Healing And Choice

"Healing & Choice"

Mark 1:40-45
February 15, 2008

A leper came to him begging him, and kneeling he said to him, “If you choose, you can
make me clean.” Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and
said to him, “I do choose. Be made clean!” Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was
made clean. After sternly warning him he sent him away at once, saying to him, “See
that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your
cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.” But he went out and
began to proclaim it freely, and to spread the word, so that Jesus could no longer go
into a town openly, but stayed out in the country; and people came to him from every
quarter.

I don’t know about you, but I’m the kind of person that every once and while wonders
what my life might have been if I had chosen to go another road, or made a different
decision other than the ones that led me to be here, in front of you.   What would my
life had been if I gone through with attending Oklahoma Baptist University rather than
the University of Alabama? How would my career been different if I had accepted a
pastoral position in Fort Collins, Colorado, rather than Spokane, Washington, for my
first call, both of which offered me jobs within a week of each other over 10 years ago?
What about if I had continued in that relationship or ended that one earlier—how would
it have all turned out, in the end? Certainly, I’m glad and very pleased with my life as it
is, but I’m still curious about what might have been, about where a different choice
might have taken me. I wonder if you have done the same—what if I had married this
person and not this person, or had three kids instead of one, or taken that job out of
state rather than stay close to home? Again, wondering about where different choices
might have taken us isn’t discounting the choice we did make, or the lives we live now—
I think it as more of a mental game of “what if…” similar to that book written a few years
ago that wondered what the world would have been like if the Nazis had won World War
II.

But I do think that when we trace out the possibilities of different choices we could have
made, it reminds us of how important our actual choices really are in this life—that one
decision, seemingly insignificant at the moment, can change our lives forever. Taking
one road rather than the other, so to speak, as Robert Frost writes, can make all the
difference in the world, though it may feel like one is simply taking a short-cut, or taking
the road these seems less bumpy. Choices matter, they really do, and they have on
obvious effect on our past, present and future. The hardest thing in this life, I think, is
to actually pay attention to how important each and every decision really is, in real time,
in our lived lives, in that moment when a decision comes before us. I don’t mean to
imply that we need to get worked up about it, so much so that it freezes in our tracks
with anxiety about each and every choice—obviously, that would be a bad choice. We
shouldn’t get worked up about choosing between candy bars, deciding between
Snickers Bar, or a Baby Ruth, or a million of other candies out there. But in the midst
making those decisions, the big ones, as well as a million small ones we make
everyday, we might want to pay attention to the simple importance of choices in our
lives.

A couple of years ago I was at a conference at the Crystal Cathedral in Southern
California, the church of Robert Schuller, Mr. Positive Thinking, and I ran across the
work of Dr. William Glasser, who is a professor of psychiatry that came up with a
interesting psychological idea that he called “Choice Theory.” Amongst many things,
Dr. Glasser believes that human behavior is composed of four main ingredients: acting,
thinking, feeling, and physiology, and the first two of those four pieces of behavior—
acting and thinking—are ones that we have considerable control over, while feeling and
physiology are far less controllable by us. What he argues is that if we exercise more
control over our acting and thinking, we can influence our feelings and even our
physiology, our actual internal chemical reactions. Now, you can see why Dr. Schuller
was such a fan of Dr. Glasser’s theory, because for Schuller, and his positive
Christiainity, attitude is everything, and Glasser’s choice theory seemed to confirm that
idea. Still, whatever you think of Schuller and the Crystal Cathedral—I actually thought
the Cathedral itself seemed smaller in person than it does on television—I do think
there is something to this idea that how we manage our behavior, and direct our
thinking does affect how we feel, and how our bodies react to those feelings—making
positive choices with our bodies, and with our minds does shape those parts of our
lives that we can’t control all that easily, our feelings, and our physiology. No, it’s not
total, this idea, it’s not all about attitude, contrary to what Schuller and people like
Norman Vincent Peale argue, but making positive choices, choosing a positive attitude,
being a positive person, it has a lot more to do with our health, emotionally, spiritually,
and physically than a lot of us really think or are willing to admit—sometimes we would
rather feel or think that we have no control over this or that part of our lives, when, in
fact, we might have more influence than we had imagined.

