7 Epiphany, Year B                                                                  Isaiah 43:18-25
February 19, 2006                                                                   Psalm 32
St. Margaret of Scotland Episcopal Church                              2 Corinthians 1:18-22
The Rev. Linda McCloud                                                         Mark 2:1-12  

Paralyzed by sin 

            Today I’m going to talk about a guy who had a lot of friends.  Four of those friends let him down, but not in the traditional sense.   

But first, I’m going to talk about sin.  When we sin, we let God down – in the traditional sense.    

Sin. It’s that three-letter word that falls out of fashion from time to time.  Yet, it’s a word that our Lord Jesus used rather often.  The Gospels toss that word around freely. “Sinfulness” describes the human condition better than any other single word.  When John the Baptizer saw Jesus coming to be baptized, he said, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”  Jesus didn’t deny it.  Jesus, the sinless One, takes away our sin.   

Should we back up and get a working definition of sin?  A broad-brush definition would be “missing the mark” as St. Paul tells us that “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”  Sin is “unperfectness” if I may coin a term.  Jesus, on the other hand, is perfect.  Our faith in Jesus Christ connects us to his perfection and renders us forgiven in the eyes of God.  But we keep sinning.  The truth is that sin is something that we all have and that we as Christians try very hard to get rid of.  We confess.  God forgives.  This is how we grow in grace and knowledge of God.  This is how we keep from getting frozen and paralyzed by our sins. 

The paralyzed man in our Gospel reading for today did not even have time to confess his sins.  Jesus in his great compassion simply forgave him.  Perhaps the man on the pallet was too frozen in his condition to ask for forgiveness.  Maybe he did not know how to express himself.  But Jesus knew this man’s heart and he knew what needed to happen next.  Jesus also knew what his detractors were thinking.  They were taking notes on his behavior to have something to accuse him of at his trial.  If they had recognized Jesus for who he is, one look from Jesus would have told them that he knew what they were thinking.     

Have you ever meditated on scripture and put yourself in the story?  Today’s Gospel is a perfect scripture for meditation, because we can use our imagination and set our hearts and minds to work on its principles.  We can think about all the characters whose lives make up the story.   

Let’s think for a few minutes about this story of Jesus healing the paralytic.  With whom do you identify?  If you were there, who would you be?  How do you see yourself?  Are you the paralytic?  Do you identify with this person who is frozen in time and cannot move a muscle?  What is it in your life that causes you to be paralyzed?  Is it fear?  Is it failure?  Is it fear of failure?  Or is it fear of success?  Does fear control you in such a way that it freezes you in its grip?  Do you behave in anger to compensate for your fear?  Ask God to heal you and free you to live a thankful, joyful life.  Remember that perfect love drives out all fear.  Imagine the paralytic’s surprise when Jesus forgave him.  Would you be surprised to find yourself suddenly, truly forgiven?   

Are you Jesus in this story?  Are you the one who forgives others?  If someone sins against you, are you quick to forgive?  Jesus forgave the paralyzed man before he even had a chance to say, “I’m sorry.”  Do we do that, or do we keep a list of apologies owed us?  If so, we are living in the past and not forging ahead with our lives.  We can become frozen in time and paralyzed by such incidents. 

Do you identify with the scribes?  These were the gentlemen who seem to follow Jesus around in the Gospels more closely than his own disciples.  These gentlemen saw themselves as keepers of the law.  Officially they were the “scribes of the Pharisees” and they followed Jesus to catch him up in breaking the law.  In the present story, they accused Jesus of blasphemy because only God can forgive sins.  So, if Jesus could forgive sins, Jesus must be God.  Hmmm.  They would get him for this claim.   

So, do you identify with the scribes?  Are you one of those persons who criticizes Jesus for forgiving the sins of another person?  Do you not want others to be forgiven and set free?  Do you always hold others frozen in time in the categories into which you have put them?  Do you not want to give them room to change and grow?  These kinds of behavior paralyze individuals and churches.  Do we hold people back by our unforgiving attitudes?  Episcopalians have long been known as the frozen chosen.  If the broad whole of the church freezes in our present state of disruption, we will die that way.  We need to find out what God is doing and get involved.  The scribes did not realize that God was doing a new thing.  They wound up more frozen and paralyzed than the man on the pallet.  He went home forgiven and healed, but they were frozen in their anger and were set on destroying Jesus.   

Are you one of the people bringing a paralyzed friend to Jesus?  Please notice that it took four people to get this paralyzed man into the house.  There were others with them, because the text says, “then some people came, bringing to him a paralyzed man, carried by four of them.”   Sometimes it takes a whole church full of people to bring someone to Jesus.  When we come to the font to baptize someone, we all re-take our baptismal vows.  We all promise to do all in our power to support the newly baptized person.   

So, are you one of this group of people, or one of the four persons helping to carry the corners of the paralyzed man’s pallet?  Are you the one digging through the roof and knocking dirt down on the heads of Jesus and the people listening to him teach? 

Or maybe you are one of the people in the crowd around Jesus.  They were all trying to get closer to him.  They were all trying to hang on to every word, for whatever personal reasons.  But the friends of the paralyzed man would not allow any barriers to come between them and Jesus.  What barriers would we try to overcome in our lives to get closer to Jesus?   

We are a week and a half away from Ash Wednesday.  It’s that time of the year when we begin to think about our Lenten discipline.  A lot of people think they have to give up something for Lent, and maybe they do.  But I would ask that we also consider taking on something for Lent, such as a deeper and more consistent prayer life, or consistent weekly attendance at Holy Eucharist.  Perhaps we could spend some time each day in one of the Gospels and walk through Jesus’ life with him.  You know where the road leads.  The road leads to Calvary.  You know he needs our company, even though he must die alone.   

We as a church don’t even pretend that we do not sin.  In fact, almost every Sunday we confess our sins and get absolution before receiving communion.   

With such regular confession we should be able to move on from there.  But for some of us, our sins paralyze us.  Maybe we might think that God won’t really forgive us.  Or maybe we can’t forgive ourselves.  Jesus has Good News for us.  Our sins are forgiven.   

How often do we invite others to come and worship with us?  If a church is not dynamic and growing, it turns to stone.  It gets set in its ways.  This has a paralyzing effect.  Maybe someone you know is in need of the life changing experience of meeting Jesus in a worship service.  Maybe that is something we can work on during Lent. Perhaps our church will grow and people around us will say, “we have never seen anything like this.”