Sermon: Do the Easy Thing

First Presbyterian Church

July 6, 2025, Pentecost 4C

2 Kings 5:1-19a; Luke 4:21-30

 

Do the Easy Thing

 

The prophet Elisha doesn't get nearly the acclaim that goes to his prophetic predecessor Elijah, but he does have his moments. 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 been taken captive from her home in Israel, presumably during one of many skirmishes between Israel and Aram. Probably she was homesick for the land of her birth. In her servant role she would have been aware both of Naaman’s military prowess and of the skin condition that threatened his stature, no matter his successful in the field. It would have been easy for her to rejoice in Naaman’s potential downfall; after all, he might even be the reason she had been taken from home. 

Is it possible that this servant girl remembered her first calling? Maybe 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 and setting in motion the events of today’s story. To her, it 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 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 talked some sense into Naaman, and he went to the river and obeyed the instructions he had been given.

It's worth noting that a kind of nationalism attaches to our gospel reading from Luke. Jesus tells this story in his first visit to his hometown during his public ministry. All he has to do is mention this healing, along with Elijah's help to a widow in Sidon, 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, but it won him no 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 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. All 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 work God gives the church to do? 

One of the initiatives of the Presbyterian Church (USA) 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, 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): #331, God of the Ages, Whose Almighty Hand; #442, Just As I Am, Without One Plea; #700, I'm Gonna Live So God Can Use Me

 

Sermon: Remember Whose You Are First

Grace Presbyterian Church

July 3, 2016, Pentecost 7C

2 Kings 5:1-19a; Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

Remember Whose You Are First

One thing you are taught in your preaching classes at seminary is that an effective sermon focuses on one scriptural passage. “Passage” here refers to a block of scripture that is “complete” in some way – it tells a full story or some block of it, contains a unit of teaching that is coherent and well-rounded, or somehow can be understood as a whole. That’s not how preachers have always been taught; at one time the emphasis seems to have been on preaching a single verse of scripture, a process I find impossible to imagine. Anyway, the idea is that you pick one such unit of scripture (a “pericope” if you want to know the fancy seminary word) and concentrate on it in your sermon. Normally that’s what I do in a sermon. While I might briefly refer to other scriptures as a way of supporting or drawing a contrast to the principal reading, there is one primary scripture that is the focus of the sermon.

I can’t do this week, though. Two passages are demanding my attention, and neither one will give way to the other. And yet, oddly enough, both of these readings are telling me the same 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 in the process. As we come to him this week he has been in that role for a while now, and aside from one 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; 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.

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, some of the most important roles in the story are played by people who are anonymous to us, and of least significance 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 military battles between Israel and Aram. 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 have been easy for her to rejoice in Naaman’s potential downfall; after all, he had led an army that defeated her homeland. How the mighty hath fallen and all that, you know.

But this servant girl remembered who she was, or whose she was. 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 in her homeland who healed others. Because of whose she was, 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.

Elisha himself also shows us what it is to remember whose we are. By reaching out to Israel’s king at a moment when that king was apparently forgetting whose he was, 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. 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. 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 all that. Being brought so low as to take the advice of a foreign servant girl was bad enough, but to get shuffled off from the king to some prophet out in the backwoods, only to be handled by some messenger boy was almost too much. Fortunately, more of those anonymous servants appear on the scene to save the day, persuading Naaman that it only made sense do the 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, and 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.

The reading from the gospel of Luke for today seems different on its face, but that same idea runs through this story like a fierce undertow out at the beach.  Jesus is commissioning seventy of his followers to go out into the towns and cities that were ahead on his own itinerary. Luke doesn’t go into much detail about exactly what Jesus is commissioning these seventy to do, but we get little snippets – extend peace to the houses they enter; be good guests, eating what they’re provided even if it’s not kosher; cure the sick; proclaim the nearness of the kingdom of God; if a town doesn’t receive you, move on – but not before you proclaim that the kingdom of God is near.

The challenging part, though, is the way Jesus sends them out. Jesus himself describes it as sending them out “like lambs into the midst of wolves.” No bag, no sandals, no provisions of any sort. They are being sent out vulnerable and at the mercy of others. They are totally reliant on the goodwill of those to whom they are sent.

So they are sent, and it seems that things go well. The seventy are excitedly reporting that “even the demons submitted to us!” and Jesus is celebrating right with them.

Note that ending, though:

Nevertheless, do not rejoice at this, that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.

Remember whose you are first.

It isn’t about doing end-zone dances over fallen demons. It isn’t about tossing power around as though you’re drunk with it. It isn’t even about shaking the dust off your feet and telling a town where to go if they don’t receive your message.

