Rosedale United Church

“A Need In Friend”

February 27, 2011
Rosedale United Church
Mark 2:1-12

Doug Norris (with Mary Morison)

click here to open an audio recording of this message

‘We have never seen anything like this!’ they said.  They crowded into a house in Capernaum because they had heard there was a teacher there – they heard that he spoke and acted as though there lived in him a power and a way that was full of God – and then they saw it themselves and they praised God, saying ‘we have never seen anything like this!’.

This is of the ‘devices’ used by Mark – a tale of extraordinary power told to make a point – this man, this Jesus of Nazareth, is the Son of God.  And we will forever debate just what that might mean, does this mean he is really Divine, or is a very fine human, or both at once…  Mark goes very quickly, in his gospel, to the scandalous assertion that the Son of God is to suffer and die, and that to follow him is to walk this path, but we’ll get to all of that a bit later, in Lent, next month.

For now, the cry of the people : ‘We have never seen anything like this!’

There is a version of this cry that is more common at our churches :  ‘Oh, we have seen lots of this…  This is nothing new.’    When we talk with children and youth about our practices here, hoping, as our Vision, says ‘to meet the spiritual needs of all ages’, they sometimes reply that things are ‘churchy’.   What they mean, I think, is that things are sometimes a tad stale – something to sit through.  As George Eliot wrote in her novel, Scenes of Clerical Life : “Captain Wybrow and Lady Cheverel walked into the room after the service, their faces radiant with the glow that is produced by a sermon when it has ended…”    Hardly the living God astounding them.   We get a bit ‘churchy’.

Now, please don’t misunderstand me, I kind of like churchy things – I like the traditions and the comfort, I love the look of relief on our faces when the sermon ends!  But I also know this : underneath all of this there has to be a pulsing power that brings us into risky contact with the One who is Life, abundant and full, and at some point the people of God will say ‘We have never seen anything like this!’  We have felt something new here.

I can identify with this.  I want to be in a place where something astounding happens.  I want to be in that house in Capernaum where the presence of holy power is felt and the people are filled and something happens that for years after they will talk about – to be among a people who feel like we have fire and wind blowing among us us, a people alive.

And – here’s where it really lands – I want to be where there are healings and resurrections and visions and where prophets really believe that new ways are breaking in and that God brings peace and ends wars…

I want to be among a people of God who regularly sing out Hallelujah! because as the hymn says ‘Our eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord’.   What a thing, to see a miracle…

In the meantime, though, (and I think this is where we hang out) …  when the miracles aren’t happening…  When the truly astounding things aren’t happening…  This is where we pretty much live, isn’t it?  And in this place, the little things have to go a long way.  When there are no sudden healings, no resurections, the lesser miracles are what we look for.

So, if this story from Mark was only about a paralyzed man who had four friends, it would be worth hearing.  If all the archaeologists had ever found was a fragment of parchment that said “Mark 2 :  ‘There once was a paralyzed man , who had four friends…‘   That is a grace, isn’t it?

There is a whole theology of friendship in that – we are not alone, as we like to say in our Creed and in our Mission Statement here.  Living as a people of God has to do with living organically connected to others, as a body where we absorb with one another our joys and our aches.  We are not in fact islands, heroic figures.

Jean Vanier wrote “I cannot be a universal brother unless I first love my people…my people are those who are written in my flesh.”   And sometimes flesh, especially broken flesh, makes for hard friendships. Strained community.

So, if this was just a story about a paralyzed man who had four friends to carry him around, that would still be something, wouldn’t it?

And if the archaeologists then found another fragment of the parchment, and now the story went “There once was a man who was paralyzed who had four friends, who took him on a stretcher to see a healer and they would not take no for an answer…”, well, that would still be a great story, wouldn’t it?

There is a theology of persistence here – that there lives in us a capacity for steadfast love, continuing, persevering, always holding out for what is right, for what is needed.

Michael Moore, the provocative US film-maker, was approached by a young man who was dying of pancreatic cancer, and whose insurance company refused to fund the operation that could save him.  Moore took camera crews to the offices of the company, tried to embarrass them, all to no avail.  So finally they hired a funeral home, a hearse, rented a casket, got the man’s family all dressed, and the man attended his own funeral, held on the front steps of the office of the insurance company, all filmed and shown on the nightly news.  Our cultural equivalent of digging through the roof and lowering a man down to the healer.  The company reluctantly gave in, said, in effect, “Oh fine…  here’s your pancreas.  Now go!”   And the man is healthy again, and raising his family.

And I get the economic argument – I understand actuarial tables and likely outcomes and unlikely outcomes…  That’s not the point.  The point is about persistent friendship.

That if we hold as an article of faith that there is a deep and holy life moving within us and that it moves between us and bonds us to one another, then we should be endlessly persistent and diligent and creative in guarding it, loving it, going to bat for it, over and over…

This story in Mark is not only, as it seems, about a dramatic healing, but also about a persistent friendship.  So I’ve asked a friend to speak here with me today, to say a few things about this.  Mary Morison.

