A Whole in the Roof

A Whole In the Roof

Mark 2:1-5

September 8, 2019 • Mount Pleasant UMC

So, you may remember, on the first Sunday of this series, I mentioned how I had been harassed about these t-shirts in our staff meeting, and how someone was concerned about how we would answer the question, “Why do you love your church?” if someone asked at lunch after worship. Well, two weeks ago, Cathy and I were going into a local restaurant after worship, and the woman who opened the door saw our shirts and said, “I like those shirts. Everyone should love their church!” When I said that we do, she asked me what church we went to. I said, “Mount Pleasant,” and the woman’s face lit up and in two words she told me everything she knew about Mount Pleasant: “Rick Swan!” So, you can take that for whatever it’s worth.

So far in this series on loving your church, we’ve talked about four of our six words. The first week we talked about the importance of community, and how we need each other. Then we talked about prayer; everything we do is built on prayer. Two weeks ago we talked about witness: living your story, sharing your story, and pointing to Jesus. And then last week Pastor Rick talked about service to others. This week, our word is “love,” which may seem strange in a series called “I Love My Church.” We love our church because our church has love? Well, yes, but let’s talk about what we mean by that word. I think, very often, we use that word and it does not mean what we think it means. When you think about the way most people today define “love,” it tends to revolve around feelings. We talk about “falling in love” or “falling out of love,” as if we end up there by accident. We as easily say “I love my shampoo” as “I love my spouse.” We’ve reduced loving someone to something that can happen in a 90-minute movie, at the end of which they “live happily ever after.” We have made “love” the supreme value in the world, and we are supposed to approve of nearly anything as long as it’s done “for the sake of love.” But, as I reminded the bride and groom at the wedding I did last Sunday, “love” is not supposed to be about our feelings. Hallmark does not have the copyright on what love is. As the title of a book written many years ago reminds us, love is a decision. Sometimes it’s a decision we have to make every day, or maybe even every hour! Sometimes, love even looks like four friends and a broken roof.

The story we read in Mark 2 is one of my favorites. Having stood in the streets of Capernaum, it’s not hard for me to picture the crowds clogging the streets and pushing up against the small houses there. In Jesus’ time, the town’s population was somewhere between 600 and 1500, and the average house was about 600 square feet (Card, Mark: The Gospel of Passion, pg. 44; Hamilton, The Way, pg. 52). It was a small, rural fishing village, but it was home base for Jesus during his ministry in Galilee. In the passage we read this morning, Mark tells us Jesus has come “home,” though the house he’s in, as we know from Mark 1, was actually Peter’s (1:29). Archaeologists have located Peter’s home, which was just down the street from the synagogue (today there’s a big church built over it), sort of near what we imagine might have been the center of town. It was a perfect location for Jesus to use as a home base, as everyone would have had easy access to him. And it certainly seems that as soon as word is out that he is in town, people come to him again, just like they did in the previous chapter (1:33-34), to be healed and for him to teach them. Mark says it is so crowded there is no room left in the house, not even outside the door (2:2). It’s standing room only, and Jesus begins preaching, but typical Mark—he doesn’t include any of the teaching (cf. Card 45)! There is not a scrap of what Jesus is teaching about here because Mark doesn’t want us distracted by words. He wants us to see what is happening. He wants us to see what love looks like.

So, outside the crowd are five guys (not the hamburger restaurant chain—these are actual guys). One of them is laying on a stretcher and the other four are carrying him toward Jesus’ house (2:3), but they’ve gotten there too late. It probably took them a while to get their friend ready to move, and then of course it’s not easy carrying a man on a stretcher across town through narrow dusty streets, but whatever the exact reasons for their delay, by the time they get there, there is no way they are going to get close enough to Jesus for him to heal the man on the stretcher. No one is willing to let them through. It’s sort of like trying to find a spot for your kids at the parade at Disney World; just try and get some of those adults to move or let your kids through! That’s the sort of thing I envision here. They have to be discouraged; they put all this effort into getting their friend here and now they can’t get near Jesus. And who knows if or when he’ll be back in town again to perform healings? If they are going to get their friend healed, it has to be today, but the crowd won’t let them through. (Which makes me wonder if there is any time when my own stubbornness has kept someone from getting through to Jesus. Just a tangential question, but one that sort of haunts me.) Anyway, back to the five guys. What are they going to do?