Remember whose you are first.

It isn’t about being Warriors for Christ or members of the Power Team, or any of the ways Christians have tended to want to gloat over the centuries. It isn’t about anything that we do, in the end. It is, for the servant girl or Elisha or Naaman or the seventy, about whose we are first.

We claim a lot of different identities. We identify ourselves by our careers or vocations, by membership in this club or that group, by our hobbies or activities, our circle of friends, by how we vote or what music we listen to or goodness knows how many different ways. There’s nothing wrong with these things, but remember whose you are first.

You are God’s own. You are called and commissioned and sent out by Jesus. Your name is written in heaven. You are a servant of God before you are anybody else’s servant.

Remember whose you are first.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Hymns:

#331                  God of the Ages, Whose Almighty Hand

#8                      Eternal Father, Strong to Save

#500                  Be Known to Us In Breaking Bread

#719                  Come, Labor On

Cure of Naaman in the River Jordan, 1150 (British Museum collection)

Sermon: Don't Blink

Grace Presbyterian Church

June 26, 2016, Pentecost 6C

2 Kings 2:1-14; Luke 9:51-62

 Don’t Blink

When last we left Elijah, the prophet had just been rebuked (mildly, to say the least) by the Lord for his pronounced myopia and “I alone am left” whine, not least by being ordered by God to go anoint his successor, a prophet named Elisha. Whether enthusiastically or not (after all, we don’t know if Elijah even knew Elisha at this point), Elijah at least obeyed that command, upon which Elisha left his farm and family (slaughtering twenty-four oxen on his way out, and giving the meat as a feast for the locals) to follow Elijah. Elijah did have a couple more prophetic encounters left in him, including his dramatic condemnation of King Ahab over his theft of the vineyard of a neighbor and one more destructive conflict with Ahab’s successor, Ahaziah. By the time we get to today’s reading, though, Elijah’s time is up, and Elisha seems to know it.

Our narrator certainly knows it, and is almost blasé about it at the beginning of our reading. How often do you see a sentence that begins “Now when the Lord was about to take Elijah up to heaven by a whirlwind” and continues in blasé fashion about Elijah and Elisha’s journey? I suppose after all the over-the-top things that have happened in Elijah’s term on earth, one more crazy thing doesn’t seem like much, but we are talking about a man who is going to be gathered up by a chariot of fire and whisked away. That seems worth a little bit of excitement. At any rate, it seems like everybody, including Elisha, knows that something extraordinary is about to happen.

And if he didn’t know it, there were plenty of others along the way to clue him in on the subject. As they travel, they encounter companies of prophets, and in each case members of those prophet groups take Elisha aside and say “you know he’s going away, don’t you?” and each time Elisha responds “yeah, yeah, I know, just hush” and determinedly plugs along with Elijah, even though Elijah keeps trying to put him off as well.

Remember, Elisha hasn’t really been the prophet yet. He has so far been functioning like an understudy, or perhaps like an Assistant Prophet of Yahwistic Theology still awaiting tenure. Even though God specifically commanded Elijah to go anoint Elisha as his successor, it’s not even clear that Elisha was a prophet at all before Elijah showed up and ordained him, so to speak. At the end of 1 Kings 19, when Elijah comes to anoint him, Elisha was plowing in the fields (his parents’ fields, evidently) with twelve yoke of oxen. And before following Elijah, Elisha wants to return home to say goodbye to mom and dad and to slaugher those oxen for a great feast. Doesn’t sound much like a prophet in the making, and his name doesn’t appear again in the Kings narrative until today’s reading, and yet here Elisha is, doggedly following his prophetic mentor to the last.

And this most likely wasn’t an easy life for which he was signing up. You might remember the gospel reading for today, in which Jesus warns those who say they want to follow him. “Nowhere to lay his head.” For that matter, no turning back – sounds like Jesus would have been less inclined to indulge Elisha’s wish to say goodbye to his parents and throw that ox barbecue. This is not a glamorous life. We have elevated these characters from the Bible to the status of heroes, but that wasn’t necessarily how they experienced life. It wasn’t easy, particularly when you had an angry king and queen hounding you as did Elijah. But, for all that, Elisha was still there, still following Elijah to the end.

So, let’s follow what he sees.

