September 09, 2024
• Rev. Mindie Moore
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Making Room Week 1: Making Room to Care Mark 2:1-12 Today we are beginning a brand new series that I am super excited about. It’s called Making Room, and it’s part of the capital campaign that St. Luke’s is currently in the middle of. I’ve been part of St. Luke’s for just over 10 years now, and over the last decade we’ve had a lot of plans as a faith community for how we could keep reaching people. Many of these plans we’ve accomplished through personal donors and through some incredibly generosity, we’ve done things like reconfigure the parking lot at North Indy to make it more functional and safer. We upgraded the Great Hall at North Indy, making an attractive meeting space and massively upgrading the kitchen. We invested in tech in our classrooms to get us through the pandemic. We opened our Midtown, and this building you are in right now got upgrades and improvements in order to open as a second in person St. Luke’s site. It’s amazing to look back and see all that we’ve done over the years, and now it’s time to come together to create the next chapter for St. Luke’s, focusing on safety needs and upgrades at our North Indy Campus, which serves ALL of us, here at Midtown and also our Online Community.
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So I want you to take a look at this video to see more about what we hope to do together over the next season as we Make Room: (PLAY VIDEO: 3 minutes) Today we're looking at a Scripture in the Gospel of Mark that shows us the lengths that some people will go to in order to make room to care about each other. You might call this one of the first construction projects that the Church did in order to help people get close to Jesus. In this story, Jesus is teaching and he has drawn a large crowd. Word has been spreading about who Jesus is and what he’s been doing. People are eager to hear him and maybe even have an experience of healing with him. And this group of friends has heard the buzz too. So they bring their paralyzed friend to this big gathering, hoping that what they’ve heard is right, hoping that by helping him encounter Jesus that things will get better. But when they get there, there’s a problem—there are so many people that it’s impossible for them to GET to Jesus. They can see him, they can hear him, but it’s not going to be
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possible to get as up close and personal as they need to in order to get healing for their friend. And this is where they could have given up. This is where they could have told their friend, “look, we tried our best, we gave it a go, but we’ll have to be on the lookout for whenever Jesus comes back to town to get you healed.” I actually wouldn’t be surprised if there WERE people who made that choice. Who DID look at the crowd and say, “yeah, not today.” But we wouldn’t be reading this story if that’s what they did. We wouldn’t be telling this story thousands of years later if they had just walked away and given up. The reason we’re telling this story is because they looked for a way to make room. And for these guys, on this day, that meant going through the roof. The text tells us that: (SLIDE) And when they could not bring him to Jesus because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him, and after having dug through it, they let down the mat on which the paralytic lay. Can you imagine that? Jesus is teaching, there’s this enormous crowd, and then all of a sudden maybe some dirt
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and straw start falling on people. And everyone is slightly confused, like “did I really just feel dirt land on my head?” And then all of a sudden, these guys jump through the opening they made, and with them comes another guy laying on a cot, put right in front of Jesus, in the middle of the action, in the middle of the crowd, and now everyone is watching. Everyone is watching the care that these people had for their friend and the impact that it had. They made room, they took down barriers because they cared. And as we think about our own lives, and our own communities, (SLIDE) we make room because we care. When you care about people, you do whatever that takes. You do what you can to make space available, to make things accessible, to make it possible for people to be welcomed and belong and know that there is a place for them in whatever setting we find ourselves in, that Jesus sees them and knows them and loves them. Now, that’s not to say there won’t be obstacles. Because there almost always will be. The groups of friends here, they had several that they had to figure out. There was the crowd, there was their friend’s condition. There was the roof itself and what it was going to take to dig through it and lower this friend to the ground without getting hurt or hurting him.
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There was the sure and potential judgement that was going to come from some of the people around them, probably the people that owned the dwelling whose roof they had now damaged. So the obstacles were THERE...but when care is also part of the story, we find a way to overcome them. We experienced this here at Midtown last summer. Now, this is an interesting building because you enter essentially on a landing of a stairwell. And you have to choose, do you go up or down. To make the building accessible, at the south entrance we have an elevator that will take you either up to the Sanctuary level or down to the Fellowship Hall (aka donuts) AND Kids’ space. So that is great. But for awhile, there was a big limitation to it. Because when you go downstairs, the elevator will get you to PART of the space, but it won’t get you to the whole thing. There are (SLIDE) 3 pesky steps that stand between the higher part of the Lower Level and the larger, lower part. And it just so happens that our Kids’ Ministry meets in that larger, lower part.
