Preventing Disease
Eight hundred and forty two days. That’s the number of days between March 6, 2020, and June 26 of this year. What happened on March 6 two years ago? I flew on a plane to Tucson, and I wiped down my seat buckle and tray table with disinfecting wipes. That was the first COVID precaution I remember taking. After that, I took many more precautions – wearing masks, washing my hands frequently, trying to stay six feet away from people, teaching my university courses over Zoom, getting vaccines and boosters. But 842 days later, I got COVID anyway. I was in bed for days, and had time to ponder questions such as: Were those 842 days of precautions a waste of time and effort? Early in the pandemic, a friend said, “We’re all going to get it.” So, was it inevitable that I get that disease?
Imagine life hundreds of years ago. A plague sweeps through your village, and you watch people get sick and die, and you have no idea how to prevent the disease, or what to do about it if you get it. That was what life was like for most of human existence, before all the discoveries about germs and microbes and medical treatments. It must have been incredibly frightening. You must have felt like a sitting duck much of the time – an earthquake could strike, or there could be a drought or flood or fire, or you could catch a fatal disease. It’s not your fault, you have no control, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. What an uncomfortable feeling, that no matter what you do, something terrible can happen to you at any time. No wonder people responded by trying ‘appease the Gods’ – perhaps if we throw people into a volcano or sacrifice animals, it will help. No wonder so many religions arose that revolved around trying to make the gods, or the one God, happy. No wonder there are so many pleas for mercy in the Bible.
Along with those superstitions and sacrifices and appeasements to the gods came the idea of responsibility for your troubles: if something terrible happened to you, you must have done something wrong, or you failed to appease the gods properly. In January I gave a sermon about the man who was born blind described in John 9. The chapter begins the disciples seeing a blind man, and they asked Jesus, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Do you see the assumption there, that it must be someone’s fault? If no one had sinned, no one would be blind. Jesus replied by saying “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.” He went on to cure the man’s blindness, so all was well – but you could also read that statement as “God made him blind just to prove a point, and there’s nothing he or anyone else could do about that.” How would that feel?
Gradually over the centuries, people started to understand the world better, and with greater understanding came greater control. Scientists discovered germs and microbes, which opened up a whole world of modern medicine and treatments, not to mention prevention. British sailors used to get scurvy on long ocean voyages, until they figured out that it was a vitamin C deficiency, and eating citrus fruits fixed the problem (which is why the British got nicknamed “limeys”). Likewise, people used to get goiters, until the discovery that adding a little iodine to salt fixed the problem. The pace of discovery never slowed down, and we are still discovering new ways to prevent and treat diseases. I think I’m safe in saying that everyone in this room has benefited from some of those techniques. For example, I am one of four men in the congregation with stents in his heart.
Of course, there are wide differences in belief about what medicines or treatments work, or are safe or harmful. Still, I think it’s safe to say that everyone believes that there’s something you can take to prevent or treat disease. That takes us back to the thought that if you get a particular disease, then it’s your fault – but now, it’s not because you sinned, it’s because you didn’t take the right pill or you’re eating the wrong food. Or you could blame your doctor for not doing the right procedures, and perhaps even sue that doctor. All of that reflects the attitude that disease and suffering is not inevitable – there are things we can do about it.
Nowadays, even something as inevitable as aging is treated as a condition you can do something about: buy the right cream, take the right vitamin supplement, soak in special mud, or avoid certain foods and you can “defy aging.” Every few weeks I see a news article promising that sooner or later, science will figure out how to cure the aging problem once and for all.
So, how do you feel about aging? Is that something you should gracefully accept, or it is something that you ought to fight against. As Dylan Thomas asked, should you “go gentle into that good night”, or should you “rage, rage against the dying of the light?”
Are You the Captain of Your Fate?
This got me thinking about a scene from the movie The Breakfast Club. It’s about five teenagers serving detention together, and opening up about their lives. The scene I was thinking of is the one where they start talking about their parents, and they all share the view that their parents were not doing a good job. One character raises the frightening question, “Are we going to turn into our parents?” And one girl, Claire, responds by saying, “Not me, not ever.” And the other girl, Allison, says, “It’s inevitable. It just happens.” So who is right?
The psychologists use the term “Locus of Control” to describe people’s attitudes toward destiny, fate, and how much they control their life. Claire has what they call an “internal locus of control” – the belief that what she does determines the outcomes in her life. Allison exhibits the “external locus of control” attitude: things just happen, there’s nothing you can do, it’s just destiny. That distinction illustrates one of the key differences between people, and it is connected to many other factors such as politics and religion. Where do you fit on that scale?
