simple, not easy
The manuscript version of today's sermon:
Simple, not Easy.
(2 Kings 5:1-17; John 15:1-12.)
Naaman was at the height of his power. Rich, respected, favoured by his king, a man in a patriarchal society, a great general in a country which valued military prowess, Naaman was the man who had single-handedly brought down Ahab king of Israel on the heights of Gilead east of the Jordan river. He had killed the king of Israel with his own bow. (That story is told back in 1 Kings 22.)
Naaman was Aramaean. Israel was a little postage-stamp-sized country prone to be tromped on and tromped through by her larger neighbours, and Aram to her northeast -- where modern-day Syria is now -- was waxing in power. During the lifetime of Elisha the prophet, Israel was pretty much constantly dominated by Ben-Hedad, king of Aram. (Hundreds of years later when Israel was a province of the Roman empire, Jesus spoke Aramaic, which attests to the strength and lasting influence of the Aramaean kingdoms.)
So Naaman was a great man in a powerful nation, commander of its armies, successful, proud.
And yet his body betrays him. At first, Naaman must have thought he'd picked up a minor bug -- he'd probably felt a little weak, a little numb, maybe his eyes were dry and bothering him a bit -- minor symptoms. But the weakness didn't go away, and his anxiety grew, and a little tell-tale spot appeared on his skin, the first of many lesions that would never heal. Naaman had tsaraat, an incurable skin disease.
Twenty-eight hundred years ago there was no cure for tsaraat. All that was known was that it was deadly -- eventually; it was miserable in the meantime, and it was contagious.
Think back a couple of decades to your first awareness of the AIDS virus, before there were any effective treatments, when we knew AIDS was crazily contagious but we didn't really understand exactly how. Most folks felt bad about ostracizing those who had AIDS, but very few were willing to risk their health or their children's health by knowingly letting them come in contact with an AIDS sufferer. We recognized the disease as a death sentence, we hoped for a cure, we prayed for the victims, but the vast majority of people kept our distance in the meantime.
Society hasn't changed all that much: tsaraat meant not only a miserable death, but also ostracism, separation, loss of human company, loss of home, loss of career. A man with tsaraat would struggle not only with the discomfort and pain of the disease, but also with the realization that he would never touch another human being ever again. In one fell swoop tsaraat represented a loss of everything it is possible to lose.
.......
In the wars in which Aram had subdued Israel, an Aramaean raiding band had assaulted yet another Israeli town, and in pillaging it had captured a young Jewish girl, and enslaved her. She had been taken from her nation and her home and her family, ripped from everything she had ever known and from everyone she had cared for, and she was brought to work for the wife of an Aramaean general in Damascus. And in the midst of all her loss she looked upon this powerful general whose troops were the cause of all her misery, and she saw his need, and she saw his fear. And somehow in the depths of all her loss she saw an opportunity -- an opportunity to witness, an opportunity for compassion, an opportunity to help this man she had every reason to hate. So she speaks with Naaman's wife, and his wife speaks with Naaman, and Naaman goes to Ben-Hedad his king, who writes him a personal letter of introduction to the King of Israel.
And Naaman gathers up seven hundred sixty pounds of silver -- each talent weighed about 76 lbs -- and six thousand shekels of gold, and surrounded by his wealth and clutching a letter from the most powerful man in the region, he sets off to see the king of Israel, most likely one of the sons of king Ahab, whom he had slain.
But the king is at a loss. Am I God, to put to death and to keep alive, ...to gather a man in from his leprosy? So the king doesn't know what to do, but at the prophet's prompting, the king sends Naaman to see Elisha, and once again Naaman sets off with his horses and chariots laden with silver and gold, clutching the letter of a king.
All that silver, all that gold, all that power: Naaman is still hoping that he can buy back everything he has lost. He wants nothing more than to go back and live his life just as he as always lived it, to be healthy and strong and powerful and respected. And this Israeli prophet, this Elisha, doesn't even bother to come to the door and greet him. Instead he stays inside, and sends out some messenger to tell him to take seven baths in the muddy Jordan river. As if he weren't already facing the loss of everything he had ever cared about -- health, family, career, respect, life itself -- this little foreign prophet will now insult him -- from a distance -- and tell him to wash in the mud?
Naaman was so sure he knew exactly what he needed that he almost missed his own cure and his own future. The Aramaean god -- Rimmon, or Ba'al the Thunderer-- was a god of storms, lord of the sky, a flashy god of lightning bolts. Naaman certainly expected the divine curing of tsaraat to be equally flashy and dramatic, a thunderbolt, an overwhelming exercise of divine power.
