Archives for 2012

Angry Jesus

March 11, 2012 By Andy James

a sermon on Mark 11:15-19 for the Third Sunday in Lent
preached on March 11, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Over the last few years, we have seen the rise of a cultural phenomenon called Angry Birds. You may have seen some marks of it around – those strange-looking red and yellow birds now available as stuffed toys and all sorts of other products – but it all began as a game for the iPhone. The story behind the game is that a flock of birds is trying to retake their homeland from a mean and possessive group of pigs who have taken it over and built these very strange fortresses to protect it. To play the game, you fling these birds at the pigs in hopes of destroying the pigs and reclaiming the birds’ homeland. It’s a strange yet addictive game – if you haven’t seen it, we’ll have a brief demonstration after worship today! – but the anger of the title seems highly unexpected for any such flock of birds!

There’s a similar disconnect between Jesus and the anger we see in him in today’s reading from the gospel according to Mark. I suspect most of us have a pretty serene image of Jesus in our heads – the two images of him we have on our stained glass here at the front of the sanctuary are very pastoral, and the illustrations I remember from my Sunday school classes growing up always showed him in a very calm and loving pose, usually surrounded by children. But Mark here gives us a very different picture of Jesus, one “inspired by love and anger,” to borrow the words of our last hymn, but also one that challenges so many of our common assumptions about Jesus and demands that we think differently about his ministry and its implications for our lives today.

The story is pretty simple, really. On the Monday of what we now know as Holy Week, Jesus made his way into Jerusalem to visit the temple. What he saw there made him furiously angry. Merchants had set up shop in the courtyard of the temple, changing money and selling doves for sacrifices. Their presence was a matter of convenience as much as anything – the pilgrims who made their way from the countryside or from all across the empire could pick up the things they needed for their visit right there within the temple – but the temple authorities of the day also profited from this commerce in the courtyard. Jesus wasn’t so happy about it, and so he drove the merchants and moneychangers out of the temple. With a strange sense of authority for someone who had just come into the city from the countryside, he turned over their tables and ran them out of the courtyard. After all this, Jesus hung around and started teaching the temple, but if anyone tried to carry anything through the temple court, he would stop them with his one-man police force. His teachings that day quoted the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah: “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations – but you have made it a den of robbers.” Jesus had imagined this place as a place for prayer, open to everyone – but instead, on his first recorded visit here, he saw a secular marketplace dominated by merchants making a profit at the expense of those who simply sought to pray and follow the religious practice of the day.

As you might expect, Jesus’ anger didn’t go over so well with the temple authorities. They were furious with Jesus for claiming such authority – they were the ones in charge of the temple, not him. They had seen the procession fit for a king that had greeted him as he entered the city the day before, and they were worried that the the real ruling Roman authorities would get angry if it got any worse. And if all this wasn’t enough, Jesus was captivating the crowds with his teaching, too – but little did any of them know that the cheers of “Hosanna!” would soon turn to cries of “Crucify him!”

This vision of an “angry Jesus” is not quite like that strange game Angry Birds. He didn’t fling himself at the constructions of the people like those strange birds, and his anger doesn’t seem to be nearly as addictive, either! But there is something important going on here with this angry Jesus, and this brief glimpse of God’s frustration getting lived out is an important part of what is going on along the journey of Lent. Sure, plenty of people like to talk about God’s anger toward the world. They go on and on about how corrupt and evil something or other is in this day and age, blaming natural disasters and other such things on God’s frustration with human sin. But I think most of us prefer to think of God as “merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love,” as we hear multiple times in the Bible.

Yet the angry Jesus we see in our reading this morning reminds us that God’s mercy and grace bring a new way of life that require us to get rid of some things that aren’t so merciful and gracious. God’s love demands an end to the actions and systems that take advantage of others and declare anyone more or less human than anyone else. God’s grace welcomes us to name the places where we go wrong so that we can amend our lives and walk in a new and different way. And God’s mercy frees us from concern over the eternal consequences of our actions, while also insisting that the things we do that harm others are displeasing to God and must be changed. So the anger we see from Jesus here is rooted not in possessiveness, jealousy, or fear but rather in the very gifts of love, grace, and mercy that stand at the center of God’s amazing love for us.

