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Making Room: Luke 5
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
What a beautiful image of hospitality that is. That we might use our ingenuity. We might marshal our resources. We might tap into our hospitable instincts, not just to welcome others into our spaces, but also to ensure that others are welcome into the spaces where we are welcome. Welcome to the commons cast.
Speaker 1:We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information. Welcome today. My name is Jeremy.
Speaker 1:I'm part of the team here, and thanks for being here this morning. We really appreciate that you take part of your weekend to worship with us. Lots going on today with baptisms, our ongoing first steps class, but it's also nice to be back teaching after having the last two Sundays to sit and listen to some of the amazing voices on our team. This first half of the Making Room series was phenomenal. If you missed either Yelena or Bobby's sermons, then jump online, head to commons.church or youtube.com/commonschurch, and you can catch up that way.
Speaker 1:But also, mentioned this first steps class. I wanna say thanks for the reception that this new initiative has received in the community. This is a new four week crash course on commons, designed to take you from your first Sunday all the way to understanding membership here at commons. And you take all four classes in order, one, two, three, four, but you don't have to complete them all in any one month. So you can jump in and out.
Speaker 1:It's repeated every month. You can head to commons.life to register because the first class will be coming up again at the December all over again. Today, however, we are talking about making room. And our thread in this series has been a series of moments in the Gospel of Luke where Jesus invites a surprising space for unexpected hospitality. So it's really a series about welcome that upends or goes beyond our expectations, and in some ways that's what hospitality is.
Speaker 1:There's conventions and expectations. Hospitality is what surprises us with welcome. And often those moments in the gospels are around meals. I have long thought that food has more than functional meaning for us. I think it's because food is such an elemental human experience.
Speaker 1:I mean, all eat, so it's almost hard not to be open around a table of good food. It's not a coincidence that the central rituals of the Christian story, Eucharist and Baptism, are purposeful reenactments of things we do every day. Our sacraments remind us that everything is sacred when we notice it. And that's what really hospitality is. That moment when we realize that just beyond social convention, there is a sacred invitation to know each other in new ways.
Speaker 1:And the farther we go in our welcome, then the closer we move towards the divine. Today, we're gonna see a story where Jesus invites more than just a meal. He actually invites physical space for someone new to join the conversation. But so far in this series, we have seen Jesus invite himself to the house of Zacchaeus. A challenging moment where Jesus reminds us that he loves people we have good reason to hate.
Speaker 1:Zacchaeus is not misunderstood. He is not unfairly unliked. He is not a good guy. In fact, he is wealthy precisely because he has defrauded his neighbors. So no wonder they are unimpressed when Jesus invites himself over.
Speaker 1:Look, we love the Jesus who loves sinners until the sinners he loves are the ones that we don't. And I don't care if you are to the right or to the left politically, eventually Jesus will offend you with grace. So if it hasn't happened yet, your time is coming. But it's important because for Jesus, grace is the platform upon which we come back to ourselves. It's where we recognize ourselves, we begin to change ourselves, and Zacchaeus transforms himself.
Speaker 1:He makes right his wrongs, but it's only because grace has allowed him to see himself clearly, Maybe for the first time in a very long time. And that is beautiful. And then last week, we saw Jesus dining with a Pharisee, Simon. And he's interrupted by a woman who doesn't fit in that moment and doesn't merit the space socially. And yet of course Jesus expands the space to include her.
Speaker 1:He acknowledges her first to those in the room seated at the table and then he turns directly to her and loves her. He gives her space to be seen and known and then, and I love the way that Bobby framed this last week. He doesn't force her or expect her. He doesn't even hint to her that she should now conform to the spaces that don't want her. He says, your faith has saved you.
Speaker 1:Go in peace. In other words, you and I see each other. You and I are good and whether they ever get that, that is not your burden to carry. You don't owe anything to anyone who does not acknowledge your dignity, so go and pursue everything that is ahead of you now. You are loved, you are beautiful, you are welcomed, you are embraced, and you owe nothing to those who refuse to acknowledge that.
Speaker 1:And so in both of these stories, Jesus makes room for unexpected hospitality. One, to the upper echelons of the socioeconomic scale, One who those around him have good reason to want to exclude. And then to one on the margins. One with a reputation and very little capacity to tell her own real story. And yet Jesus finds a way to make room for both of them near him with us.
