Text: Mark 2:2-12
Speaker: Sarah Werner
This morning I want to talk to you about the spiritual practice of friendship. Our hyper-individualized world often fails to embrace the benefits of various types of community, including friendship.
Thankfully literature is full of powerful friendships. A few good friends can make up for quite a lot of fear and danger. I think this is why The Lord of the Rings is one of my favorite book series of all time. It is essentially a story about the incredible power of friendship in the most perilous of circumstances, how these four friends save each other over and over, and how they save the world in the process. We should all wish to have friends like Merry, Pippin, Frodo, and Sam.
And so it is with our text for this morning, four people who literally tore apart a roof for their friend. Before we begin, though, I have to share that I have a fraught relationship with most of the healing miracle stories in the Gospels as a disabled person. I do not believe that God is going to cure me of being disabled. Some days I am fine with this, because my physical embodiment, including disability, has shaped my life in distinctive and amazing ways. I wouldn’t be the same person without it. Other days I would dearly love to leave behind the pain and the unpredictability and the frustration of inhabiting a disabled body. Pride and grief can comingle.
Another reason miracle stories are fraught is how Christians have weaponized them against people with disabilities. We receive unsolicited offers of prayers for healing from people who know nothing about us and our lives. When said healing does not occur, we are blamed for our disability because of our lack of faith. Or, despite Jesus’ teachings to the contrary, that we are disabled because we have lived a life of sin. Fun fact, one of the reasons churches fought to be excluded from the Americans with Disabilities Act was that they did not want to be required to provide services to people who had become disabled due to AIDS, which was raging at the time. They thought that these people became disabled because of their sinful lifestyle, and they didn’t want them in their churches. There’s a lot that could be said here about the intersectional nature of injustice. But I digress.
This particular healing miracle is one of my favorites, though, and it’s because of the presence and the faith of the friends. At a time when disabled people were shunned and ignored because they were supposedly suffering because of their sin, this guy has four friends. And not just casual, have barbeque once a month kind of friends. Dedicated friends. Friends who actually disassembled a roof in order to get him in front of Jesus. And while we’re talking about this story, this particular disabled guy needs a name. No one should be defined by their disability. So many of the minor players in the Gospels are unnamed, so for the purposes of this sermon, let’s call him Jeff. We don’t know what exactly happened to Jeff, whether he was born disabled or was injured in a farm accident or from falling off a donkey. Mark is notoriously sparse on details.
The important thing is that Jeff has friends, and they are determined to get him down to where Jesus is. I imagine them peering down into the crowded house after they lowered him down, unbothered that they have just interrupted whatever was happening. And this is what Jesus notices in all the hubbub, the faith of the friends in helping Jeff get to Jesus. Which leads him to offer spiritual healing to Jeff, telling him that his sins are forgiven, essentially restoring him to spiritual wholeness. This of course really angers the rule-followers in the crowd because in their tradition, the tradition that Jesus also shares, only God can do this, can make someone spiritually whole.
And Jesus, being the super-conscious enlightened being that he is, senses that they feel this way. To prove that he too has this authority, he does something physical. He heals Jeff’s body in addition to his soul. We humans have always been big on having proof. And so Jeff’s body becomes the proof. Jesus tells him to stand up and walk, and everyone is amazed. I wonder what the friends thought at this point. They were excited for sure. They likely brought Jeff to Jesus hoping for a miracle. But I wonder if they were also just a little bit sad because they enjoyed having this close connection with their friend and found value in caring for him. I hope that Jeff and his friends continued to have a happy life together and that they found other meaningful ways to be together, even though Jeff didn’t need their help in quite the same way anymore.
I have been blessed in my life to have similar friends, friends who have carried me both spiritually and literally, up flights of steps and down rocky sections of trail, so that I can be included and see amazing things. Yes, so far none of those adventures have included a visit to a miracle worker, but for me the physical healing aspect of this story is almost an afterthought. Jesus made Jeff’s spirit whole again and was going to leave it at that until the rule-followers interrupted. I wonder if Jesus felt like that was all that Jeff needed.
For me, and for many disabled people, healing and wholeness look different than they do to the able-bodied people who imagine what our lives are like from the outside looking in. I created a workshop on embodiment that centers around Psalm 139. I have led it with several different groups of people, but the most meaningful experience was at the Institute for Theology and Disability a few months ago in St. Paul, Minnesota. All of us in the room either had a disability or were intimately acquainted with disability. At the beginning we went around to introduce ourselves and answered the question, what comes to mind when you think about your embodied experience. Almost everyone in the room answered, “pain.” Disabled life often involves pain of some kind or another.