The season of Lent is a good time to be challenged by our images of God and Jesus and to start thinking about life in a new and different way. These are good days to imagine an angry Jesus – a Jesus who was not satisfied with things being the way they were and so demanded that God’s loving and just kingdom become real. How can we be a part of insisting that the world be different? What practices do we need to cleanse from our temples so that we can be more faithful in our worship and work? What in our world gets in the way of our practice of faith and keeps us from responding to God’s call for a new and different way of life for all humanity?

We may rarely be able to speak out so clearly as Jesus did, with such directness and such boldness, but God nonetheless challenges us to speak up against oppression and injustice and give voice to peoples long silenced. God insists that we join in making God’s reign real in this world by proclaiming a new and different way amidst all the need and pain that we see so clearly. And God promises to work in and through normal people like us – not through the halls of power but rather among the “fishermen and fools” of our age – to transform the world into the new way of life that God intends.

Will we accept this challenge? Will we follow in the difficult way of Jesus during this Lent? Will we extend the reach of God’s mercy and grace to those who most need it – to the poor, the lonely, the “victims of heartless human greed,” the wronged – by insisting that God’s word and way will transform everything? Will we be open to the new road made possible by the journey to the cross? Are we willing to number ourselves among the fishermen and fools so that God might use us too as part of the transformation of the world?

May God give us the wisdom and strength to respond to this call, to challenge the things of this world so that all might know the fullness of God’s glory, to set aside all the advantage we have so that we might join in the coming of God’s kingdom, and to journey the self-giving way of the cross with Jesus himself so that we might know the fullness of resurrection life first glimpsed on that Easter morning and that lies ahead for us and all creation through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Taking Up the Cross

March 4, 2012 By Andy James

a sermon on Mark 8:31-38 for the Second Sunday of Lent
preached on March 4, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

The cross is an incredible mark of the faith of the church. In our worship, we see it all around us – on the wall here at the front of the sanctuary, on the table here in the chancel, on the pulpit and lectern, on the bulletin cover, and even normally on top of our steeple! Today’s children’s bulletin even has an activity for counting crosses – in its four pages, there are forty crosses, one for each day of the season of Lent!

When we see a cross in our world today, I suspect that most of us immediately think of Jesus and the Christian faith. But this simple symbol is not quite as universal as we might think. In some parts of the world, the cross is exclusively a Roman Catholic symbol. When I visited the Czech Republic and Hungary several years ago while in seminary, we learned that most Protestant churches there do not use the cross at all because they do not want to be confused with Catholics. This was quite strange for many of us Americans – one member of our group had cross jewelry of every sort and wore it often, and I can only wonder what the locals thought of this Presbyterian seminary student from America who was so Catholic in her attire!

Even so, in our context at least, the cross has become a clear symbol of Christians and Christianity. However, I suspect that most people of Jesus’ time would be quite surprised by the prevalence of this symbol in these days. In Jesus’ own time, the cross was much more a sign of death than new life. Crucifixion was the most severe and cruel form of capital punishment imaginable. To anyone under Roman rule, then, the cross was a symbol of torture and death, something to be avoided as much as possible, and certainly not something you’d wear around your neck every day!

And yet in the eight verses of our reading from the gospel of Mark this morning, Jesus suggests not only that he will face a cross, but that we should, too. These eight verses mark a major shift in Jesus’ emphasis with the disciples over the course of the whole gospel of Mark. This moment comes immediately after Jesus asked the disciples what other people were saying about him and who they said that he was. While Peter responded that Jesus was the Messiah, Jesus ordered them all to keep quiet about it.

But right after this, Jesus began to teach them a little more about what is required of the Messiah. Jesus said that he would need to “undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.” The disciples were not happy with what Jesus said. Just as Peter had enthusiastically affirmed the emerging picture of Jesus as Messiah, he enthusiastically denied that he could face such things, so he pulled Jesus aside and gave him a stern talking-to.

