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The following message for the moment is delivered by the Reverend Dr. Bruce Wheeler Thielman. Today's sermon is entitled "On Raising the Roof." The scripture reading of the morning is the Gospel according to Mark, chapter 2. I begin the reading at the verse numbered 1. And when Jesus returned to Capernaum

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after some days, it was reported that he was at home. And many were gathered together so that there was no longer room for them, not even about the door. And he was preaching the word to them. And they came bringing to him a paralytic carried by four men. And when they could not get near him because of

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the crowd, they removed the roof above him. And when they had made an opening, they let down the pallet on which the paralytic lay. And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, "My son, your sins are forgiven." Now some of the scribes were sitting there, questioning in their hearts, "Why does this man speak

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thus? It is blasphemy. Who can forgive sins but God alone?" And immediately Jesus, perceiving in his spirit that they thus questioned within themselves, said to them, "Why do you question thus in your hearts? Which is easier to say to the paralytic, 'Your sins are forgiven,' or to say, 'Rise, take up your pallet and walk?'

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But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins, he said to the paralytic, 'I say to you, rise, take up your pallet and go home.' And he rose and immediately took up the pallet and went out before them all, so that they were all amazed and glorified God, saying, 'We never saw anything like

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this.'" And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his word. Pray with me. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. It was his first day working in the supermarket and he had been assigned to

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the produce department, and a lady came up and said she would like to buy half a head of lettuce. And he said, "I don't know whether I can do that or not, I'll have to go back and ask the manager." So he started to the rear of the store to ask the manager, not recognizing that this lady was walking along behind him.

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And when he went through the swinging doors into the back, he said to the manager, "There's some ugly old bag out there that wants half a head of lettuce. What should I do?" And when he saw the look of horror on the manager's face, he realized that the woman must be right behind him. So he continued, "But this very

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nice lady here, she'd like to buy half a head too, so could I just divide it in half for them?" Well, the manager thought to himself, "This young man is very, very quick." And that afternoon he sought out the young fellow and congratulated him on how swiftly he managed to extricate himself from that situation. And he said,

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"Where are you from?" And the boy said, "Oh, I'm from Toronto, the city of ugly women and great hockey players." And the manager said, "My wife is from Toronto." And the boy said, "Oh, what team does she play for?" Well, I admire people who can shift gears quickly like that, who can act decisively,

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who have about them a skill of improvisation which is very impressive. And it's that kind of story that we had before us this morning. Four friends here that Jesus has started at a clinic in his hometown. And the place is really crowded. They bring one of their friends on a litter to be healed of Jesus, but

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they can't even get near the door. So just like that, they improvise. They go up the stairway on the outside of the house, and all Palestinian houses in those days had such staircases, and they tore a hole in the roof. Now that sounds like a major thing. It really wasn't very major because roofs in those days were only

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wooden beams, and between the wood were pieces of reed and bits of thorns and some mud and turf woven in. So it was not difficult to tear one up, and it was not difficult to replace one either. But they tore a hole big enough to be able to lower this man on the litter. Four, you see, getting their friend to Christ. And

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I'd like you to think with me about that today. Under four general headings, four for one, one for one, one for five, and some for none. First of all then, four for one. Now this obviously is the ministry of the believing friends. These are believers. We know that from verse five in the passage. And being Christian,

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they understand that it is one of their joys and responsibilities to bring others to Christ. They not only know Jesus as their Savior, but also as their Lord. In other words, they not only believe in him, but they also obey him. Christ says you are to love your neighbor as you love yourself, and you

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are to love God. And the important thing to do is to bring these two loves together. Or at another place he says, "Love your neighbor and go ye into all the world making disciples, that is, making lovers of all the people on the earth." The most moving thing that you can do for a friend of yours is to get her to

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Jesus Christ, even if it means raising the roof. I think this morning of a young man named Tim who was going to college in the state of Kansas, and he was assigned a roommate, a young lad from Africa whom we shall call Larry. Larry was not a Christian, and Tim thought it his responsibility to bring Larry to the

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Lord. They became very good friends, and at the end of the year, Larry became a Christian. And when he was asked what led him to faith, or who led him to faith, he replied, "Well, it was Tim. And it wasn't that he tried to manipulate me, and it wasn't that he argued with me all the time. What did it was the fact that three

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times I heard him praying for me while he was asleep." Now Tim had lived in my home one summer some years before, and I've heard him talking asleep, and it's quite loud and it's quite easy to understand. And here, this boy Larry heard Tim pleading with God while he was asleep to bring this boy into the fold

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of the faithful, and it was that that melted young Larry's heart. Four for one, raising the roof if necessary, to get that one to the Savior. But secondly, notice, one for one. And here we have the misery of the unbelieving friend. This is one of the most interesting details of the story. You see, there's no evidence in

