First Congregational Church
165 Main St, Amherst, MA
2 Kings 5:1-14
Mark 1:40-42
There is sometimes a fine line between trust and surrender, between letting go and giving up, between acceptance and resignation. In the same way, it is sometimes hard to distinguish between hope and desperation, or faith and delusion, or to tell the difference between a take-charge, can-do attitude and sheer terror. But one thing is certain: Serious illness and dire circumstances will evoke a full range of feelings, attitudes and responses—sometimes all within a single five-minute period.
And so it is that, as our story begins, we can’t be quite sure of Naaman’s state of mind. He is, one the one hand, an extremely successful man—one who, like so many of us, wrongly believes that he alone is responsible for his success. But no matter how many battles he wins—by his hand or God’s—there is nothing Naaman can do to control, much less cure, his leprosy.
Now the term “leprosy,” as it’s used here, does not necessarily refer to the disfiguring, highly contagious, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it disease that afflicts the unnamed man in our Gospel story. Leprosy also described any one of “a variety of infectious skin diseases,” 1 and since Naaman is still very much a part of society—and, indeed, is still functioning as part of the ruling class—he must be suffering from psoriasis or some other, less serious, ailment.
And yet our story tells us that Naaman suffered from this condition, and his suffering was evidently severe and obvious enough that even his wife’s slave girl, an Israeli POW—notices and has compassion on him. Naaman may take pride in his capacity to carry on, to win battles for his king in spite of his condition, but that doesn’t mean he’s not suffering, that he doesn’t long to be whole again.
So when the slave girl tells Naaman’s wife about a prophet who could cure him, the wife runs to the husband, who runs to the king, who says, “Go! Go with my blessing!”—a flurry of action that surely indicates eagerness, if not desperation.>
And if you’re still doubting the seriousness of Naaman’s plight or the depth of his desire to be healed, consider what he takes with him: 10 talents of silver—that is, about 750 pounds; six thousands shekels of gold, or some 150 pounds; and 10 sets of garments. Now, I don’t know what the market values of silver and gold were back in Naaman’s day, but I can tell you that on Friday, silver was selling for $13.50 an ounce, while gold was going for roughly $938 dollars an ounce. In other words, so badly does Naaman long to be cured of his leprosy that he carries with him 162,000 dollars’ worth of silver and more than 2 million dollars’ worth of gold—plus these 10 sets of garments. And if you think 2 million dollars and change is a lot of money these days, consider what it was worth almost 3,000 years ago.
In our eagerness, or desperation, to be healed—or to get a job or to solve a problem or escape the fear that things will never get better—we sometimes misread or even ignore the signals, and Naaman is no different. Although the source of his hope is a lowly unnamed slave girl who speaks of a prophet, even though the girl has said nothing of medicine or politics, Naaman goes first to his king for help and then, royal hall pass in hand, travels to see a foreign king. In other words, while our story suggests that, once again, God works through the “little” people of the world—that is the powerless, the oppressed and the marginalized who are instruments of God’s healing and grace—Naaman continues to operate from his place of privilege, putting his hope in worldly, political power.
Please excuse my bluntness, but it is at this point that I need to ask you if any of this is beginning to sound at all familiar. Time and again we, too, have seen redemption and liberation coming from the oppressed—from the likes of Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Martin Luther King Jr. in our own country, and from the imprisoned Nelson Mandela in South Africa. Time and again we have seen social progress, political victory and peace come into our world through the side door and from the bottom up—via nonviolent protests and hunger strikes in Gandhi’s India, by virtue of decades of nonviolent struggle and civil disobedience by African Americans, by the means of truth-telling and reconciliation in South Africa. Time and again we have seen in the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth that receiving comes from giving, that salvation comes from serving the least of these, that abundance comes from trusting God to provide for our needs, that healing and wholeness come through God’s Spirit, and that the road to God’s kingdom follows the upside-down way of the cross.
And yet so understandably desperate are we for justice, so angry are we about the way things are, that we first try the ways we know best—the ways of the world. So undeniably eager are we for peace and equality, that we may invest too much of our hope in President Barack Obama, who—for all his substantial gifts and all the momentum of the movement he has generated—still is constrained by the weakness of our economy, the partisanship of our politics, and our very human self-interest. Let us learn from Naaman’s mistake and the examples of Moses and Jesus, Gandhi and King, Dorothy Day and Mother Theresa to work the “system” with kingdom values from below while putting our hopes and our trust in none other than God above and within.
