sermon excerpts: "Healthy Choices" (2 Kings 5: 1-14, Mark 1: 40-45)

Much of life is balancing expectations with reality. In the 2 Kings reading, Naaman expected great and marvelous, miraculous things from this mysterious healer, not the simple direction to go have a bath. He wanted a spectacle and dramatic display of power. All he had to do is show up at the river? He didn’t have to undertake some mythic quest and slay some dragons? That’s too easy, it’s so easy that it’s not even worth doing.

We look for the hard way of doing things. After all, I’ve said to myself many times that it must be the right thing to do if it’s the hard thing to do. Maybe it is as simple as listening to what we’re told. In the end it is a choice that we have to make.

We know of the placebo effect in drug testing, ... [proving] the mind is a powerful persuader of our reality. Wednesday night’s viewing of the movie “What the Bleep Do We Know?” overwhelmed our brains with this message. What we choose to believe and visualize can change the events and future of this world.

This theme of choice was heard in the gospel lesson. The leper presents a choice to Jesus: that he could heal him or not. Jesus chose to heal the leper. But the leper then chose to disobey the warning to keep quiet. So Jesus’ stay in town had to be cut short and he fled to the countryside where there would be more room for people to gather.

But isn’t that what we want? So many people gathered in church that there isn’t room? What about parking? What if someone sits in our seat? What if we grow so big that we don’t know who everyone is? ...

We really and truly only want growth on our terms: according to expectations, well-managed and tightly controlled. But when we live in the Spirit, as people of God, what we want is not what we get. Not even Jesus got what he wanted. He preferred a low-key ministry free from miracles and publicity so that the real message of changing your life, choosing to live for service in love could be the focus, not the razzledazzle of casting out demons, curing the incurable and bending the forces of nature to his will.

All because the leper couldn’t keep his mouth shut. We call it evangelizing, spreading the good news, telling our story. And maybe Jesus had no right to tell the leper that he couldn’t speak of the greatest moment of his life, but at the heart of these lessons is choice. Our own free will to decide: do we wash simply in the Jordan, or make things harder on ourselves thinking we know better? Do we keep silent and to ourselves, or do we dare to approach others and ask plainly for what we need?

Whether we choose wisely or not, is not the worry. We have the ability in our life to make a decision before it gets made for us. Let us never waste those opportunities. Such is the gift of our existence and the call of our faith.