If You Choose
By Ruthie Waugh
When
Bruce suggested that I preach this Sunday, I looked up the assigned scriptures
in the calendar we use. Let me read it
again for you. …Mark
The first time I read these verses I thought ‘Oh good, I like those happy ending healing stories. Then ‘How does this speak to us today’? The part of the scripture that was highlighted in the lectionary was the leper’s words to Jesus “If you choose”.
As part of my internship I am visiting people in hospitals and nursing facilities, the elderly and the ill. I am seeing people in need of physical healing on a regular basis. We have prayed for them as a congregation and they have been on the prayer chain. We have asked Jesus for healing and the easing of their pain. There have been answers to our prayers but none of these people has experienced instantaneous healing like this leper. Why not? In the scripture reading the leper said, “If you choose, you can make me clean”. Is it Jesus’ choice that we don’t experience immediate healing like the leper? I don’t think so! If we challenge Jesus to heal us as the leper did, why don’t we have the same experience that he had???? What does this scripture mean?
I took the time to look at these verses in more detail, starting with a leper. We don’t encounter lepers today, but we understand that they were for the most part social outcasts, diseased, unclean persons, devalued, and unwanted. This leper has the audacity to challenge Jesus first of all by approaching him and then by saying, “If you choose, you can make me clean”. The leper is in the physical presence of Jesus, the Son of God, the incarnation of the divine. He dares Jesus to make him clean, to be healed physically and restored to social acceptability. In the face of this challenge, Jesus is filled with compassion and chooses to make the leper clean. Jesus physically reaches out his hand and touches the leper. Jesus touches the untouchable and says, “I so choose, be clean”. Then Jesus sternly tells him not to tell anyone, but go show himself to the priests, and offer what Moses commanded. The man did the opposite of what Jesus asked and spread the news of his healing, making it necessary for Jesus to stay away from towns where he would be overwhelmed by people wanting to be healed. It implies that Jesus would not choose to turn away those who came to him for healing.
How do we translate this passage into something that we can use today? Especially the part “If you choose”. What things are the same as in Jesus’ time and what things are different in our modern day? The biggest difference that I see between then and now is the physical presence of Jesus. Many have experienced the spiritual presence of the divine, but Jesus hasn’t been around physically for a long time. Then it dawned on me that we, as Christians, are to continue to do the work that Jesus started. As disciples we are representatives of Jesus. Maybe this passage is to be understood as an example of how we, the followers of Jesus, are to act.
Is it reasonable to put ourselves in Jesus’ place? Is that presumptuous? If we understand God as our parent and Jesus as our brother we could support this premise, but we have even more specific biblical support. In John 12: 14 we read Jesus’ words, “Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the father”. In the 5th chapter of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians we are told, “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children…”.
If Jesus was setting an example for us, what was the lesson? The leper came to Jesus; Jesus did not seek him out. The leper demanded attention, begging on his knees. The leper challenged Jesus to make a choice and Jesus was moved with compassion. His choice was to use his power and I think the choice was his power. Where are the parallels in our lives? We don’t encounter lepers, but maybe the leper represents the unclean, the unacceptable, ‘that which is not wanted’ in our lives. We certainly have many instances in our lives where we are challenged by ‘that which is not wanted’. It comes to us; we don’t have to go looking for it. We experience it in many different areas in our lives: major issues about health or lack of it, relationships, finances, and little everyday annoyances like shoveling more snow. How do we use compassion and the divine within us to make choices to ‘make clean’ or at least not make things messier? We have a wonderful example in our own community. I was privileged to visit with Jessie Hitt for a few weeks before she died. Jessie had a lung disease that severely limited her activity, but she did not use that as cause to complain. She chose to live fully until she died, ever supporting those around her. I saw her the day before she moved to the non-physical realm. A friend was with her helping her make little booklets to give to loved ones. Jessie would speak until she had no breath, rest a moment and talk some more. When a woman came in to fill out the menu slip, Jessie explained that a meal would be needed for her friend also. When the woman said that guests were not served in the room, Jessie very, very gently told her that it had been arranged in a way that brooked no argument. She had a strength and power that were not of the body. Jessie chose to live fully, to bless everyone who came in contact with her, and anticipate a reunion with her husband when death finally came. She was awesome! Her disease was not under her control, but her attitude was. Jessie chose JOY.
Sometimes we feel like we have no choice. We feel stuck. The world and the situations in our lives dictate our every action. We feel like victims of the circumstances of our lives. I think Jesus is telling us that there is always a compassionate choice. The choice may not be a choice of action, but a choice of attitude, like Jessie Hitt.
A friend sent me an e-mail a few weeks ago with the following story: (The narrator of the story is a nursing home aide.)
She is 92 years old, petite, well
poised, and proud. She is fully dressed
each morning by
Today she has moved to a nursing home. Her husband of 70 years recently passed away, making this move necessary.
After many hours of waiting patiently in the lobby of the nursing home, where I am employed, she smiled sweetly when told her room was ready. As she maneuvered her walker to the elevator, I provided a visual description of her tiny room, including the eyelet curtains that had been hung on her window.
“I love it,” she stated with the enthusiasm of an eight-year-old having just been presented with a new puppy.
