After a few days, Jesus went back to Capernaum, and people heard that he was at home. 2 So many gathered that there was no longer space, not even near the door. Jesus was speaking the word to them. 3 Some people arrived, and four of them were bringing to him a man who was paralyzed. 4 They couldn’t carry him through the crowd, so they tore off part of the roof above where Jesus was. When they had made an opening, they lowered the mat on which the paralyzed man was lying. 5 When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Child, your sins are forgiven!”
6 Some legal experts were sitting there, muttering among themselves, 7 “Why does he speak this way? He’s insulting God. Only the one God can forgive sins.”
8 Jesus immediately recognized what they were discussing, and he said to them, “Why do you fill your minds with these questions? 9 Which is easier—to say to a paralyzed person, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up, take up your bed, and walk’? 10 But so you will know that the Human One[a] has authority on the earth to forgive sins”—he said to the man who was paralyzed, 11 “Get up, take your mat, and go home.”
12 Jesus raised him up, and right away he picked up his mat and walked out in front of everybody. They were all amazed and praised God, saying, “We’ve never seen anything like this!”
(This homily, given as the opening lesson of Faith in Action Alabam's Birmingham hub meeting, is inspired by a sermon on the same text I delivered two years ago for Vancouver First Presbyterian Church. Faith in Action Alabama is a multi-faith grassroots organization dedicated to dismantling systemic racism.)I thank Daniel Schwartz for this invitation, and particularly for his work these past several weeks arranging for guest speakers to brief us covid-19 vaccination efforts and equity issues around access to the vaccine. This has made a real difference for me in my ministry as the new minister of Valley Christian Church.
I also am grateful to be here with all y’all. Since arriving in Birmingham last year with my wife and our daughter, I have striven to be purposeful in watching, listening, and learning before reaching for “here is what to change.”
Faith in Action Alabama has been such a space for us—to listen and learn from y’all, from your experience, from the good work and ministry you are doing on the ground. In gratitude for this space in which to learn, I want to take my opening reflection time here to talk with y’all for a few minutes about a story in Mark 2 in the Christian New Testament.
Jesus is teaching at someone’s home, and of course word gets out and it becomes a packed house—so packed that when a paralyzed man arrives with four of his friends, there is just no space for them. But his man wants to be healed by Jesus, and his friends want him to be healed by Jesus, so the friends remove a section from the roof and lower the man down to Jesus, who of course heals him.
I came here to Birmingham after working for a couple of years for a pastor who was fond of inviting his audience to see who in the text they identify with, and I thought it might be a helpful technique for us to look for someone in the crowds with whom the audience is meant by Mark to identify.
There are some good candidates here. The four friends were so determined to help their paralyzed friend that they dug through a rooftop to make space for their friend, and you may hope that you would similarly move heaven and earth for a loved one in need of healing.
The paralyzed man is another possibility as someone who is determined to have a space for themselves even while living with a disability. That is something disabled people face every day in a world still nowhere near as inclusive of them as it should be.
But the possible proxy I like the most is whoever’s house this is that the four friends just cut a giant hole in the roof of. Especially in an American culture that often values material property over people and their wellbeing, that person’s role in this story is very relevant.
Think about it—you are probably thrilled to be hosting Jesus in your home, and then four total randos you don’t know from Adam carve up your rooftop and, presumably, don’t pay to have it restored to its original state. And I think the way we are taught and have been conditioned by American culture and white supremacy has been to value the property over this person. Even though everything we have is on loan from the God who created it, we still see it this way.
I think that’s because even with something as fundamental and necessary as having a roof over our heads, we have been conditioned to value our stuff and our space over our people. It is, ironically, why so many of our neighbors lack roofs, a reality that was reemphasized to us again during last month’s cold snap across the South. Here, today, roofs are lacked because we lack that valuing of people. But here, in Mark 2, the roof—something that limits space, is removed. A boundary is broken down and the infinite possibilities of the divine are let in.
The four friends of the paralyzed man are willing to value their friend over the property in order to heal their friend. And I can already hear the commentary if such a miracle took place today: “I’m not against ‘those’ people, but he should have done this the right way,” or “Homeowners Lives Matter.”
Because white supremacy teaches to value things and spaces over people, there is this continual goalpost-moving against which people who do not look like us must forever live when they enter space that we perceive as owned by us—community spaces like churches, and public spaces like airports and parks.
I am ethnically Armenian, and because of the genocide that killed 1.5 million of us, I had no idea until a few years ago that I had blood relatives in Los Angeles. Thanks to the dogged work of a cousin of mine, I got to meet those relatives for the first time in my life two years ago. After I had landed in LAX and was standing, waiting for the flights of my mother and my cousin to arrive, airport security threw me out of the terminal.
LAX was not my space. Since 9/11, truthfully, airports have never been my space. I was reminded of it that day, that I do not get to assert ownership of that space. Two weeks later I took the pulpit in the congregation I then served to preach on this very passage in Mark 2, on the making of space.
In meditating on Faith in Action’s mission of dismantling systemic racism, I understand as part of that mission the dismantling of this sense of ownership of space which comes from supremacy and not humanity. So we make space here. Faith in Action is explicitly multi-faith, so that no one denomination can claim such an ownership, because that ownership would diminish space, not create it. We make space for the revelation of God that comes to people in their own faith traditions, and in God’s good time. And we make space for a common cause of dismantling systemic racism that is fueled and informed by each of our faiths, each of our theologies, each of our religions, each of our experiences of God.
I am thankful for this space, and I am thankful to have had this time to share this message of gratitude with you.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
March 11, 2021