Speaker 1:Today, we have a different story. No less compelling in its subversion of expectation though, but one that deals with physical barriers in a surprising way. So we'll pray and then today we have healing as justice, controversy as welcome, ceilings as doorways, and making space for divine invitation. But first, let's pray. God of grace and peace, of warmth and welcome, God who extends hospitality and unexpected ways in unexpected places to unexpected people.
Speaker 1:May we first learn to accept your invitation. May we then learn to extend it to all those near us. With your advent on the horizon, your coming to us coming close now. Might we begin to prepare our hearts by practicing hospitality even now. Might we notice each other, see each other's stories, Look past the surface to learn and be changed by what we see in those near us.
Speaker 1:May the mundane meals we share become sacred in our sharing of them. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen. Okay. Healing controversy ceilings and invitations.
Speaker 1:But today we're gonna start with the text. And we're in Luke at chapter five and interestingly, the start of Luke five is actually where Jesus calls his first disciples in this gospel. He encounters some fishermen at work. He starts talking with them, and over the course of that conversation, Simon, Peter, that's one dude. James and John, two more end up following him.
Speaker 1:So three followers in his first day of work, not bad. However, that doesn't really play into our story at all except to help us situate it. This is very early in Jesus' ministry. People are just starting to hear about him. They're intrigued by what he has to say.
Speaker 1:However, in a lot of ways, this is the same Jesus we encountered in the Sermon on the Mount earlier this fall. He's quickly building a following, but people haven't quite figured out what is so compelling about him yet. And so with that in mind, let's jump to Luke chapter five verse 12 where we read that while Jesus was in one of the towns, a man came along who was covered with a leprosy. When he saw Jesus, he fell with his face to the ground and begged him, Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean. Jesus reached at his hand and touched the man.
Speaker 1:I am willing, he said, be clean. And immediately, the leprosy left him. Then Jesus ordered him, don't tell anyone what's happened, but go, show yourself to the priest and offer the sacrifices that Moses commanded for your cleansing as a testimony to them. Now, this is not actually our story yet. We're getting there.
Speaker 1:But this is important because there's something really interesting going on here I wanna come back to. First, we've established this is very early in Jesus' public life. Only three followers at this point. We're not even at the Sermon on the Mount yet. And in fact, the Lukan parable are parallel to the Sermon on the Mount, often called the, Sermon on the Plain, shows up in the next chapter, chapter six.
Speaker 1:So this is before any big public sermon has been given, and yet word is already starting to spread to the point where a lone man with leprosy has clearly heard of Jesus and presumably somehow tracked him down. And here, the man asked to be healed. Jesus says sure. He heals the man, and then something really interesting happens. Jesus says, don't tell anyone.
Speaker 1:Show yourself to the priest. Offer the sacrifices commanded for your healing. Now, the next verse, 15, says, and yet news about him spread all the more. So clearly, this guy is not great at keeping secrets, and really, can you blame him? But I wanna talk about Jesus' instructions here quickly because I think they're gonna help us when we get to our real story.
Speaker 1:Don't tell anyone. Show yourself to the priest. Offer the sacrifices commanded. What this is about is the healing of social stigma. You see, leprosy was a terrible disease.
Speaker 1:It's actually a bacterial infection that causes sores on the skin, but really the harm comes because it damages nerve sensation. And that means that people slowly stop feeling pain, and that means injuries and infections often go unnoticed until far too late. Now, the disease was considered extremely communicable around the time of Jesus. The truth is it's actually not. But when you have no means to combat the infection, well, that doesn't really matter much, does it?
Speaker 1:Fear kind of takes over. And so what happened was people with leprosy were shunned. They were often, excluded from community and put into quarantined colonies where they had to look after themselves. And you can imagine having a disease where the main problem is that you don't have the nerve sensation to properly look after yourself, and then being cut off from the people who might potentially be able to look out for you, this was essentially a slow death sentence. And so here, the story where Jesus heals a man, but immediately turns his attention to the social isolation.