Naaman learns the hard way that his healing will not come from the political sphere. After he has almost started another war single-handedly, Elisha the prophet sends for him. Finally, Naaman is on the right track, seeking the proper source for his healing. But no sooner does he get to church—I mean, Elisha’s house—than he starts complaining about how things are done there. Instead of coming out himself to work miracles, Elisha sends a messenger—some lowly, unknown preacher who tells Naaman that if he wants to be made whole he must humble himself, be transformed, and do the hard work of forgiveness and reconciliation, the slow work of justice and healing.
Once again, Naaman’s story is instructive. If you want to know why Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Houston has some 40,000 members while we have 200; if you want to know what makes some churches grow by the thousands while others remain vital but small, just consider Naaman. It is human nature to desire the quick fix over hard work; it is human nature to want to be promised the sky; it is human nature to desire power and to want to do things our way rather than God’s way; and it is human nature to let our pride and stubbornness get in the way of true healing and lasting change.
In the end, the story of Naaman is a folk tale about pride, I think. Just like us, Naaman wants desperately to be healed. But, also just like us, he wants to do it his way—with his pride preserved and his reputation secure. Instead of acknowledging his need for help—especially help from a man of God, or help from his servants—he’s prepared to spend all that he has to buy a cure or to do something daring or difficult that would further elevate his status as a strong, self-sufficient man. We’ve established that Naaman wants to be healed in the worst way, that he’s all but desperate, and yet his pride seems to be even stronger than his need. Elisha’s command to humble himself makes Naaman furious.
And so Naaman is just about to storm right out of church—I mean, Israel—when his servants (there’s God working through the nobodies again) talk him out of it. “Look,” they say to Naaman. “If the prophet had told you to donate a couple million dollars, build a new temple, win the war on terror or start a new ministry team, surely you would have done that. And yes, we understand that it’s humiliating to wash seven times in the Jordan River. But all the prophet is telling you to do is ask for help, and to accept it when it’s offered.”
Now if you’re like Naaman, if you’re anything like me or most people—especially upper-middle-class, highly-educated, self-sufficient Yankees—you probably have a hard time asking for help. Maybe you need a ride somewhere, or help paying a bill, to have some meals brought in or just to talk to someone. But it’s so hard to admit that we can’t make it on our own, it’s so hard to pick up the phone and ask for help, that all too often we do without, we remain alone, and we get in the way of our own healing and growth.
What Naaman had to learn, and what we all have to learn and re-learn, is that we are not saved by works—or money or status or competence or self-sufficiency. We are not saved by the right doctrine, the right doctor or the right diet. Instead, we are saved—that is, healed—by grace. Almost all of us know the theological shorthand: We are saved by grace, not by works. But take a moment to parse that out. What it means is that we are not saved by what we do; we are saved by what we receive. I’m going to say that again:
We are not saved by what we do. We are saved by what we receive.
So fundamental and universal is this truth that even our local newspaper was spreading it a few days ago. In a long article about how a group of volunteers organized to help a woman and her cancer-stricken husband, the woman says, “The [group] taught me how to ask for help and to receive it. Being part of a community means that whether it’s making a meal, holding a sick friend’s hand, or comforting [one who is] bereaved …, there’s usually at least one person, maybe more, who can help with a particular task.” 2
We have been given the gift of such a community. To receive from it, we need simply ask. To receive God’s grace, we need only open the doors of our hearts. To receive the healing, empowering, life-giving gifts of community, we only have to admit that we need one another. Whatever our disease of the spirit, we need only wash in the river of God’s love to be healed. No matter how deep our wounds or broken our hearts, there is water enough to wash us clean and make us whole.
“If you choose,” the leper said to Jesus, “you can make me clean.” Hearing the humility and faith of this request, seeing the leper’s desire and open heart, Jesus, the embodiment of God’s loving grace, reached across centuries of Jewish law and the best medical science of the day. Jesus reached across the barriers of fear and privilege and pride. Sacrificing his own position and violating every religious and social taboo, Jesus touched the leper and said, “I do choose. Be made clean.”
May we all choose to let Jesus heal us. May we all ask God—and one another—for what we need. Then we, too, will be made clean and whole.