Those houses in Caperanum that I mentioned earlier? Archaeological discoveries in the town have revealed they were built with rough black basalt stone, common to the area. But they were built without mortar; the stones were just fitted together like those fences you see along the road in Kentucky. Because of that, they would not have had walls that could support anything more than a thatch roof. That’s okay, as it doesn’t rain there much anyway. So the roofs were most likely made of wooden cross beams overlaid with a matting of reeds, branches and dried mud. It would not have taken a lot of work to break through this roof, and it could be easily repaired (Garland, NIV Application Commentary: Mark, pg. 93). I tell you all of that for a couple of reasons. For one, it would have been quick work to cut a hole in the roof and it would have needed to be. The men on the roof could not be up there for long. For another, it probably wasn’t as unusual an act as it might be today. In our world, if someone started tearing a hole in your roof, you would be on the phone to your lawyer before they were done. In Jesus’ world, these four men probably helped fix up the roof when it was all over.

So they lower the paralyzed man down in front of Jesus (which means the crowd now has to disperse or back up at least some), and Jesus, perhaps standing there with some of the mud or branches in his hair, looks at him and says, “Who’s going to fix the hole in the roof?” Oh, wait, no, that’s what I would say (cf. Wright, Mark for Everyone, pg. 17). No, Jesus says, “You are healed.” Nope, that’s not what he says either. That’s what they expect him to say. That’s what we expect him to say. That’s probably what the four men who are leaning over the side of the roof want him to say. But that’s not what the man most needs. We come to Jesus with what we think we want, and Jesus always gives us what we need rather than just what we want. To this man, Jesus says, “Son, your sins are forgiven” (2:5). We don’t know what was going on in his life, but Jesus saw that his greatest need was the power and the peace of forgiveness. Now, in the next few verses (that we did not read this morning), that pronouncement sparks an intense discussion and eventually, Jesus does physically heal the paralyzed man. But what fascinates me and what has fascinated interpreters and writers for centuries is that the paralyzed man’s faith is not mentioned at all. In fact, we don’t even know if he had any faith. We don’t know if he even wanted to be there with Jesus. My guess is that, if he has been sick a long time, if he has lain on a bed or a stretcher for any length of time, he has given up on ever walking again. He’s most likely discouraged, or depressed, or despondent. At no point does he say anything. At no point does he express any kind of hope or faith in Jesus for his healing.

This is the way Mark describes what happens: “When Jesus saw their faith…” (2:5). Whose faith? Not the faith of the paralytic. Their faith—the faith of the friends who brought him to Jesus. The faith of the guys who carried him across town to the top of Peter’s house and who then proceeded to clear a hole big enough to lower him down in front of Jesus. Their faith. The faith of those guys. What Jesus is honoring here is their determination to do absolutely anything to bring their friend to Jesus so he could receive what he most needed. They were his stretcher bearers; they held him and helped him when he could not help himself. They used a hole in the roof to help him become whole. They were his friends in the truest sense of the word. They were his stretcher bearers.

And that brings me back to me and you and the church and why I love the church. The church is like no place else in our world because here we find stretcher bearers. We find people who will be there in our difficult times, in those times when life seems to be working against us, those times when we might even feel paralyzed or when we struggle to find any faith at all. We find the people we need, people who come alongside us and help when we need it. Stretcher bearers look like friends who tear a hole in a roof to get us to Jesus. And stretcher bearers also look like someone who comes and does what we cannot—sort of like this. Take a look.

