the church geek

The text for this sermon is 2 Kings 5:1-15. This is one of my favorite stories in the Old Testament.

According to all accounts Naaman was a truly great man. No matter what you sent him to do – as a military commander – he got the job done. As a patriot and a citizen, there wasn’t a person more loyal to the King.

His great military success made him a popular hero in Aram. From the highest to the lowest, everyone knew the name of Naaman. He was indeed the General Schwarzkopf of the Aramean Army.

His army was fierce and powerful. Their great advances in technology and strategy confounded their enemies. In their current campaign against the forces of the northern Israeli army they were swiftly gaining ground and conquering vast amounts of territory.

Opposing armies usually took one look at Naaman’s forces, quivered in their boots, and ran the other direction.

Everybody loved Naaman. He was at the top of his game. When his superiors had questions about what steps to take next in battle or how the progress of the war was going, they knew there was only one person who would give the straight answer.

With Naaman, there was no monkey business – he said what he meant. If he said a job could be done, everyone knew it would get done. If he said there were obstacles, they knew he would come up with a good plan of attack.

But Naaman was at the height of his career and at the pinnacle of his popularity, when tragedy struck. A skin disease was having a field day. It was getting the best of him and he knew it might end his career, if not his life.

At first people warned him, “You know, Naaman, you should really have that thing looked at.” But he was a busy, as well as a proud man, and so he shook off their suggestions. He said it was probably nothing and then he tried to convince himself he had no reason to worry.

After a while the thing really started to fester. Everywhere he went folks offered him advice about what he should do. They told him to try - cucumber creams, cold compresses, a glass of pomegranate juice every morning. You name it; it was offered to him.

And of course there came all the advice about who he should see. The funny thing was, as a military man, he had all the best medical help available to him. And still he ignored it. He hoped it would simply go away.

But it didn’t get better. Things got worse. And now the boils and the sores made people turn away. When he spoke to others they didn’t seem able to focus or pay attention. They were so distracted by the ugliness of his disease.

It wasn’t easy – no one looked directly at him anymore. They didn’t seek him out in a crowd. There were less and less parties to attend.

Finally Naaman decided to get help; but the doctors took one look at him and told him there wasn’t anything they could do. He had ignored the early warning signs. He had failed to pay attention to the clues right in front of him, and now it was too late.

Naaman became a desperate man, groping for anything that might work. He tried everything he could think of, but there just wasn’t anywhere he could turn.

His wife struggled with uncertainty and doubt as well. There were many sleepless nights and many questions. Would Naaman lose his job? Would they have to sell the house she had worked so hard at making into a home?

How would they feed the children? Would they have to let go of some of the extra help? She wanted to support and encourage her husband but it was getting harder as each day passed and as Naaman’s situation and mood worsened.

A young servant girl saw what was happening. She observed all the fretting. She knew of the many sleepless nights. Even though she had an idea and thought of something that might help, she also knew she was just a servant girl – a young Hebrew captured from the land of Israel in one of Naaman’s many battles.

Somehow, she managed to screw up the courage to take a risk. She approached her mistress and said to her, “If only my Lord were with the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy.”

Naaman’s wife shooed her off saying that was the most ridiculous thing she had ever heard. She told herself,

Why should my husband listen to this no-account slave girl captured from the hands of his enemy? She is nothing more than chattel, a piece of property, an alien, a prisoner of war. What on earth does she possibly have to offer my husband?

The more she thought about it and the more she wrestled with the reality that Naaman had tried everything else they could think of the more she thought perhaps this servant girl’s idea wasn’t so bad after all.

Maybe there was a Hebrew prophet in Samaria who could heal him of his affliction. After all, what did they have to lose?

She approached Naaman with some fear - knowing how quickly he had brushed off the advice others had given him. This time however She was surprised to find him quietly assent to the servant girl’s plan; mumbling something about this perhaps being his last chance to get well.

A good bureaucrat, Naaman knew how to get this sort of thing done. He approached the king and explained the situation. The King responded saying he would look forward to having Naaman back in commission. Then he sent him off with a letter to take to the Hebrew King.

Naaman arrived at the King’s court. He was hopeful, but that was before he realized there was a little problem. The letter failed to mention that the healing Naaman wanted was requested of the prophet in Samaria, not of the King himself!