This is something you have probably been struggling with your entire life. When you were a child, you probably felt like adults controlled everything, and you just had to accept what they threw your way. But as you grew up, those same adults probably tried to teach you that your own actions, and certainly your attitudes, do affect the outcomes in your life. Teaching children cause and effect is central, and part of that is the lesson that they are the cause of more things than they think they are. I have a friend Scott whose son is the same age as my son Alec, and when the boys were about ten years old, we took them canoeing. As you probably know, the person in the back of the canoe is the one who controls direction, and the person in the front basically just helps with the paddling. We started off with the boys in the front of the canoes, but then we decided to trade places with them, and let them sit in the back. And immediately we started going off in odd directions, and Scott and I would say “Watch where we’re going! Steer away from that rock!” And the boys would say, “I’m not doing that!” And we’d reply, “Yes you are – you’re the one steering the canoe.” It’s a pretty central lesson in life, isn’t it? You’re the one steering the canoe. If you go through life with that external locus of control attitude, the one that says it’s always someone else who is steering your canoe, you won’t go far.
So a basic part of maturing is learning to recognize when you’re steering the canoe, and not just blaming others for everything. When she was four years old, my daughter said to my son “You’re making me boss you around!” That is the way 4-year-old think: no matter what, it’s always someone else’s fault.
One of the people you could blame for your woes is God himself, so maturing also involves getting away from that attitude of “God is making me miserable, what can I do?” God didn’t give me an attractive enough face; God made me be born in the wrong place or time; I’m lonely and God isn’t sending me friends; it’s God’s fault I didn’t get that dream job. If you find yourself thinking that way, maybe it’s time to grow up a little more, and that means moving closer to the “internal locus of control” end of the spectrum.
Yet here is the problem with internal locus of control, and the idea that you are “the master of your fate, the captain of your soul”: where does Divine Providence fit into that picture? Where is the recognition that the Lord God Jesus Christ rules the universe, not you? Emanuel Swedenborg wrote a book called Divine Providence, and the whole book is devoted to helping us understand how God rules everything. Where is the trust in the Lord that, the Bible says over and over, is essential? The true heroes of the Bible are people like Daniel, who put their complete faith in God and do not trust in their own power and wisdom.
So another approach is to try to achieve that complete faith in God. You can try to be fully accepting of Divine Providence, and let God lead you wherever He wills. If you take that attitude to the extreme, it will make you completely passive: you will not resist anything that happens to you, you will not try to take control away from God, and you may even fear that any action you take will go against the stream of providence.
That’s why I included that passage from Swedenborg’s Secrets of Heaven about people who conclude that they “may as well drop their hands and let themselves be pushed around” (see below). They had to be corrected: no, being passive like that is not good. You must act, you must do your part.
It reminds me of an old joke about a man who is caught in a flood. As the waters rise, the man goes out and climbs on top of his roof. People come by in a rescue boat and say “Get in!” but the man replies that he has faith in God, and will wait for God to save him. The waters rise higher and another rescue crew shows up with a helicopter, and calls down to him “Grab the rope and climb up!” But again the man says, “I have faith in God, and will wait for God to save me.” In the end, the man drowns, and when he gets to the other world, he confronts God and angrily asks, “Why didn’t you save me?” But God replies, “I sent a boat and you didn’t get on it; I sent a helicopter and you ignored it; what were you waiting for?”
This passive attitude, hanging your hands down and just waiting, goes directly against the idea that we are put on this earth to do good works and help each other – by our fruits you will know us.
What is the lesson from all this? You could reach the conclusion that life is a balance between the things that are inevitable and things you can control. Jesus talks about inevitable things quite a bit in the New Testament. In Mark, he says, “The poor you will always have with you,” implying that we will never win the fight against poverty. In the end of the book of John he says “In this world, you will have trouble.” Sooner or later, something will go wrong with your body. If you are a doctor, and your ambitious is to make sure no one ever suffers or dies, you will be a failure – and if you are a patient, you should not have those expectations either. Something will go badly in your life. If it’s not your body, it may be losing money or property or a job or reputation– but Jesus calls those “treasures on earth,” and emphasizes that they ultimately don’t matter if you are storing up treasures in heaven. The goal is not to live a trouble-free life.
When Jesus Faced The Inevitable
All of this is leading up to the short and simple passage that I really want to talk about: what Jesus said when he prayed in the Garden of Gesthemane. The Last Supper had already finished, and He and the disciples went to Gesthemane, where he wanted to pray. And you can see in his prayer the inner conflict. He knows that his crucifixion is inevitable – all week he had been telling his disciples it would happen. And he understood why it had to happen: that his death would be the fulfillment of the prophecies, and is what it would take to control the hells and restore freedom for all.