VIDEO: “Helping”

There are times we all need helpers. We need people who will pick us up, who will carry us and our burdens if need be, who will have faith for us even on days when we don’t have any. We need stretcher bearers (cf. Hamilton 61), people who will demonstrate and bring us to the love of Jesus so that we can find what we most need. This morning, we welcomed eleven new members into our church, and when we get together at Pie with the Pastors, I always ask them all to answer at least two questions. First, what made you come to Mount Pleasant? And second, why did you come back? I’ve been asking those questions of new member classes for over twenty years, and I have learned two things. First, people come to churches the first time for a lot of different reasons. Sometimes they have moved into the community or they were invited by someone or they came for a special program or they were just looking for a place to worship or a positive influence for their kids or grandkids. There are a lot of things that cause people to wander through our front doors. It’s the second question that I’m really interested in, though, and it’s been clear over twenty-plus years that the main reason someone stays at church is because they make a connection—with a small group or an individual or a ministry. Ultimately, someone cared about them.

We need connections. We crave deeper connections than we usually experience. We need stretcher bearers—friends who will bring us to Jesus, people who will be friends not just in word but in deed. So let me ask you: who are your stretcher bearers? When you think of people who love you with no strings attached, who comes to mind? It’s important to remember that such friendships don’t just happen. You don’t come to worship one week and suddenly have stretcher bearers. It takes a lot of work, a lot of energy and a lot of time for such friendships to develop. These men in Mark’s story had likely been the paralyzed man’s friends for a long time, perhaps a lifetime. It wasn’t Jesus’ arrival in town that caused them to pick him up. They had probably carried him for a long time—both physically and emotionally and perhaps even spiritually. We have to invest in relationships and we have to be willing to be someone else’s stretcher bearer for them to be ours (cf. Hamilton 62). That’s one of the things I admire about our Celebrate Recovery ministry, something you hear from many of the participants: they have found a community that will be there for them and they in turn will be there for the other. It’s a mutually supportive community born out of struggle. And while that’s an important part of the recovery program, it’s also true that that’s the kind of investment it takes to have stretcher bearers, to have people who will have faith for you when you don’t have any. Over the last month, if you’ve followed the news, there have been a couple of high-profile Christians who have either publicly doubted or publicly renounced their faith. One of them in particular said no one wanted to talk about what he called “difficult issues.” He has no stretcher bearers. He had no one to hold him up when his faith was struggling, when he was paralyzed with doubt.

Who are your stretcher bearers? Who brought you to Jesus in the first place? Most of us did not find our own way there. For me, initially, it was my parents who took me to church, who taught me the Bible stories, who pointed me toward Jesus in every way they could by living their story in front of me and my brother. They took me to Bible School, and there I met another person who pointed me toward Jesus: Noel Johns. She was my fifth grade VBS teacher (we would call them group leaders today), and she shared her faith in such an authentic and loving way that I gave my life to Jesus in that class. I think of my youth leaders like Dave and Carol Bushfield and Dave and Sharon Need, and my pastor, Amos McGinnis, all of whom allowed me to explore and enlarge my faith, and then I think of the folks who literally brought me to InterVarsity meetings and to church during my college years. Those four years were critical in deepening my faith and making me who I am today. Then there was seminary and the years we’ve served in four different churches, and each time God has brought about people who were our stretcher bearers during good and bad times, through sunshine and struggle. One of the times that shaped me most was when a group of pastors began gathering for weekly prayer in my second appointment. I was contacted by the organizer and invited to participate, but because of a prior regular commitment at that time, I could not on the day they had chosen. Then he called back and said they changed it so that I could attend. That blew me away but it told me a lot about this group of men and women and their commitment not just to their own churches but to the kingdom of God. That group met every week to talk, support one another, and pray for each other. I am not stretching the truth when I say we had every type of theology in that group: Evangelical, Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, independent Christian, Nazarene, Mennonite and even Roman Catholic. (I’ll let you guess who is who in the picture.) They were my stretcher bearers when I went through my first heart valve replacement. We were stretcher bearers for Marcia when she had a car accident that nearly killed her and really stretched her faith. We were stretcher bearers for Dan when he and his wife found out they were having a third child—oops! We were stretcher bearers for Michael when he was unceremoniously let go from his church. This group was willing to tear a hole in the roof each time so that one of us could get to Jesus to be made whole. Friends, in this day of Facebook friends and people we may “know” online but never meet, we need more than ever to have stretcher bearers like that who will bring us to Jesus and who will hold onto us during difficult times. Who brought you to Jesus? Who continues to bring you to Jesus?

