Paralysis
Theme Paralysis occurs in many ways. We bring each other to Jesus for healing.
Prelude
Welcome
Call to Worship
One: Happy are those who consider the poor;
All: The Lord delivers them in the day of trouble.
One: The Lord protects them and keeps them alive;
All: They are happy in the land.
– Based on Psalm 41:1–2b
*Hymn of Praise # 57 “I Sing the Mighty Power of God”
*Invocation (the Lord’s Prayer) Break through every barrier we place before you, Holy Spirit, and touch our lives with your inspiration and truth. Break through our preconceived ideas about who you are and where we will find you, Jesus Christ.
*Gloria Patri
Four Faithful Friends
Preparation: Identify the ways your church building is inviting to people with physical disabilities.
Churches are welcoming places, places for everyone to worship God. Some of God’s people use wheelchairs or walkers or crutches. How is our church building welcoming for them? (Accept answers and point out others.)
One day four people brought their friend to see Jesus. They carried their friend on a mat because he couldn’t walk. They knew that Jesus could heal their friend, if only they could reach Jesus. The house where Jesus was teaching was packed with people. They couldn’t get through the crowd. The four friends climbed to the rooftop. The flat roof was made of woven plants and covered with clay. They carefully removed part of the roof and lowered their friend through the opening. Jesus looked up and watched as the man came down from the roof. Jesus said, “Stand up, take your mat and go to your home.” And that’s just what the man did! Jesus healed him!
These four people found a way to get their friend to Jesus. What do you think was the first thing the five friends did together?
Prayer: Dear Jesus, help us to welcome all people who want to see you. Amen.
Malachi 3:7 - 12
“But you ask, ‘How can we return when we have never gone away?’
8 _ “Should people cheat God? Yet you have cheated me! “But you ask, ‘What do you mean? When did we ever cheat you?’”
You have cheated me of the tithes and offerings due to me. 9You are under a curse, for your whole nation has been cheating me. 10 _ Bring all the tithes into the storehouse so there will be enough food in my Temple. If you do,” says the Lord Almighty, “I will open the windows of heaven for you. I will pour out a blessing so great you won’t have enough room to take it in! Try it! Let me prove it to you! 11Your crops will be abundant, for I will guard them from insects and disease.£ Your grapes will not shrivel before they are ripe,” says the Lord Almighty. 12“Then all nations will call you blessed, for your land will be such a delight,” says the Lord Almighty.
The people of Malachi’s day ignored God’s command to give a tithe of their income to his Temple. They may have feared losing what they had worked so hard to get, but in this they misjudged God. “If you give, you will receive,” he says (Luke 6:38).
Our Offering to God one barrier to the life of Jesus can be the crowds that are gathered around him – that could be the church itself when it excludes people, or “crowds out” views of God that it doesn’t like. Sometimes the barrier is that we like to define the nature of our healing. Some people would not even understand sin as something that needs healing and that can incapacitate us to the point of paralysis. We ourselves often decide what it is we need from God for the renewing of our life rather than simply staying there before the Christ and waiting for the gift. Sometimes we won’t even notice the offer of healing from our God because we are determined to have something else. It would be interesting to know what the man in the Gospel story hoped to receive from Jesus.
*Offertory Sentence
Let us give to God, bearing in mind all who long to come closer to the healing touch of the Christ. Your offering will now be received.
*Doxology
*Prayer of Dedication We bring you our gifts, in humble faith, O God. Grant us wisdom in their use, that all may be done to your glory.
Scripture Reading Isaiah 43:18–25
God is about to do a new thing for the chosen people, even though they have not honored God with appropriate sacrifices and prayers. Instead, they have burdened God with their sins.
*Hymn of Prayer # 58 This is My Father’s World
Pastoral Prayer You see us, O holy God, as we are, and you love us still. You see our weaknesses, our faults, our sins, the ways in which we struggle to find meaning. We come to you with problems of one sort and you are able to look deeper within to see the real trouble. Give us the ability to see ourselves as you see us. Show us what we ought to do to be more like Jesus, our Lord and Savior.