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the story that this man on the litter wanted to come. He doesn't say a word to Jesus, nothing. Not when he's being lowered, not when he's in front of the Lord, not after the healing, he doesn't say a word to Jesus. Now the scriptures are full of individuals crying out to Jesus for salvation, crying out to Jesus

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for healing, but this man doesn't say a single word. I imagine he was somewhat embarrassed. I mean, we don't mind being the object of attention if what we're receiving is applause, but most of us aren't comfortable if we're the object of attention and what we're receiving is sympathy. Here they had carried this

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fellow through the streets, then they had dragged him up these stairs, then they tore a hole in the roof of all things, and lowered him down to the feet of what he must have considered to be just another doctor. Now he did not refuse to go with them, and the reason he didn't refuse to go with them, of course, was

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because he knew they were his friends. He knew their intentions were good. The thing that held these men together, the four carrying their friend and the friend who didn't want to go but yielded to their desires, the thing that held them together was love. They could disagree, you see, without being disagreeable. I've

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often been asked, "How aggressive can you become in talking to someone else about Christ?" and my answer is always the same. You can go as far as love allows. These four men did not agree with this one paralyzed fellow, but they would not yield to his not wanting to go. I'm told that young medical students are taught

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very early in their training that they should never trust too much the self-diagnosis that a patient gives to himself or herself. The patient, of course, is very subjective, is not able to look at the evidence from any distance, and therefore his testimony is not worth a great deal, and so this fellow on the

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litter, even when he didn't want to go, well, they took him anyway. They persevered, and they could do this without his crying out in anger and frustration. They could do this because he trusted them. In the book of Proverbs we read, "Faithful are the wounds of a friend." Sometimes one friend has to wound

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another, but when they are genuine friends, those wounds do that which is good. When Jesus came into this world, he didn't come as a spaceman or some alien from another planet. He took upon himself the full garb of humanity, flesh and blood, and he entered into human life, which was quite a humbling thing for him

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to do, being very God of very God. Not only that, but he took upon himself suffering and frustration and even the burden of our sin, and then died for our sakes, and he did it all out of love. And what he calls us to do is to love as he loves. We are to identify with those we are seeking to win. We are to be

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vulnerable to them. We are to be involved with them, and love is the key to this kind of saving. I remember once in Colombo, in Sri Lanka, used to be called Ceylon, there was a fellow riding down the street, teenage boy, and he was shining shoes. That was his business, and he had a bike with a bell on it, and he'd

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ring this bell, but more interesting than that, he had fastened to his hat and to his t-shirt and to his shorts and to his shoes, empty cans of shoe polish, so that as he moved down the street, he was clinking and clanking and ringing everywhere he went, and drew quite a bit of attention to himself. And as I saw him

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with all these cans of polish hanging over him, I looked at my shoes and I decided I needed to shine. So I started across the street to where he was, and I had just come up to him while he was waiting on someone else, when I looked down and saw that his shoes were about the dirtiest and most run-down I'd ever

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seen in all of my life. And I turned around and I went away. You see, he talked about shining shoes, yet there was no evidence that he had enough confidence in himself to even shine his own. And just so we have some people who talk about the gospel, but there's no evidence of the gospel in their lives. No effects

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are seen. We don't win people by sharing their sin with them. We win people by sharing our love with them. One of the greatest lies of all of human history is this. You can do good by perpetrating an evil act. That is an absolute falsehood. It is a prostitution of what the Christian faith is. The Christian way to

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win is not to do that which is wrong, but rather instead to overcome with a vulnerable, sensitive, caring, identifying love, just like Jesus. Well, this brings us to one for five, and of course I'm thinking here of the mercy that is shown by the Master. Here are four men looking down through this hole in the roof, and

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the paralyzed man looking up from the litter. And the Scriptures say, "And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to him, 'My son, your sins are forgiven you.'" I imagine this came as quite a surprise to this fellow on the litter because he thought he was being brought there because of physical, not spiritual, problems. And here

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this doctor starts to talk to him about the morals and the ethics of his life. Jesus took one look at this fellow and understood that his illness was essentially psychosomatic. He had a crippled soul, and because he had a crippled soul, he had a crippled body. You know, in this sense, sin is very much like

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radioactive waste. You know how lethal, how deadly poisonous that stuff can be. And the worst of it, they take and they encase it in huge blocks of concrete and they carry it out into the deepest parts of the sea and drop it. Sometimes that concrete cracks, and when it does, that deadly poison within rises

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slowly to the surface. Well, it's just like that with some people. They have some poisonous, lethal source down in their lives, and it bubbles up through what they do. And they will not become different from what they are until they face the reality of that, until they are exposed before Christ and dealt with by

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Christ. That's the way it was with this fellow on the litter. Christ forgave him and he was healed, and Jesus said, "Rise up and walk," and he got up and walked. And wonder of wonder, there were some people there who resented what happened, which brings me to the last of my points, namely, some for none. The Pharisees

