February 15, 2009 Message

1 Corinthians 9:24-27; Mark 1:40-45
“If You…”

A man goes into a drugstore and asks the pharmacist if he can give him something for the hiccups.
The pharmacist promptly reaches out and slaps the man’s face.
“What did you do that for?!” the man exclaims.
“Well, you don’t have the hiccups anymore, do you?” answers the pharmacist.
“No,” the man says, “but my wife out in the car still does!”

Often there can be more to a question than what we might hear, as the pharmacist in this story discovered.

Today’s lesson centers on a question and its implication for all of us. Jesus understood fully what the leper was asking when he said, “If you choose, make me clean.” Questions require our making choices and sometimes those choices can be limited.

The flight attendant of an airline that once served meals, asked a passenger if he would like a small snack.
"What are my choices?" he asked.
"Yes or No," she replied.

With some questions there is simply a choice - either yes or no, with no in-betweens. Questions starting with “If you…” are those kinds of questions. The options are limited. It’s either one, or the other.

In the gospel lesson today, Jesus gets that kind of question and has to make a choice. When the leper comes to him, interrupting what he is doing, and says, “If you…” Jesus, who had come to preach to the people rather than heal, has only two options. He can ignore the leper, and concentrate on preaching his message of God's love in the towns and cities – or he can touch the leper, make himself unclean by the law, and because of his compassion, isolate himself from everyone who might hear his message. Jesus had a yes or no choice to make.

I have heard "parenting" defined as "a parable of interruption." Those who are parents would no doubt agree. That is the kind of interruption Jesus experienced - right in the middle of doing something important - but, as parents know, it could not be ignored.

Jesus chooses to touches the leper, and in doing so joins him in his place of exclusion and uncleanness. He heals the leper...and then, sending him to have his healing confirmed by the priest, gives him back his community.

Jesus responds to this “If you…,” question by saying, “I do choose. Be made clean!” His act reveals the true nature of God. When we look at scripture, we see Jesus always chooses to help people and is always working for good in their lives — he never chooses the opposite.

Jesus IS willing to heal the least wanted. And in doing so, Jesus 1) makes himself accessible to even the most excluded of society, 2) crosses a ritual barrier, 3) rises over the law to offer compassion and over judgment to offer love, and 4) cleanses the man.

Not only does he cleanse the leper, he is delighted to cleanse him [NT2309 thelo] It is God's pleasure to look for us when we are lost and to cleanse us. “God’s will” and “God is willing” are interchangeable terms. It is God's joy to show us his will.

In turn, if we want to be in God's will then we will seek to make God happy. If we want to delight God we must be willing to cleanse others. However, we are not as dependable as Jesus, are we? Ours is not always the right choice, is it?

Robert Frost begins his poem The Road Not Taken with these words: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.” He cautions the choices made in the dense woods of life do matter, with one path leading to another. Frost then concludes his poem by writing:

I shall be telling this with a sigh,
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I...
I took the one less traveled by,
And that made all the difference.

This poem makes me think about the choices I’ve made and the paths to which they’ve led. Full of metaphor and simile, Frost’s words create rich images in the mind. That’s what poetry does. It tells us about life and death and who we are as people.

The apostle Paul knew all about metaphor. He wrote: Love is a rose. Man is a snake. God is a rock. Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. You are the body of Christ, children of the light. And in today’s scripture, he refers to faithful Christians as athletes.

Robert Frost has his road; Paul has his race. Our lives are shaped each day by the choices we make. What is the choice we are being asked to make today, as a church, or as an individual? Down which road should we go? Is our eye upon the goal, as Paul has encouraged, or have we lost our focus by the distractions of the world?

When faced with the question, “If you choose… to love the Lord our God, and our neighbors as ourselves” (Matthew 22:34-40), then what? Will we instead turn our backs on God and look down on our neighbors; will we be unfaithful or unloving?

Or, “If you choose… follow the heavenly call of God in Jesus Christ” (Philippians 3:14) to live a moral life at home, in school, on the job and in business dealings, or in our communities, then what? Will we instead do what we please?

Or, “If you choose… to live in the Spirit” (Galatians 5:16), as God wills, then what? Do we instead indulge ourselves in all the things our society says will make us feel good?

And, “If you choose… to live out the great Commission to make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:19-20), then what? Do we keep what we have learned about Jesus to ourselves? Or do we share by witnessing to others.

Sarayu (the Holy Spirit), in the book The Shack by Wm. Paul Young, talking to Mackenzie about mankind in general, says: "When you chose independence over relationship, you became a danger to each other. Others became objects to be manipulated or managed for your own happiness. Authority, as you usually think of it, is merely an excuse the strong use to make others conform to what they want."

When asked, “If you choose…” Jesus didn’t do what the standards of “organized religion” of his day would dictate or what the Scribes and Pharasees would approve of, but instead what is God’s very nature to do – which raises some interesting questions. Which of our church "rules" might Jesus break if he were walking around today? And what "rules" might we need to break to get closer to Jesus? Who are like lepers in our community – the people we wouldn’t want to touch? And what is our church's relationship to them? Would Jesus touch them? Why haven’t we?

Today, the question is directed to us. “If you…?” What will we choose?

Let us be in prayer…