For love and forgiveness and patience, we give you thanks, O Lord. For friends and family, for all those who care enough to see that we get what we need to be safe and fed, we give you thanks, O Lord.
Teach us to be that kind of friend to others, even to those we have never met. Give us faith enough to share with those for whom faith is hard to come by, or who struggle because of difficulty simply to recognize your goodness. And when we find ourselves among those who strain to find an ounce of faith, send friends our way who will let us lean on them until we can find our own way of standing.
*Hymn of Praise # 90 “Oh for a Thousand Tongues”
Oh, to know the joy of being healed as the man in Capernaum did! Such an occurrence would be the turning point in one’s life, an event coloring all others. The hymn “Oh for a Thousand Tongues” testifies that, for Charles Wesley, that event in his life was becoming a Christian.
Penned on the first anniversary of his 1738 conversion, Wesley’s mighty hymn is comprised of eighteen stanzas from which four are generally selected. Carl Gläser’s AZMON is an uplifting eight-bar melody that complements Wesley’s jubilant text.
Scripture Reading Mark 2:1–12
Four people who wanted to bring a friend who was paralyzed to Jesus in a crowded house went up on the roof and made a hole in it, then let the man down in front of Jesus. Jesus forgave his sins and healed him.
Message Paralysis
Jesus sees us as we are, and knows our deepest needs
Jesus was at home in Capernaum. Word got around after a few days that he was there and people came to hear him teach. There was quite a crowd, with people filling up the house and spilling out into the street.
For one man, this day was quite different. He suffered from some sort of paralysis. We don’t know how long he’d been paralyzed, how often he’d prayed to be healed. We don’t know if he’d grown despondent from the length of time he’d been bedridden. But one thing we know: there were people close to him who cared about what happened to him. They wanted to do something to help. /// The paralyzed man’s need moved his friends to action, and they brought him to Jesus. When you recognize someone’s need, do you act? Many people have physical and spiritual needs you can meet, either by yourself or with others who are also concerned. Human need moved these four men; let it also move you to compassionate action.
The details of the story are sketchy, but I like to imagine that someone close to this man heard that Jesus was nearby and hit upon the idea of taking the sick man to be healed. He got three other friends, and they planned to carry this man to where Jesus was. They knew he couldn’t get there on his own, so they determined to take him.
This is what real friendship and love are about. When we can’t do for ourselves – when our physical or spiritual or emotional health is weak – those who care about us step into the picture and provide the help we need.
These people took the man to the house where Jesus was teaching, but they couldn’t get anywhere near the door because of the crowd. I imagine them talking among themselves about just how they would get Jesus to see the man. They must have discussed and discarded several possibilities before one of them tentatively said, “You know, about the only way we can get him in front of Jesus is to go up and let him down through the roof.” Everyone laughed. “Yeah, right!” “No, really.” And they all looked at him as though he had lost his mind. After some talking, he convinced them to give it a try.
Maybe one friend ran home to get a shovel, and they struggled up the outside stairs to the roof, carrying their friend. Most roofs in those days were formed by beams and rafters, then covered with matting or straw, or with tiles or a type of cement that hardened in the sun, or even a layer of dirt. Mark says that they dug through the roof in order to open up a hole.
Now imagine Jesus, in the house below, with the room absolutely filled with people. It must have been a little hot and dusty. There was some shuffling as people stirred, but mostly they were very quiet, listening. Some were listening to find things to disagree with. Others were listening for some word that would help them in their lives of faith. Both kinds of listeners had their attention focused on Jesus.
Then a little dust fell from the ceiling. A couple of people looked up but didn’t see anything. Then more dust. Then the faint noise of digging, which began to get louder. Soon everyone was looking up as a man’s face appeared at a hole in the roof. Jesus had stopped teaching. The hole got bigger. Though there was no room in the house, suddenly people somehow made room as a pallet was lowered through that hole in the roof down beside Jesus.