Speaker 1:Go to the priest, show them that you're clean, offer the sacrifices, jump through their hoops, but regain your place in the community. Now, certainly Jesus wants to heal this person. Leprosy, today we call it Hansen's disease, is a terrible affliction. But it's almost as if Jesus' underlying concern is the stigmatization of sickness. Everything that has isolated this man from the community that should have been there to support him.
Speaker 1:In other words, this is healing as social justice. The healing of a man that repairs the community that has become broken. And let's be honest here. All of us who are alive are slowly dying. And a Jesus who miraculously heals one or two of us along the way is nice, but against the drumbeat of the world, it's possible that a Jesus who teaches us how to be together, how to support each other, how to see each other, how to embrace each other even in our suffering, this is the one who really heals the world.
Speaker 1:And I would argue that there is far more at stake in the story than dulled nerve endings. There is a community that has become too dull to understand its responsibility to each other. And that, I wanna argue, is incredibly important for what comes next. So, verse 17. One day Jesus was teaching and some Pharisees and teachers of the law were sitting there.
Speaker 1:They had come from every village of Galilee and from Judea and Jerusalem, and the power of the Lord was with Jesus to heal the sick. Now, I wanna pause here for a moment because we need to acknowledge one small note that Bobby made last Sunday. Last week, we saw Jesus reclining at the table of a Pharisee, Simon. Today, we find Pharisees from all over who have come to sit under the teaching of Jesus. And there is this real anachronistic reading that Christians sometimes have of the pharisaical tradition that they are the bad guys.
Speaker 1:Now, obviously, Luke and Matthew in particular present Jesus in contrast to the pharisaical tradition quite often. There's gonna be a disagreement today in the story. Obviously, the tension between Jesus and certain persons in that tradition reached a fevered pitch by the end of the gospel, but here's the rub of all the strains of Judaism present at the time of Jesus. It was the Pharisees that Jesus is probably most closely aligned with theologically. And what that means is that the reason Jesus is found over and over again eating at the home of promising Pharisees, the reason Pharisees are coming to sit and listen to his teaching is because in some sense, these are his colleagues.
Speaker 1:In fact in the Gospel of Mark, which is the earliest Gospel written, Jesus is frequently referred to by the title Rabboni or Rabbi and it's the Pharisees who become the rabbinical movement in Judaism. So the rabbi at the synagogue near your house, they will consider themselves part of that tradition. Couple things to hold onto here. First, whenever Jesus confronts the pharisees, and he does very clearly, remember this is an intra not an inter religious dialogue. These are his beloved siblings with whom he argues.
Speaker 1:Second, when we use Pharisee carelessly as a synonym for villain, we dishonor our Jewish neighbors and we need to do better than that. Third, look at how Jesus invites those who need his teaching, those who welcome his teaching, those who challenge his teaching, and those who openly criticize his teaching to come to him regardless. Religious leaders who will not countenance difference, those who refuse to listen to criticism and critique, these are not worth listening to. What is true does not fear what is not. Therefore, conversation and critique are never an enemy of God.
Speaker 1:And if I ever reach the point where I am unwilling to listen, hope then at least I will have the sense to stop talking. In fact, returning to the theme of hospitality for this series, Priya Parker, in her book, The Art of Gathering, talks about what she calls making good use of what divides us. Now for Priya, rather than avoiding politics and religion at dinner, she talks about how the right kind of a controversy in the right kind of hands can add both energy and clarifying light to our gatherings. She says that a wise host with generous hospitality prioritizes the safety of everyone at the table, but also works to create space for the dissonance that allows us to hear each other and through that understand ourselves more precisely. Now, don't get me wrong, that can be a really tricky balance.
Speaker 1:James Baldwin once wrote, we can disagree and we can love each other unless our disagreement is rooted in the denial of my humanity and my right to exist. Remember, last week, Jesus welcomes a woman and then sends her on her way because she owes nothing to the tables that refuse to acknowledge her dignity and her contribution. But Jesus retains this remarkable knack for dissonant welcome. And that should somehow characterize our experience of Christian community. However, our story is just getting rolling, so let's keep reading here.
