Sermon - Not As Expected

Preached on July 7, 2013 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC.

Scripture: 2 Kings 5:1-14

Naaman, commander of the army of the king of Aram, was a great man and in high favor with his master, because by him the Lord had given victory to Aram. The man, though a mighty warrior, suffered from leprosy. Now the Arameans on one of their raids had taken a young girl captive from the land of Israel, and she served Naaman’s wife. She said to her mistress, “If only my lord were with the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy.” So Naaman went in and told his lord just what the girl from the land of Israel had said. And the king of Aram said, “Go then, and I will send along a letter to the king of Israel.” He went, taking with him ten talents of silver, six thousand shekels of gold, and ten sets of garments. He brought the letter to the king of Israel, which read, “When this letter reaches you, know that I have sent to you my servant Naaman, that you may cure him of his leprosy.” When the king of Israel read the letter, he tore his clothes and said, “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.” But when Elisha the man of God heard that the king of Israel had torn his clothes, he sent a message to the king, “Why have you torn your clothes? Let him come to me, that he may learn that there is a prophet in Israel.”

So Naaman came with his horses and chariots, and halted at the entrance of Elisha’s house. Elisha sent a messenger to him, saying, “Go, wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh shall be restored and you shall be clean.” But Naaman became angry and went away, saying, “I thought that for me he would surely come out, and stand and call on the name of the Lord his God, and would wave his hand over the spot, and cure the leprosy! Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? Could I not wash in them, and be clean?” He turned and went away in a rage. But his servants approached and said to 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’?”So he went down and immersed himself seven times in the Jordan, according to the word of the man of God; his flesh was restored like the flesh of a young boy, and he was clean.

Sermon

In 2006, Smith Magazine invited people to a creative challenge with the question: “can you tell your life story in six words?”  Since then, they have collected thousands of these six-word memoirs, which tend to be little clues about a person’s life. 

“Made a mess. Cleaned it up.” Reads one.

From a Journalist: “I asked. They answered. I wrote.”

From a veteran: “Two tours, no injuries, thank God.”

One of my favorites, from a 13 year old: “Who says weird isn't a compliment?"

One of the best entries, which became the title of a whole book of memoirs, is this one: Not Quite What I Was Planning. Could that be the story of your life?  My guess is that it applies to a lot of us.  Not Quite What I Was Planning.

When we think back on the lives of our ancestors, we know that life was never what they planned, never what they expected. Our lives are not what we planned, and not as expected, especially when God is at work. If the Bible had a subtitle, I think it should be just that: The Bible: Not Quite What I Was Expecting.

Take today’s story from 2 Kings about Elisha the prophet healing the foreign army general called Naaman. We heard the way the healing went, but let’s step back and imagine how Naaman expected it to go. Naaman is the celebrated general of the army of Aram. He’s a war hero, a respected man in his community, with a nice home and diversified investments. Everything is going well, except that he has this terrible skin disease: leprosy.

What he expects is that the best healers of Aram will be brought to treat him in a first rate medical center. What he gets instead is advice from an Israelite slavegirl that they captured during their recent victory who now serves his wife. Advice from a foreign girl about seeing the prophet in Israel? Why would such a girl know about this, and why would a captured slave show unprompted kindness to her captor? Long before the healing, God is at work in ways we didn’t expect.

I’ve been following the news of Nelson Mandela’s illness with thanksgiving for his great life and sadness as it nears an end. Mandela was instrumental in ending the great injustices of apartheid in South Africa, and we’ve come to take for granted that apartheid ended without a violent overthrow, but actually that was unexpected. To think that a persecuted majority would finally take power without returning violence to the minority who had hurt and killed their friends and family for years was unthinkable. But Nelson Mandela, during his years in a prison cell as a political prisoner, decided to be just and loving toward his captors. Without prompting, he sought a place for his captors and for their culture in the new South Africa. God works, not as expected, but through the lives of prisoners and slaves, to heal the world.