Jesus looked at the man, but also at his companions, still up on the roof, I imagine. There they rested, peering down into the room, filled with hope and prayers for their friend. Mark tells us that Jesus saw their faith. Does he include the faith of the sick man? Probably, but he also is referring to the faith of those who brought him. Jesus cared about their concerns, their prayers, their hopes.
When we pray for those we love, God sees our tears, feels our heavy hearts, understands our pleas. And when we don’t have faith enough to see us through, we are buoyed by the faith of those around us. People who care about us pester us about our health, love us when we feel unloved, pray for us when we have lost all ability to pray. They can tell when we have had more than we can take, and they find ways to let us know they will share the burden with us, that they will hope for us, that they will believe for us when our faith is thin.
When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the man – and here’s the surprise part of the story – “Child, your sins are forgiven.” This wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen! The poor guy was there to be healed, not this! Forgiveness could be granted by other means. They hadn’t gone through all this for plain old forgiveness.
//// I have wondered, though, if the sick man might have been the only one there who wasn’t troubled by Jesus’ statement. Was there something Jesus could see in him that no one else could? Was there some need that even a miraculous physical healing would not touch? Were there needs unseen to all but the man and God? Jesus stepped into a different realm as he moved to heal the spirit before the body.
Mark indicates that some scribes who were there became furious. Only God had the authority to forgive sins. /// Before saying to the paralyzed man, “Get up,” Jesus said, “Your sins are forgiven.” To the Jewish leaders this statement was blasphemous, claiming to do something only God could do. According to the law, the punishment for this sin was death (Leviticus 24:15, 16). The religious leaders understood correctly that Jesus was claiming divine prerogatives, but their judgment of him was wrong. Jesus was not blaspheming - because his claim was true. Jesus is God, and he proved his claim by healing the paralyzed man. /// What was this Jesus trying to do?
Jesus confronted their anger. “Do you think it is easy to tell someone their sins are forgiven?” he asked. Of course they thought it was easy.
And so Jesus told the man to pick up his mat. He did, and walked away, and all were amazed, even (especially?) the scribes.
The signs of Jesus’ ministry and the signs of the kingdom of God were often dramatic healings, as in this story. But there is a deeper sign embedded here. Not every person who was paralyzed had access to Jesus, or experienced that kind of healing. All of us, though, have access to the power of forgiveness offered to this sick man. This man’s healing was indeed a sign. Jesus made it clear – “so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins” (Mk 2:10) – that the healing of the man’s paralysis pointed to a different kind of healing. The visible points us toward the invisible. Whatever the man’s physical need, he also shared with all humanity hidden spiritual needs, and those needs were met by the Son of Man. /// This is the first time in Mark that Jesus is referred to as the “Son of Man.” The title Son of Man emphasizes that Jesus is fully human, while Son of God (see, for example, John 20:31) emphasizes that he is fully God. As God’s Son, Jesus has the authority to forgive sin. As a man, he can identify with our deepest needs and sufferings and help us overcome sin ///
Paralysis takes different forms, and though some experience the extraordinarily difficult burden of physical paralysis, all of us know the hidden burden of the paralysis that affects the soul – when we are unable or unwilling to respond to God’s gifts of mercy and grace. Often those who love or befriend us are the ones who nurture our souls and help us take the first steps back toward God. Even if we can’t make those steps on our own, there are sometimes those who carry us in their prayers and their love until we are able to walk on our own. Once there, we find the spiritual healing we need, the forgiveness, the love, the grace. We find Jesus.
– Melissa Bane Sevier
*Hymn of Response # 28 “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing”
*Sending forth
*Postlude
Thought for the Day Jesus meets a man with paralysis, but sees that his problems run deeper. Jesus helps the man when he sees his faith and the faith of those who brought him.
