Texts: Isaiah 43: 18-25; Mark 2: 1-12

There are certain words we associate with certain parts of the country. The word "bodacious" is one of them. A term meaning boldly audacious, it even sounds southern. When I hear that word, it brings to mind that scene in Gone With the Wind, when Scarlett O'Hara tells Rhett Butler that his behavior was bodacious. I can still hear the voice of Vivien Leigh as she flirted with Clark Gable saying, "Why, Mr. Butler, you are so bodacious!" For a Shakespearean trained actress, she did that southern accent pretty well.

Well, Capernaum wasn't exactly southern Galilee, but Jesus' behavior was certainly bodacious. There are more than a few thing s interesting about this Gospel passage. First is, what surprised people and what did not surprise them. But to begin properly, we should note a few things about the setting of this story. The text tells us that "It was reported that he was at home." This implies that Jesus no longer made his home in Nazareth.

Originally a small Jewish fishing village about 20 miles from Nazareth, Capernaum had frown to become an important town on the route from the Tetrarchy of Philip, son of Herod the Great, to that of Herod Antipas, Ruler of Galilee, who married Herodias causing John to fume and lost his head. He ruled the Territory east of Galilee from 4 BCE to 34 CE; he married Salome, yes that Salome, daughter of Herodias. Capernaum lay on a narrow plain, its basalt hills rising barely 750 feet from the shore. Yet the stony beach at Capernaum was the site of constant activity a boats from other Jewish fishing villages stopped there because the richest fishing grounds in the lake lay between Capernaum and Bethsaida, about 2 to 3 miles to the east. Capernaum became the center of Jesus' Galieean ministry, so much so that Mark's Gospel says he "was at home" there.

Archaeological excavation indicates that ancient Capernaum was a fairly well-off city. The stones of the ancient synagogues were richly ornamented. To date, the oldest synagogue uncovered is from the third century. It contains the "seat of Moses," the place from which a rabbi would comment on the law to any who would listen.

The gospels all speak of Jesus retreating to pray – sometimes at the shore and sometimes in the wilderness – to listen for the word of God. Jesus' fame as a healer had spread far and wide, so much so that as mark says, "so many were gathered around that there was no longer room for them, not even in front of the door." I use that passage to hold myself together when we have a particularly difficult Saturday afternoon at my office. In our modern day parlance we would say the place was mobbed. The paralytic's friend decided to get creative and find another way in. That's what we often need to do when totally overwhelmed, when totally besides ourselves: get creative, or as we might say, think out of the box. Because everyone was jamming the door, hey! There's the roof. House roofs in Palestine were and, by the way, are in these small villages still, flat. This is the paralytic's last AND best hope.

So what does Jesus do? He says to the paralytic, "Son, your sins are forgiven." Note that the narrator of the story has Jesus saying this first, before he tells him to take up his bed and walk. This truly is a bodacious statement. For, as the scribes and chief priests ask, "Who is this man to forgive sin?" Jesus, knew what they were thinking, "in his spirit," and so as a demonstration of his authority, he just tells the man to take up his bed and walk. That is, of course, what forgiveness permits us to do: to get up and walk. To walk away from our past, our failings, and to take on a new life, a new life in these times, these interesting times.

If we are bound by our sin, it acts as a form of paralysis on our lives. But if we know we are forgiven, then we are free to live new and free lives in God's kingdom which is in this world. Being held own by our sin, even our past sin, permits us to be controlled by our sin and by others. Dictators understand this very well. In the time of what Mao Tse-tung called the Cultural Revolution, he was able to use the past actions, or sins, of the perceived enemies of his vision of society as a way to control the people. People who had engaged in so-called bourgeois behavior were dragged into the streets; children were encouraged to denounce their parents, their siblings.

Jesus lived in a society where sin was also used as a form of social control. The temple and its leadership make their living off people bringing their offerings as a sacrifice to assuage God. By forgiving the sins of the paralytic, Jesus tells the Pharisees that they are no longer the mediators. In fact, there are no mediators between us and God. Jesus is proclaiming a new relationship. The poetry of the Second Isaiah puts it this way: I am about to do a new thing: now it springs forth. Do you not perceive it? ...I have not burdened you with offerings, or wearied you with frankincense... I am God who blots out your transgressions for my own sake and I will not remember your sins.

Not to be burdened by our past frees us to live for the future. The past is more than our individual sins; it is also the way we think about how we should act towards each other. The new relationship Jesus tells us we must have with God requires a new relationship with humanity. Each generation has had its own concept of its relationship with others. For those, like the Pharisees, stuck in the mud of ritual and social control, those new ways of relating have not only been examples of boldly audacious and outrageous behavior but have seem as threatening the social fabric itself.

Some of you may remember the sixties with its breakthrough in music and style and its message of social change as inevitable. Bob Dylan, one of is prophets, even sang, “If you can't join in, then get out of the way, for the times, they are a'changing.” This is not to say that all bodacious behavior is necessarily the best behavior or the most effective method of creating orderly social change. But Jesus was not about orderly social change. He burst on the scene and offered God's forgiveness to all. Didn't matter who they were or what they were. Tax collectors, prostitutes and women who refused to obey social convention, lepers, revolutionaries, ordinary folk like you and me. The freedom from our past life of sin frees us from the constraint of what's supposed to be, from the myths that have nourished us and given us life to live now.

It's easy to soften the bodacious behavior of the revolutionaries of the past to enable them to become part of our foundation. One of our nation's founders, whose birthday we officially celebrate tomorrow, realized that the battle for American independence could cost him not only his head, but his fortune and his family's holdings. If Washington had lost, he would have been hanged, even possibly drawn and quartered, his property seized, is wife left penniless, his family ostracized. If Lincoln, whose birthday was last week, had not secured Southern surrender at Appomattox, he would have been pilloried the same way the bourgeois were in china during the Cultural Revolution. Each of them had a vision for which they were willing to die. Lincoln was martyred as have been many who have held firmly to their visions.

Jesus demands bodacious behavior in these times – our times. There is an old Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times. However, this is not a curse as far as I am concerned; it is a challenge. May we live in our time, faithful to the Gospel which free us from our past and allows us to envision a future – a future of the kingdom of God.

Let us pray: Eternal Spirit, God of the One we follow, Jesus of Nazareth, give us the courage to free ourselves from the constraints which hinder the full realization of your domain. Give us the courage to be truly bodacious, living as if the kingdom is indeed a reality. Amen.