Sermon and Worship Resources

Of all the wonderful gifts that God has given us, one of the greatest is friendship. It certainly makes my own personal “Top Ten” list. When we’re going through some emotional or physical trial of life, friends can help to reassure us that God is there with us, and we don’t have to face any obstacle life throws in our path alone.

I remember my two best friends from my high school days - Larry and Freddy. We were “The Three Musketeers” in those days. Wherever you saw one of us, the other two were not far away. We helped each other get through many a crisis in those difficult teenage years. I often wonder where they are now. I haven’t seen either of them in the last twenty years.

You see, although we were as close as friends can be all those years ago, somehow we drifted apart after high school. The bond we shared had gone. I joined the Air Force. Larry went to college and got a degree in accounting. The last I heard, he was working at one of the local hospitals in Memphis. Freddy went into business with his older brother, and together they developed and patented a new type of locking device for storm doors and made quite a bit of money from it. That’s all I know about them now.

It’s sad, but without the connection to helping each other through the struggle of those awkward years, our relationship disintegrated. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize that’s life, that’s just the way it is. When a relationship depends on the fulfillment of certain needs, once the needs are met or don’t exist any more, the inner need to maintain that relationship can wither and die. That’s why people who retire sometimes have difficulty going back to visit the old workplace. They see that life is going on without them, no one seems to really miss them, and eventually they just don’t go back any more. They don’t feel needed.

We all need the companionship of other people in order to survive the daily hardships of life. We are, after all, social creatures, have been from the very beginning. Remember what God said about Adam - “It is not good that the man should be alone” (Genesis 2:18). To one degree or another, we all need other people around us to share our joys and to help us bear our sorrows. As the song says, “That’s what friends are for.”

The reading from the Gospel of Mark for today tells us about a friend in need. This incident will set off a series of confrontations between Jesus and the religious leaders of the synagogue - controversies that will eventually lead to Calvary.

Here’s the story: Finally Jesus has come back to Capernaum. His popularity is at its peak now. Crowds of people follow him everywhere he goes, hanging on every word he speaks, watching every move he makes. They’ve come to hear him preach, watch him perform healings, maybe even to seek healing for themselves.

Among this throng of people, we are told about one man who is very ill. He is paralyzed, bedridden. We don’t know what caused his paralysis, but that doesn’t really matter. People in Jesus’ day didn’t know anything about the nervous system or the immune system of the body. They believed that all illness came from one of two causes: you either had done something that angered God and your illness was God’s way of getting even; or a demon or devil had possessed you, trying to take you away from God. That was it. The medical dictionary of that day was a very short book. The Health Tips page would have simply read: “Don’t make God mad and stay away from demons.”

That had to be a pretty tough pill to swallow, especially if you were the one who was sick. It must have pretty hard for relatives and friends of sick people too, don’t you think? How difficult it must have been to watch a loved one suffer and not be able to do anything about it. To complicate matters, you had to wonder what this person had done to deserve the suffering and misery they were having to endure.

But all was not lost. You’ve heard that Jesus, the evangelist from Nazareth who has the reputation of being able to cure the sick, is coming to visit your town. You’ve tried everything else to help your friend, why not let Jesus have a crack at it? So you and a few other friends rig up a stretcher and carry your friend to the place where Jesus is staying. But when you get near the house, you can’t even see the doorway for the crowd of people gathered outside. What are you going to do now?

Someone says, “Well, we might as well give up and go home. We’ll never even get close to Jesus with all these people around him.” But this is your friend on that stretcher, so you’re determined to find a way. As you gaze around, helplessly searching for a glimmer of an idea, your eyes wander up to the roof of the house. If there was just some way to get up there and lower him down through the roof.... That’s it! You go around to the back of the house and stack boxes and barrels high enough to climb up on the roof. With ropes attached to the stretcher, you hoist your sick friend up. Okay, now that we’re here, how do we get him down through the roof? Well, we’ll just have to cut a hole in the roof. Don’t worry, Mr. Homeowner, we’ll fix it later.

You lower yourself through the hole and direct your friends to lower the stretcher. As you look around the room, you see various emotions at play on the faces of those gathered inside the house - anger at having dirt thrown on their heads as you cut that hole in the roof; surprise that someone would be so bold as to attempt this; annoyance at this intrusion on their privacy; maybe even amusement. “Do you believe what these guys just did? Isn’t that a hoot?”