This whole idea about the importance of choice is why this story from Mark’s Gospel
fascinates me so, this third miracle found in only the first chapter of Mark’s telling of the
Jesus story. Jesus has already healed a man with an unclean spirit, and Peter’s
mother, as well as other people throughout Galilee, and now a leper comes before him,
begging him, pleading with him, kneeling before him, speaking to Jesus, this man with a
newly minted reputation for healing the sick, the lame, the diseased. A leper kneels
before him, and in the ancient world the leper is not someone simply with a skin
disease—he or she is a figure on the outskirts of the town, the impure wander, a
separated species, forever distanced from her family, her friends, her community. She
is not simply a person with a communicable disease who must be separated from the
community for its protection—Jewish law labeled her as impure, tainted by something
more than a flesh-eating disease—it was a spiritual problem as well as a physical
problem. Whole chapters of the Law of Israel was devoted to the issue of how a leper
could enter back into the world of community (Leviticus 13-14) after being on the
edges, literally and figuratively, of the cities and towns they had once lived in, the
places where their families still lived, families they could not touch, perhaps forever.

Still, we shouldn’t be too judgmental of how ancient cultures handled what they did not
understand, mostly because we probably don’t handle it much better. Pastor O’Ryan,
the Methodist pastor next door, shared an experience he had with us group of pastors
that meet regularly for sermon preparation and Bible study, an experience he had at
his dermatologists office. As he waiting to see the doctor, he noticed many of the other
patients in the room, many with skin diseases one didn’t think existed in this day and
age, mostly because we rarely actually see people in public with these ailments. Even
in this day and age, I am sure that many of these patients limit their time in public
places because of the visceral reaction many of us have to disfiguring skin diseases—it
still makes us uncomfortable, even now, though obviously the ones who hurt the most
are those don’t feel comfortable being out in the community, the ones with the
diseases. There is a hidden community out there, who suffer because we are
uncomfortable with their suffering, with their disease, and many have chosen to remain
on the outskirts of the community, if not literally, certainly figuratively. We may not
officially ostracize them through religious and social laws, but we unmask our own
discomfort with these kinds of diseases by the way we react to them, and it does shed
light on what that leper was experiencing as he approached Jesus in our Scripture
today.

What happens next is pretty interesting, and a little mysterious as well. We have the
text saying Jesus was moved with pity by this leper—and yet, the word pity is missing in
other texts—in other manuscripts of this Gospel, just as old, just as important, it is said
that Jesus was moved with anger, not pity, but anger. Some translations uses that
word rather than pity, and if one does make that translation choice, it really does
change the character of the moment, doesn’t it? Jesus is angry-but at who is he
angry? It’s not at the man begging for healing, obviously—no, I think the anger is
directed at a social and religious system that seems to have no mercy, no compassion,
even as it attempts to keep the community safe. Moved by anger or pity—I think the
former rather than the latter, as do most scholars—Jesus makes a choice, and he
reaches to touch this man—sit with that for a second—he reaches out and touches
someone he is not supposed to touch, a man who has probably not felt human touch in
years, and the Greek word here seems to imply that Jesus even caresses this man—he
makes the choice to touch him and he says, “I do choose. Be made clean!” and in
doing so, he heals him, he makes him clean, so says the writer of Mark.

And the irony is that in that moment, the leper is cured, and yet the one who has cured
him has now become unclean himself, they have switched places, Jesus and this man.
A choice made by Jesus that changed everything, in many ways, and he rewrites the
book on who is pure and impure, tainted and not tainted—and he enlarges the beloved
community he is gathering around him by healing and touching and breaking down the
barriers that divide us. Another irony, of course, is that Jesus tells the man to go back
to the priests and the powers that be so that he can be certified and confirmed as
clean, ready to go back into the community, and yet, what does this former leper do?
He disobeys Jesus, and instead he goes about telling the good news of his healing, a
healing that is more profound, more real than anything that could be confirmed by the
same system that had excluded him for so long, making him, quite literally, a leper, as
we often say in our common parlance. I wonder if Jesus even knew what he had done
in that moment, of how he had radicalized his message beyond what even could have
ever imagined. This man saddled with a disease and a label becomes the first
evangelist, the first Christian missionary who tells of good news, good news that has
made him truly whole.