Thinking it was some sort of ruse or a way to start another war, the King tore his clothes, and cried out saying, “Am I God, to give death or life, that this man sends word to me to cure a man of his leprosy? Just look and see how he is trying to pick a quarrel with me.”

News of the King’s grief traveled quickly to the Hebrew prophet Elisha. Elisha - still trying to prove himself after having taken the reigns from his mentor Elijah who had disappeared into thin air – quietly pulled some strings, straightened things out, and invited Naaman out to his home.

Naaman arrived at the front door of Elisha’s house, but instead of ushering him in, Elisha sent out a messenger who told him to “Go, wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh shall be restored and you shall be clean.”

Naaman was not happy with that sort of treatment and advice. Infuriated, Namman thought:

That prophet should have marched straight out of his house to greet me. He should have looked right at me and at these nasty boils and these sores.

And then he should have given God a mighty loud shout. He should have waved his hands over these spots. He should have made a show over me.

But no, he sent out his messenger, a servant boy who tells me to go bathe myself seven times in the old, stinky, filthy waters of the Jordan River.

All he wants me to do is a ritual cleansing. I’m not a Hebrew. I don’t follow or worship this God of his. I don’t need to be ritually cleansed.

If that was all I came here to do, I could have just as well stayed home and done the exact same thing in the rivers of Damascus – at least the water there doesn’t stink.”

Naaman wanted a high profile and flashy miracle. He wanted to be doted over. He wanted to have a great and grand spectacle performed over him. But since he wasn’t getting any of that, he set himself to turn around and walk away.

Yet, once again Naaman found himself listening to the words of folks underneath him. This time it wasn’t a Hebrew slave girl, but it was his everyday servants.

They stopped him. They challenged him to consider heeding the prophet’s advice. Surely they argued if you were willing to do something much more difficult, why aren’t you willing to try this common easy thing?

Humbling himself in obedience to the word of the messenger and heeding the advice of his servants, Naaman finally did as he was commanded.

And to his surprise he came up out of the Jordan River as a brand new person. Miraculously healed he proclaimed aloud, “there is no God in all the earth except in Israel.”

In spite of his great stature and his position of power and authority, mighty and powerful Naaman learned the importance of paying heed and attention to the lesser and more ordinary things around him.

Through his ability to listen and to respond to much that was common and ordinary around him and to do the ordinary as Elisha instructed, Naaman found himself miraculously brought to new health and to faith.

In a vivid way this story shows us that - more often than not - God uses the ordinary – even the lowly – things in our lives to accomplish the extraordinary.

Surely, in many ways we are just like Naaman. At times we are blinded by our pride and our expectations that God must work in extraordinary and dramatic circumstances.

There are so many ways such a tendency may be at work in our lives. Sometimes we may fail to be faithful to the simple and ordinary ways God asks us for obedience.

Prayer, scripture reading, devotion, meditation, getting out in mission and ministry, and spiritual conversation with others, these are some of the many ordinary ways that God may help us work through and affect healing in different areas of our lives.

Sometimes - whether it’s out of pride or arrogance, we may fail to listen to the voices of those around us – who may hold a word of healing, challenge or encouragement which we need to hear.

The other day I had a short conversation with a young lady who cut my hair at great clips…these conversations aren’t usually very long…but she told me how surprised she is at how rude customers are to her.

A pastor whose blog I frequently read wrote the other day that when she was in seminary she had a job as a clerk at the seminary bookstore; she was surprised and peeved at the way fellow students – future pastors no less – treated her whenever she got behind that cash register. It often wasn’t pretty, she suggested.

God may or may not want to speak to us through someone we encounter in our everyday live, but we’ll never know or we’ll never be able to hear or listen to them – whether it’s the clerk, a co-worker, a neighbor, or a family member - if we don’t treat them with the dignity or the common courtesy they deserve.

Spiritual Director, Margaret Guenther, states “When we seek to discern the action of the Holy Spirit in our lives, we expect the dramatic, even the spectacular.” She then proceeds to warn us against that tendency to quickly “reject the homely, the ordinary, and the near at hand.”

Often it’s faithfulness to the common, everyday, ordinary things that God uses to work the extraordinary in our midst. So let’s work to pay better attention to those things, to listen, to be faithful so that we might begin to discern what it is that God wants to do with the ordinary in order to accomplish the extraordinary in our lives.

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