I say this often, both from the pulpit and in smaller gatherings, but I want to emphasize it again this morning. Your stretcher bearers are most likely going to be the people who are in a small group with you. In a church this size, we are not going to find that kind of support, love and help in the Sunday morning worship service—and that’s okay, because, friends, that’s not what this gathering is about anyway. Sunday morning is for worship. It’s for focusing on God, perhaps being equipped a bit for living our Christian life better, but mostly this time is meant to be about honoring the God who has done so much for us. He has saved us from sin so it’s a small thing, really, for us to show up on Sunday morning to honor him. But this time is not meant primarily for community-building. That happens in smaller settings as we learn to trust the people we are with. It happens in youth group and in children’s ministry for our younger folks. It happens in LifeGroups and Bible studies and in Sunday school classes and in accountability groups and in a whole lot of other types of groups I’m not even aware of. Those are the people who are really going to love you. Those are the people who will pick you up when you can’t even move and they will take you to Jesus. Those are the people who will do anything, including tearing off a roof and putting it back on, just so that you can get to Jesus. Your stretcher bearers are the folks who know you better than anyone else and love you anyway. They are why this week’s word is love.

If you haven’t yet gotten involved in some form of small community—in some ways, a church within the church—I cannot stress how important it is for you to do so. Now, let me be very honest this morning: we’ve been struggling in this area as a church lately. While we have several excellent LifeGroups and several small group classes that gather on a regular basis, I’m also aware that there are some of you who want to be part of a group and haven’t been able to yet. There is a lack of space on two levels. One, if we just start adding lots of people to small groups, they don’t stay small and their effectiveness is diminished. Then we just have the same problem we have on Sunday mornings. And two, most of our groups are tight on space to begin with; you can only put so many people in a room and be able to have a discussion. So we’ve been praying and working on that and this morning I’m going to ask some of you to step up. We need you, especially if you’re one of those who has been looking for a small group experience, to step up and take the lead. We need folks who are willing to be leaders. I know, some folks will tell me, “But I don’t know how to lead a study group or a Bible discussion.” Well, many of our LifeGroups use the questions that are in the bulletin each week, so your work is already done for you. If you are able to welcome people, maybe open your home or find space here at the church or even at a coffee shop, and if you can read questions out loud to a group, then you have the potential to be a leader. On Wednesday the 18th, just ten days from now, I’m going to host a training gathering so that we can give you some tools to get up and running. You can become someone’s stretcher bearer. You can be the way someone experiences the love of Jesus. You can be one of the people standing around a hole in the roof that has helped someone get to Jesus and become whole.

I love the way this story ends. After the discussion about forgiveness and who can or can’t grant it, Jesus physically heals the man. He gets up, rolls up his mat, and walks out through the crowd. Apparently, though they couldn’t let him in when he first arrived, they’re glad to make room so he can get out without having to climb back up through the roof! Then, the people gathered there praise God and they say, “We have never seen anything like this!” (2:12). What is the “this”? Because they had seen healings before. As I mentioned earlier, back in chapter 1, we’re told “Jesus healed many who had various diseases. He also drove out many demons…” (1:34). And that took place in this same house in this same small town! Maybe they had not seen him actually heal a paralytic, but they had seen Jesus heal people before and not that long ago. So what is the “this” they had not seen before? Maybe it’s the dedication and determination of the friends to get their friend to Jesus. Maybe it’s the willingness to risk life and limb to get their friend what he needed. Maybe the “this” they had not seen before were the stretcher bearers, the deep commitment to each other that brought about wholeness. I know this for certain: our world today would be among that crowd, because that kind of commitment and love for one another is rare today. Every time it shows up, the world, like the crowd in Mark’s story, is astounded. “We have never seen this before!” But it’s that kind of love and commitment that should characterize Jesus’ church, and it’s one more reason why I love my church. Let’s pray.