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 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!” (Common English Bible)
Gospel of Mark Sermon Series, Winter/Spring 2019
I remember the day vividly, in high-definition color, and I think I will continue to for some time to come. It was a cold, gray, Pacific Northwest Sunday morning in February when I was walking my and Carrie’s two dogs, Sir Henry and Dame Frida, in front of the Disciples of Christ church in Longview that I’d been pastoring, at that point in time, for four-and-a-half years. As was often the case in the winter months—indeed, I’m wearing it now—I had fully grown my beard out.
A couple of joggers had stopped in front of the church building to admire it. This was a common occurrence—the church building sits across the street from a lake and public park with a walking trail, and the building’s gothic revival architecture is genuinely beautiful. As I usually do when see such folks, I walk up to them, dogs in tow, introduce myself as the pastor, and ask them if they have any questions that I can help answer about the building or the congregation. After a few minutes of small talk, one of the two joggers eyeballs me and blurts out, “Is this even still a church? Because you look like one of those Arabs who would turn this place into a mosque.”
Lest you think this is something that would only happen in a smaller town like Longview, and surely not in a community as large and ostensibly forward-thinking as Vancouver or Portland, only ten days or so after Carrie and I closed on our home that sits just a couple miles up the road from here, we were out walking the dogs one morning when a man pulled up next to us, rolled down his window, shouted, “Your wife’s a ****ing whore for marrying you!” and sped off.
And just earlier this month, as I arrived at the LAX airport for a day of meeting family, I was simply standing off to one side in one of the terminal buildings, orienting myself, playing Pokemon Go, and waiting for my mom and cousin to arrive, when a pair of airport security officers almost immediately showed up and promptly escorted me back out of the terminal.
These are only three instances, three stories, three snapshots in time, but in the time they’ve taken place, brown men have been assaulted up in Kent, down in Salem, and in my hometown area of Overland Park and Olathe, Kansas. Meanwhile, two white men who dared defend the presence of brown- and black-skinned girls on the Portland MAX found themselves murdered by a white racist. And just yesterday, a group of white high school students ganged up on an elder of the Omaha tribe to prevent him from moving as he drummed. Each of these took place in public, sometimes in broad view, and that is no accident. We can talk about how such public space has no owner, that a church building or a public sidewalk is there for anyone to be welcome in or on, but the truth I think most of us know is that for the majority of our nation’s history, such spaces were not for everyone, and they were seen as belonging to certain people more than others.
And today, that is what I want to take a few minutes to talk with all of you about—the nature of public and sacred space, of making and creating such space, and our sense of entitlement to (and ownership over) it, even when it is not ours to take and to own…and how that sense of entitlement is fundamentally at odds with Mark’s Gospel as early as its second chapter. Mark 2 is full of interesting stories, but if I preached on all of them at once, it’d be like watching me juggle plates only way, way worse, so we’ll focus on this one. Pastor Josh has already gone through Mark 1 with you and introduced the series to you in broad contours. In his absence, I’ve promised to both not burn the place down and preach on a passage from Mark 2. So here we are, I’ve got my old-timey preacher hankie in hand and a word on Mark 2 in front of me. Let’s talk.
Unlike last week where Mark clearly states that Jesus was at the home of Simon Peter, the identity of the owner of the house in Mark 2:1-12 isn’t clear. The text says that Jesus was “at home,” but it also says that He was at Capernaum, and we know that Jesus’s hometown was Nazareth. It could be that “home” for Jesus is for now the home of Andrew and Simon Peter, whose house we know from Mark 1 was in Capernaum, but we just don’t know for sure.
Which I think is useful for us as readers of the text, because when surveying this crowded scene, of a house so packed with throngs of followers that a paralyzed man needed his friends to remove the roof and lower him through it in order to reach Jesus, it can sometimes (not always, but sometimes) be a helpful reading technique to look for an audience proxy—someone in the crowds with whom the audience is meant to identify.
There are some good candidates for an audience proxy in this story, too! The four friends who were so determined to help their paralyzed friend that they literally dug through a rooftop to make space for their friend are inspiring to behold, and you may well want to think 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 welcoming and hospitable to 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. That’s who, especially in an American culture that often values material property over people and their wellbeing, I think we may need to identify ourselves with here.
Think about it—you are probably thrilled, overjoyed, even, to be hosting the only begotten Son of God in your home, and then four total randos carve up your rooftop and, presumably, don’t pay to have it restored to its original state. And now I really want you to be honest with yourself: that’d probably upset you, at least a little bit, wouldn’t it? I know I’d struggle with it, too.
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 over our people, and particularly, space that we perceive as ours over people.
The four friends of the paralyzed man are willing to inflict at least some damage on 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 disabled people, but he really should have done this the right way.” “Why should these people get special dispensation from the property damage they caused just because their friend was paralyzed?”
And therein lies the 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, including churches.
Think back to the jogger in my first story. Even though this was a church I had pastored for going on five years, and he was a complete stranger, he still felt the need to express that he, and not I, actually represented the church and its best interests. To him, even though he had no other discernible prior connection to my then-church, he felt his sense of its identity superseded mine.
It was the same thing with the man who drove by hurling expletives at my wife—with the added nastiness of his anger at what he perceived to be a marriage of a white woman and a brown man. To him, that marriage shouldn’t be seen in public. He felt entitled to communicate that this space of Vancouver was more his than mine, or more his than Carrie’s because she is married to me.
And I’m 99% sure that’s what the Covington Catholic School teens were trying to communicate to Nathan Phillips, the Omaha elder—we think this space we occupy is more ours than yours.
Which brings me to our church building, because it, too, functions at times both as a home and as a public space. Tomorrow is Martin Luther King Day, and one of his many quotes that is as true today as when he spoke it is that the most segregated hour in the United States is Sunday at eleven a.m. And even though our churches may not belong to ourselves individually, or even to all of us morally, we certainly do hold to a sense of ownership about them—and I’m not talking just about FPC, I’m talking broadly, throughout American Christianity.
So when someone appears at a church building who may not look like us or sound like us, we (white Christianity broadly speaking) do not always respond with, “Blessed are you who comes in the name of the Lord,” we respond with, “We think you might be capable of destroying a section of our roof,” or “We think you might be turning this into a mosque on the down-low.” We respond by valuing not the person’s presence, but this other thing we believe ourselves entitled to. Which then means that someone different from us might feel they have to scratch and claw their way into the space we pretend to own, including, if necessary, going right ahead and removing the roof so that their friend might come face to face with God.
I want to be clear—I make no universal equivalence between my personal experience and the experience of being Black or otherwise of color in the United States. Being of ethnicity is not the same as being of color. But I am saying that when God has sent us a messenger who said, “I have been to the mountaintop,” and “Let justice roll like a river, and righteousness like a never-ending stream,” we cannot content ourselves with muddling along in the valley, or with insisting on remaining in the water-free desert. Those are ill-gotten luxuries that we do not get to afford ourselves with.
These are questions of value that the four anonymous friends of the paralyzed man are asking of us. Who do we value, what do we value, and when are we putting the ‘what’ before the ‘who?’
These are all questions that Jesus, as revealed throughout Mark’s Gospel, can answer for us, but we have to lend an ear to listen—to Him, to the indigenous prophets and prophets of color who came before us, and who are among us now, calling on us to cede the rooftops if it means more sacred space for the children of God within. Let us listen to them with open ears and open souls.
May it be so. Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson, D.Min.
Vancouver, Washington
January 20, 2019