Most of us aren’t actively seeking a cure for our physical conditions. We just want to have less pain, either through medical intervention or better mobility equipment, or even more basic: social inclusion and an actual sense of belonging in our communities. For some of us, our disability is a core part of our identity. We would like to be free from pain and other annoying things like the oppressive crush of ableism that puts red tape on our medical care, excludes us from public life in a variety of ways, and puts us under the scrutinizing gaze of able-bodied people who constantly judge our worthiness of receiving some basic consideration like an accessible parking spot or the ability to have a job or the barest minimum in government income. But we don’t often wish away our disability entirely, because disabled experience has shaped us into the people that we are.
And ableism is exactly what keeps us from wholeness, from community, and in many cases from having good friends who support us like the ones that Jeff has in the story. Community is the lifeblood of human existence. Each of us, disabled or not, need friends who can support us and get us to a healer when we need help. Autonomy is important, but we are always interdependent. The primary purpose of healing in the Gospels is to return someone to their life in community with others. If Jeff had access to high quality medical care, an excellent all-terrain wheelchair for the Judean desert, and meaningful work, that would be the same end goal as the healing of his paralysis. Jeff and his friends could have spent their time wandering the hills together and fishing, free from the ableist gaze that would prefer Jeff remain the object of pity and an example of sin, than a whole, happy person surrounded by friends.
Who are your friends who would tear apart a roof for you? We can never successfully seek healing alone. It’s important to find companions to travel on the journey with you, whatever that may be. Independence is a lie sold to you by people who see you as purely a cog in the capitalist system, existing only to make money and buy things.
One of several meaningful friendships I have had in my life was with my pal Mandy when I was in college. To give you some context, I went to Warren Wilson College just outside of Asheville, NC. Warren Wilson is a work school, which means that every student on campus is on a work crew. This can be anything from milking the dairy cows to working in the print shop. Mandy and I were on the landscaping crew together and we specifically were in charge of growing native plants for use in campus landscaping projects. We, along with a third member of the team, collected seeds from local grasses and wildflowers, processed them, and then spent the winter growing them in the greenhouse. It was an awesome job, and Mandy and I were both passionate about native plants. We also used to argue about everything, from the best way to wet the potting soil to how the format the guidebook we created together. But in addition to arguing, we also had a lot of fun. Halfway through my second year on the crew, I was hit with a sudden bout of muscle weakness in my legs. This has been a recurrent feature of my life, but at that point, it was only the second time that it had happened, and I still didn’t have a proper diagnosis. Mandy was there for me at every step of that agonizing journey. She drove me to neurology appointments and raged with me at their incompetency and inability to figure out what was wrong. She pushed my wheelchair up and down the hills that are everywhere on campus for months. There is literally not a single level surface at Warren Wilson. When it was time to collect seeds, she carried me several times so we could make it out to a particular spot together. She even came to get me in the middle of the week from Durham, several hours away, after yet another unhelpful neurology appointment when my aunt couldn’t drive me home until the weekend.
Mandy was the friend who would have torn apart a roof for me in those excruciating months. I eventually got better, and also had the chance to be there for her during her own difficult moments. Her sister was a Sea-Bee, one of the first units deployed to Iraq when war was declared in the spring of 2003. We were fearful together, and rejoiced when she safely made it home again after her deployment. After we graduated, we ended up living fairly near one another, and still got together most Saturdays to collect seeds for a local arboretum. It was a beautiful and sacred friendship, one of several I have been blessed with in my life. Mandy reminded me that my disability didn’t define me, didn’t make me less whole. She didn’t see me as a burden but as a friend and a valuable contributor to our shared work.
As it happens, while I was writing this sermon, I was working at the church because my house was getting a new roof. It wasn’t being replaced because well-meaning people broke through it, but that would have made for an awesome story. Also that day my step-mother-in-law was actively dying after living for years with metastatic cancer. When we got word that she had passed, I found myself in the comforting embrace of friends instead of alone in my house. And that felt like a huge blessing. We are too accustomed to doing everything alone, to grieve quietly lest we disturb others, to be in pain alone because we fear being vulnerable, and to make do with our limitations alone because we don’t want to ask for help. This is where friendship becomes a spiritual practice, encouraging us to reach out and embrace our interdependence. We all need each other, and that’s a good thing. We were created to care for one another, to accompany each other on the journey, and to destroy any barriers that get in our friend’s way.