Grace Presbyterian Church
July 3, 2022, Pentecost 4C
Do the Easy Thing
We were introduced to Elisha last week, as he doggedly held on to Elijah until the very last, taking up Elijah’s prophetic mantle as well as his clothing mantle in the process. As we come to him this week he has been in that role for a while now, and aside from that angry cursing at a group of young boys who taunted him over his baldness, his prophetic term has been rather calmer than his predecessor’s. He has his quirks, to be sure; when a trio of kings came to him for an oracle in 2 Kings 3, he refused to speak until a musician was provided to play – perhaps making Elisha the first beat-poet prophet. (That scripture reading tells us that once that musician began to play, "the power of the Lord came on him." Maybe some of us preachers today ought to give that a try.)
In today’s reading from 2 Kings, Elisha remains almost a background character, only appearing in person at its close but deeply involved in events nonetheless. While a powerful army commander and multiple kings are involved in the story - people who expect to be important - some of the biggest roles in the story are played by people who are anonymous to us, utterly insignificant in the social strata of the time; the servants of the general Naaman and his wife.
Take the young servant girl who served Naaman’s wife, for instance. She had apparently been taken captive from her home in Israel, presumably during one of many skirmishes between Israel and Aram. One might guess that she was fully homesick for the land of her birth. In this servant role she would have been well aware both of Naaman’s military prowess and of the skin condition that threatened his stature, no matter how successful he was in the field. It would have been easy for her to say nothing. It would also have been easy for her to rejoice in Naaman’s potential downfall (quietly, to be sure; no point in chancing punishment); after all, he had defeated her homeland. How the mighty hath fallen and all that, you know.
Is it possible that this servant girl remembered her first calling? Such gloating, or even simple refusal to offer help in that time of suffering, simply was not reconcilable with what she knew of Israel’s God. Yahweh was a God who heals, and she remembered the prophet of that God in her homeland who healed others. With all of this in mind, she spoke up to her mistress, telling her about that prophet in the region of Samaria, which set in motion the events of today’s story. To her, that was the right thing and the easy thing to do.
Elisha himself also shows us what it is to remember whose we are. Like any good prophet, Elisha has had a testy relationship with the monarchy so far, apparently getting along better with Jehoshaphat, then the king of Judah, than with the ruler in his own land of Israel. Nonetheless, Elisha reached out to Israel’s king at a moment when that king was apparently forgetting whose he was. By his intervention, Elisha helps avert a potential disaster between Israel and Aram, and incidentally reminds that king that there is indeed a prophet of the one true God in the land (Israel's king Jehoram was an idol-worshiper like his father Ahab). Later in the story Elisha will also demonstrate whose he really is as well, refusing Naaman’s very generous offers of reward for his healing.
For Naaman, though, first he has to learn whose he is, which goes against everything he has been taught to believe. He was a man of power and accustomed to wielding authority over others even as he also served his king. The humiliating spectre of his disease threatened that. Being so desperate as to take the advice that a foreign servant girl gave to his wife was bad enough, but to get shuffled off from the king to some prophet out in the Samarian backwoods, only to be handled by some messenger boy was too much. I am the general of a great military power, he must have thought. Who are these people, these mere Israelites, these nobodies, to treat me this way? He might well have started thinking about how to bring these insolent people down once and for all.
Fortunately, more of those anonymous servants are there to save the day, persuading Naaman that it only made sense do the extremely simple thing that the prophet asked of him. Finally he takes his Jordan River bath and is “over-healed”, his skin being made like that of a young boy.
It seems that a lot of people overlook an important point in this story: Naaman converts! He declares his profession of faith in verse 15 – “there is no God in all the earth except in Israel.” He’s still a little confused about some things, not realizing that that same God would be with him even in Aram and wanting to take along some Israelite dirt, but it’s a start. After Elisha rebuffs his attempts to pay, Naaman confesses his dilemma; his job required him to support his master, who still worshiped that foreign non-god, even physically in that act of idol-worship. He seeks pardon of Yahweh through Elisha, who sends him on his way in peace. Whatever else he may have had to learn, Naaman had picked up one important thing: he knew whose he was, he knew the Lord who held not only his healing but his very life in his hands, and that this Lord would still be whose he was, first and foremost.
But let's not overlook this central point in the story, and just how much Naaman's pride almost undid everything. Look again at Naaman's ranting after Elisha has first given him the instruction on how to be healed. First, this one:
"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?
Naaman was expecting a big production number, something of a spectacle to be made over a Very Important Person like himself. It's not hard to imagine that Elisha's predecessor Elijah might have given exactly that kind of spectacle if he had deigned to intervene at all. But Elisha doesn't even leave the house; he sends these instructions via messenger - another servant, in other words. How in the world could a general who could crush Israel if he so chose be expected to take instruction from a mere servant?
Then there was this bit of ranting:
"Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters in Israel? Could I not wash in them, and be clean?"
Here's where his Aramean nationalism is showing. Why do I have to dunk myself in this podunk river when there are great and mighty rivers back home I could immerse myself in? Who does this jerk think he is, anyway? Fortunately those servants (we have no idea if they were Aramean or were captured from some other foreign nation) talked some sense into Naaman, and he finally went to the river and obeyed the instructions he had been given.
It's worth noting that something like a kind of nationalism attaches to our gospel reading from Luke when Jesus recounts this event in his first visit to his hometown after starting his public ministry. All he has to do is mention this healing, along with Elijah's help to a widow in Sidon during a famine, and the crowd literally tries to throw him off a cliff. Elisha's intervention here might have gotten Israel out of another battle with Aram (roughly equivalent to Syria today), but it probably didn't win him a lot of fans in Israel.
Anyway, not only was Naaman healed by the time his seventh dip was done, but he was even over-healed; his flesh was cleaned "like the flesh of a young boy" which we can safely assume Naaman was not. It's enough to cut through all the pride and bluster and bring Naaman to a completely different understanding of ... well, of everything. He makes haste to return to the prophet and deliver that remarkable confession noted above. All of this comes about because a man who was looking for some great thing to do was finally talked into doing the easy thing he was given to do.
Do we fall into this trap sometimes? Does the church get obsessed with doing some big public spectacle of a thing to the detriment of carrying out the basic work God has given the church to do?
One of the initiatives of the Presbyterian Church (USA), also taken up by the St. Augustine Presbytery of which we are a part, is the Matthew 25 Initiative, taking its inspiration from the well-known parable at the end of that chapter known as the "parable of the sheep and the goats." The three focus points developed from that scripture for this initiative are:
· Building congregational vitality.
· Dismantling structural racism.
· Eradicating systemic poverty.
That sounds rather intimidating, to be sure; but go back to the source and look at those things Jesus talks about in Matthew 25:
"I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me."
How much of that do we already do? Not all of it, but a good bit.
There will be times when the church, or maybe some of us as individuals, are called upon to do harder things. But the first thing is to do the basic, easy things that God has set before us, some of which we do almost by reflex here.
Sometimes the hardest thing is to do the easy thing. Naaman almost ruined everything by being unwilling to go dunk himself in a river. Let us never get so caught up in anything that would distract us so that we fail to do the most basic things God has set before us.
For the obedience to do the easy thing, Thanks be to God. Amen.
Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #298, Lord, You Give the Great Commission; #312, Take Us As We Are, O God; #719, Come, Labor On
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