———

Doug asked me to reflect on persistent friendship. When I mentioned this to my friends, visiting from Halifax, they said – “oh you mean annoying friends?” We all laughed. And then I started thinking about it.

Friends can be annoying. Friendships can be hard. And in the hard times that friendships are built and strengthened and, yes, tested. For it is in the hard times that we need our friends.

In Mark the men carried their friend to a house where Jesus was meeting with people. When they couldn’t get through the crowds, they lifted him to the roof, cut a hole in the roof and lowered him down.

Would you do that? And how often? What if it hadn’t worked? What if the man had to be carried home again?

I have lost friends because I got tired; I couldn’t carry them any more. I needed to be carried.

And most of us, if asked, can tell you about the times our friends have come to our assistance, the times they have carried us on their shoulders.

And we can remember the times we have carried our friends – in sickness, in death, in fear or crisis.

But persistent friendship isn’t only about those hard times. It is tested in those times, but it is built in the ordinary times, the times we have walked together, talked together, laughed together, sat quietly together. The easy times – easy for us and easy for them. The nurturing times.

Friendship is like faith. Necessary for us. There for us when we are in need. But there for us the rest of the time too, surrounding us, enfolding us.

———

Here’s an image I saw this week – it made me think of this passage.  In one of the papers, or maybe online, I forget : 4 young men, carrying another young man who appeared to be paralyzed.  They were carrying him off one of the public squares in Cairo or in Tripoli – he was bloodied, they looked afraid, smoke and debris in the background.  Guns and tanks…

It is easy to carry around Sunday School versions of these stories in the gospels – a picture of Jesus with a combed beard and clean robes in a room full of well behaved people…  if these are in fact eternal stories, they need to also live in such places as in that photo I saw, they will have to be comprehensible also in the messiness of human history.

So I wondered about the men in the photo.  Who was the man they were holding?  Did he live, or die?  Who was at home, to shriek and faint when learning of his death?  Were the four men longtime friends?  Had they gone to school together, shared meals, played with toys at the knees of their mothers, wondered about the future, then decided to go together to the risky place, and now, here they are, surrounded by violence and fear, and they have to carry him out…  They have to search for healing together.

Here is a speculation I have.  About what is unfolding in these past weeks, in north Africa.  Much of what we are seeing is coming about because a tipping point was reached, where a critical mass of courage tipped past the point where it now outweighs the level of fear.  And this development of a courage that outweighs fear, has to do with human connection.  Courage is not, or not only, an individual heroic quality – it is also cultivated when we believe we stand held in a community.

And I don’t mean this in the shallow sense of ‘safety in numbers’, the mob bravado of drunk undergrads who will do things in a group they would not do alone.

I mean the transforming effect of persistent friendship – which brings about not simply an adding together of our individual strengths, but creates a new character, a new platform, that is more than the sum of the parts.

I have seen groups of friends here circle tightly, and a critical mass of courage develops, which is enough to keep at bay the fears and the pain, as these circles confront a cancer, a death, a threat.  I know this from seeing it among you (Mary, Marjorie, Don, ) persistent friendship that fosters a courage that trumps fear.

We are quite accustomed to thinking of Jesus in the individual-heroic terms – he is Saviour, he alone brought about salvation, he is one of a kind.  But I look at it this way too :  The moment he understood a stirring within him, he went to join the community of his cousin John.  The first thing he did himself was to gather friends he could trust.  When he sent his people out to teach he sent them in pairs and groups.  When he understood that his path was leading to his death he called his people to a shared meal, and his greatest lament at the last was that his friends had, for a time, left him alone, and on his own was not sure he had courage to go on.

I need to know, now, how this ends…

I’ve been listening a lot, over the years, to Garrison Keillor, on Prairie Home Companion.  And I’ve noticed that he often, in the middle of telling a story, just kind of ends it.  Stops talking, says, ‘Well, that’s the news from Lake Wobegon….’
I used to find that odd and now I understand that sometimes you just get to where you don’t know how it goes, so it’s time to stop talking.

So I don’t know whether the holy power of persistent friendship will be enough, to undo tyrants, to quell our own dark nights, our fears and our losses.  We don’t yet know how this goes.

Kahlil Gibran – “I beg you to forgive me for beginning a story that I cannot end.  But the end is not yet upon my lips.  It is still a love song on the wind…”

So I’ll end with borrowed words – a promise, and a prayer.

The promise we have sung, a while ago, in the hymn :

“As we wrap our healing arms to hold what her arms held,
this ancient love, this aching love rolls on.”

And the prayer we will, in a moment, sing together,

‘O Jesus, from the mountainside, make haste to heal these hearts of pain.
Among the restless throngs abide, and tread our cities’ streets again!’