With some of those other prophets following along, Elijah and Elisha come to the Jordan River. Ii isn’t one of the Great Rivers of the World, but it’s not small. One doesn’t just wade across it, or swim across for that matter. Elisha watches as Elijah takes his mantle (the same one he had wrapped around his face on Horeb the mount of God, at the “sound of sheer silence”) and rolls it up to strike the water, causing it to part. No doubt Elisha and the others recall the Hebrew people crossing the Jordan under Joshua’s leadership as they finally approached their promised land after years in the wilderness. Elijah and Elisha cross, as the other prophets watch.

Finally Elijah gives up and asks Elisha what he wants. What do you say in such a situation? Many years before a newly elevated king, Solomon, was asked this question by no less than God, and had chosen to ask for wisdom. Here Elisha, asked by his prophetic mentor, chooses to ask for what he sees in Elijah, only more. Given what we’ve seen of Elijah this might seem a truly frightening prospect, but Elisha nonetheless sees in Elijah what he needs to step into his call. Except he doesn’t just ask for it, he asks for a “double portion.” He asks for more, for beyond. What makes a “double portion”? Is it more power, more ability to do great feats, more discernment about God’s call to a prophet? We don’t get an explanation. Nonetheless Elijah allows that Elisha’s request will be granted, but only if Elisha sees Elijah is he is taken away.

In other words, don’t look away at all. Don’t even blink. And certainly don’t look down at your cell phone. No pressure there, right?

And yet Elisha, determined as ever to fulfill this call he never expected, manages to keep his eyes on Elijah, until the fiery chariot and whirlwind sweep him away, finally fading from sight.

In a story like this one, with some utterly fantastic elements and a setting clearly unlike anything we will ever know, it can be difficult to relate. Chariots of Fire is a movie, not something we actually expect to see in real life. But Elisha does show us something we need to see, something we can in fact learn from even in our own very different modern times.

Elisha is wise enough to seek what his mentor had. It’s not that we need to think Elisha saw Elijah as perfect. We’ve seen the ways in which Elijah’s zeal sometimes outstripped his willingness to rely on God’s leading. And yet for all his excess, Elijah was still in touch with God, still a servant of Yahweh, and Elisha knew he needed that if he were to step into Elijah’s prophetic office.

But even at the same time he asked for Elijah’s blessing, he knew that wasn’t enough. He needed more. Elijah’s world was already shifting away. Ahab was no longer on the scene, and even his successor Ahaziah’s reign was short-lived. Israel would be challenged by different enemies. Elijah’s way wasn’t going to be sufficient. Elisha’s prophetic ministry was going to be a different one than Elijah’s, and in his request he was wise enough to grasp that.

We can learn from this. We, the modern church here in Gainesville and around the world, cannot cavalierly dispense with the foundation that our ancestors in the faith have built. It is not perfect. It is not foolproof. We as Christ’s church in God’s world have failed too many times in too many places in too many cases to think we’ve ever been perfect. We’ve endorsed too many evils in the name of our convenience or our status in society. We managed to read the Bible in such a way that we decided keeping slaves was o.k., for perhaps the most egregious example. That’s in our history.

But still, flawed as those saints may have been, they are the ones who have built the foundation on which we stand, and we cannot dispense with that. Neither, however, can we be bound to it.

The church of the nineteenth century was not sufficient to witness to the world of the twentieth century, and neither would the twentieth-century church will never be the church that successfully witnesses to the world of the twenty-first century. Just try telling someone they ought to be in church. They’ll ask you “why?” point blank. And if you don’t have a real, honest, authentic answer, you’ve lost them, probably for good. We don’t get to throw open the doors and just expect them to come. Doesn’t work.

We need more. We need things we’ve never understood before. Our challenges are different than those our fathers and mothers, or grandmothers and grandfathers, or any of the generations before us ever faced, and we need to be equipped and prepared to witness to unchanging truth in an ever-changing world.

Elisha did indeed step into Elijah’s prophetic call. Yet his prophetic ministry would be quite different from Elijah’s. No rash challenges to a horde of Baal prophets, no running from Israel to Sinai. And yet his work would see healings, health restored to barren and poisoned lands and wells, and even a powerful foreign general converted to the worship of Yahweh. Not bad.

Can we as a church, both local and universal, rise to that challenge? Can we be a church that witnesses to the eternal in an age like none we’ve known before? Can we speak truth, bear witness, tell good news to a world or a country or a city that is dramatically different that the one in which we grew up?

We would do well to ask for a double portion. Thanks be to God. Amen.

#405            Praise God for This Holy Ground

#810            When In the Night I Meditate

#282            Come Down, O Love Divine

#825            Swing Low, Sweet Chariot

Well, you try to paint a man being carried away in a whirlwind and a chariot of fire...