CHOOSE LIFE John M. Buchanan
John §:2-9 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
March 18, 1984 Columbus, Chio

Arthur Miller's Pulitzer-winning play, Death of a Salesman, written in 1949,
is opening yet another time on Broadway. It is about a man who wants more
for his family than he is able to provide. When it becomes clear that his dreams
will remain dreama, his self respect, his sense of meaning, the vitality of his
life begins a long and tragic process of decline. The play is powerful because
of Miller's great genius - but also, I think, because of the brooding theme which
runs throughout: namely, the futility of waiting for a future which is not going
to come. Early in the play Willie's grown sons are talking about their life and
their hopes for the future. One of them says:

"All I can do now is wait for the merchandise manager to die. And
suppose I get to be merchandise manager...1 don't know what I'm work~
ing for. Sometimes I sit in my apartment all alone. And I think of
the rent I'm paying, and it's crazy. But then it's what I always wanted.
uy own apartment, and car, plenty of women. And still...I'm lonely."
p. 19)

There is something universal about that experience. We invest an enormous
amount of our lives, our energy, skill, passion, time - in the future, And sometimes
it seems like our investment in the future is so heavy we have nothing left for
living in the present. Sometimes it seems that the present is dull, unimaginative,
a sequential waiting for something to happen, for the future to get here.

Once there was a man who had invested 38 years in the task of waiting.
We encounter him lying on a mat, beside a large pool in Jerusalem, in 30 A.D.
The pool of Bethesda, meaning "house of healing," has been excavated. t's a
large double pool with porches on four sides and one on a divider in the middle.
The poal was fed by an intermittent spring. When the spring flowed, the water
on the surface of the pool splashed and danced and turned a reddish color. There
was always mystery surrounding that phenomenon. It was held widely that a
local spirit, or an angel of the Lord disturbed the waters and that the first person
into the water during the disturbance would be healed.

And so, around the perimeters of the pool, under the porches, were the
crippled, the sick, the aged, watching, waiting. Some surely had a friend or rela-
tive waiting with them, ready to assist as soon as the water started to churn.
And some of them were alone, watching intently, anxiously hoping to scramble
to the side as soon as it happened. And then there were some - and I have the
sense that this may have been the majority - who were alone and who were watch-
ing less intently. These were the ones whe had concluded that the future wasn't
going to come, that they weren't going to make it to the pool first - not ever.
They would continue going through the motions, to be sure. They would remain
there, lying on their mats, but they were resigned to the statue quo. Catholic
‘scholar Raymond Brown observes that if this man were not so tragic he'd be
amusing, "with his unimaginative approach to the curative matters...his crotchety
grumbling about the 'whippersnappers' who outrace him.” (The Gospel of John,
vol, I, p. 209)

-2-

In time the adjustments had been made, the self-justifications carefully
. worded and rehearsed: "There is no one to help me, someone always pushes me
out of the way and steps in front of me..." A whole new dynamic had emerged:
a community of misery, devoted to enabling its participants to continue the rituals
of life waiting for the future to happen. That community was important for
the man; it allowed him to continue to engage in the charade. By common consent
it allowed everyone to choose the status quo. There was something to be said,
after all for life around the pool. It was not an unpleasant place to be. Passersby
often left money for food. The man had his cronies with whom to pass the time
of day, talk about yesterday's game, play a little pinochle. He had his bed to
lie on.

The author of the fourth Gospel, who has arranged his material with an
artist's eye for symmetry wants us to see something important about the new
life occasioned by Jesus Christ. When Jesus discovers this 38 year veteran of
waiting, he. asks a basic question: "Do you want to be healed?" The man never
answers that by the way, instead complains about his hard luck and his inability
to make it into the pool on time. Jesus, however, is not interested in that at
all. His concern, apparently, is with the man's will. “Do you want to be healed?"

In his book Love and Will Rollo May suggests that modern life conspires

against the existence of a strong, healthy individual will. We are in a crisis of
will according to May. Modern men and women feel powerless, victims of large
global forces over which they have absolutely no control. It takes a strong sense
of self and a strong effort to maintain the integrity and power of one's own will.

"Do you want to be healed?" What a rude question. Of course the man
wanted to be well. Why else would he have spent 38 years waiting to get in the
pool? And yet, it isn't a rude question at all. In actuality, it is the question.
"What do you actually want? What do you choose for yourself?" Ruminating
about the text, I thought about how unsettling and unlikely it would be for a
physician to enter the examination room (after we have been waiting for something
less than 38 years) and ask us, "Do you want to be well?" And then it occurred
to me that a good doctor does ask that question. Not in those words, and perhaps
not even consciously; but my guess is that the starting point for the physician's
work is somewhere close to the patient's will to be well. —

Certainly there is mounting evidence that without the will to be well, healing
will not occur. After his now famous battle against a rare blood disease, Norman
Cousins wrote: "The will to live is not a theoretical abstraction but a physiologic
reality with therapeutic characteristics."