“Mrs. Jones, you haven’t seen the room…just wait,” I said.
Then she spoke these words that I will never forget;
“That does not have anything to do with it,” she gently replied. “Happiness is something you decide on ahead of time. Whether I like my room or not, does not depend on how the furniture is arranged. It is how I arrange my mind. I have already decided to love it. It is a decision I make every morning when I wake up. I have a choice. I can spend the day in bed recounting the difficulty I have with the parts of my body that no longer work, or I can get out of bed and be thankful for the ones that do work. Each day is a gift, and as long as my eyes open, I will focus on the new day and all of the happy memories I have stored away…just for this time in my life.”
Can we take ‘that which is not wanted’ in our lives and treat it with compassion? Is being happy and joyful as easy as making a choice? I have tried consistently making the choice for joy and it isn’t so easy. Compassion is the response of love, so anytime I respond to ‘that which is not wanted’ with any negative emotion, I’m not responding with love. If our emotions are primarily a product of our thought patterns, than we would have to consciously choose our thoughts if we are to be consistently compassionate. That is a challenge--to live so much in the present that we can consciously choose what we are thinking.
I had to try it out. If there is no practical application in my life, what good is it? I have been working on this for a few weeks. I reasoned that it would be easier to start with something little ‘that was not wanted’. All I had to do was notice when I was annoyed-- my typical response to the little things not wanted in my life. The first noticeable annoyance occurred that evening when I came home with several bags of groceries and only after the three trips to the car to unload them did anyone show up to help. I considered my options as my annoyance mounted. I could ask for someone to Help Now in a loud voice, but I did not want to be a nag. I could wait, but I wanted the job done soon so I could take off my coat and relax. I could do it myself and put it into a positive light. I had two ideas for that. I could appreciate that I am blessed with the financial means to buy several bags of groceries at the same time or I could appreciate getting the exercise because staying in shape is important to me. Maybe I’m just perverse, but none of those things helped and the same thing happened the next week. I decided I had to dig deeper. What really was underneath this annoyance? It wasn’t hard to find-- it seems to be behind a lot of my unhappiness. I felt like they didn’t love me enough to stop their activities to help me because I’m not lovable enough. I was looking for my feelings of worth to be validated by the behavior of those around me instead of my relationship with God. I do know better than that, and this week when I was really ready to bring the groceries in without getting annoyed, I got help right away.
Is a compassionate response to ‘that which is not wanted’ a question of faith? How much faith do we have in God’s power and love for us? Does God’s perfect love cast out our fear, even our fear of not being good enough? Do we believe that God has everything under control? I seem to come to you with more questions than answers, but in order for us to grow in our faith we each have to answer these questions for ourselves.
I would like to close with another story. This story challenged me to be more compassionate with ‘that which was not wanted within myself’. This man’s experience validated the worth and value of our existence regardless of our actions. From his other worldly perception, he understood his value enough to choose joy in what we would look at as a hopeless situation. It comes from a book of near-death experiences called The Case for Heaven by Mally Cox-Chapman.
“
Warren Doe is a potter and a sculptor who decided to commit suicide in
his twenties because of confusion about sexual identity and problems resulting
from a tour of duty in
Born and raised a Baptist, Warren remembers thinking, “’Oh my gosh, the Catholics are right.’ Suddenly I was there. I was in this grayish area, with a light above me. When I realized where I was, I saw the earth and realized that what I had conceived as God—all knowing and omnipotent—that’s what I was. Yet I also realized as part of that knowledge that I was part of the Light, part of God in general, like pieces of sand on the beach. I was one piece of sand that was God, but God itself consisted of the whole beach. I definitely remember thinking that everything made sense. I had all knowledge. I understood why a million people get killed in an earthquake. I understood the total balance of the world, and why it operated the way it did. All my answers were there.”
One might suppose that a realization of such magnitude would be exhilarating, but there was a hitch. “I didn’t know where I was. A person spoke to me, telepathically. I didn’t see the person, and then the person took shape. And this person, the only way I can describe, it to you, was that this person was a cross between an angel and an attorney. This person basically said, ‘I’m going to represent you,’ just as in a courtroom here on earth. I understood that my case was going to be considered.
“I cannot tell you that I reviewed my whole life. It seems to me that I was asked to contemplate whether I wanted to go back to earth. And because of my knowledge that existence on earth is one of the most important experiences you can possibly have, I did want to. The problem was, I didn’t know what condition I was in down there. At one point my reasoning was, it doesn’t matter what condition I’m in. Because even if I were in a coma, the ability to listen to the nurses coming into the room, making a few jokes, the experience of being there, is reward enough for existence.
“I suddenly had this awareness that to be, even in a vegetative state, is extremely valuable. To breathe. To feel the sensation of breathing. So my answer was right away, ‘I want to go back.’”
The
angel-attorney asked
This decision to go back to his body, even at the risk that it might be a ‘mangled mess,’ was made by the same young man who had methodically planned to have the car he was driving explode in flames with him in it.
Can we choose to respond to our challenges with compassion? Can we experience the love of God enough to let go of our fear? Each of us has to make that choice. Amen