February 19, 2005
Sermon: “1 Seat – 3 People”
Scripture: Mark 2: 1-12
Reverend Larry Gerber
It’s hard to ask for help and sometimes we have to step up and offer.
It’s a problem in ethics. You have an opportunity right now to solve it.
You’re driving along in your car on a wild, stormy night. You pass by a bus stop, and you see three people waiting for the bus:
1. An old lady who looks as if she is about to die.
2. Your best friend who once saved your life.
3. The perfect person you have been dreaming about all your life.
There can only be one passenger in your car, and you can’t return to the bus stop once you leave it. Which one would you choose to offer a ride?
Think before you continue reading. This is a moral/ethical dilemma that was once used on an employment questionnaire.
You could pick up the old lady, because she is going to die, and thus you should save her first; or you could take your best friend because he once saved your life, and this would be the perfect chance to pay him back. However, you may never be able to find your perfect dream lover again.
The candidate who was hired (out of 200 applicants) had no trouble coming up with his answer. What did he say?
He said, “I would give the car keys to my old friend and let him take the old lady to the hospital. I would stay behind and wait for the bus with the woman of my dreams.”
Now that we’re talking about ethics and the human impulse to be of help to one another, listen to another story:
There were seven sailors off the Kamchatka peninsula in a Russian mini-submarine that had become entangled in a series of underwater antennae who were quite certain they were going to die.
Every one of them remembered their 118 comrades who died in the ill-fated Kursk in August of 2000. Now, in August of 2005, they would meet the same fate. Putin would not ask for help, nor would he accept help.
They were wrong. Within three days, the Russians cobbled together a rescue team with international help and plucked their sailors from the cold depths — all alive and well.
It’s a feel-good story, but it happened only after a hard lesson was learned five years earlier.
In the summer of 2000, a series of explosions in the forward torpedo room rocked the Russian submarine Kursk, sending it plunging to the bottom of the frigid Barents Sea. The fate of the 118 sailors aboard the ship was not known, though experts believed that there were likely survivors of the blast who would need to be rescued, and fast.
As word of the accident got out, several countries, including the United States, Great Britain and Norway, lined up to offer the Russians technological and manpower assistance toward a rescue operation — help in the form of sophisticated submersible rescue subs and salvage equipment that could conceivably help bring sailors from the stricken sub safely back to the surface.
The Russian response? Nyet! “We have all the necessary technology to carry out the operation,” said Russian Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov.
That was wishful thinking.
By official accounts, the Russian navy did not locate the Kursk, 354 feet below the Barents Sea surface, until nearly 16 hours after the accident, and did not lower the first rescue vessel until more than 15 hours after that. A day later, the United States and Britain publicly offered to help in the Kursk rescue effort, but two more days passed before Russian leader Vladimir Putin ordered naval officials to accept any aid that was extended. Three more days then went by before British and Norwegian rescue vessels arrived at the wreck site.
Meanwhile, deep in the bowels of the dying ship, some of the crew members had managed to seal themselves into a rear compartment, trying in vain to get out, hoping for a rescue. An officer scrawled a message in the fading light of the cold compartment: “All the crew from the sixth, seventh and eighth compartments went over to the ninth. There are 23 people here. We made this decision as a result of the accident. None of us can get to the surface .... I am writing blindly ....”
That note would be found on the officer’s body when the hull of the Kursk was finally breached by rescuers. All aboard had perished by that time.
No one knows how long those sailors may have survived. The note was written at least four hours after the initial explosion and some experts believe that the sailors may have had enough oxygen to sustain them up to a week.
Whatever the possibilities might have been, the reality was that help came too late — even though it was offered and available.
This rugged refusal of help, this unwillingness-to-ask-for-help is called “the Kursk Syndrome.” Help was readily available, but not accepted until too late.
Whether it’s boys with their nuclear toys or people refusing the cure for what ails them, there seems to be an innate human tendency to refuse help because it might be perceived as a sign of weakness.
