Sermon Archive
Taking to the Streets
Sermon preached by John McLuckie at Holy Communion on 23 February 2003
Is 43:18-25, 2 Cor 1:18-22, Mk 2:1-12
Over the past week, I suspect that many of us will be have been thinking about what it means when people take to the streets for a strong common cause. Those of us present at the events in Glasgow a week past yesterday experienced a particularly powerful example of the phenomenon - people who would not normally do so taking to the streets to express a very deep level of concern over the threat of a war against Iraq. There are, of course, many other examples of people taking to the streets for other causes: cyclists claiming the roads from the motorised fellow travellers with whom they normally have to jostle for position; women claiming the streets for themselves in a statement of their refusal to be intimidated into abandoning public spaces as unsafe; mothers making a public stand against drug dealers in their community; gay and lesbian people celebrating the diversity of human life in a city; workers asserting that their claim for fairness in their employment is a public issue. These are all recognisable and, even though some of these situations may feel uncomfortable for some us, they are a recognisable part of our democratic commitments. I wonder if we feel the same about the people who take to the streets to seek the money they are otherwise denied by a society that seems to have discarded them. Certainly, there are many people who are questioning the right to space on our streets claimed by asylum seekers and many of us feel threatened by the space claimed on our streets by people whose behaviour challenges us - we'd rather they just went somewhere else. When people assert their right to public space and the recognition that implies, we don't always feel that we want to allow them that space. We can feel invaded, threatened, swamped.
I wonder if something like that is going on in today's powerful incident in the gospel reading. Here we have a classic picture of someone who ought to be out of sight claiming a very public space. The paralysed man should really have known better, and so should his friends. He simply does not belong in company with normal people. His condition was taken to be a sign that he had done something to put him beyond the pale. He was judged by those who had the power to make such judgements to be an outsider to the community. However, the man and his friends make a powerful assertion that he had a right to be in that community. They behave very badly indeed. Not seeking an invitation, not waiting their turn they burst in on the scene and assert the right of the man to a hearing and a healing. They don't do this meekly. In effect, they are claiming that the man already has a right to be there. He has been judged to be outside the community but they do not accept that judgement. What's worse is that Jesus accepts their assertion. He declares that the man is already forgiven, already restored to the heart of the community on account of the faith shown by the man and his friends. The scribes, with their calculated reason of ritual exclusion, which they mediate, are appalled. This is blasphemy. You can't go about accepting the brass-necked claims of sinners to be heard and seen. Once you start that, all sorts of people might get ideas about their acceptability to God and their place in the community. Someone needs to police the boundaries of that community to keep it clean and ordered.
Mark's gospel is bristling with conflict and this story sets up the conflict that will eventually come back at Jesus at his trial - his claim that sins can be forgiven, debts remitted and people returned to their rightful place in the community apart from the ritual judgements of the religious establishment. Jesus is a strong challenge to those whose power interests are dependent on the exclusion of others from the community. Those who are ritually pure are challenged by those who are manifestly imperfect. They just dare not accept the humanity of someone who is so obviously flawed. To do so would be to admit the possibility that they too are not perfect. The impure are an uncomfortable mirror to the messiness in their own lives. This, I fear, is one of the outcomes of a religion which has perfection as a goal. Is that true of our own religious sensibilities?
So how do we respond when we feel challenged by someone's assertion to a place or a voice in our community? Might that sense of challenge come from an unwillingness to face something about ourselves that makes us feel uncomfortable? How ready are we to accept the less perfect dimensions of who we are? Perhaps we might hear Jesus inviting us to stand boldly and honestly in the midst of the crowd and know that we are welcomed there. In the light of that welcome, we might be better able to ask; who has a right to space in our city, in our church, in our home, in our lives?
And what if we are ourselves excluded from a community? How do we assert our voice and our own sense of a right to a place there? Like the man in our story, it's easier to do so with friends who can help us dismantle some barriers and who believe in us. And perhaps it helps to know that we are accompanied by one who raised his voice from the margins - an outsider who consorted with the imperfect, confronted those who had power over him and showed us what God is like: forgiving, healing, welcoming, and rather fond of those who tear open holes in perfectly good roofs in order to come close.
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