Preacher: Nicole Crouch

Date: July 30, 2023

Scripture: Luke 5:17-26

Audio for this sermon can be found here via Google Drive:

It is an honor to be here with you all. (As Rev Jenn mentioned) I am the Site Manager for this
church and Capitol Hill United Methodist Church, and I have been working here since January
with the migrant ministries offered in partnership with Mutual Aid Migrant Solidarity Network,
previously the bus welcomes and mini respites, and for this past week and for the next two weeks
offering a Summer Program to migrant children who are living with their families at the hotels
paid for by DHS and the city for migrant housing. I want to thank you all for your support of
welcoming and caring for migrants who have arrived on buses and continue to arrive and seek to
make this city their home. Thank you for opening your building and for all the other ways you
have supported these efforts.

Also, I am an Ordained Deacon in the United Methodist Church, and my main area of focus is
immigration. I grew up in Erie, Pennsylvania, and in college I did a semester abroad in Peru that changed my life. In Peru I experienced a deep hospitality and love from my host family and from so many people that I met that when I returned to the US, I felt that desire to return this hospitality to the Latinx community living here. This began a journey of being a case manager, going to seminary, working with asylum seekers in El Paso, TX, and visiting migrants in immigration detention, and led me back to working with immigrants when my husband and I moved back to Virginia from El Paso.

Turning now to our text for today, I want to start by sharing that one of the texts I looked at in preparation for this Sunday was the First Nations Version, An Indigenous Translation of the New
Testament. And one of the things I appreciated in reading this translation of the Scripture was the
names for God and for Jesus that are used.

The text uses Great Spirit, Maker of Life, and Creator as names for God.

And then for Jesus, the translators chose “Creator Sets Free” and I think that is really beautiful.

The translators chose these names and titles for God that are more relevant for the First Nations
people.

And the truth is that there are different names and attributes of the Divine that each of us are drawn to. Some people relate to God as Creator, Yahweh, Lord, Savior, our healer, our guide. Some are drawn to God as a source of wisdom, or justice, or peace.

How do you see God?

For me, I see God as abundant. God as a provider. And in my work here, bringing together donations of clothing and more to share with immigrants on their journey, God has always been at work showing up and showing off abundance in the timeliness of when supplies come in. This past spring there were many times where I walked into the donation room to be surprised by a new bag of men’s jeans or other much needed item that had appeared. And when we set up an Amazon wish list for faith communities to buy jeans, underwear, shoes and other much needed items, items poured in over at St George’s parish at U street and I drove countless packages over in my car.

These items continue to be distributed to migrants settling and building the next chapter in their lives in our communities. And as we continue to share our resources with them, we too participate in abundance.

God is abundant. And God is good.

And another thing about God that I’m drawn to is that God is about restoration. Spiritual and physical restoration. Individual and communal restoration and right relationship.

My favorite parables from the Gospels are about healing people and feeding people.

Feeding the 5,000. Healing the woman with the issue of blood. The faith of the Roman Centurion. Those are some of my favorite parables, along with today’s passage.

Our God heals. Our God feeds people. That is to say that God cares about us and our physical beings, our physical needs, not just our spiritual ones. God wants to restore us, not only to right
and full relationship with the Divine, but to right relationship with the community.

In Luke 5, we see Jesus both forgive the sins of the paralyzed man and heal him so that he can walk again. In doing both of these things, Jesus is not just healing spiritually and physically. He is healing socially. Jesus is removing the barriers that ostracized this paralyzed man from others so that the man can be in relationship with the community again and not be thought of as unclean or sinful based on his physical condition.

Healing then, is spiritual, physical, and communal. Healing is full restoration to what we were made for and meant to be.

And as Jesus heals, so too, we are called to be a part of God’s healing work in the world by the power of the Holy Spirit.

I believe that our part of this work is exemplified by those in the passage who carried the paralyzed man to Jesus.

It is our job to bring people to Jesus. It is our job to take our faith out onto the roof.

Sometimes I worry Church, that we are too caught up in a “Build it and they will come” mentality for sharing the Gospel. We have our buildings, our sanctuaries, our set times of worship. And we expect people to come.

But how is it fair to expect people to come to our churches if we never actually invite them?
If we never share how Jesus has transformed our hearts and lives?
If we never share of the joy in our hearts when we sing?
If we never share about answered prayers?
If we never say how we thought something looked impossible, but God made a way?
If we never share how fellowship with other believers fills our hearts?
If we never start living differently as a result of our faith?
If we never participate in working for justice for God’s people?

The people who brought the paralyzed man to Jesus were determined to intercede on their friend’s behalf. They just knew that Jesus could heal him if they could only get a minute.

But they encountered crowds. Yet they still found a way. They put in the effort to get their friend up to the roof and then removed part of the roof and somehow lowered the man in front of Jesus. I mean that sounds like A LOT of effort to put in for someone.

Yet I think that is a choice we all have to make.

Are we going to be like the friends of the paralyzed man or are we just going to stand in the
way?

