Mark 1:40-45
February 13, 2000
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church of San Francisco.
Remote Controls
Have you been hearing the “dumb men” jokes going around lately? (I’m only telling these jokes because the women are on retreat today!)
What do men consider housecleaning? Lifting their feet so you can vacuum under them?
Or this: How do you get a man to do situps? Put the remote control between his toes.
When was your final trip to turn on the television? That is, actually walking to the TV set to turn the switch on by hand? It doesn’t count when the battery in your remote went dead and you had to switch to manual control.
These days we have a remote control for everything: TVs, VCRs, CD players, camcorders, cable boxes, stereos, Web TV, model airplanes…even gas fireplaces!
Just this past week in Indian Wells, a conference called, “Demo 2000” took place. The founder of TeleVend” stood in front of a soda machine with “No cash needed” emblazoned on its front. He whipped out his cell phone and dialed the number printed on the front of the machine. An automated voice welcomed him to the “TeleDrink” system. When he presses 1 for Coke, 2 for Diet Coke, 3 for Sprite or 4 for bottled water, his purchased is automatically billed to his cell phone. Just about anything from feeding parking meters to ordering pizza to pumping gas can be yours just by dialing the phone numbers with your cell phone.
With our remote controls and cellular phones, we can gain complete control, and we love it. But this craziness for controllers raises a troubling issue of whether we have come to expect remote control of our spirituality too.
Can we program God? Can we use prayer as a remote control device to get the “channels” and “programs” and now “sodas” we want? Have we grown too accustomed to the idea of being in control?
Leper Giving Up Control
Today’s gospel story is about a leper who approaches Jesus and begs on his knees for Jesus to heal him. And Jesus does.
But the man does not “ask” or “request” Jesus to heal him. On the contrary, the leper simply states, “If you choose, you can make me clean.”
This is the true nature of prayer—devotion to divine compassion and will, not to human ends. The man with leprosy, kneeling before Jesus relinquishes control by not asking for healing. He simply prays that if the will of God has compassion then he would like to be clean. This is a prayer of devotion to the compassion and will of God.
The disease called leprosy covers a variety of skin rashes, most of which were not life threatening, but they were seen as signs of being unclean. People with leprosy were isolated from clean people and were instructed to cry out, “Unclean, unclean” so to warn people not to come close and touch them, lest they too may become unclean. Such persons were not only isolated from family and friends but were excluded also from public worship.
The news of Jesus’ authority has reached many people by now, even to this leper who was living in isolation. The leper does not for a moment doubt that Jesus can purify him. He is not certain that Jesus will want to. So he comes to Jesus and does not ask to be healed. The reason for this uncertainty on the part of the leper is that leprosy is frequently viewed in the Old Testament as punishment for sin.
Kneeling before Jesus, the man didn’t lunged forward to touch Jesus. But rather,
Jesus moved with pity and compassion, stretches out his hand and touched him. Jesus did the touching. And he said to him, “I do choose. Be made clean!” The man’s skin rashes that separated him from his family and friends and prevented him from going to public worship were made cleaned. The man whose skin rashes broadcast to everyone that his leprosy was the result of sin was forgiven.
The point of this healing story is that the true nature of prayer is devotion to divine compassion and God’s will. Not our human need for “having it my way.” When we entrust our lives to God’s will, we give up the remote control of our own lives. We let Jesus say, “I do choose. Be made clean!”
Prayer—Giving Up Control
How many of you pray daily? Maybe over a meal? before an exam? during a stressful time of your life? Maybe the only time you really pray is when you come to Sunday morning worship.
Prayer is not going to God with your shopping list. Save that for Santa Claus.
Prayer is not a way to get what we want to happen, like the remote control that comes with the television set—when one program is boring you try another.
Prayer is not a final referral to the divine physician either. It’s not when a very ill cancer patient is told by her doctor that there was nothing more that he can do for her medically and now it’s time to pray. For this doctor, prayer was a kind of last resort…a “what the heck” effort when effective treatments had been exhausted. This is merely a desperate pushing of the religious remote control with the hope for an instant and pleasing result to happen.
Prayer is not about getting control; it is about giving up control.
Henri Nouwen talks about “the descending way of Jesus.” What he means is that God’s love and compassion for us becomes visible to us in Jesus. Jesus is the embodiment of God’s divine love in the world. God in Jesus descends into the world and chooses us because God is moved by our suffering and pain. In Jesus, God fully participates in our struggles.
During Jesus’ ministry, many suffering people came to him. There were the ignorant, the hungry, the blind, the lepers, the widows—all suffering from life’s trials. And out of God’s compassion, Jesus liberated these sick and tormented people from their pains. But central to these miraculous events is not that the people were cured, but that Jesus is moved by our suffering and pain. What is important here is not the cure of the sick, but the deep compassion that moved Jesus to these cures.
Face it, we are people who look for easy solutions, seek quick healing, manufacture spiritual experiences like they were commercial products, and search endlessly for remote controls over our lives and the events that shape them. When we pray, we expect results. Granted the leper was healed, but it is only because of the compassion and will of God in Jesus that happened.
