Sermon for the Episcopal Church of St John the Baptist, Capitola,

given by Rev. Eliza Linley/July 8, 2007

  The Episcopal Church of Saint John the Baptist welcomes all to worship God and to share

Christ's love in the world.  We are a parish family committed to provide liturgy, Bible study, music, counseling, and Christian education for children, youth, and adults, and to equip all our members for life and for service to other

Naaman, conquering general of a mighty nation, hero of the war that subjugated Israel to the Arameans, is himself being conquered by disease. He has a communicable illness that is eating him up, bit by bit. It isolates him and it will kill him, and there seems to be no cure. But there is a slave girl in his household, one of the spoils of war he brought home from Israel, who says, “too bad he can’t visit the prophet we have at home who could cure that illness.” Naaman, desperate as only those who know they are dying can be, goes, not to the Israeli prophet, but to his own commander-in-chief. King Aram promises to send a letter, again, not to the prophet, but to the vanquished king of Israel, asking for the prophet’s help. Naaman takes a delegation to Israel, laden with gifts – gold, silver, precious garments, for the king, who presumably has power to do something. The king freaks out. He can’t cure leprosy, either. He knows it’s incurable. He thinks Aram is trying to pick a fight with him – having conquered his country, that Aram will now grind them utterly into subjection and poverty. 

Elisha, the prophet in question, hears about all this. He sends word to the king to send Naaman along to him. Naaman arrives, but Elisha does not even come out of his house to meet him. Rather, he sends a messenger who tells Naaman to wash 7 times in the Jordan and be healed. Naaman is appalled. He has come all this way and this two-bit Samarian fortune-teller won’t even come out to meet him. He was expecting at least a laying-on of hands, some one-on-one prayer...wash in the Jordan! They have better rivers back home in Aramea that he could have washed in for all the good it will do. Why did he have to come all this way to swim in their muddy old conquered river? His servants, however, point out that if he had been assigned something really difficult, this can-do general would have been the first to try it. Just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it can’t work. He does what he is told, and goes home healed. 

How difficult it must have been for him for him to travel so far outside of his comfort zone! Generals, I would imagine, are apt to be control freaks. It’s part of what they get paid for. He had to be willing to sacrifice his status, his national pride, his ego in order to save his life. And where does help come from? First of all, from one of the most marginal of society – a slave of a conquered nation, an unwilling immigrant working in his own household. And a girl, at that! Think of the Latina household worker without a green card suggesting that her employer’s husband go see a shaman in the highlands of Guatemala to cure his skin disease. Not very likely. And then that strange prophet, Elisha, who will help him, but will not meet his expectations; will turn them upside down, will send him where he does not want to go in order to be healed. 

I think of Naaman’s leprosy in this story as a metaphor for a sickness of the soul. If it were translated into our own society, Naaman might be suffering from an addiction to being the mightiest general in the most powerful nation on earth. He might be soul-weary with the constant need to defend a superpower. In our own lives, we might say that our true nature is being eaten away by an addiction to things, by our need to acquire more stuff in order to be justified. Waking from our own post-Independence Day stupor, it is easy to forget that the greatest blessings of this country are not about material prosperity but about freedom for all. Like Hansen’s disease, this metaphoric illness causes blindness, when we cannot see those who are different from us, when our eyes are closed to possibilities that threaten our conventional sense of self-worth. The nature of Elisha’s prescription for healing is to unmask the false self. That sevenfold washing in the Jordan could, indeed, have been any river – God’s healing power is effective wherever and whenever the detritus of falsehood is washed away. And it took some doing for Naaman to arrive at THAT place.

“God is not mocked”, says St. Paul, “for you reap whatever you sow.” In other words, you may be able to fool yourself, you may be able to fool others, but you really can’t fool God. And the false front we try so hard to keep in place, are even blind to ourselves, will be our undoing. Of course, there will be no moment in our lives when we are finally free from the urge to clothe ourselves in illusion. Look at the disciples! They were committed and faithful. They were also, much of the time, fearful, hobbled by doubt, and just plain wrong. Yet Jesus, not having anyone better, sends them out with power to heal the sick, cast out demons, proclaim the nearness of God’s Kingdom of truth. Twelve disciples – that’s one for each of the tribes of Israel. In the portion of Luke we read this morning, that mandate has been expanded to 70, one for each of the nations of the known world -  messengers of truth, of healing, of access to a transformed life. The expansion of the mission is significant for us. Healing may come from God, but it’s mediated through people. Like the slave in Naaman’s household, it may come from a quarter where we least expect it, from someone who is quite different from ourselves. This is as true for societies as it is for individuals. And it means that we, too, may be messengers of healing for someone we never considered. 

In his pioneering role as chair of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Desmond Tutu used the concept of “ubuntu”. It’s a description of fullness of personhood in which you or I cannot truly be ourselves in the deepest sense unless all in our community, our society, share the same freedom to be who we truly are. We have, therefore, an obligation to do what we can to bring everyone to that same threshold of limitless possibility. And that is what the mission of the 70 disciples, of all of us, is most truly about. Note that the 70 are not sent out alone, but in pairs. Only God can do transforming work, but we can’t even be messengers of transformation alone. What a strange concept for those of us who have been raised on the myth of self-sufficiency! Note also that everyone who is sent is sent somewhere else, away from our comfort zone, our home turf. And when we reach that place, we, too, become susceptible to the same miracle of transformation. 

We who are blessed to live in a nation where we really can change our government tend to take this for granted. But think what it must have been like for a black person to vote for the first time in South Africa. Tutu describes voting day in 1994, what it felt like, waiting for hours at the polling places, how people danced in the streets after their votes were cast. He describes a woman who had spent her whole life working in someone else’s household to feed her family, shoulders slumped, eyes downcast, going into the voting booth. She comes out a different person, looking others straight in the eye, shoulders back, standing up straight. She is transformed into a new sense of personhood. Then he describes a white person going into the voting booth, eyes downcast, shoulders slumped with the weight of guilt for years of apartheid and all its evils. She, too, emerges transformed, having been relieved in this one moment of the huge burden of so many years of being among the oppressors. When asked to describe life in South Africa post-apartheid, he said, “How do you tell a blind man that this is a red rose? How do you tell someone who is deaf that I am listening to a Beethoven symphony? How do you tell someone who has never been unfree what it means to be free?”

The seventy disciples are called to travel light. In order to do that, one must cast off all that heavy weight. The corporate name of the Episcopal Church is the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society - what a mouthful! But it leaves no doubt that we are called to cut loose the ballast, to leave the place of our psychic comfort, to look for prophecy in unexpected places: we are road warriors who, nonetheless, have found a kingdom in the Reign of God. The mission implies the knowledge that we’re all in this together, that no one is expendable, that each works for the good of all. And that we experience our deepest, most authentic freedom when we can say, “The Kingdom of God has come near to you.”