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protested what Jesus had done. They were angry at Christ, they were angry at the crowd who were helping to make Christ popular, they were angry at this stunt of going up on the roof, which must have drawn a lot of attention, they were angry even at the healing, because Jesus talked about forgiving sin and they said

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only God can forgive sin. You know, I used to find it very hard to believe that people could become offended when something very good is done. But I understand that now. When people raise the roof, there are some who resent it, and they call the ones who do it "hypocrites" and "do-gooders" and "bleeding

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hearts" and, well, you've heard the words, you know exactly that of which I speak. There's nothing new in this. One of the interesting archaeological finds of the last decade was a wall in ancient Rome, and on this wall was drawn the picture of a little boy worshipping, and in front of him, the object of his worship is a

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cross, and on this cross is a man, and the man has the head of a jackass, and neatly written below this cartoon are the words "Alexamenos worships his God." But, and here's the most interesting part, below this neatly written line is the scrawling of a child, and the words read "Alexamenos is faithful." No matter how he

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was ridiculed for his belief, he was faithful, and that's what we're called to be. Jesus says to us in John 15, "If they persecuted me, they're going to persecute you too." And that's the reason that the history of the Church is so often written in blood, because the Church has stood up for the right in the face of

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that which was wrong. Now admittedly, there are some pages in the Church's history in which the blood is the blood that has been drawn by one Christian attacking another Christian, and that's a great shame. That has sometimes happened in the history of the Church, but in its better and nobler moments, the Church has

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never forgotten that its primary allegiance is to Jesus Christ. Back in July of the year 1746, a small group of Scotsmen were gathered on the shore, the northeast shore of Scotland. They were helping their king, Bonnie Prince Charlie, escape from Oliver Cromwell to France. There were seven of these men, and as

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Bonnie Prince Charlie boarded the little boat which was to take him out to a larger vessel, these seven men, before their king, took a vow. They said, "Our backs shall be to God, and our faces to the devil, and all the curses the Scriptures do pronounce may come on us and all our posterity if we do not stand

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firm to help our prince in the hour of his greatest danger." And having taken that vow, Bonnie Prince Charlie watched them take it and stepped out of the boat back onto the shore, and he went to the leader of the seven Scotsmen, a man by the name of Hugh Chisholm, and he shook his hand. And from that day till the day

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he died, Hugh Chisholm never shook another person's hand. He said he never wanted to lose the touch of his king. The touch of the king is the call to courage in proclaiming his name. It means carrying a litter if need be. It means raising the roof if need be. It means

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putting Christ before all else, be it family or friends or philosophy. It means standing together as those four men stood together, so close that they moved as one. The church is to be a fellowship in which the people are so close to one another that when you touch one of them, you touch them all. There is to be no

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greater comradeship on the face of the earth than that which exists within the church. None more vital, none more caring, none more forgiving, none more forbearing, none at all. When a church stands like that with a witness to individuals and the world, when it honors its vow and allows itself never to shake the hand of

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anyone other than the king, those constitute its noblest moments. Well, my time is gone, but let me just close with this. There was a young seminarian who was in his first year in school, and he came to the day he had rude. It was the day that he, as a young first-year student, had to address all of

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the upperclassmen together with all of the faculty, and the president called him forward and said, "I want you to preach to us the gospel." And the young man was terrified, and he looked out at all of these faces and he said, "My brothers, do you know what I'm going to say?" They shook their heads, "No." And he said, "Well,

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neither do I. Stand for the benediction. God bless you all." Well, he didn't get away with that, because the next day the president called him before the chapel again, and he said, "Now, you can get past this. I want you to get up there and preach the gospel." So the young man, even more terrified than he'd been the day

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before, climbed up into the pulpit and said, "Brothers, do you know what I'm going to say?" And trying to encourage him, they shook their heads, "Yes." And he replied, "Well, if you already know, then there's no point in my saying it. Please stand for the benediction, and God bless you all." Well, the president was determined that

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this young fellow was going to learn how to show and preach the gospel, and so for the third day he called him up front and he said, "Now, preach the gospel to us." And the young man stood there trembling, and he said, "Brothers, do you know what I'm going to say?" And some shook their head, "Yes," and some shook their head, "No." And he

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said, "All right, let those of you who know tell those who do not know, and stand for the benediction, God bless you all." And that, in a single sentence, is all I've said this morning. Jesus calls us, and he says, "Let those of you who know, for my sake, tell those who don't, and may God bless you all."

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Let us pray. Our Father, as individual Christians and as a church, grant that we might hold high the banner of the Lord, and that banner, as the psalmist sings, "That banner over us is the banner of love." Grant that we might show love to all those who are

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without Christ in the world, that we might exemplify that love, not only testify it, but exemplify it, not only talk about it, but demonstrate it in our walk. And bless our efforts, we pray, that those who don't know might come to know, and be saved, and be glad. We pray our prayer in the name of that one whose touch we

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claim above and beyond all others. Amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]