The Rev. Patricia Gillespie
2 Kings 5:1-15b
Psalm 42
1 Corinthians 9:24-27
Mark 1:40-45
Carolyn is thirty-seven years old and she's dying. She knows it. I know it. Her children Kevin and Alicia, even at ages 14 and 6, know it, too. You can see it in their eyes. Mom is getting ready to go somewhere else.
Bob, her husband, doesn't believe it. Everyday he asks God to take away the disease that is destroying her body. He prays with his whole heart, and many others pray with him. Prayer meetings, prayer chains, whole congregations of people.
He asks the priest for laying on of hands for healing. I talk with them about what healing might mean, about bringing Carolyn, and us, to the place where God wants us to be ... and that might mean something other than having things just like they were two years ago, before she got sick. I try to make a distinction between healing and curing.
My explanation of healing feels like a cop out. It sounds hollow and cheap. We all know what kind of healing we want for Carolyn we do want it to be like two years ago, when Carolyn was the nurse beside the hospital bed instead the patient who could no longer get herself out of it.
Bob reminds me that "with God anything is possible." And he adds, "we all saw what happened when we prayed over that boy last year he was brain dead, the doctors had given up, and now he's a normal kid back in school."
The look of fear and hope in his face is mixed with an almost accusatory glare. I, his priest, haven't prayed hard enough. He doesn't say so, but I hear the words of today's gospel: "If you choose, you can make her well."
But I am not Jesus. I am not Elisha. I'm not even the King of Israel, but I am as frightened as the King of Israel was when Naaman showed up to purchase healing for his leprosy.
I try to lean on Bob's strong faith, where mine is weak. We have laying on of hands for healing, we anoint Carolyn with healing oils, and we all pray with all our hearts. Kevin's heart is breaking. Alicia's heart is in her eyes. And my eyes are full of tears.
I have seen miracles of healing happen. This was not to be one of them. Carolyn died a week later.
"My tears have been my food day and night,The psalmist knows this story well. Where was God when we prayed? Did we not pray hard enough? Like the leper, we fell to our knees and said, "God, if you choose, you can make her well." Did God not listen? Where now is our God? Why does God choose that some will live and some will die? It seems so arbitrary. Why bother to pray at all?
while all day long they say to me,
Where now is your God?'
I pour out my soul when I think these things....
My soul is heavy within me."
We ask Jesus again, as his friends have always done, "Teach us to pray" Jesus then teaches us, again and again, his prayer, the Lord's prayer. When things don't go as we would like, we latch on to that one line, "Thy will be done."
I hate that. I find no comfort in it. I hate it because we try to make God's will fit our understanding. Our hearts are broken and someone says, "It's God's will." Is it God's will that Carolyn should die, leaving Bob to raise their children alone? When we all stood by Carolyn's hospital bed praying with our whole heart "God, if you choose, you can make her well!" did God then choose death for her? Is it God's will, God's choice, that she should die?
God ALWAYS chooses life. The Father chose life for Jesus, Although the cross is not the choice Jesus himself would have made. God chose life for Carolyn. Although it's not the choice we would have made for her life.
So, was our prayer for Carolyn unanswered because we didn't get the miracle we hoped for? God always answers. But it's not always the answer we want. And often we don't hear the answer at all.
But the answer is there. Sometimes the answer is a miracle, not a response just to make us happy or feel like our prayers "worked" but a miracle, like the ones in today's readings: A miracle that is a prophetic sign pointing to God Other times the answer is not the miracle we hoped for but another kind of prophetic sign: A reminder that we are not God. That God's ways are not our ways.
God answers our prayer and waits for us to keep the conversation going for God's "prayer" for us to be answered by a prayer of our own. Listen again to how Jesus teaches us to pray.
The Lord's Prayer begins with praise. "Holy is your name." And, as we have learned to pray it, it ends with praise, "Yours is the glory." All the hard stuff in the middle is wrapped in praise. That's a model of how our life might be ... our prayer life and our daily life together. All the hard stuff in the middle is wrapped in praise. The Lord's Prayer says to us: "Always and everywhere, praise God."
Yet Jesus tells the cleansed leper and us to tell no one about the answers to our prayers. Perhaps because he knows we do not really understand that God's ways are not our ways. Perhaps because Jesus knows that not all the lepers in the world would be made clean, at least not in our time.
Jesus says only, "Go, show the priest and make your offering." But the leper makes another kind of offering an offering of praise and thanksgiving. That is the human response that is made again and again in the psalms praise and thanks even when God's response is not a miracle, but a reminder that we are not God and that God's ways are not our ways.
The psalmist knows that irrational mystery and says "Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul? and why are you so disquieted within me? Put your trust in God, for I will yet give thanks to him, who is the help of my countenance, and my God."
The psalmists prayer is quite simply: "We are not God. We do not understand. Our hearts are broken. Praise God."
Little Alicia knew that too. A well meaning friend, at Alicia's mother's graveside, trying to comfort the child, said to her "Your mother is happy now. She is with God. God will take care of you too." Alicia's response was to shout so all could hear, "It's not fair. I want her back!"
The well meaning priest went to her, intending to pick up the child, while inside desperately praying that the Spirit would send some words of prayer for Alicia and for the gathered crowd. As the priest holds the child up to see the crowd, before I can offer any prayer, Alicia says, "Mommy's at a party and God's gonna be our baby sitter. It's okay for us to have a party, too."
It isn't fair. Yet, even when we don't see it, God always chooses to send us life So here is Alicia's psalm for the broken hearted and the lepers of today:
"We are not God. But we will yet praise God.
Our hearts are broken. So let's have a party."