Speaker 1:Verse 18. Some men carrying a paralyzed man on a mat tried to take him into the house to lay him before Jesus, But when they couldn't find a way through the crowd, they went up on the roof. They lowered him on his mat through the tiles into the middle of the crowd right in front of Jesus. And if politics and religion are awkward when placed on the table in front of us, well, what about a man lowered through our ceiling in front of us? And let's talk about this for a second because this is a pretty crazy scene at least from our modern vantage point.
Speaker 1:Truth though, this is not as surprising as it might seem. In ancient Palestine, houses were built not with these peaked roofs we're used to, but with one wall slightly higher than the other. Trusses would be set up to run between them, and then a flat roof covering them would be there with just enough slope that the water would run off of it. And the roof itself was then made from grass and straw embedded in mud and clay in these sort of big overlapping sheets. So we're not talking about removing little individual tiles to make a hole.
Speaker 1:We're talking about moving probably one or maybe two large tile sheets. And actually, this is how a lot of things were moved in and out of houses at the time. Doorways being structural weaknesses would have been quite small generally, and specifically at the time this is how coffins were moved. They would be assembled in the house for preparation and then they'd be removed through the roof when it was time for burial. So surprising, entertaining, enterprising, definitely a little unexpected, but, these friends are not vigilantes.
Speaker 1:They are not destroying someone's home here. They are, however, taking extraordinary measures on behalf of their friend. There are physical constraints that stop their friend from accessing Jesus and they take the solution upon themselves. And what a beautiful image of hospitality that is. That we might use our ingenuity.
Speaker 1:We might marshal our resources. We might tap into our hospitable instincts, not just to welcome others into our spaces, spaces, but also to ensure that others are welcome into the spaces where we are welcome. I mean this is a really challenging story if like me you are able-bodied and don't give much thought to accessing physical space. Your thought about shoveling your sidewalk as sacred hospitality for your neighbor with a cane or a wheelchair or a pain when they walk? You ever thought about public transit as sacred hospitality?
Speaker 1:What about free WiFi as hospitality? What about all the ways that other people are excluded, Probably unintentionally, but excluded from spaces that I take for granted. I mean the kingdom of God is accessible to everyone. Right? So how does Jesus respond to this albeit somewhat amusing interruption?
Speaker 1:Well, verse 20 says that when Jesus saw their faith, he said, friend, your sins are forgiven. That's an intriguing moment because Jesus' response is at least a little unexpected, and a lot of that intrigue is bound up in the pronouns here. Says when he saw their faith, plural, he said, your sins, singular, are forgiven. And scholars like to debate about whether the there includes the man who was forgiven and that's likely the case. One can imagine it would have been hard to coerce an unwilling participant into this crazy scheme.
Speaker 1:So the easiest way to imagine the story is that everyone has been cooperating with the plan. But technically, the pronoun autos for their in this section corresponds with the active third person plural verbs in the story which precede it, which very specifically focus on the men who brought their friend to Jesus. And that is kind of a tough one for us who tend to think in the very individualistic terms of Western culture. It is not however at all surprising to the way that Jesus world thinks. In first Corinthians, Paul writes that an unbelieving husband is sanctified through his faith's wife or wife's faith and that an unbelieving wife is sanctified through her believing husband.
Speaker 1:Acts 16 tells us a story about a man, a jailer who comes to faith in Jesus and then we're told that immediately he and all of his household are baptized into faith. The world of Jesus did not believe that you did anything including believe on your own. And really, when we think about it, of course that's right, isn't it? I mean, why did we all get up and come here today to sing, to listen, to baptize each other? It's because we can't do any of that on our own.
Speaker 1:You ever tried to baptize yourself? It's hard. It takes a lot of core strength. Here's the thing, you are not any different from this paralyzed man. And his faith couldn't get him to Jesus on his own and neither can yours.
Speaker 1:You and I, we believe in a story that is far too big, far too beautiful for any of us to hold onto on our own. And the beautiful thing is the fact that God works in us. Does nothing to diminish the work that God does in me. This is all part of the divine both and. But it does bring us to one final question here.
Speaker 1:What on earth is Jesus talking about? I mean, forgiving a man who is clearly not here for forgiveness. I mean, read the room. Right, Jesus? But this is where we're gonna need both the earlier story I said we'd come back to and a little bit of background to make sense of things.