A few years ago, I was on a short retreat and one of the exercises we did as a group was to imagine that we were a character in this parable. We each visualized ourselves in the story. Some people saw themselves as the man being healed. And some saw themselves as people in the crowd or perhaps even the homeowner, and they shared that they were annoyed by the disruption of the man being lowered from the roof and his pushy friends.

How dare they cut in line

How dare they take apart the roof. Who was going to repair that? How much was that going to cost?

How dare they think their friend was more important than them.

How dare they break the rules
‘
We might like to say that we would never identify as the people in the crowd or the pharisees, but how often do we cling to rules and processes over showing people grace or making space for them? How often do we cling to scarcity and propriety over abundance?

After all, if the crowd had seen the paralyzed man, seen him and made space for him, then his friends wouldn’t have had to be all dramatic and get all sweaty carrying him up a roof and taking it apart. I mean that probably took a lot of time, right?

So the questions for us today are these:
Who are we not seeing? Who is not in this space?
What are the barriers that people might face getting here?
Is past baggage from the church, past judgements, keeping people away?

Is there someone that you need to tell that God loves them no matter what?
Is there someone you need to be praying for so that they can enter this space?
Is there something you need to unpack or dismantle in order to bring someone to Jesus?
Are there -isms that are keeping people out of this space?

I promise this is not a message specific to just this church but to the larger church, of who do we
want to be and in what business do we want to be?

Do we want to be in the way or do we want to bring people to Jesus?

Do we want to do the work to take some things apart, even if they might never look the same again?

Do we want to be about the kingdom work of healing and restoration?

Do we want to get out on that roof?

When I imagined myself in this story, I saw myself as one of the people carrying the paralyzed man on the mat. And I imagined that it was frustrating and hard work and sweaty– No one ever said it was easy to bring people to the Lord—

But.

But it was work I did in relationship with the other people who carried the man with me. I imagined that those other people who carried the man, and that the paralyzed man himself, that we were all cousins.

And in the end, after the paralyzed man was healed, I imagined running around celebrating and running home to tell all our parents and planning a big party because my cousin was healed.

And isn’t that how we should act when people find Jesus and when Jesus heals us?

Shouldn’t we run around and celebrate and have a big party? Shouldn’t we be excited? And shouldn’t we be excited about every act of healing and restoration? About every victory for
equality and justice?

I don’t know about you, but this is what excites me.
Healing.
Restoration.
Children of God breaking free of what has held them back individually, and breaking through the
ways that society has held them back and fully living into who they are called to be.

I’m not talking about the healing of just the individual. But the healing of community. For we are called to be in relationship with one another. As Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 12, We are a body,
each of us a member of the body of Christ. And when one part suffers, we all suffer.

When one part is hungry, when one part is hurting, when the basic needs of one are not met, they are not able to be the person that God made them to be. And that hurts all of us. As Martin Luther King Jr wrote in a Letter from Birmingham jail,

“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.
Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

We can never be what we ought to be unless others are able to be what they ought to be.
We all have gifts to offer one another and responsibilities to care for each other.
We are family.

While our Gospel passage this morning speaks to a physical ailment that causes the separation of the paralyzed man from full inclusion in the life of the community, in our world today we are ailed by the labels that society uses to divide us. Some labels of physical characteristics, others about who we love, how we vote, and how much money we have.

As family, we cannot let the labels of society divide us and lead to devaluing other parts of the body of Christ. In our country, the term migrant has become a highly politicized word, a word that many see as dirty or undesirable. As migrants have been mistreated by our country, and used as political pawns by governors, we as the church, as their Divine siblings, must continue to work for justice for migrants.

Several months ago, I sat across from a man, a father, from Venezuela. He told me a bit about his journey. His eyes reflected a deep pain, and he told me how he felt when people looked at him in
the US, how they looked at him like he was dirty, like he was less than, because he was a migrant. He looked at me and said, but don’t we all have the same blood running through our veins? Que todos tenemos la misma sangre, no?

What pain the rest of the body feels by not being valued as it should be.

At the same time, we must recognize that we as a body are also weaker as a whole when one part
is not properly cared for.

We must be careful church that the work we do does not play into our Savior complex and further perpetuate systems of inequality, instead of further propelling us into solidarity and justice work. We must listen, really listen, to those we seek to be in solidarity with and respect their agency.

When we focus on being a whole healthy body, we can value the other parts and recognize their abilities and gifts. When we do things that further invite migrants in, like having them help with our clothing distributions or with our summer program for children, we begin to further break down the barriers that society says should divide us.

When we recognize the gifts in others and realize we have much to learn from them, we begin to
really care for the whole body of Christ. And only together can we work for the full healing and restoration of our communities, both spiritually and physically.

And this is the work we are called to Church:

We must work for a holistic healing.

We must work for restoration, for inclusion, and for justice.

We must climb up roofs together and lower people before Jesus.

Because we have a God who heals and restores.

And a God who calls us to be involved in the work of healing and restoration along side the
Divine.

A God who is abundant and teaches us to live in that abundance.

God is Good.

Praise be to God.