The psychologists, the physicians and the theologians tell us that to be
fully alive has a great deal to do with a choice each one of us makes, There
is, for each of us, a decision to be made - an act of personal will to be expressed.
"If we want to live today, we must consciously will life,” Theologian Juergen
Moltman writes. "Apathy seems to be a characteristic sign of the illness of our
society and of many individuals in it. Interest in life is crippled. The courage
to be is weakened...We must learn to love life with such a passion that we will
no longer become accustomed to the powers of destruction. We must overcome

~ 3-

ow own apathy and be siezed by a passion for life." (The Passion for Life, p.
20, 22). It is very difficult for us to understand, but something like that happens
to the people who become advocates of change and revolution in third world
nations. They choose to be on the side of Hfe, on the side of justice and compas-
sion, on the side of literacy and health care and enough food for their chidiren
to eat, on the side of human dignity and human rights. For many people in the
world it is not an easy choice because it means standing against the authorities
and perhaps standing beside others with whom you would not ordinarily choose
to stand. How does one choose life in El Salvador today, when the good we support
has killed thousands and turned its head while Right Wing death squads execute
tens of thousands; where even modest proposals to enhance the plight of the
poor are regarded as communistic,

There is a choice to be made by each of us. Thirty eight years the man
had waited. That's very close to a full career in our culture. This story asks
us to look at our own lives, Are there echoes in my life of that man's self-justifica-
tion, his weak rationalization? Do we hear our own voice saying "no one ever
helps me, people always push ahead of me." Do we ever engage in that comfortable
litany which starts out "someday I will...?" Someday, when I accomplish my
goals, when I get the promotion, the office, the degree, the money - I'll be able
to breathe easier. Someday, Yll spend time doing what is life-giving; with my
spouse and children and friends. Someday I'll read more books and see more
plays and write poems. Someday, I'll lose twenty pounds, quit smoking and take
up pottery. But in the meantime I can't, Are there familiar echoes in that?
To the question "Do you want to be healed? Do you really want things to be
different in your life?" Wouldn't many of us be forced to say “not really; no
thank you; the status quo may not be what I want, but it's not as bad as trying
to change it,”

William Sloane Coffin quipped recently that mast of us "fear the cure more
than the sickness." (The Courage to Love, p. 13). There were risks, after all,
for the man in the story. When he obeyed the command of Jesus, picking up
his bed to walk away, there was the risk that he might fall down. There was
the very real uncertainty about the daily details of life. Deprived of alms for
crippled people, where in the world does a new!y-healed man find his next meal?
No longer confined to his mat, where will he find a place te sleep? No jonger
part of the community of misery, where will he find new friends?

We prefer the security of the known to the radical insecurity of the unknown,
as anyone who has ever changed jobs or moved to a new community, or altered
careers, has discovered. It can be very frightening business; and the impetus
to remain with the safety of the status quo is very powerful,

But we are not alive fully to the degree that we are unwilling to accept
the risks of choosing life. The trouble with life on the mat is its deadly dullness,
It is boring. It is not, finally, Hfe at all.

This marvelous story is an illustration actually of the rebirth, the new life,
which is so important throughout the fourth Gospel. Recall how Jesus told Nico-
demus that he had te be born again, and how much trouble Nicodemus had under
standing that. “Can I enter a second time into my mother's womb?" he asked,
Recall also the trouble we have with the idea of rebirth: how the phrase “born
again Christian" has come to be synonymous with everything that makes us uncom-

~4-

fortable about public religion. When the conversation turns to rebirth in Christ,
we Presbyterians ordinarily start heading for the exits. What offends us, of course,
is the currently popular conversion dynamic which involves an emotional upheaval,
and acceptance of Jesus as Lord and then the adoption of a new vocabulary to
describe the experience to one's friends. But what if rebirth means something
like what happened to the man beside the pool? What if it means getting up
and walking into the future? What if being born again means choosing life instead
of death, the present instead of some ethereal future? What if rebirth means
falling passionately in love with life?

In many of D. H. Lawrence's poems there is a strong hint of Christian theo-
logy. Listen to one which I believe can be a commentary on our text:

"As we live, we are transmitters of life...

And if, as we work, we can transmit life into our work,
Life, still more life, rushes in to compensate, to be ready...
Give, and it shall be given to you

Is still the truth about life..."

In faith, as in life, Jesus calls us to lay aside old securities, to stand up
and against all odds, sometimes in the face of our better judgment, to walk into
the future ~ fully alive. We would be more comfortable waiting. We would rather
wait till our doubts are resolved, till the difficult questions of faith are answered
before we venture anything. We believe, but not nearly enough to try something
new; to let go of old prejudices, to risk giving part of ourselves: our money,
our time, our love ~ to someone, some cause that needs us. Of course we believe,
but our position remains on hold,

“There is not one of us who does not need to be converted," William Sloane
Coffin wrote, "not from life to something more than life, but from something
less than life to full life itself." (op. cit., p. 12). The early church theologian
Irenaeus put it wonderfully: "The glory of God is a human being fully alive."

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is good news about a God who is on the side
of life: a God who sets before his people the choice between life and death;
the God who will lead them and strengthen and nurture them always when they
choose life. It is not about an abstractly neutral deity who passively watches
the affairs of his people, but a passionate God, a lover, a God who gets involved
in life with his people; who created life good, and who is honored best when that
good gift is fully lived.

The Gospel is about a God who so loved the world, he gave his only son
that people might live fully. Jesus, the Christ, continues to surprise us with a
love that does not call us away from life, but deeply into life. Jesus keeps surpris-
ing us by challenging us when we settle for something less than life, when we
opt for the status quo instead of creative change in our own lives. The Gospel
is about a Lord who loves us so much he wants us, wills us to be fully alive; a
Savior who invites us to choose life, to stand up and walk, to follow him into
our future. Amen.