Homily for 5 July 2015--the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost: "You Are Healed: Stand Up, Pick Up Your Pallet, and Go Home"

You Are Healed:  Stand Up, Pick Up Your Pallet, and Go Home

Homily for Sixth Sunday after Pentecost (5 July 2015, 26 June 2005)

Romans 12:6-14…………….Matthew 9:1-8

 

Two things stand out in today’s Gospel story of Jesus’ healing the paralyzed man.  First, Jesus forgives the man’s since before He heals his paralyzed body.  And, second, when He heals the man, Jesus tells him to stand up, pick up his pallet, and go to his home.

From this we learn that spiritual healing always goes ahead of, or along with, physical healing, and that part of healing is moving ahead, getting on with the activities of life.

These things are as true for communities as for individual persons.  If a community or a group of people is paralyzed, unable to move, stuck in one spot, incapable of seeing new directions or solutions to their problems, the first thing they must seek is spiritual healing and renewal.

The Church has a word for this, a Greek word—metanoia.  It is translated as “change of heart.”  It’s similar to repentance, but it’s more than that.  Metanoia signifies opening the heart to God, so that it can be filled with God’s love and grace and power.  More than any human action, God in us forgives our sins, breaks the bonds that keep us from moving, and enables us to move forward again.

But we have to come to God, conscious of our paralysis and need for healing, and we have to ask God to fill us with His healing love and mercy.

And when we turn to God and receive healing, we have to carry out the second part of the deal.  Like the paralyzed man, we have to stand up, pick up our pallet, and go home.

It’s easy to understand the first instruction Jesus gives:  stand up.  That’s the natural action anyone would take after being healed from paralysis.  It’s the first move, the one that tells us the healing is real.  Until we stand up, we don’t know we are healed and we can’t go anywhere.

Jesus’ second instruction is to pick up your pallet.  In a way, the pallet or bed symbolizes the paralysis—it’s where we are stuck until we are healed.  We might just want to leave it behind and forget about it, but we have to pick it up and carry it away.  It reminds us of what we have been healed from by the power of God.  It reminds us to be thankful.  And it reminds us of where we could end up again if we lose our closeness to God and let sin paralyze us again.

Finally Jesus tells the man to go to his home.  After he was healed, he might have wanted to go out and celebrate.  He might have wanted to show off to everybody that he could walk and run and dance again.  But Jesus tells him, “Go to your home.”  Home is the center of our life.  It’s the place where we share life with those we love.  It’s where we learn to pray, where we praise God in the morning and thank God in the evening.

So before we can go out in new directions after being healed, we have to go home, to the center, to get re-oriented, to get focused, to decide what’s important and how we will use our restored ability to move.  And from there we will be able to begin again, to go forward knowing that God is with us, that God has healed our souls as well as our bodies.

And then we can give thanks and praise and glory to God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, now and ever and unto the ages of ages.  Amen.