My first response to all of this would probably be. "Hey! What do you think you’re doing!"
Bob, our Junior Warden, would probably be fit to be tied. These guys have chopped a big hole in our new roof. Bob and several others go outside to stop the destruction.
The banging doesn’t stop as the hole gets bigger and bigger. Now we see a stretcher being lowered through the hole and discover that there is a man on it. In all the commotion I walk over to the man and say, "Son, your sins are forgiven."
From the back of the church comes a voice, "Hey, you can’t do that, he hasn’t made his confession yet."
Doing things outside the box (place small box on the pulpit for everyone to see). "The box," represents the way we have organized things in our lives, especially our faith, the way we worship, what we think about God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. It represents the order in which we do things. For instance, if you want to be healed you have to come on the first Sunday of the month, at which time we offer the laying on of hands and anointing with oil for healing. If you have a crisis, you can contact the priest and he will arrange for the sacrament of healing. But don’t just drop in and expect to be healed. In the Episcopal Church we have the "Sacrament of Reconciliation." The prescribed forms for hearing confession and granting absolution are found on pages 447 through 452 of The Book of Common Prayer. Heaven forbid, that I should absolve someone of their sins who has not "properly" confessed them.
"Thinking outside the box." I was challenged this past week at the diocesan clergy conference by some Generation X priests as to the rules and ways in which I practice religion. For those of you who don’t know, Generation Xers are young people in their 20s and 30s. I had several interesting conversations with these young priests who are trying to reach out to their age group and bring them into the Episcopal Church. One thing that I learned was that they do not necessarily think the same way I do on some matters of the faith and the way religion is practiced in the Episcopal Church. They are not rebelling against the establishment, just trying to understand why things have to be the way they are, why the rules are so definite? They wanted to know, what if God acted outside the rules that we have established?
That is exactly what Jesus did in our Gospel reading from Mark this morning. Jewish law and teaching claimed that only God could forgive sins. The Jews had developed rather strict rituals for the offering of animal sacrifices by the High Priest for the atonement of the sins of the people. This is the way that it had been done for centuries, and now along comes Jesus who pronounces the absolution of this man’s sins. Why, he can’t do that, it’s, it’s blaspheme! Jesus was acting outside the box!
At this point I believe that Jesus decided that he would humor them a little bit. "Ok," he said, then looking at the man, "I say to you, stand up, take your mat and go to your home." And with that the man stood up and walked home. Mark says, "all were amazed and glorified God, saying, ‘We have never seen anything like this!’"
The miracle revealed the power of God in Jesus Christ. It revealed a God that was not confined to a box, he did not always conform to the ways of the Jewish law and teaching. And when you get right down to it, what Jesus did, did not even conform to the laws of nature.
Religion – both Jewish and Christian – has tended to tame God. Even though in Christianity we often talk about the mystery of God, it is a tamed mystery. Let’s face it, most of us do not expect God to intervene in our lives or the events of the world.
When we read of events in the Old Testament, like the great flood or the parting of the Red Sea, we come up with all sorts of alternatives to the Biblical accounts. Are Noah and the flood true? If it is, why haven’t we found the ark? Perhaps it was just a local flood, like some that we have seen in this country in the past couple of decades. And what about Moses and the parting of the Red Sea? Some Biblical scholars maintain that it was the Reed Sea, a marshy area, and that Israel crossed it at low tide.
And then we read about Jesus. He heals Peter’s mother-in-law, a leper, a man who is paralyzed, he makes the blind see and the deaf hear. He walks on water, which by the way I can also do (at least at this time of the year), he turns water into wine, feeds five thousand with two fish and five loaves of bread. What do we think of all of this? Are they just fairy tales? Did someone stretch the facts, not just a little, but a whole bunch?
Do we expect God to act today? Or are his mighty acts confined to this book (hold up Bible) that we call the Bible? I believe that it was Desmond Tutu who once said, if your God does not act in the world today, if he is not still performing miracles, then your God is too small.
Oh, that we could have the faith of the paralyzed man’s friends, who cut a hole in the roof and lowered their friend down to Jesus. They weren’t doing it just for fun. It was hard work to cut that hole in the roof. They believed that if Jesus saw their friend, he would heal him. They expected something to happen, and it did. Their God was not too small.
The funny thing about putting God in a box is either the box will explode because it cannot contain God, or it will be empty (turn box on pulpit to show an empty inside), because it is the god of our own creation that we have placed in it.
When we pray do we expect things to happen, or do we pray because that is what good Christians are suppose to do? If it is the latter case, it won’t prevent God from acting, but it may prevent us from seeing something happen, or even fail to recognize God’s grace descending upon us. What I have gained from our readings this morning is that our belief – our faith – is not empty. It is not based on a fairy tale, something that men of ages ago created. The Christian faith is a revealed religion, that is, God revealed himself to us in Jesus Christ. What we know, what we believe, has come from God, not the wishful thinking of men. Yes we struggle with the stories, the miracles, and the resurrection. We may not completely understand and may even doubt at times. Yet we are amazed, because at least at times we feel the presence of God in our lives. Sometimes God breaks in with a miracle, large or small. At other times we just know that he is there, beside us to see us through the troubled times.
God is out there. He is in here. And he very well may come to us in ways that we lease expect.
Amen, come Lord Jesus and fill us with the glory of God.