But while our God is certainly capable of instigating a ferocious storm when desired -- think Noah -- very often He chooses to speak almost humbly, quietly, through human beings, and through broken human beings at that. Again and again in the Bible healing and radical transformation come only in the midst of brokenness, in the midst of loss, in humility rather than in pride, in need rather than in fulness. God's word comes through the mouth of stutterers; God's witnesses are exiles and slaves and sinners and thieves; God's prophets are born to barren women. It is as if all the great expectations we have, all the pride that is tied up in our self-sufficiency and our worldly identity and even in our love for this strong beautiful country of ours -- all of those things we value in our strength get in the way of our seeing how God really comes to us and how God really surrounds us, always in the unexpected, often in the broken, often in the humble.
It is Namaan's servants who see his anger and feel his frustration, and they ask the right questions. Gently they prod him, Father, if the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it? How much more, when all he said to you was, 'Wash, and be clean?' And Namaan finds it in himself to listen, and he submits; he washes, and is transformed. Where once he derided Israel's Jordan River as inferior to the rivers of mighty Damascus, now he packs up some of Israel's river-mud to bring back with him to Aram. Where once he worshipped a god of thunder and storms, he now has a relationship with the very patient and often very subtle God of all life.
.......
There are very few of us who have made it through the last five years or so without loss. We've lost relationships, we've lost health, we've lost loved ones, we've lost jobs, and all those losses are hard. Loss is not only painful; it also threatens our identities, our understanding of who we are in the world, and of how we can relate to one another. It's easy to feel -- broken, somehow -- and to wish that we were no longer broken, that we had those relationships and loved ones and jobs and all we've lost restored to us. Sometimes when we're broken I think we even wish we could go back, to a time when we didn't feel quite so broken, or to a time when we weren't dealing with so much loss.
But I think what we need is rarely what we've lost. What we seek is in the present and in the future, not in the past; and it's joyful, and it's humble, and it's communal, and it's where our souls will pull us if only we will listen.
The servants in this story are a good model for us. They are perceptive, they are good witnesses, they are good friends, and they ask the right questions. I think that if we are humble and prayerful and if we reach out to God we too can serve this function for one another; that even in loss or in brokenness -- especially in loss or in brokenness -- we can gently help each other find our way into that joyful, humble, communal, God-filled future.
After all, it is Jesus himself who asks it of us.
I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.
This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.
Thanks be to God. [prayer.]
Simple, not Easy.
(2 Kings 5:1-17; John 15:1-12.)
Naaman was at the height of his power. Rich, respected, favoured by his king, a man in a patriarchal society, a great general in a country which valued military prowess, Naaman was the man who had single-handedly brought down Ahab king of Israel on the heights of Gilead east of the Jordan river. He had killed the king of Israel with his own bow. (That story is told back in 1 Kings 22.)
Naaman was Aramaean. Israel was a little postage-stamp-sized country prone to be tromped on and tromped through by her larger neighbours, and Aram to her northeast -- where modern-day Syria is now -- was waxing in power. During the lifetime of Elisha the prophet, Israel was pretty much constantly dominated by Ben-Hedad, king of Aram. (Hundreds of years later when Israel was a province of the Roman empire, Jesus spoke Aramaic, which attests to the strength and lasting influence of the Aramaean kingdoms.)
So Naaman was a great man in a powerful nation, commander of its armies, successful, proud.
And yet his body betrays him. At first, Naaman must have thought he'd picked up a minor bug -- he'd probably felt a little weak, a little numb, maybe his eyes were dry and bothering him a bit -- minor symptoms. But the weakness didn't go away, and his anxiety grew, and a little tell-tale spot appeared on his skin, the first of many lesions that would never heal. Naaman had tsaraat, an incurable skin disease.
Twenty-eight hundred years ago there was no cure for tsaraat. All that was known was that it was deadly -- eventually; it was miserable in the meantime, and it was contagious.
Think back a couple of decades to your first awareness of the AIDS virus, before there were any effective treatments, when we knew AIDS was crazily contagious but we didn't really understand exactly how. Most folks felt bad about ostracizing those who had AIDS, but very few were willing to risk their health or their children's health by knowingly letting them come in contact with an AIDS sufferer. We recognized the disease as a death sentence, we hoped for a cure, we prayed for the victims, but the vast majority of people kept our distance in the meantime.
Society hasn't changed all that much: tsaraat meant not only a miserable death, but also ostracism, separation, loss of human company, loss of home, loss of career. A man with tsaraat would struggle not only with the discomfort and pain of the disease, but also with the realization that he would never touch another human being ever again. In one fell swoop tsaraat represented a loss of everything it is possible to lose.
.......
