because in it we are part of something larger than ourselves.  And being part of something larger than ourselves means that we, like the paralytic man, have others to count on.  It means, I think, that the faith of all of us together is stronger than the faith of any one individual.  It means that on the days when any one of us is floundering we can rely on the faith of our community to carry us along. It means that on those days when the cognitive assent is difficult, we still have solidarity with a community acting in faith to hold us up.

Of course, this goes two ways. Being part of a community of faith means that we have responsibility for others in our community as well. Today we will baptize two babies, Carly and Sarah, incorporating them fully into the Body of Christ, and into our community. In doing so, we will promise, all of us together, to support these children and their parents in their lives in Christ. What does this mean for us?  Practically it might mean lots of things—that we will have a vibrant Church School and Youth Program available for them as they grow up, that we will welcome them in worship, that we will provide moral support, encouragement and friendship for their parents, that we will be warm and loving role models in the community.  But beyond that, it means that the glue of our faith is there for them, too, to support them.  It means that, like the paralytic man, that they can count on being carried on the faith of others when they can’t do it themselves.  This begins when their parents and godparents make the baptismal promises for them, but it continues long past that as we along with their parents and godparents hold them in our prayers and in our hearts. 

It is always a joyful moment for me when during baptism we mark the sign of the cross on a child’s head and say, “you are marked as Christ’s own forever”--it's a 'goosebump' moment for me.   To me that is an indelible sign of being incorporated into the Body of Christ and into our community of faith. We have all been marked as Christ’s own forever, and we have all been incorporated into the Body of Christ, and we all have available for us the faith of our community—at Saint Mary’s, and in the larger Christian world, to hold us up when we need it. May we rejoice and give thanks for that today and always.

Thanks be to God.