While Peter thought that Jesus, with the stature and presence of a respected teacher and prophet and the one he believed to be the Messiah, could never suffer and die, Jesus insisted that this was the path ahead for him. He made sure that all the disciples could hear his own rebuke of Peter: “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

But this was not enough for Jesus. He wanted everyone who was listening to him to be aware of what he was facing. So he went to the crowd and spoke again to them, insisting that those who wanted to follow him had to deny themselves and take up a cross instead. He made it clear that no one should follow him for personal gain or with expectations of an immediate transformation of this world or a speedy coming of the next. Instead, everyone who follows him should be ready to give up everything they have and get nothing tangible in return. While this may seem to be a difficult, strange, and paradoxical word coming from one named as the Messiah, Jesus insisted that this was nothing to be ashamed of – those who were not happy with these things would find themselves struggling all the more in the days to come.

Taking up the cross is a difficult challenge. We can’t just put on a piece of jewelry or place a beautiful adornment in our sanctuary to receive its benefits, and we want to avoid the suffering and pain that we know, deep down, that it brings. We don’t want to give up the things of this world, and we want to stay in control at all costs. But taking up the cross requires letting go of all those things. We also have some good theological justifications developed over the centuries that give us pause, too, as we consider taking up the cross for ourselves. We say that Christ’s suffering was enough for all of us and that no one should have to endure that kind of suffering anymore. We Protestants intentionally have an empty cross rather than a crucifix to remind us that Jesus’ suffering there was not the end of the story. And we say that there is no reason to keep crucifying Christ over and over again in our actions or practices of faith.

So I think we’re incredibly good at avoiding this command to “take up our cross” for practical, personal, and theological reasons, yet Jesus’ words still ring in our ears: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” Jesus challenges us to somehow balance our conviction that he suffered enough for all of us with his command to take up our cross and follow him, to walk the way of uncertainty, pain, and death, to give up the things of this world for the sake of something beyond ourselves, and to trust that God will not only make something greater of our pain but has already walked that way before us and walks that way alongside us too.

This suffering is quite likely something more than giving up chocolate or cigarettes or Facebook for forty days. It is quite different from the awful things we have seen in the aftermath of tornadoes in our nation in recent days, for these things are not suffering sent by God to test us or punishment doled out for some sin we have committed. And the suffering Jesus calls us to face as we take up our cross is far less than putting ourselves out there to be killed as he did.

Instead, I think this suffering is much more like reorienting our lives toward the way God wants things to be, shifting everything we say and do into a mode of self-giving love, adjusting our hearts to give up everything we have to make room for all that we can still receive, walking our own road to the cross not for the benefits we will find there but because we and all the world will be better for taking that journey.

All this is the challenge of Lent – to somehow find our way through this difficult path, to remember and respond to Jesus’ challenge to deny ourselves and take up the cross and follow him, to sort out what we must give up so that we can take up this new way, and to always keep in mind that the sufferings of these days are not the end of the journey, for there is even greater glory ahead.

May God give us the strength we need to walk this journey together and with Jesus, so that the suffering we share along the way of the cross with one another and with Jesus will bear joyous fruit with the dawn of Easter Day.

Thanks be to God.
Amen.

The Way of Lent

February 26, 2012 By Andy James

a sermon on Mark 1:9-15 and Psalm 25:1-10 for the First Sunday of Lent
preached on February 26, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

If the New York news media is to be believed, all Christians in New York City celebrate Lent because all Christians are Catholics, and all of us are so excited that our archbishop was elevated to cardinal last week! The press coverage of Cardinal Dolan’s new title seemed perfectly timed for the beginning of Lent, really – the archbishop’s return to the city came right in time for Ash Wednesday, so everyone trying to catch a glimpse of him at work in leading worship got to watch the imposition of ashes and all the other strange practices of Ash Wednesday. Suddenly the press had to try to explain these things to a broader audience – while there was surely a significant group of faithful Roman Catholics who understood it all very, very well and a smaller group of Protestants who were familiar with these things, the growing majority knows so very little about matters of religious practice.