Then Jesus himself comes over to your friend on the stretcher. You think to yourself, “All right! Here it comes! He’s going to heal my friend now!” But Jesus doesn’t place his hand on your friend’s head and say, “You are healed.” He just looks down at him and says, “Your sins are forgiven.” Uh-oh! What did he just say? Does this man think he’s God or something? Only God can forgive sins, for Pete’s sake! Why did I have to come here? What was I thinking? I was trying to help my friend, but now.... Uh-oh, again! Isn’t that Brother Johnson and Brother Jones from First Church Jerusalem over there in the corner? Did they hear what Jesus said just now? From the look on their faces, they did. Here they come! You’re in big trouble now, Jesus!

The two church leaders step forward and address Jesus. “And just who do you think you are, sir? You don’t have the authority to forgive sins! And furthermore, this man obviously didn’t come to you for confession, he came for HEALING!”

Suddenly the expression on Jesus’ face changes from compassionate to stern. You almost know what he’s going to say before he says it. You want to say, “Wait a minute, Jesus! Are you sure you want to confront these men? You don’t really want to make enemies in high places, do you?” But before you can speak up, Jesus offers his response.

“So you think that forgiveness has nothing to do with healing? It would have been so easy to just tell this man that he was healed. But would he really be healed, not just in his body but in his heart and in his mind? No! So, to demonstrate to you that I DO have the authority to forgive sins....” Jesus then turns to the paralyzed man and says, “You can get up now. You really can. You’re healed.”

And, what do you know, your friend gets up off the stretcher and walks out! You turn to the man standing next to you and say, “Well, don’t that just beat all? Have you ever in your life seen anything like that?” What does this story have to do with us, 2000 years after the event? I mean, after all, we believe that Jesus is the Son of God, don’t we? And of course, we know that he can forgive sins. Really? Do we truly believe that Jesus can grant forgiveness of our sins? Even the ones we have not forgiven ourselves for? And is forgiveness more important to us than healing, or do we, like Jesus, realize that the two are inseparable?

You’re sitting in the waiting room at the hospital waiting to hear whether or not the chest pains your spouse had was a heart attack or something else. Suddenly, the door to the trauma unit opens and the doctor walks out. “I have good news,” he says. “Your spouse’s sins have been forgiven. God loves both of you very much.” Somehow that’s not quite what you wanted to hear. I mean, it’s nice to know that, but what does it have to do with curing the problem? Isn’t this typical of our attitude toward God’s forgiveness? If I’m sick, what do I care about forgiveness? I just want to be well again. If I’ve lost my job, what do I care about God’s love? I just want my job back. If I’m overweight, ugly and don’t like myself very much, how does it help to know that God loves me anyway? God’s forgiveness just doesn’t seem to be much consolation when it comes to dealing with the day to day problems of life. So when the Bible or the preacher or a friend tells us that God loves us, we say, “That’s nice, but it doesn’t pay any bills. It doesn’t relieve my physical suffering. It doesn’t make me feel better about myself.”

How wrong can we be? The truth is that the forgiveness offered to us in Jesus is the single most important thing in life. Without it we have nothing; with it we have everything! Hard to believe, you say? Only if we fail to realize that we were created in the image of God, but we are NOT God - we are human. But having been created in the image of God, we are meant to be in fellowship with our creator. That’s the way we were made. And when something isn’t right about our relationship with God, nothing else in our life is going to be right either.

A right relationship with God is like the cornerstone of a building. Without a solid cornerstone, sooner or later the whole building is going to come down. You can have fame, fortune, a good job, popularity, you name it. But that doesn’t mean that you have peace and happiness, because true peace and happiness depend on being in right relationship with God. On the other hand, even if everything else in life appears to be going wrong, as long as we have our faith in God, then the cornerstone is firmly in place, and we can have hope that things will get better. There is nothing that God cannot cure, no problem so great that God cannot help you overcome it.

So is it irrelevant or naive to tell people who are dying, couples who are experiencing problems in their marriage, or people who just don’t like themselves very much that God has forgiven their sins? Only if you think that the cornerstone of a building is irrelevant. You see, the fact is that you can have all the other things you need to construct a building, but you can’t build it without a cornerstone. So it is with the life of faith. Without the forgiveness offered to us in Jesus Christ, we have no cornerstone on which to build our faith. And without faith, we have no life.

Staff, by Johnny Dean