So you ask, what about those who lay themselves before God and don’t get what they pray for? We know of people, friends and family members that when prayers are expressed, the results were not what they asked for. I know that this happened to me and it has happened to you.
There are certainly plenty of those examples in the Bible too.
Out of the depths, the psalmist cries to God.
Jepthah tells her father to honor the vow he made to the Lord and loses her life.
Jeremiah curses the day he was born.
Job argues with God because his life is ruined.
But who knows better than any what it means to kneel before God and hope that God’s compassion and will might lead another way? Later in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus and his disciples go to the place called Gethsemane, and there he prays. The scene goes like this:
“And going a little farther, Jesus threw himself on the ground and pray that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him.” (Mk. 14:35).
Jesus’ prayer rings strangely familiar in our ears. He said, in words closely parallel to those from the lips of the leper,
“’Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want’” (Mk. 14:36).
Although Jesus knew what lay before him, he gave up control in his prayer to his Father. Not out of resignation or resentment, but out of a confession of confidence in God, Jesus turned the remote control over to God. Jesus showed us how we may trust God by his profound confidence in doing God’s will.
For God so love the world that God through Jesus Christ shows that he knows our suffering and pain. God participated and is still participating in our struggles. In Jesus, God reveals his compassion and love for us.
Changing Ourselves
When we give up the remote control of our lives, we relinquish to God our desperate need to control our destiny. Prayer is less about asking for the things we are attached to: going beyond fears, having future hope, getting the things we want. When we pray, we don’t change the world, we change ourselves.
We change, and we leave in the hands of God how much else is going to change. This is a maddening message to hear when we’ve been punching the religious remote for years. We want so much: healing and wholeness, happiness and peace, strength and success. We pray for these things, and we ask ourselves, “There’s nothing wrong with any of these requests…is there, really?
No, there isn’t. But the truth is that we set ourselves up for disappointment when we expect God to change the world according to our vision. Maybe God has a different vision of healing, wholeness, happiness, peace, strength, and success than we do.
When we pray, saying to Jesus, “If you choose, you can make me clean.” we stop trying to control life and God and remember that we belong to God. Prayer is an opportunity to experience humility and to recognize grace, to see ourselves as human and to see God as omnipotent, omniscient and altogether good and gracious.
Sometimes people will say to me, “Your prayers didn’t work, but thanks,” as if I was praying for only one thing. A miracle. A cure. But in the hardest situations, all one can do is to ask for God’s mercy. Maybe it is for a friend to die at home and not in the hospital. Or let him go quickly, God, and with his loved ones present.
Maybe this relationship would be best to end so that everyone who’s involved might begin again. Or let me have the strength to handle this job change, Lord, believing that at first, it will be difficult for many.
When we learn to pray not asking for what you think you want but asking to be changed in ways you can’t imagine, we become more grateful, more able to see the good in what you have been given instead of always grieving for what might have been. People who are in the habit of praying know that when a prayer is answered, it is never in a way that you expect.
But prayer stumbles over our modern self-consciousness for control—the belief in our ability to set goals and attain them as quickly as possible. We need to drop the remote control and say, “Here I am, Lord. Control Me.”
Listen to a story about a monk.
An old monk prayed many years for a vision from God to strengthen his faith, but it never came. He had almost given up hope when, one day, a vision appeared. The old monk was overjoyed. But then, right in the middle of the vision, the monastery bell rang. The ringing of the bell meant it was time to feed the poor who gathered daily at the monastery gate. And it was the old monk’s turn to feed them. If he failed to show up with food, the poor people would leave quietly, thinking the monastery had nothing to give them that day.
The old monk was torn between his earthly duty and his heavenly vision. However, before the bell stopped tolling, the monk had made his decision. With a heavy heart, he turned his back to the vision and went off to feed the poor. Nearly an hour later, the old monk returned to his room. When he opened the door, he could hardly believe his eyes. There in the room was the vision, waiting for him. As the monk dropped to his knees in thanksgiving, the vision said to him, “My son, had you not gone off to feed the poor, I would no have stayed.”
When the old monk gave up his life long prayer to have a vision and to trusted God’s purpose for his life to feed the poor is when God’s presence was revealed. This is the true nature of prayer—our devotion to God’s compassion and will and not ours.
Praying Today
Giving up the remote control is the beginning of learning how to pray in the presence of God’s compassion and will and not ours.
Giving up the remote control is to depend more fully on God, and to connect our lives to this almighty One who is the source of life.
Giving up the remote control is to come to see illness not as a punishment for sin, but as a chance to rely even more fully on God, and to see how suffering can serve as a path to new life.
Giving up the remote control is to live with integrity, actively loving both Lord and neighbor, and to lean ever more heavily on the One who is always at work to bring good out of evil.
When we pray, “Here I am Lord, control me,” we become creatures who are finally open to God’s divine love and purpose, and able to see God’s hand at work in all of life. God is the ultimate Control in our lives.
And actually, this isn’t remote control at all! God is not far away, at a distance, in a remote place. God is here. God is close by ready to have a close relationship with each one of us. It is Jesus Christ, the One who controls all creation, with endless love and grace.
Let us pray.