I myself found it interesting and a bit instructive, as I grew up in a world where Lent was not celebrated, let alone enforced with the careful guidelines for fasting and abstinence required by the new cardinal. While Christian influences were everywhere and my second-grade public school teacher even led a blessing before we went to lunch, Lent was a very foreign concept in my life of faith. Receiving ashes on Ash Wednesday was not at all part of our tradition – we just had our normal church events on that Wednesday night. Giving up something for this season was not on anyone’s mind in the church where I grew up. And there were even people around me quoting scripture to say that celebrating things like Lent was explicitly forbidden in the New Testament. Now we certainly celebrated Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday, but these days were not cast in the careful light of preparation that is the norm when we think about Lent.

I suspect I don’t have to defend Lent to you all in the way that I might to some people back in Mississippi, but nonetheless I think it is important that we begin this season by revisiting one of the stories that inspires us to take this journey and considering some words that can give particular shape to the things we do in these days. This morning’s readings take us first to the pretty familiar story of Jesus spending forty days in the wilderness after his baptism, where he was tempted by Satan, surrounded by wild beasts, and attended by angels. In Matthew and Luke, two later gospels that incorporate some additional source material beyond the earlier gospel of Mark, this story stretches on for several more verses, with much greater detail about the specific temptations and Jesus’ responses to them. But Mark’s story is so simple, consolidated into just two verses, that we have to add several verses around it to make it a complete reading for today!

Yet Mark still tells us that this was an incredibly important time of formation for Jesus along his journey. After being named as God’s Son, the Beloved, Jesus is led out into the wilderness to be shaped and formed into something even greater than he had been. Only after this experience is he ready to step up and proclaim his own message to the people of Galilee when John the Baptist is forced off the scene:

The time is fulfilled,
and the kingdom of God has come near;
repent, and believe in the good news.

While Mark says so little about what happened in these forty days, it is clear that they are incredibly important to his story. Jesus was shaped and formed and prepared for his ministry of teaching and healing by his time in the wilderness. He was given this time apart from the rest of the world to resist temptation and gain the spiritual insight he needed for the days that followed. And he could not have done everything that he did – the teaching, the healing, the living, the calling, the suffering, the dying – without this time to get ready.

And so the forty days of Lent are inspired by these forty days that Jesus spent in the wilderness, yet I doubt that the point of these days is for us to seek out the exact same kind of temptation that Jesus found along the way! So I find our psalm for today to be very helpful in guiding our own journeys of Lent in these days.

First, this is a season of reorientation, of lifting our lives and hearts and souls to God, of setting aside the temptation to think that we have it all figured out, of moving beyond our shame and uncertainty, of putting our full hope and faith and confidence and trust not in ourselves but in God alone.

Then the psalm reminds us that this is a season of remembrance and transformation, a time to recall God’s mercy and steadfast love. It’s easy to remember the sins of our past and the places where things have gone wrong, yet God’s steadfast love sets that memory aside because of God’s amazing love. For God, the missteps of our past matter far less than the promise of our future. So in these Lenten days, we set aside where we have been and strive to take a new path, not just “giving up” something for forty days but seeking to find and sustain a new way of life for this season and beyond.

Finally, the psalm gives us a guide for our journey during these forty days. It insists that God will show us a path for all of life. It invites us to humility and hope that will give guidance. And it shows that there is a loving and gracious and sure way in these and all days for those who keep God’s covenant and commandments. In this time of reorientation, remembrance, and guidance, the psalm reminds us of God’s promises to transform all of life through this journey of hope, faith, and love.

As I look at these two texts, I see so many words that can describe this journey of Lent for us – temptation, repentance, penitence, remembrance, transformation, reorientation. These are not the easiest words for us to hear, and this is not an easy season. We are not people who like to be challenged to live differently. Even when we want things to change, it is so easy for us to resist what must be done in order to make that change reality. And the promise of reorienting things toward God means that we will have to give up our hold on power and our desire to be in control.

