Shane Hughes 6-14-26

Good morning, Highland.

I want to jump into a sermon today, and I think it's going to be something you want to hear. But before we do that, I want to say thank you. Thank you for the break. You don't know what it's like to work at a church that has elders that are so supportive as the elders at Highland, who look out not only for the welfare of this flock, to make sure that we are well fed and care. Well fed and cared for, but also that look after those that serve.

And so I want to say thanks and not just to the others, but to those of you that have sent cards and food and blankets and 100 other things that offered to do laundry and then done laundry and offered a million things. Thank you. It's my deepest gratitude that I express to you that I don't think I've ever quite felt as loved and as cared for by a community of faith as I have in these past few months. So let us go to God in prayer.

God, who created the cosmos and gives us good things to eat, who helps us see the glory of creation, but also the beauty of. Of a sunrise, who puts in our hearts a desire and a yearning to see the good things happen in this world. Father, who gives us capability to serve you, we give you praise. And I ask in this moment, as we turn our hearts and our minds to your word, that you pour through me the gift of preaching, that I might speak your truth in love to these, your people. And it's together that the church says amen.

So I want to talk to you today about three graces. I want us to think about grace in terms of a big grace, a medium grace, and a small grace. And the interesting thing is, in our text today, Jesus deals directly with the question of the big grace and the middle grace and the small grace. Jesus looks at a paralyzed man who's being lowered through somebody's roof where he's trying to teach, and the first thing out of his mouth isn't, be healed. It's your sins are forgiven.

And I think that's the big grace. I think on some level, that's the deep question that all of us are asking and yearning for an answer to. Are we right with God?

Now, I also imagine that if you were in that room or if you were that man's family, or if you were that person themselves, you might have thought, that's not what we came here for. We came here for legs that work. We came for. For a body that can carry him to work or to the well or to the synagogue or under his own power. And Jesus says instead, forgiveness.

Because what Jesus is doing here is diagnosing a deeper problem before he addresses the presenting problem. And it's not because this man's paralysis is caused by some sort of specific sin. In fact, Jesus, other places, denies that fact with a man that was born blind. It's because Jesus is showing us what the real crisis of human existence is. We think that the problem is what we have broken, what's broken on the outside, or our circumstances, or our bodies, or our bank accounts, our relationship.

And what we want to hear today is that Jesus says there is something beneath all of that.

There is a separation between you and God that no amount of fixed circumstance will ever heal.

And we can imagine in that moment it's kind of the religious leaders that are there to. To watch Jesus, to observe Jesus, because he's gaining popularity at this point. We can. We can imagine their reaction in the room. In fact, Luke tells us that they're not wrong in their theology, right?

When they're asking the question, who is this blasphemer? They're not wrong asking that question, who can forgive sins but God alone? That's actually correct. That's good doctrine. The mistake that they make is not their theology of who can forgive sins.

The mistake is in what they do with that theology when it shows up in front of them in human form. And I think this is what I think Luke wants us to feel. Luke wants us to rub in the dissonance of it all. Either this man Jesus is committing some kind of blasphemy, claiming the authority that belongs only to God, or Jesus is God walking around Capernaum, available to be touched, to be argued with, to be watched with hostile eyes in the back of a crowded room. C.S.

lewis put it in a way that only Lewis could, that you can't put Jesus in a category of great moral teacher. And stop there. Because no great moral teacher says the things that Jesus says about himself. He doesn't leave that category open to us. CS Lewis says that Jesus forces a choice.

He is either a liar, a lunatic, or he's Lord. He either knows what he's saying isn't true, or he's mistaken. He believes what he's saying, but it's still not true, or Jesus is God.

So what does Jesus do with that choice? I want you to notice that in this moment, he doesn't argue theology with the scribes. He doesn't cite proof texts. He says, in effect, let me show you who I am, which is Easier to say your sins are forgiven or get up and walk. And then he heals the man right there as a kind of visible signature on an invisible check.

And this is why that's so important to us, because we live in a world that wants evidence. We want to see results. And Jesus and his kindness gives the crowd something they can see to authenticate something they can't.

I want you to hear this. The healing is not the point of the story. It's the sign that points to the point. The man walks out carrying his own mat, the very thing that used to carry him as living proof that something deeper than then, muscle and nerve has been restored.

And I have to tell you the truth, for most of my life, I believed that the point is actually the point. And it's not really about the healing. It's really about salvation. I have to tell you the truth that what I longed for was to live in the big grace.

But then there's times in your life where the thing that you really want more than anything else is the healing. I think Reid spoke of this last week. The thing that you really want more than anything else is the conception. The thing that you want more than anything else is the resolution to the relationship, the thing that you really want. I'm happy about heaven, and I'm happy about Jesus.