Naaman hears about the prophet in Israel from the slave girl, and he expects that if anyone is deserving of a healing, it is him. He gets a letter of reference from the King of Aram to the King of Israel to introduce him and request his healing: a kingly favor. And that would probably be enough, but Naaman also brings a caravan of riches to pay for his healing: silver, gold, and rich garments, carried by horses and chariots and tractor trailers. He’s like the oil tycoon taking a limo to New York City’s fifth Avenue, or to shop in Beverly Hills. He’s like the stereotype of the ugly American traveler, who goes to other countries and expects to just throw around his visa and mastercard, to get what he wants (in English!) because he’s the customer and the customer is always… spared from having to understand local customs or having to be polite.  That’s Naaman: the ugly Aramian tourist.

But it does not go as expected. The King of Israel doesn’t know what to do with this letter, thinks maybe the King of Aram is playing him. “Am I God, to give death or life?” he shouts. Nothing is going well for Naaman, until the the prophet Elisha hears about the request, and sends word for Naaman to come see him, so that he may know that there is a prophet in Israel. Naaman backs the caravan out of the palace and heads for Elisha.  It’s been a long journey, but finally he knows what to expect. Once he reaches the house, the great prophet will come out to see him, or will invite him into a sacred space, and there will be a mutual acknowledgment, a ceremonial ritual with the waving of hands over his skin, and at the end Elisha will be richer and Naaman will be healed.

Once again, things go not as expected. Elisha doesn’t even come out, but sends a message for Naaman to wash seven times in the Jordan river. “What? No personal visit? No ceremony? Just washing in the Jordan? I could have done that at home, our rivers in Syria are way better!”

Can we confess that we sometimes think about religion in this way? Don’t we sometimes, at least once in a while, think that religion should be a validation of us, the good religious people? Do we, perhaps, expect ceremonial recognition instead of the challenge to go and do something new? I wonder how often we miss God at work in the world because we expected it to be more about us, more grand and ceremonial, more showy and obvious? How often does the reign of God come near to us in a way that we do not receive because it arrives not as expected?

Again, it is the servants who intervene. They know how to talk to Naaman, and they convince him to go ahead and do what the prophet has asked him to do. He washes seven times in the Jordan River, and he is healed. But he isn’t healed because he had riches to pay, or because he had a letter from the king, or because he even knew what to ask for. His healing, it should be clear, is entirely due to the grace of God: the grace of God that moves in our lives without regard for our ability to pay, our stature in the world, or even our understanding; the grace of God that moves through the most unlikely people, the unnamed servants who do what kings and riches cannot accomplish.

And that may be the most unexpected part of all: that God works to heal the world through the least likely candidates.  The reverend Frederick Buechner writes about the unlikeliness of the disciples to carry on the healing work of God.

“They've had a pretty bad press over the centuries, and by and large they seem to have deserved it,” Buechner writes. “On the night of the arrest, for instance, not one of them apparently so much as raised a finger to defend their friend except Peter, who cut the ear off one of the high priest's slaves with his sword, which can hardly have made matters anything but worse and might have led to worse still if Jesus hadn't told him in effect to cool it, adding that those who live by the sword usually end up dying by the sword, which is a point so close to the heart of his message in general that you'd think they'd have gotten it by then.

“But of course the other reason for their bad press is that they never seem to have gotten any of his points very well, or if and when they did get them, never seem to have lived by them very well, which makes them people very much like you…and…me.  That is to say, they were human beings. Jesus made his church out of human beings with more or less the same mixture in them of cowardice and guts, of intelligence and stupidity, of selfishness and generosity, of openness of heart and sheer cussedness as you would be apt to find in any of us. The reason he made his church out of human beings is that human beings were all there was to make it out of. In fact, as far as I know, human beings are all there is to make it out of still. It's a point worth remembering.”   (The Clown in the Belfry, pages 150-151)

If your life has turned out different than you planned, and I suspect that it has, it may be that God is finding a way to bring you healing, just maybe not the kind of healing you expected.  And it may be that God is finding a way to work in your life for the healing of others, not because you are the most qualified, or most knowledgeable, or most esteemed, but because God tends to work the sort of people that you are.