If that is not enough, we know that the journey of these forty days will get harder before it gets easier. The difficult road of Lent will eventually turn toward the darkness of Gethsemane, the pain of Golgotha, and the gloom of the tomb. Yet we also see that there is more ahead on this road than just these things. We walk this road knowing that even with the darkest hours ahead, there is light coming at the end of the journey. Even the gloom of the tomb is transformed by God’s power into the glory of the resurrection.

This can be our story, too. We do not have to obey every Lenten rule perfectly to find this new way. We do not have to suffer and die as Jesus did to know the promise of the resurrection. But we are nonetheless challenged in these forty days just to walk this road with Jesus, trusting that there is something more going on in this season than we can accomplish through giving anything up on our own; looking for signs of transformation and new life as the days lengthen, the winter turns to spring, and new life sprouts up all around us; and deepening our walk of faith as we cast off what gets in the way of us seeing God’s grace at work around us.

So may this Lenten journey be filled with peace, love, and hope, that through our walk in these days we might be prepared for the sorrow and joy that lies ahead for us and that we might be filled with the faith we need for this and every journey we make with one another and with Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Shiny Happy Jesus People

February 19, 2012 By Andy James

a sermon for Transfiguration of the Lord on Mark 9:2-9
preached on February 19, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

What do we say about the transfiguration of Jesus? This is one of those days that is clearly important in our life together as the church, but figuring out the exact reasons for that and meaning of it is not quite so easy.

What do you say about a story that seems so otherworldly, so seemingly unreal? It’s not like we go around climbing mountains and seeing people’s clothes turn dazzling white every day. And visitations from the great ancestors of our past just aren’t part of our experience. If I were choosing stories for the gospels on the basis of what makes sense, I would probably leave this one out – I’d want things to be believable, to be unquestionable and accessible for everyone.

The transfiguration of Jesus has so much speaking against its reality by these standards. There is only a small pool of sympathetic, highly biased witnesses. Supernatural appearances of ancestral figures stand at the center of the story. Strange voices speak out of nowhere. A sudden ending leaves the whole thing hanging. And those who saw it receive stern instructions not to tell anyone what they had seen.

Yet this story is such an integral part of the gospel witness. Three of the four gospels tell this story, and each of them uses it as a pivot point in its narrative, helping to turn our focus from a humble teacher wandering around the villages of Galilee to the clearly marked Son of God willing to risk even his life to show that God’s power is greater than any human designs.

At the core, this is a simple story. Jesus gathers his three most-trusted disciples – three of those fishermen whom he called on that first day as he was walking by the Sea of Galilee – and he takes them with him up the mountain. Atop the mountain, something happened to Jesus. There, he looked entirely different from the man who had hiked up with the disciples. His appearance changed, and “his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them.” Then two others appeared and started talking with Jesus. Somehow, maybe based on the conversation they had with Jesus, the disciples recognized these guests as Moses and Elijah.

It was an incredible experience. The disciples were mesmerized and terrified by it all. Peter clearly didn’t want it to end, so he stupidly suggested a plan to preserve the moment, to build three shrines atop the mountain for the three great leaders so that they could enjoy this time of teaching and learning for all eternity. But even before Jesus could respond to Peter, a voice spoke out of the cloud, just as had happened a few years earlier at Jesus’ baptism: “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” Suddenly Jesus and the disciples were all alone again, and it was time to head back down the mountain. Along the way Jesus instructed them to keep quiet about what they had seen until the time was right.

There are plenty of possible ramifications of this story for Jesus. Biblical scholars have debated the meaning and consequences of this text for centuries. Theologians have suggested that this might be the moment when the divine nature of Jesus started to become clear. And storytellers and literary critics have noted how this transfiguration is a turning point for Jesus in much the same way as the later story of his triumphal entry into Jerusalem transitions us so well into the last week of Jesus’ life.

Yet I think all those impacts of this story are a little too theoretical for us. I for one want to know what this transfiguration business has to do with me. Why should this strange story of a shiny happy Jesus matter to me two thousand years after it theoretically happened? What is the point of following someone who one day suddenly lit up brighter than a Christmas tree? And can we even get anywhere close to this shining Jesus ourselves?