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And so from the outset when we opened as a campus, there were several of us kind of fretting about these three stairs. We knew it wasn’t ideal. We knew that these steps were preventing us from REALLY living into our stated value of being an open and inclusive community. And we weren’t 100% sure what to do or how to do it or, of course, with any good construction project, how to fund it. So there were all these obstacles. And it was always kind of in the back of our mind, we’ve got to fix this SOMEDAY. And then, someday came. Because one of the kids in our church broke their leg while out in the community, and all of a sudden the need for the ramp when from the back of our minds to a must do immediately. This is not SOMEDAY, this is TODAY. And I watched as our church community stepped into action. I watched as our Facilities Director and Trustees got costs approved, I watched volunteers get supplies and build the ramp, I watched this ramp come together so quickly that you might have thought it was in the plans all along. (SLIDE, SLIDE) I watched what can happen when people care and act out of that place of caring. I watched us make room for a ramp and
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room for more people to get to easily experience our Kids’ and Large Gathering Space. And the thing about making room, is that it’s not just physical. It’s not JUST about our space, although that’s a big part of it. It’s about our hearts and it’s about the ways that we are willing to know each other. John Ortberg has this quote where he says, (SLIDE) “You can only be loved to the extent that you are known.” I’m sure you’ve seen that be true in your life. And it’s so true particularly in the Church. It’s so easy to show up to a place and spend an hour singing and praying and doing all the church things and NEVER feel like anyone knows you. And if you come to this place and you don’t feel known then my hunch is that you probably don’t really feel loved. And so as we’re in this campaign to transform the capacity of our physical space, we will absolutely miss something essential if we don’t transform the capacity of our hearts too. And maybe the first step of doing that is just to get to know the people we share this space with just a little bit better.
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And so I want to invite my two friends up here now. Over the next few weeks, you’re going to see two yellow benches set up throughout this series—one right outside of the sanctuary and one downstairs by the donuts. And here’s what we want you to do with the benches...we want you to sit on them, if you’re willing to have a conversation with someone, maybe who you haven’t met before or don’t know very well. We want to use these brightly colored benches to be a tool that we can all use to make some room in our hearts for each other. Brandon and Rachel have agreed to be my example here, thank you two very much. Brandon and Rachel don’t really know each other, and they are both on this bench. And if Brandon and Rachel introduced themselves to each other, and made a little small talk, here’s what they would find out: they have some stuff in common! They both grew up in suburbs of Indianapolis. They both teach Middle School. And... So over the next few weeks, spend some time on one of these benches. See who you meet. See how God helps you make room in your heart for new friends and to care about the people you worship with each week in a new way.
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Because when we do that, we start to reduce the amount of strangers in our midst. We start to break down some of the barriers that we think exist in going deeper in community with each other. We start to care in a way that is more personal. It gets us deeply involved. And when we care this way, we aren’t just empathetic bystanders but we’re now invested in the outcome. Look at the example of these people bringing their friend to Jesus. They are in it with him. Their well-being is tied up in his well-being. They broke someone’s roof to get him healed. They risked making the pharisees and Jesus and whoever owned this dwelling pretty angry. They were willing to disrupt everything that is going on in order to make space for their friend and create a space of inclusion and healing. And by doing that, it had a bigger impact than just the person they were making room for. It impacted the friends, it impacted the bystanders, and what happened when they intentionally made room because they cared is that they (SLIDE) moved from allowing someone’s presence to being transformed by someone’s presence. I saw how this can happen at the church I served in Pasadena. It was a smaller church on a residential street,
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pretty similar to the street we are on right now, and several houses down the block was a group home for women who had developmental disabilities. Every week, the women who lived there would walk down the block to come to church. They would sit in the second row on the left-hand side, every single week. And every single week, they would pray during the service. Now, this church had something called Prayers of the People, I don’t know if you’ve been part of a church that does this, but basically the pastor says a short opening prayer and then turns it over to whoever wants to pray outloud. It can get very exciting sometimes. But every week, during Prayers of the People, a few of the women in the second row on the lefthand side would pray out loud. And I’m going to be incredibly honest with you, as the person who led Prayers of the People MOST weeks. It was sometimes very uncomfortable. Most of the time it was hard to understand what they were saying and sometimes they would pray for a very long time. It wasn’t always clear how to navigate that moment, if we should hold the space, or try
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and smoothly wrap things up. But what WAS clear to me was that these prayers made an impact on our congregation. Because there would be the rare week where this group of women DIDN’T come to church. And when they weren’t there, Prayers of the People was different. It was missing something. We felt their absence. And the truth is, even though making room for their prayers was sometimes uncomfortable or even a little confusing, it was undeniable that the Holy Spirit was at work every time they would pray. These prayers were real and from the heart and I know that God was shaping that congregation through the way these women prayed. We would miss something without those prayers. We miss something if we don’t make room. And so let’s not miss it. Let’s be like the friends who will stop at nothing to show care and love to the people in our midst. Let’s be like the crowd who can let ourselves be amazed at the working on God and say “we’ve never seen anything like this!” Let’s believe that Jesus can take situations that seem impossible and relationships that seem distant and can do things in those moments that we can hardly even imagine.
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Let’s have that kind of trust and vision...and then let’s be a church who is committed to making room and doing what we’ve been called to do alongside our God who is doing amazing things all around us. Let’s pray.