In the wars in which Aram had subdued Israel, an Aramaean raiding band had assaulted yet another Israeli town, and in pillaging it had captured a young Jewish girl, and enslaved her. She had been taken from her nation and her home and her family, ripped from everything she had ever known and from everyone she had cared for, and she was brought to work for the wife of an Aramaean general in Damascus. And in the midst of all her loss she looked upon this powerful general whose troops were the cause of all her misery, and she saw his need, and she saw his fear. And somehow in the depths of all her loss she saw an opportunity -- an opportunity to witness, an opportunity for compassion, an opportunity to help this man she had every reason to hate. So she speaks with Naaman's wife, and his wife speaks with Naaman, and Naaman goes to Ben-Hedad his king, who writes him a personal letter of introduction to the King of Israel.
And Naaman gathers up seven hundred sixty pounds of silver -- each talent weighed about 76 lbs -- and six thousand shekels of gold, and surrounded by his wealth and clutching a letter from the most powerful man in the region, he sets off to see the king of Israel, most likely one of the sons of king Ahab, whom he had slain.
But the king is at a loss. Am I God, to put to death and to keep alive, ...to gather a man in from his leprosy? So the king doesn't know what to do, but at the prophet's prompting, the king sends Naaman to see Elisha, and once again Naaman sets off with his horses and chariots laden with silver and gold, clutching the letter of a king.
All that silver, all that gold, all that power: Naaman is still hoping that he can buy back everything he has lost. He wants nothing more than to go back and live his life just as he as always lived it, to be healthy and strong and powerful and respected. And this Israeli prophet, this Elisha, doesn't even bother to come to the door and greet him. Instead he stays inside, and sends out some messenger to tell him to take seven baths in the muddy Jordan river. As if he weren't already facing the loss of everything he had ever cared about -- health, family, career, respect, life itself -- this little foreign prophet will now insult him -- from a distance -- and tell him to wash in the mud?
Naaman was so sure he knew exactly what he needed that he almost missed his own cure and his own future. The Aramaean god -- Rimmon, or Ba'al the Thunderer-- was a god of storms, lord of the sky, a flashy god of lightning bolts. Naaman certainly expected the divine curing of tsaraat to be equally flashy and dramatic, a thunderbolt, an overwhelming exercise of divine power.
But while our God is certainly capable of instigating a ferocious storm when desired -- think Noah -- very often He chooses to speak almost humbly, quietly, through human beings, and through broken human beings at that. Again and again in the Bible healing and radical transformation come only in the midst of brokenness, in the midst of loss, in humility rather than in pride, in need rather than in fulness. God's word comes through the mouth of stutterers; God's witnesses are exiles and slaves and sinners and thieves; God's prophets are born to barren women. It is as if all the great expectations we have, all the pride that is tied up in our self-sufficiency and our worldly identity and even in our love for this strong beautiful country of ours -- all of those things we value in our strength get in the way of our seeing how God really comes to us and how God really surrounds us, always in the unexpected, often in the broken, often in the humble.
It is Namaan's servants who see his anger and feel his frustration, and they ask the right questions. Gently they prod him, Father, if the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it? How much more, when all he said to you was, 'Wash, and be clean?' And Namaan finds it in himself to listen, and he submits; he washes, and is transformed. Where once he derided Israel's Jordan River as inferior to the rivers of mighty Damascus, now he packs up some of Israel's river-mud to bring back with him to Aram. Where once he worshipped a god of thunder and storms, he now has a relationship with the very patient and often very subtle God of all life.
.......
There are very few of us who have made it through the last five years or so without loss. We've lost relationships, we've lost health, we've lost loved ones, we've lost jobs, and all those losses are hard. Loss is not only painful; it also threatens our identities, our understanding of who we are in the world, and of how we can relate to one another. It's easy to feel -- broken, somehow -- and to wish that we were no longer broken, that we had those relationships and loved ones and jobs and all we've lost restored to us. Sometimes when we're broken I think we even wish we could go back, to a time when we didn't feel quite so broken, or to a time when we weren't dealing with so much loss.
But I think what we need is rarely what we've lost. What we seek is in the present and in the future, not in the past; and it's joyful, and it's humble, and it's communal, and it's where our souls will pull us if only we will listen.
The servants in this story are a good model for us. They are perceptive, they are good witnesses, they are good friends, and they ask the right questions. I think that if we are humble and prayerful and if we reach out to God we too can serve this function for one another; that even in loss or in brokenness -- especially in loss or in brokenness -- we can gently help each other find our way into that joyful, humble, communal, God-filled future.
After all, it is Jesus himself who asks it of us.
I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.
This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.
Thanks be to God. [prayer.]