Well, first of all, I think this story helps us to think more clearly about the idea of the mountaintop experience. The human life always seems to have its ups and downs, and one of the great challenges seems to be how to carry what we learn in our highs into our lower moments. Jesus’ brief moment of bright glory on the mountaintop is a good reminder for us that we can be energized by our glimpses of glory. As our last hymn put it so well,

How good, Lord, to be here,
yet we may not remain,
but since you bid us leave the mount,
come with us to the plain.

– Joseph Armitage Robinson, 1888

When we carry the memory and power of our mountaintop moments into our daily lives, we have wisdom and energy to be more faithful and to listen more closely to what God is calling us to be and to do.

Yet the brightness we witness on top of the mountain is also important, too. In the Transfiguration, we get a nearly-complete glimpse of God’s glory as revealed in Jesus Christ. We still see him as a teacher, but we also finally see him exalted and glorified, receiving the honor and appreciation that we know he deserves, getting a little preview of the greater glory that will come on Easter. By the power of this witness to God’s glory, by our glimpse of this shiny happy Jesus, we too can bear a bit of that glory into the world. Like good mirrors that reflect light into more visible brightness, like the orbs of our night sky that shine brightly yet often only cast back the light that they receive, we can be reflections of God’s glory into this world that so desperately needs God’s light.

And so we can and should and must be shiny happy Jesus people because of this light that we witness on the mountaintop. We can embody a new and different way of life and living that points to something beyond ourselves so that others might join us on this journey. We can reflect even a little glimpse of God’s glory into our broken and fearful world so that all might have courage to be the people whom God has called them to be. And we can shine with the wonder of Jesus himself because of this encounter so that we can have the light we need to follow in his path.

So today as we prepare to begin the season of Lent, we can be shiny happy Jesus people. We sing songs of God’s glory and wonder and praise. We rejoice with “alleluias” loud and strong as we prepare to set them aside for the season ahead. We gather at this table, hoping to catch a glimpse of our bright, shining savior meeting us here. And we go forth to continue reflecting the light of Christ that we find in this place into our lives and our world.

May we shine with happiness, peace, joy, hope, and love, today and always, living and walking as the shiny happy Jesus people that we are, unafraid to reflect his glory and new life into every place until he comes again to make all things shine with his glory forever and ever.

Lord, come quickly! Alleluia! Amen.

The Path to Healing

February 12, 2012 By Andy James

a sermon on 2 Kings 5:1-14 for the Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time
preached on February 12, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

There’s been a lot of talk about economics and class in our world lately. The Occupy Wall Street protests struck a nerve among many people last fall as they lifted up the striking inequality between the top 1% and the rest of us. The controversy has only intensified as the presidential campaign continues, where almost all of the candidates make more in a single year than I suspect we do among all of us in this room!

But I’ve also been thinking about class lately as I’ve become a fan of the television series Downton Abbey. This great British drama airing on PBS traces the life of the noble Grantham family and their servants beginning with the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 and continuing through World War I into 1918 and beyond.

While the interactions between the family upstairs and their servants downstairs were very closely regulated in those days, I’m constantly amazed at how those lines are so often – and so realistically – breached on the show. Most of the servants seem to genuinely care about the welfare of the Grantham family in the midst of their joy and turmoil, and the noble Grantham family shows a similar familial love for their servants, of course with a bit of a paternalistic streak, assuming that they do know what is best. The servants keep the family abreast of the latest developments in the personal lives of the household help, and the family even seeks out the advice of the servants sometimes when facing a difficult situation, sometimes trusting the hired help more than their own relatives.

All is certainly not perfect between these two groups. They all know that there is no real equality between them and that the family upstairs is always in charge. Some things such as romance and love are not to be breached under any circumstances. Yet the genuine care and concern they demonstrate for one another is always evident.

This mutual care and concern by those on both sides of class divides is also evident in our reading from 2 Kings this morning. At its core, this is the story of the miraculous healing of the great general Naaman at the hands of the prophet Elisha – yet his healing would not have been possible were it not for a young slave girl.