I'm happy about salvation. But what I really want is the problem that's right in front of me.

I think that we operate on the same instinct as this man's friends or the crowd. We think that if we can just get close enough to Jesus, he will fix us visibly in any broken area of our life. And Jesus does. He often might.

But what he's actually offering, what he's always offering first, is something so much greater than that.

He's offering to give us the thing that separates us from him in the first place. And that's not because your circumstances matter him. He clearly, clearly do, because he heals the man, but because he knows what our deepest need actually are.

And I want you to see this point in the text.

In fact, in this week, I interrupted Suzetta, she was doing something else, but she's my office mate. And I interrupted, and I walked into her office and I said, hey, did you know that in the story of the man that gets lowered from the roof that Jesus calls him a friend? He doesn't call him you there. He doesn't call him sinner, he calls him friend. And she said, whoa.

And then she just let me talk for a minute, and I said, do you know how many other places in Luke that it shows up that Jesus actually calls someone else friend and she says, no, how many? And I said, I don't know, but I want to find out now. And so I looked it up, and there's only. There's only two other places. And this is how Jesus uses friend.

In this moment, in this story, he calls the man friend in an inviting way. It's the exact same way that Peter, when he's betraying Jesus, calls one of the other people around the fire friend because he wants that person to draw closer. Jesus, in this moment of interruption, in this moment of, you know, house destruction, in this moment, he wants the man to know before anything is fixed, before any miracle happens, that that relationship is already restored, the verdict has already been rendered. Like everything else, the standing up, the walking, the carrying the mat. It's just the visual, visual visible unfolding of something that was already fully, completely true.

But the moment that Jesus spoke. And I think that's the gospel in a moment in miniature. It's not get better, and then you'll be accepted, but you are accepted now. Watch what that's going to do to you.

And so if you wonder why Jesus is in this room, why, why Luke bothers to tell this story at all, why he claims with breathtaking authority to forgive sins and heal a broken body, then you just have to go back one chapter to a sermon that Jesus preaches. It's his first sermon ever. It's in a synagogue in Nazareth in his hometown. And there Jesus stands up and he unrolls the scroll of Isaiah, and he reads, the spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to proclaim the good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty to the captives recovering the sight to the blind, and to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favorite. And then he does something that nobody expects.

He sits down and he says, today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. And that's not the Solman illustration. That's his job description. That's Jesus telling the people of Nazareth everything Isaiah said the Messiah would do. I am going to do it now.

So when we get to chapter five, Jesus says to the paralyzed man, your sins are forgiven. And. And then he says, get up and walk. Those aren't two random miracles separately stitched together. They're the two threads of the announcement.

It's the same announcement. It's the year of the Lord's favor. It's the great jubilee it's the time when debts are going to be canceled and captives go free has arrived. And it's both a spiritual dimension and a physical one. Liberty for the captive soul, sight for the literally blind, freedom for the oppressed.

Oppressed by sin and oppressed by sickness, decay, and death. Jesus doesn't believe that this man's body and soul are two different compartments in the kingdom Jesus is announcing. Sin and sickness are both symptoms of the same underlying catastrophe that the world has come undone from its make, and Jesus has come to put it back together. All of it, every part.

So I want you to understand that in this world there is large grace, and it is instantly and immediately accessible to you, but there's also little grace.

Have you ever encountered a little grace, A small grace? It was a random Tuesday, and I was in my. It's like a shed in our backyard. I call it a workshop. It's just full of old radios.

And I was trying to clean things up. And there was this moment when a ladybug, it landed on my forearm. It was the kind of Tuesday where I decided nothing else was going to happen. Good for me that day, because nothing had really been going for me, well, recently. And I just kind of began to expect that's how it's going to go for a while.

And this ladybug landed on my forearm. And instead of flying off the way bugs are supposed to do the second they realize you're a person and not a leaf, it just stayed.

It just walked around on my forearm like I had nowhere else to be. Like my arm was a perfectly reasonable place to spend an afternoon. And I sat there, I stood there very still, absurdly moved, watching this tiny red insect amble across my skin. And I thought to myself, you know, nobody asked for this. I didn't pray for this.

This is not on anybody's list of God things that God needs to do for me. And yet here it was, unrequested and unearned, entirely unnecessary, which is, I think. I think it's the point.

I think it's more or less the definition of grace when you strip away all the stained glass language we usually wrap around that word. Here's another one. I think you experience small graces all the time. You. You had the kind of day at work or that day it just kicked you out, you know, and you're walking home and you can barely breathe to your car.

