Mark 2:1-12

The evening was cool and I was sitting on the porch with my grandparents at their farmhouse when I was a girl. The phone rang and my grandmother got up to answer it. We could hear her chatting through the screen door, and after just a few minutes we heard her say, “Can I call you back tomorrow? We’ve got company right now.”   

When she returned to the porch I said, “Grandma, who’s our company?”

And she said, “Why Viki, you are!”

And suddenly an ordinary evening was transformed. I was company! I was used to having folks out after church and we’d use the china and the real silver and the company tablecloth. I knew how to be on my best manners for the guests, and I was familiar with the ritual of standing on the porch waving good-bye, long after all we could see was the dust from their car.

And here was my grandmother declaring me: company. And all we were doing was sitting on the porch.

As I’ve grown, I’ve come to regard having company as something of a mixed bag. I love having guests in my home: preparing for their arrival, making things special, enjoying friends in a way that can be outside of the routine. I love that. And I also love the feeling of enjoying another’s hospitality and being a guest in their home.

But there are times  — is this true for you ? — where the dinner party is wearing on and on: Your guests are enjoying a spirited conversation that shows no signs of letting up; you’ve got a kitchen full of dirty dishes; you can hardly keep your eyes open  and no one wants to leave.

In moments like that I’ve always wished I had the chutzpa of my grandfather who would turn to my grandmother and say, “Well, honey, I guess we’d better go to bed so these folks can go home!”

Having company, being company, can be one of life’s great pleasures. And it can also be one of those occasions that tests good marriages, good friendships, happy households.

Probably because having company and being company requires us to be present and maybe vulnerable in some particular ways.

Today I would like for us to consider some of what it means to keep company with others who are trying to reconstitute the world[1] in one fashion or another.

What do we believe?

What is true?

What are we living into? 

And what can we already claim…

about partnership,

about keeping company with one another,

and about working together to heal the world?

I want to make some theological claims about this, and I want to do so through the lens of this story in Mark’s Gospel, the healing of the paralyzed man.

You will remember that the writer of Mark’s Gospel gets right to the point of the story. He wastes no time in giving context or history. Matthew and Luke, you recall, start with genealogy. Jesus was born of Mary and Joseph who were related to so and so, and they were begotten of so and so. Matthew and Luke are once upon a time stories. They set the scene for Jesus’ life. They lead us into his birth, his childhood so that when we get to the stories of his ministry and death, there is some context. We get a sense of the soil out of which Jesus grew.

But not so much with Mark. Mark just jumps right into what he considers the most important stuff: the ministry and teaching of Jesus. So that in the first chapter – a mere 43 verses – Mark tells us about:

• John the Baptist baptizing Jesus

• The calling of the first disciples

• And then by verse 21 Mark has Jesus out there: teaching and preaching and healing.

In the second half of the first chapter are three healing stories.

And this is typical of Mark’s writing style. He writes at a galloping pace and uses strong, jolting language:

• Jesus is baptized by John, and then immediately

• the spirit sent him out into the desert where he was tempted

• and then he asked some fisherman to follow him — 6 verses

• and then he started teaching.

• people were amazed

• word got around

• he drove out an evil spirit

• he healed Simon’s mother-in-law

• he healed a leper

• word was spreading and crowds were forming.

All of this in chapter one! And then we get to chapter two, where Mark takes four sentences to tell the story of the paralyzed man.

Sentence one: “When he returned from Capernaum, word got around that Jesus was at home.”

Sentence two:  “A huge crowd gathered around, blocking the door and spilling out into the street.

Three: “Then some people came, bringing to him a paralyzed man, carried by four of them.

And four: “When they could not get to Jesus, they dug through the roof and lowered the man through the opening.

This Cliffs Notes version of the story leaves so much unanswered. Who was the guy and why was he paralyzed? Had he been that way for long? How had he heard about Jesus? And who were those four guys carrying him? Did they know him? Were they related? And please, give us more of the story about how it is they decided to cut a hole in the roof? How did that happen?

But this is all we get from Mark the galloping story teller. We barely catch our breath and he’s off to other stories about healing, and calling more disciples and teaching to gathered crowds.

