SERMON, February 15, 2009

2 Kings 5:1-15; MK 1:40-45

Years ago when I lived in San Diego and I did quite a bit of hospital visiting. I visited people in almost all the hospitals in the city. One day I had occasion to spend sometime in the emergency room at University Hospital. It was filled with all kinds of people—people who were waiting, waiting, waiting. While there were people of all classes there that day, most were poor. At that time that was the hospital that took care of most of the people who had no insurance. I was struck by the fact that almost everyone there waited with patience. The waiting room was packed, the TV was blaring, some folks were reading, but most were just sitting, waiting. I imagine they didn’t have high expectations of speedy service—they just sat there.

The same day I also visited a patient at Scripps Hospital I think it was—at any rate it was new and very nice. Beautifully appointed you might say. This was the hospital in those days where the people went who had great insurance or who didn’t need insurance. As I passed the welcome center I overheard a woman complaining loudly that things were not the way she expected, wanted or deserved. She had the understanding that when her husband came in for his surgery she would be able to be with him the whole time up to the moment of his surgery. And yet she had been asked to leave while he was being prepped for surgery. She was irate and she had no problem letting everyone know. This was a definitely a person entitled to the best. Only the best. And she knew it. These were two different worlds—these two hospitals. Two different worlds.

This wonderful story from the second book of Kings brings these two worlds together—and reminds of the ways of God in those worlds, and in our world for that matter. The story begins in the world of Scripps Hospital where the wealthy and well-insured can be found. It begins with a man of power, a military hero. He’s from Aram--Syria which already lets us know he’s in a position of power compared to Israel. Syria was sworn enemy of Israel and definitely a great power to be reckoned with. Naaman wasn’t just any general, but a victorious one who had special favor with his king. There was only one problem: he had leprosy. This was a big problem, because leprosy would not only cause him physical suffering, but it would result in Naaman’s being isolated and left on the outskirts of his own society. We can only imagine his grief and perhaps frantic effort to find someone who could heal him. Money and connections were no problem: this is a man in the center of power, with plenty of financial resources. The problem was to find someone at Scripps who could actually heal a leper.

The first word of hope in the story comes from an unlikely source: a young woman, not named at all—and Israelite who was a servant to Naaman’s wife. Not just any servant, she’d been captured in the war and taken as booty. Young, female, captive—no one really that you would notice. But she has a memory—that’s of critical importance and she dares to speak out. Imagine that! Her memory gives her hope—she has hope for the man who captured her. What an amazing thing. “If only,” she says. . . if only… that’s a key phrase in the story I think. Because it’s the phrase that brings with it the unimaginable possibility. “If only my lord were with the prophet in Samaria. He would cure him of his leprosy.”

The word of hope, of impossible possibility, from the least powerful person—the most alien, the most un-noteworthy of persons: the young woman slave. And it’s hard to imagine this word of hope. It’s like telling some big wig from Washington DC that he’ll be cured by a shaman in the Amazon basin somewhere.I don’t know: and I don’t mean to put anyone down from the Amazon basin—but I’m trying to get at the shocking nature of this possibility from Naaman’s point of view. The fact that he listens at all gives us some indication of how desperate he was. How hopeless he had become perhaps with conventional medicine in his own country.

He goes to the King—to whom else would he turn? He’s a man of power, he turns to power. And, to whom does the King go? Another King of course—the king of Israel. The powerful ruler of Samaria. This is so business as usual—this series of transactions. The powerful deal with the powerful. And they take money and gifts because this is bound to cost something, right? It’s about an economic transaction.

The King of Israel most likely judges this whole thing to be a trick. Some new way the King of Syria has devised to do him in. Asked him to do something he knows he can’t do—to have an excuse to march in and take over his land. Something like that—that’s how kings’ think. What a great line though, ”Am I God?” he cries out, “to give life or death?” Of course if truth be known—most kings know that they can give death for sure. They specialize in that kind of power. death-dealing. But healing a leper?The King knows he’s out of his league. No wonder he tears his clothes to shreds. He’s very anxious this guy.

Enter our hero: Elisha. From the wings I might add. From the edges, the outskirts. Not from Walter Reed Medical Center-- this one. He’s way out there somewhere—like maybe Monte Rio or some such place. He affirms the King in his wisdom, and chastises him from destroying his clothes. “Send him to me,” he says, “so he will know there is a prophet in Israel.”

And Naaman pulls up in Monte Rio with all his chariots and his loads of money and gifts, and Elisha doesn’t even go to the door to see him. He just sends Naaman his instructions via a clerk perhaps. “Go wash 7 times in the Jordan.” Anyone who has ever seen the Jordan will tell you it’s hard to imagine immersing yourself in it. It’s not that big or deep; it’s kind of a nothing river, from what I’ve heard. Naaman is a man whose afraid, he’s desperate, but he’s also got his expectations, and his pride. He’s got his sense of entitlement—which has already no doubt been a bit eroded just in the journey to this nowhere place and being sent on further into nothingness by a second rate king. This drives him nuts. He’s like the woman at Scripps hospital. He objects. “Do you know who I am?” he’s thinking.

Once again the word of hope comes from an unexpected source. His servants. He’s in a rage, but they dare to approach him and remind him that if the prophet had asked something challenging of him, he would have done it. This is easy—try it.

Just imagine this. The big name general in a rage, his medals no doubt flapping in the breezes as he swings around and heads toward the Jordan. Try to picture him, stripping down to his skivvies, and going under the water not once or twice but seven times. Obedient, humiliated, powerless to heal himself, taking suggestions from servants and slaves: he rises up from the water and his flesh is restored like that of a young boy! In the Hebrew you can’t help but notice that in his healing he’s become just like the young girl. He’s a young boy. He is clean. He is ready to be restored to his community. He shouts out, perhaps to his own surprise: ”Now I know there is no God on all the earth except in Israel.”

Like all the healing stories in the gospels, this one too points beyond itself to God. Always to God.

Whatever else this great story is about, it’s about the way that faith is tied up with a stripping bare—with a humbling. With a loss of pride. With the coming up against the limits of our own capacity to take care of everything. Naaman finally knows that he cannot heal himself. He cannot even dictate the terms of his healing. He becomes maybe like a child even before he rises up from the waters of the Jordan. He does what he is told. Stripped of his power, his sense of entitlement, his desserts: he is opened to the radical healing power of God. And that power is not in the control of the powers-that-be. It is not something that can be bought and sold. Elisha refused all his offers of payment. It is not even necessarily found in the center of things. Rather it comes from the edges.

And thanks be to those who remember, like the young woman. Who remember the ways of God. Who carry the gospel you might say and dare to proclaim it. Who know that God’s mercy is even for the enemy—her captor. “If only.” May she remind us all of our own call to remember, remember and speak the “if onlys” so longed for in our day.

We are the people of the God of “if only”—the impossible possibility, found so often in the unlikeliest of places. Surprising. Boundaryless. Ridiculous even. The God of new life when all the entitlement and all the efforts of the powers-that-be come to nothing. When our efforts to make it happen our way come to their end there is always the God whose power is all about healing and restoration and hope. Always.