And the sky just does that thing in West Texas that the sky does where it goes orange and pink and this kind of strange green gold at the edges. And it's like God reached into his paint box and said, you know, we're just going to go wild tonight. And for no reason at all. And it's an audience of just like it's me and this stray dog that's wandering down Santos and it's just me. And I see this beautiful sunset and I didn't ask for it and I'll never remember to thank anyone for it.

But it doesn't happen because it just happened anyway. Or maybe you've had this small grace. You're just somebody completely out of nowhere tells you exactly the thing you needed to hear and they have no idea why they're doing it. A stranger in line at a pharmacy says something kind, just making conversation, but it lands on you like a key turning a lock that you forgot was locked and they walk away and they'll never know. And you stand there in pharmacy fluorescent lighting at 10 o' clock at night, undone in the best possible way by someone who is just being a person.

I think the small grace meets you. I think the small grace surprises you. It sort of sideswipes you, but it doesn't leave you where it found you. This isn't the sort of big grace. Salvation, heaven, miraculous healing.

It's a small grace. None of this. The bug, the sky, the stranger. It doesn't fix anything. The bug doesn't pay your bills and the sunset doesn't heal what's broken in your family.

The stranger at the pharmacist doesn't know anything about the diagnosis, the divorce, or that kid, the kid that won't call you back.

But this is what it does.

For about 30 seconds, you are no longer the sum of your problems. For 30 seconds, you're just a person in a body on a planet. That is against all odds, against any reasonable expectation, given how the news usually is. It is to remind you that life is still beautiful, still doing things like this for no reason on a Tuesday, for nobody in particular. And I think that's the point of the small grace.

It doesn't dig through anybody's roof. It's not trying to save your life. It's just small, specific, completely unnecessary. But it's a reminder that you are noticed. God is still in the business of small, specific, unnecessary kindness.

Which means that maybe the big kindness, the real rescue, the kind of thing that does carry you somewhere, maybe that's not off the table either. Ladybug doesn't prove anything, but it does make you wonder.

So eventually, I don't know how long it lasted, but eventually the flew away, they always do. But for a minute on an ordinary Tuesday, grace landed on me and it stayed a while Walked around like it belonged.

I want you to notice something about where this story fits, where it sits in Luke's gospel. What comes right before it is Jesus calling the disciples. What comes right after it is Jesus calling Levi. Matthew, he's forming his team. He's going to make people that will follow him for the next three years.

And in the course of those three years, they are going to become friends. And so on either side of this text, you've got people leaving everything for Jesus. They're called disciples, but he's also calling friends. And this sandwich right in the middle, you've got these four guys that we don't even have a name for. We don't even know who they are.

But here's what those four guys did. They had a friend that could not walk. They could not get himself anywhere. He could not on his own, get himself within a hundred yards of Jesus. And when they go to the house, it's so crowded, it's packed wall to wall.

They can't get in. People are spilling out the door. And so what do they do? They don't give up. They start digging.

They tear off somebody's roof, tile by tile and dirt and debris. It's probably raining down on the very crowd they're trying to get through. And then they lower their friend down on ropes right in the middle of the room, right in front of Jesus. Can you imagine how disruptive that would be eight years ago, when Stormont was here? I would have no doubt that there would be someone digging through the roof right now, coming straight down.

Right. Just to show you how disruptive it is, these guys are causing a scene. They're costing somebody money. The roof isn't going to repair itself. The text doesn't say.

But does Jesus, like, kind of wave his hands and fix the roof? I doubt it. They're making themselves, frankly, look ridiculous. And they don't care because their friend needs Jesus. And they've decided, apparently without much discussion, that nothing is going to stop them from getting him to Jesus.

And I think church. That's what friendship looks like when it's pointed in the right direction. Do you know who else had a friendship like that? It's in scripture. It's in the Old Testament.

It's. It's David. King David in second Samuel 23. There's this moment where David is exhausted and he's in hiding. He's in the midst of conflict and war.

And he says, almost offhand, man, I would love a drink of water from the well from back home in Bethlehem. And three of his mightiest friends, Adino, Eleazar and Shama, they hear that and they don't say, well, hey, that's nice, David. They break through the Philistine lines, they fight through the enemy to Bethlehem. I imagine one of them is going down to pull up water from the well while the other two are defending him. And then they fight their way back.

They risk their lives, they fight their way to Bethlehem, they draw water, they bring it back to David. And here's the part that gets me every time, when they get back to the cave, David takes the water and he won't drink it.

He pours it on the ground. And the first reading of this text, you kind of wonder, like, David, don't you See what they did? Why aren't you grateful for what they did? They risked their lives just so you could drink from the well that you drank from when you were a boy. What are you thinking?