Jesus was home. A huge crowd gathered. Four men carried a paralyzed man, but they could not get through the crowd so they cut a hole in the roof. Jesus healed him, blessed him, next story.

The company we keep.

The partnerships from which we work.

I want to suggest this morning that in this little anecdote Mark tells us, we can find some very wise clues about the nature of partnership, and what it actually looks like to work together with folks who might be very different from us. Or maybe even harder: those very much like us.

Let me suggest three things: community, accompaniment, imagination.                                                                       

COMMUNITY, a deeply held value by Christians. We have grown up believing that we are stronger together than we are alone. As Christians we understand the use of the “body” metaphor when talking about Christian community —how we all have a gift that contributes to a beautiful whole.

Remember that old children’s sermon illustration? That one pencil by itself is easily broken. But, when we all bundle together and stay close, when there are many of us, it’s a different story. We can’t be broken.

We’ve always believed in the power of community, but I’ve been wondering if we have any idea just how counter-cultural the notion of community really is these days.

On many issues in our public life we seem to care more about the individual than we do the whole community. We seem to be forgetting what it means to look after one another.

• As a country, we still think poor and homeless folks would be better off if they just worked harder

• Many of our communities are still deeply suspicious about welcoming immigrants into our midst, fearing that if we treat them hospitably, that somehow that means less for me, and mine.

• And the debate around our national healthcare. Can you imagine if the paralyzed man in Mark’s gospel had showed up at one of the community meetings last summer at which so many people expressed fear and outrage about the possibility that everyone might actually get health insurance? It is likely he would have been booed out of the building, told to figure it out for himself. “We’ve got ours! You go get your own!”

One of my students lives in an economically challenged neighborhood here in Nashville, and he is a student minister at one of the churches in the neighborhood. He lives just down the street from the church where he serves.

One day a couple of weeks ago he was home studying when he heard hollering in the street. “Stop! Stop! Hey you! Stop!!” He looked out the window to see a policeman chasing a young man from the neighborhood who had apparently just stole something from a car. The kid had stolen an   iPod, and when the policemen shouted for him to stop, he did. And he was pulling the iPod out of his pocket, as if to say, “Here it is. take it back.” But the policeman saw him pull something silver from his pocket, thought it was a gun, and shot the kid, killing him in the street.

Our student rushed out to the street to see what he might do, but there was nothing. Other neighbors were beginning to gather, and they all just stood around in little clumps, with their hands over their mouths, trying to absorb what had just happened on their street. Our student, Andrew, spoke of feeling so powerless in that moment, like there was absolutely nothing he could do to make things better. And he was a pastor, he kept saying, he should be able to do something. As Andrew reflected on this event later, it occurred to him that he wished he would have tried to gather the neighbors together. He could have said, “This has broken my heart today. I can’t return to my studies just now. I’m going to be sitting on my porch, praying for this young man, and for our neighborhood. Will you join me?” 

Sometimes community is so ripe — ready to be formed, pregnant with possibility — and it just takes a little bit of risk and vulnerability on our part to make it happen. Imagine what could happen on that one street when a few neighbors gather together to pray or cry or sing.

Are there communities in your context that could be formed if someone risked inviting folks to sit together on the porch?

Sometimes when you have company all you do is sit on the porch. Sometimes building community means sitting on the porch together.

The paralyzed man would never have received help that day if it were not for the solidarity and determination of his mates. Together, they would not be broken. Together, they did what none of them could do alone.

Secondly, accompaniment.

What does it mean, what does it look like to keep company with another? The word “accompaniment” comes from an Old French word (compainie) that literally means “to come with bread.”

And the word “companion” literally means: “bread mate.”

When we accompany another, we come with bread. Sitting on the porch with one’s companions, one’s bread mates, with a loaf of bread in our midst, we break open our lives with one another while we break the bread together.

We don’t come with an idea of how the bread should be prepared, or cut or served, but we come to break it open together and see what happens,

Accompaniment. Isn’t this a wonderful way to think about our work with partners? Walking alongside, sharing bread? This posture suggests that we truly regard each other with mutuality, and that we trust the ways the spirit will move among us. To use the language of the seminary, the notion of accompaniment has much to do with our notions of ecclesiology, pneumatology and especially missiology, because what we believe about church, about God’s Spirit, and about our work in the world will show up in the ways we accompany others. Practice betrays our theology. We act out of what we believe.