Yet you can still hear a little of his human side resisting the idea, and he is suffering mightily. He says “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.” His human side is not yet aligned with his divine side – there is one last thing that must be worked out, and it has everything to do with how he feels about the inevitable. There is nothing left to do but pray. But what does he pray?
He says, “Abba, father, everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me.” If the human Jesus cannot prevent his death, then he is asking one last time, maybe the divine can do it for him. Maybe he can get God to change his mind about what is about to happen.
This brings up a deep question about prayer, and what the purpose of prayer is. It’s a big subject, but I’ll just put it briefly: is the purpose of prayer to get God to change his mind? I read the story about Abraham having a conversation with God about the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and it seems to be a negotiation – Abraham is bargaining with God about the number of good people it would take to spare the cities. Here is Abraham, an ordinary human, recognizing that God has the power to destroy the cities or not, so he’s asking, “Are you sure? Could you change your mind about what you’re about to do?” It’s an extreme example, but is that what some of your prayers sound like? If you are praying about something inevitable, what is the point of that kind of prayer?
But notice that right after Jesus asks the divine to “take this cup from me” (don’t let me be crucified), he immediately follows it with “Yet not what I will, but what you will.” It echoes what we saw in the Lord’s prayer: “Thy will be done.” The omniscient and omnipotent God should be making the decisions, not me.
So, what does that prayer accomplish? What it accomplishes is that it brings the human and the divine in alignment with each other. It makes Jesus okay with what is about to happen. From that point on, he does nothing to resist the crucifixion – he doesn’t speak up at his trial, he doesn’t come down from the cross. He is at peace.
I think that is the ultimate lesson we need to learn: to not fight against God’s will, but to learn how to be at peace with it. And if God’s will seems to involve disease and suffering and death, we can learn to understand that that’s only losing treasures on earth. And yes, I should still do what I can to prevent hardship and suffering for myself and others; I should continue to try to make life better for everyone, I should not just hang my hands down and say, “Oh well, terrible things happen: what can you do?”
What you can do is accept that God is watching out for our eternal welfare and happiness, accept that He respects our freedom of choice but He is doing everything in His divine power to get you to choose heaven. In that passage from the end of John that I mentioned, he says “In this world you will have trouble.” But I should read the full passage: “I have told you these things so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”
- Amen
READINGS
Old Testament Reading: Genesis 18:20-33
Then the Lord said, “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me. If not, I will know.” The men turned away and went toward Sodom, but Abraham remained standing before the Lord. Then Abraham approached him and said: “Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing—to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?” The Lord said, “If I find fifty righteous people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake.”
Then Abraham spoke up again: “Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, though I am nothing but dust and ashes, what if the number of the righteous is five less than fifty? Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five people?” “If I find forty-five there,” he said, “I will not destroy it.” Once again he spoke to him, “What if only forty are found there?” He said, “For the sake of forty, I will not do it.” Then he said, “May the Lord not be angry, but let me speak. What if only thirty can be found there?” He answered, “I will not do it if I find thirty there.” Abraham said, “Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, what if only twenty can be found there?” He said, “For the sake of twenty, I will not destroy it.” Then he said, “May the Lord not be angry, but let me speak just once more. What if only ten can be found there?” He answered, “For the sake of ten, I will not destroy it.”
New Testament Reading: Mark 14:32-36
They went to a place called Gethsemane, and Jesus said to his disciples, “Sit here while I pray.” He took Peter, James and John along with him, and he began to be deeply distressed and troubled. “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death,” he said to them. “Stay here and keep watch.” Going a little farther, he fell to the ground and prayed that if possible the hour might pass from him. “Abba, Father,” he said, “everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.”
Reading from Emanuel Swedenborg’s Secrets of Heaven #2891
Spirits newly arrived in the spiritual world rack their brains trying to understand the idea that we cannot do what is good or think what is true on our own but only from the Lord. They believe that this would make them machines, incapable of anything, and that if so, they may as well drop their hands and let themselves be pushed around. “No,” they are told, “you really have to think, will, and do good on your own. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to develop a heavenly sense of autonomy or heavenly freedom. But you still ought to acknowledge that what is good and true comes not from you but from the Lord.” All angels, they are taught, make this acknowledgment and even live in the perception that it is so. The more keenly they sense that the Lord leads them and that they therefore live in the Lord, the freer they are.