There’s a flip side to this, of course. And it’s found right here in the text. Instead of a man and his friends afflicted with the Kursk Syndrome, these be-knighted fellows are endowed with the Courtesy syndrome.
Mark describes the incident: some friends go to extraordinary lengths to get help for a friend, risking embarrassment and (if this were America) a possible lawsuit.
The passage opens with Jesus “at home” in Capernaum in a house that the context suggests was either his or that of a close friend. Word gets out that he’s back in town and the neighbors begin to bang on the door, wanting to get close to him. Suddenly, the house is full of uninvited guests wanting to hear a word — so many that “there was no longer room for them, not even in front of the door” (v. 2).
Standing on the fringes of the crowd were some men who had brought with them a “paralyzed man” (v. 3), carrying him on a mat or stretcher. We don’t know anything else about these men, other than their objective was to get their disabled friend in front of Jesus in what may have been a last-ditch rescue mission to save him from a life of begging in the streets (which was usually the only occupation available to the differently abled in those days) or worse.
The crowd being too thick, the rescuers move immediately to Plan B. They dig a hole through the flat roof of the house and go deep in order to help, lowering their friend right in front of Jesus regardless of embarrassment, cost or the perception of the others around them.
From the perspective of the helpless chap on the mat. He is not too proud to ask for help, he accepts help, and if he had refused their help, he would have made it impossible for his friends to use their spiritual gifts.
When we are unwilling to ask for help, when we are unwilling to accept help, not only is the outcome bad for us, we also compound the tragedy by destroying a divine and sacred moment in which others have an opportunity to exercise their gifts and ministry in the ChristBody. And that’s not a good thing.
There’s no Kursk going on here. There’s courtesy, caring and a lot of charis — gifts, happening. No Kursk. No refusals. No sense of embarrassment. No aura of humiliation.
Only a sense of purpose, and only a true sense of the power of Jesus Christ, i.e., the certain knowledge that once in the presence of Jesus, this man would be lifted up, released from his trapped condition, given to breathe once again the fresh air of liberty and movement. He would be whole.
We’re the man on the mat.
When we ask for help, when we have the support of the ChristBody who want to keep us in, or take us to, the presence of the risen Christ, do we have the certain knowledge that once there, we will be whole again? Sins forgiven? Guilt rolled away? Free to love and to care, to work and to serve — again?
If we don’t, why bother? Or why should our friends bother?
For Jesus, that help was not merely a quick fix but rather a basic approach to the human crisis. For Jesus, the real enemy was the systemic disease of sin. In a culture where there was a deep belief in the connection between body and spirit, Jesus sought to rescue and repair the whole person — the basic rescue technique being the application of forgiveness, a lifeline of grace tossed to those drowning in a sea of sin and self-centeredness. It is real help freely offered.
The paralytic’s friends weren’t afraid to ask for help. Jesus wasn’t afraid to give it despite the protests of his countrymen. Pride went down with the dirt on that roof. As a result, the man on the mat, experiencing a real healing of body and spirit, walked out of the house through the front door and surfaced to a whole new way of life.
Do you need help with an embarrassing sin or struggle? Is pride keeping you from getting the help you need? Is there someone you know that needs someone like you to dig deeper in getting them the help that they need?
One seat, three people. What is your solution? There is a precious name we can call on. His name is the hope of earth and the joy of heaven. Let stand and sing: Precious Name…
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Sources:
McDonald, Mark. “Health of men in Russia is rapidly declining.” Knight Ridder Newspapers, Washington Bureau. February 10, 2005. realcities.com/mld/krwashington/10868352.htm. Retrieved July 11, 2005.
“Russian navy begins attempt to evacuate sailors from sunken sub,” CNN Web Site, August 15, 2000. edition.cnn.com/2000/WORLD/europe/08/15/russia.submarine.02/index.html. Retrieved July 11, 2005.Wines, Michael. “‘None of us can get out,” Kursk sailor wrote.” The New York Times, October 27, 2000.