But I think the second reading of this text, you realize what he did.

He pours it on the ground because he's not worthy to drink the water. Because somehow in the time that it moved from that well to his hands, it became something more than water. It became holy. The gift, the risk, the service to a friend made that water different.

And David says, I'm not. I'm not worthy of this.

And I think that water, I think those men breaking the roof, I think that. I think that's the middle grace. We understand the big grace. I think that you can tell me or tell your friends at lunch what the small grace is in your life. But I think that water, I think that those men, I think that's the middle grace.

Because the diagnosis may never change and the relationship may never heal on this side of reality.

And I have prayed for over a year that the problems my family is facing would just go away, that we would just hear a report that says, we can't explain this, but poof. And that may still happen.

But what I received instead was the middle grace.

We had a meal train.

You probably don't know this about me, but it wouldn't be hard to guess. I'm not much of a cook. For the last 20 odd years, Natalie has been the cook in our family. And there's a reason for that. It's not.

I mean, she is great, but it's because I'm so poor at this job. And so when she wasn't feeling well, we had this meal train. And one of our friends, who's not sitting in this room, but he attends this church, he wrote on the meal train. He's bringing homemade brisket. Oh, my goodness, it was the best brisket you've ever had.

It's the best brisket in Abilene. Jo Alan, Sharon's. Nothing can compete with this brisket. The shed, it was amazing. But then, like a week later, another friend, he saw brisket and.

And he. He said, well, that's nothing. You're going to have my ribs. And I have to tell you the truth, those ribs could be used as currency. I could.

I could buy a used car with those ribs. They were amazing.

And then another one of my friends saw the brisket and saw the ribs, and he wrote back, just wait till you have my pulled pork. And he brought this pulled pork with a coleslaw that was homemade and it was amazing. And I've never had friends that would fight to Bethlehem just so that I could have a drink of the water from a well.

But I have pretty good friends.

I think that's exactly what's happening in Capernaum. Those four friends, they pay a cost socially, physically, financially, to get their friend in front of Jesus. And what comes down through the hole isn't just a man on a mat. It is a mat carried by somebody else's faith. In verse 20, Jesus sees their faith, not his faith, their.

Their faith. And there's a kind of friendship that exists in Christian life. And Paul talks about it in Philippians. It's. It's where you don't carry something for them exactly, but you carry them with you.

Paul says in chapter one, I thank my God and all my remembrance of you because of your partnership. In the Gospel, from the first day until now, the word partnership there is koinonia. And it's not like, hey, I'm going to pray for you from a distance. It's I am with this, I am in this, I am with you.

Your fight is my fight, and your burden is on my shoulders too. And then in chapter two, he says, complete my joy. Make my joy complete by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. And Paul there is describing a community that moves together, that when one of them is down, the others don't step around them. They pick up the mat and they carry it.

And there's an obvious conclusion to the end of this sermon. Sometimes you're going to be the person on the mat, and sometimes you're going to be the person Digging through the roof. But this is what I want you to feel. And this is where it's going to get personal.

There are people right now in this room who are the man on the mat. And it's all you could do to get yourself to Jesus today. It's all you could do to get yourself into this room. But you feel paralyzed by depression, by shame, by grief, by diagnosis, by a relationship that's falling apart, by a sin you can't seem to outrun. And you're probably sitting in this room right now, here, thinking, I don't even have the strength to ask for help, let alone get myself into the presence of God.

So I want to speak to you for just a moment. If you are here on the flat of your back today, unable to move toward God under your own power, I want you to know that that is not a disqualification. That is the exact position in this story where Jesus shows up when you are at your end. That's where Jesus is ready. And then there's people, people in this room who are the friends.

You have the strength right now that someone else doesn't have. You have the faith right now that someone else needs to borrow. You have access to Jesus and to hope and to faith. That's running low for someone you know. And the question this text puts to you is what are you willing to tear apart to get them closer to Jesus?

And I think this is the church at its best. Not just Highland, but the world. The church at its best. It's not a building full of people who got it together, following Jesus on their own steam. It's a room full of people carrying each other toward the only one who can do anything about it.

Look, sometimes you're going to be on the mat, and sometimes you're on the roof. But either way, no matter where you are, Jesus is right here. And Jesus is ready. So I want us to close today in a benediction by a. It's a poem by.

Credited to Teresa of Avila. She's a mystic, wrote beautiful poetry. So if you would not mind, please stand. If, as you're able to.

Teresa writes, christ has now. Sorry, Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes with which he looks compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good.

Yours are the hands with which he blesses the world. Yours are the hands, yours are the feet. Yours are the eyes. You are his body. Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

May you be filled with God's presence and go in peace.