For example, we are still repenting — aren’t we? — of theologies of mission that guided the churches work for centuries: The idea that we knew what was best for other peoples all around the globe, without listening to the stories of their lives. We might have come with bread, but we told others how to eat it.

Tom Montgomery-Fate, in his book, Beyond the White Noise: Mission in a Multi-Cultural World, tells a particularly poignant story about the importance of putting aside one’s agenda when working in partnership with others.[2]

He was visiting the Philippines and it was the rainy season. His Filipino companions and he had set off on a half-day hike up a mountain to a village where he would spend a few months. An hour into the hike, the rains came.  In minutes the steep path became a reddish-brown water slide on which Tom struggled to maintain his footing. Several hours later they reached the village and stopped in a small bamboo chapel to rest. The rain was booming on the metal roof and they had to shout to hear each other over the noise.

One of his Filipino companions smiled, pointed to the roof and said, “white man’s noise.”

It turns out that a well-meaning missionary group had spent some time in the village and noticed that every year or two the villagers had to replace the thatched roofs on all of their homes and buildings because the rainy season took its toll. And the missionaries thought —with very good intentions — that they might not be able to replace every single roof, but they could certainly start by putting a more permanent roof on the village chapel. 

So they schlepped panels of metal up that same mountain path until they had enough to make a roof.

It’s not that the people of the village were ungrateful for the roof. In fact, they were rather proud that they had helped to carry all that metal up the steep mountain. Given the choice, though, the people of the village might have spent the money differently, perhaps for rice seedlings to plant on the terraces they had just started on the mountain. Roofs were something they could easily construct themselves from bamboo or other local fronds.  Thatched roofs didn’t last as long as the metal roofs, but they were cooler and more easily repaired. Not to mention quieter and more peaceful: God’s noise, not white missionary noise.

Genuine accompaniment would mean that we come with bread and sit together as companions, as bread mates, talking and listening, listening and listening, being attentive to how the Spirit might be prompting us to work together to make the world better. We come with bread….and as best we are able, we leave our agenda behind.

And thirdly: IMAGINATION

Figuring it out. Dreaming it up. Making a way out of no way.

Those four guys carried their friend on a pallet to Jesus. The crowd was so big they couldn’t even get near the house. Every time they thought they could clear a path by which to carry him, the way would close around them with more bodies. Maybe they tried the back door, or a window, but the crowd was just too big, and they could not find a way. 

I wonder how it went when one of them suggested they go through the roof. Was there resistance? Did they argue? Did they think about giving up? Was one of them persuasive enough to encourage them to give it a try because it might be their only chance? Did the paralyzed man get a vote? And how did they get up there, with the deadweight body of their friend in tow?

It’s the poets and the songwriters and the dreamers and the prophets and the children who are best at this. They have the kind of imagination needed to find a way out of no way. We would do well to include them among our companions, our bread mates.

When the way is blocked; or when there is no way through. When our institutions are paralyzed and we’re carrying around dead weight, when we can’t imagine how we’re going to do this: Look again. Ask a bread mate what options they see from where they are sitting. Kick it around. Suggest something outrageous. Listen. And listen some more. And then dare to give it a try. It just might work.

When we partner with each other to make God’s dream for our world a reality, we join the long parade of saints who have gone before us.

• When we seek peace in violent times, and when we continue to pray that the wars will end, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Menno Simons and Yasser Arafat become our bread mates in this work.
• When we continue to work to make our churches fully inclusive of everyone’s gifts and graces, we are joined as bread mates by Helen Barrett Montgomery and Anne Neal, and countless, nameless others.
• Anytime we take a risk to create something new and better, we take our place beside Alan Neely in the parade.

Who are your bread mates, your partners along the way?  Help me complete this sentence: Whenever I do God’s work in my local context, I am joined as bread mates by: _________ and ___________ and ____________.

And because it is God’s good Spirit that animates all we do, we are, indeed, in good company. May God bless us on our way. Amen.