Jesus’ choice in that moment changes everything, his choice to touch this man, to heal
this man, to take this man’s ritual and social impurity upon himself, his choice to
become unclean in order to make another man clean, it changes everything. A
moment in time, a moment when Jesus says, I do choose, I do choose, and we are all
changed by that choice, even thousands of years later. The leper had asked Jesus, “If
you choose, you can make me clean,” and Jesus did choose, and it changed two lives
at the moment, forever.   And I think we can make choices in our own lives that change
not only our lives, but the lives of those we love and whom we wish to make whole. But,
of course, the healing begins with a choice, the choice to change our lives for the
better, the choice to focus on our own actions, our own behavior, our own thinking that
has got us stuck in a rut. I mean, think about this—up until this moment, as far as we
know, Jesus has been a good observant, law-abiding man of his religious tradition—
and yet, he makes a choice that changes everything, that challenges what it means to
be clean and unclean, and he chooses to touch what he should have never touched.
His behavior, his actions in that moment with that leper begin a chain of events that
lead him into reconsidering the boundaries that kept people apart from each other—the
leper in this story becomes the model for what Jesus will eventually become—the rebel
who challenges the forces that oppress him. Jesus changed his behavior, he touched
that leper, and then slowly the thinking caught up with the behavior, because soon
enough he would no longer be telling people to seek out the approval and affirmation
of priests and religious authorities—if anything, he would soon be exemplifying a
behavior that goaded on their anger and fury at his refusal to play their games.

You see, what Jesus knew or came to know, is that there is difference between being
cured and being healed—they are not the same. The man was cured of leprosy, many
of us get cured of our diseases, many of our problems go away, but most of us are still
in need of healing, of one kind or another. A cure is the absence of a disease that was
afflicting us, but healing, real healing, is the presence of wholeness, completeness—
spiritual and emotional wholeness. We can be cured, and not receive healing—think
about that other story when Jesus cured those 10 lepers, but only one came back, the
one who wanted more than a life without disease, the one who wanted more than a
cure, the one who wanted to be healed. The leper in our story and the one of leper out
of 10 in that other story—they were healed because they made the choice to be
healed, to seek wholeness, to seek fullness rather than absence, to seek more rather
than less. Christ can cure our diseases, and sometimes nature simply does what
nature does, which is to repair our bodies, cure our diseases, but I do think that we
have to be ones to choose our own healing—we are the ones who, with Christ, have to
say, “I do choose, I do, I want to be made whole, I don’t simply want to be without that
thing that seems hold me back, I want to be full of life, and love, and God, and so, I
choose this moment to begin my healing.” And then all the other moments that follow,
all the other choices that follow, little ones and big ones, they become choices that
honor ourselves, our bodies, our lives, our spirits, our children, our relationships, every
choice flows out of that moment when we choose healing.

We can make choices in our lives that begin the lifelong process of spiritual and
emotional, and yes, even sometimes physical healing. Sure, sometimes we’re going to
make some bad choices, but life isn’t about one bad choice—life is about a lifetime of
choices, some bad, but hopefully most of them good. What matters is that moment
when we decide we don’t want to be sick anymore, and what we mean by that is
something more than simply wanting to be free of the physical or emotional struggles
we’re wresting with—what we’re really saying is that we want to be whole. In the next
few minutes, I’m asking that we wash this place in silence, but I want us to think and
pray about those things in our lives for which we need healing, real, actual healing—not
only of body, some of which we certainly need, but more importantly, of spirit, of mind.
Whatever it is, whatever it is that keeps up at night, or nips at our minds in our most
vulnerable moments, I’m asking us to pray for our own healing and the healing of
everyone in this room. And then, in the ancient tradition of the church, I invite you to
come forward and receive an anointing of oil, a sign, a symbol, that God has chosen
us, to be present with you and me and to join with us in our own journeys towards
healing.