Like every episode of Downton Abbey, power, prestige, and class are prominent characters in this story of healing. The young slave girl’s presence in Naaman’s house was due solely to the victory of the army of Aram over the house of Israel. The king of Israel was scared out of his wits when the commander of the army that had just defeated his forces showed up on his doorstep asking for healing. And the powerful Naaman felt shunned and ignored when the prophet Elisha would not even come out to see him when he showed up at his doorstep – and he was even more offended when Elisha’s prescription for healing his leprosy was to bathe in the muddy waters of the Jordan River.

Naaman is just not supposed to have to face this kind of thing at all. His power and prestige as commander of the victorious Aramean army would surely imply that he was safe from a disease such as leprosy. And if for some reason he was affected, he could expect only the best and most effective treatments with the greatest respect along the way. But in the end he had an incurable disease, and his best hope for healing was the suggestion of a slave girl.

So when Naaman took action on the girl’s suggestion to seek out the prophet in Samaria, he returned to his natural position and perspective of power. He received the proper letter of reference from his king and made his way to the king of Israel, figuring he would certainly guide him through the proper channels to meet the prophet and be healed. He took loads and loads of gifts to smooth the way to his healing. Even when he was referred beyond the usual halls of power, Naaman still expected to meet with the prophet personally and receive some sort of magical, immediate healing from his disease.

Amazingly, though, all this didn’t matter. Naaman’s healing was not accomplished through the channels of power but only outside of them. The slave girl who suggested the prophet in Samaria spoke up outside the proper limits on her authority to do so. Neither the king of Aram nor the king of Israel had anything to do with Naaman’s eventual healing. The prophet Elisha didn’t follow the proper protocol for receiving a foreign general at all and communicated with the powerful Naaman only through a messenger. And the prescription Elisha gave insisted that Naaman humble himself enough to bathe in the great river of the enemy.

After hearing all this, I have to wonder if Naaman’s healing had anything to do with those strange, muddy waters of the Jordan at all. Did his path to healing go through the halls of power, or did was he healed somewhere along the journey to humility and openness to the other? Did Elisha understand something about the limitations of power, prestige, and dignity that Naaman did not? Was God working to heal Naaman of his disease as much through a journey to a different way of life as through those waters of the Jordan?

I don’t fully understand what God is really up to in these kinds of healing stories, but it sure seems to me that God is trying to say as much here about the attitude to bring to healing as the healing itself. God clearly could care less about working through the proper channels of power than about making healing real and possible for those who submit themselves to a different way of life. God seems to seek a humble and generous attitude toward others as part of the process of transformation and healing. And God makes it clear that everyone – even and especially those whom the world assumes are nothing – has an important and special role to play in making healing and wholeness possible.

In many ways, this is the same message as what emerges in our discussions of class today, in Downton Abbey, Occupy Wall Street, and so many other places. The people in power may not see it, but I think the overall message is pretty clear. Every person has something to contribute to the life of others. Everyone matters, even those whom the world implies have no value and worth. Death and infirmity strike the rich and the poor equally.

While we are in a very different from that of Naaman and his slave girl or even the household and servants at Downton Abbey, Naaman’s story reminds us that we still have more work to do. Even our best efforts at living out equality are fraught with our own prejudice and preference. Our health care system in this country alone shows a strange and sad preference for caring for those who are well off and leaving behind those who cannot advocate for or finance their own care. And too often our efforts to care for those less fortunate emerge out of paternalism or a personal desire to feel good and be useful rather than actually meeting the needs of those we are trying to help.

So Naaman and his slave girl are important reminders for us – not so much of the direct path to healing for the infirmities of our lives but that God’s path to wholeness for all of us involves giving up some of our deepest-held assumptions and recognizing that healing for one of us requires wholeness for all of us. May God show us the path to healing through all the difficulties and challenges of our life together so that we may live in the fullness of life that God intends for us and all people and offer even a little glimpse of that for all the world through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.