Speaker 1:Because around the time of Jesus, one of the hotly debated questions was, where did this kind of suffering come from? Now, understand, this is a prescientific society. So no real concept of genetics or disease, just what appeared to be random suffering. And that was a hard pill to swallow. So sickness was really scary.
Speaker 1:Because of that, people who had leprosy were excommunicated and people who had disabilities were barred from the priesthood and people who were considered unclean were banned from worshiping in the temple with everyone else. In fact in John nine, the disciples see a man who's blind and they ask Jesus, Rabbi who sinned? This man or his parents? And setting aside the obvious insensitivity of the disciples in that moment, This was actually indicative of the question that many religious figures were discussing and debating at the time of Jesus. Sin is obviously the root of this, so whose was it?
Speaker 1:And Jesus response there was surprising. He says neither, no one sinned. Then he heals the man. But here, even though his approach is to forgive the man's sins, I think his point is actually the same. You see, in a culture that struggles to embrace human suffering, Sin is often the scapegoat, and when that happens, the person who suffers can then justifiably be pushed to the edges.
Speaker 1:I mean, I know it's hard. I know you're going through something right now, but come on, you must have brought this on yourself somehow. Right? And tell me you haven't heard that, you haven't said that, you haven't thought that at some point somewhere along the line, and I don't blame you, I have. Things that scare us, things that we don't understand, things that we struggle to make sense of.
Speaker 1:It's all much easier if we can blame that on someone. But here, in a room filled with the religious, those of us who often champion the idea that someone is to blame and we are justified in our exclusion of them. Jesus reads the room and he says, first before anything I restore you fully to community. No longer will religion be used to justify your exclusion based on difference. And this is why the setup story is so important because taken together, we see Jesus' real concern here in chapter five that Jesus is telling us the same thing over again, that community, that welcome, that hospitality is actually the primary healing the divine is interested in enacting in the world among us.
Speaker 1:Of course, everyone in the room, they know exactly what Jesus is saying, and so they jump up in arms and they're like, you can't do that. You can't say that. You can't restore him to us, and yet Jesus knows exactly what they're thinking. And he says, okay. So what's easier to say?
Speaker 1:Your sins are forgiven, you're restored to community, or get up and walk? See, I want you to know what I'm here for. And I want you to understand what I'm about. I want you to see with your eyes community restored and sins forgiven as the primary motivation. So get up.
Speaker 1:Take your mat, go home to those who need you as much as you need them. Immediately, he stood up in front of them, he took what he'd been lying on, he went home praising God, the sun still shining in through the roof above. And everyone was amazed. They gave praise to God, they were filled with awe, and they said to themselves, we have seen remarkable things today. And it's these remarkable things that I wanna leave you with today as we close.
Speaker 1:Because in one of the beautiful quirks of the original text, the Greek word here is actually the word paradoxa. And in the context, remarkable is fine, it's a little unremarkable. But I think Luke is right. I think this story is about the paradox and the mystery and the beauty of surrendering ourselves to divine hospitality. It's about the fact that sometimes we suffer and we don't have an answer for why.
Speaker 1:It's about the fact that we have faith, and yet sometimes we still need others to believe for us. It's about the fact that we sin, we fall, we mess up, we injure each other, and yet God makes room to welcome us home always. It's about the fact that God's self welcomes us into community with each other. It's about the fact that shoveling your walkway, opening your table, making room for another, all of this is how we make room for God among us. And so as we reflect on the story this week, this is my prayer that you might make room this week.
Speaker 1:And it might be God who shows up to fill that space near you. There are remarkable things to be seen in the world, and our eyes are opened when we make room to see them. Let's pray. God of welcome, might you by your spirit help us become aware of all the walls that we construct around us. The ways that people near us do not feel welcome, do not feel able, do not feel the accessibility to come near to you.
Speaker 1:Perhaps it is injuries, wounds, religious hurts that stop people from encountering your grace. Perhaps it is physical accessibility that stops people from encountering the community that brings God to them. Perhaps the spaces we create that don't create room for someone whose difference is no barrier for you. And so God, may we see each other. May we understand each other.
Speaker 1:In that might we become better versions of each other. And may we intentionally make room for all to come near, trusting that it will be you who fills that space when it's available. In the strong name of a risen Christ we pray. Amen.