Sermon: Healing Power

The Rev. Bryn Smallwood-Garcia
Congregational Church of Brookfield (UCC)
July 8, 2007

Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

Healing Power

2 Kings 5:1-14

Prayer:   “May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of our hearts and minds here together be acceptable to you, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.”

I love this story.  But I bet “the healing of Naaman’s leprosy” is not a Bible story you’d say you love, or even remember, for that matter.  But what I love about it is that it does more than show God is great enough to cure a skin disease.  It’s a story about what I consider an even greater miracle – God heals a man not merely WITH divine power, but God heals him OF power, heals Naaman of his delusion that power is next to godliness. 

You see, Naaman thought his problem was an irritating and ugly skin rash.  (It wasn’t Hanson’s Disease, by the way, the leper-colony leprosy we know about.) Naaman’s real problem was he thought power was the answer to all of life’s problems, including his illness.  In all fairness to Naaman, he was the greatest commander of the greatest army of the greatest empire that the ancient world had known so far, Assyria, so he might be expected to care about power.  (Even we ordinary folk, here in Brookfield, are sometimes tempted to think having power matters.  But lucky for us, God blesses many of us with children to prove us wrong!)  But poor Naaman was a rich and powerful man, so he thought he could command the God of Israel to sell him a miracle.

So this story begins with an ironic REVERSAL of power, as a young slave girl carried off from her native Israel to wait on Naaman’s wife gets the whole mighty plot rolling, all with one innocent remark made in private.  I picture this tiny girl hearing her mistress confess how disgusted she is by her husband’s skin disease.  The little maid simply remarks that it’s shame Naaman doesn’t know Elisha, her country’s prophet who’s cured so many people back home.  Well, as you might expect, the mistress grabs that slender thread of hope, and you wonder if the maid regretted opening her mouth.  After all, this is the evil man who captured her in a raid on her village and did who knows what to her.  We never know, because the story goes galloping off to higher levels of power.

Naaman’s King takes charge next, dashing off a letter to the King of Israel and sending Naaman off with a great caravan of men and dozens of chariots and horses and some 1,500 pounds of treasure, to buy this healing miracle ASAP.  But in their eagerness to get the job done, these two men of power don’t listen very carefully to the maid.  They assume the way to buy a healing is to throw money at the King.  So the poor King of Israel is distraught when he realizes what he’s expected to do.  Assyria might destroy his whole nation if he fails to satisfy the Emperor with the miracle demanded.  Lucky for him, Elisha speaks up, to save the day.  He doesn’t go rushing to the rescue, the way you’d expect a man of power to do, though.  He sends the king a simple message, “Let him come to me,” he says, “that he may know that here is a prophet in Israel.”

You can just imagine the King’s enormous relief, that he could pass this terrifying problem downstream to someone else.  As for Naaman’s reaction, to understand it in terms of our geography:  Imagine he loaded up his caravan at his capital in Albany, got into his dazzling armor and marched for days, all the way to Sloan Kettering in New York City, waited while the hospital chief stalled on an answer, only to find he was supposed to be at some obscure faith healer’s cabin out in the woods out west of New Fairfield.  Do you think he’d be in a good mood when he finally arrived at Elisha’s trailer park? 

What might that scene have been like?  Naaman pulls up with all his horses and chariots, laden down with more silver and gold than anyone in Elisha’s little town had ever seen, so everybody would’ve been outside gawking – everybody, everybody but Elisha.  The caravan is at the door of Elisha’s house, and yet Elisha stays inside.  He plays it cool.  He sends out a messenger to deliver Naaman’s prescription: “go and bathe in the Jordan River 7 times.”  Now when the text says Naaman was angry, can’t you just imagine?  He’s on hold with his HMO for days, and then a recording says, “Let us sell you a timeshare for a week at Candlewood Lake.”  Naaman rages, “At least he could come out and look at me, at least he could stand up and call on the mighty name of his God and wave his hands over me!  Don’t we have perfectly good rivers back home if all I needed to do was take a blinkedy blink blankedy blank bath????”  As an army commander, he would have used all the best Assyrian swear words, I’m sure. 

But again, lowly servants speak truth to power.  Can you imagine the courage it must’ve taken for the slaves of this ranting Naaman to suggest that, well, he’d come all that way, he might at least try the prophet’s stupid idea?  I don’t know; maybe it was self-preservation.  Maybe they just didn’t want to haul all that treasure back home!  Can’t you just hear them?  “Sir, um, just a thought: if Elisha had suggested you do some heroic feat, wouldn’t you have tried to do it?  So mightn’t you be, uh, I don’t know, relieved, that all you need to do is just go down to the river and, uh, wash up a bit?” 

The Bible doesn’t record what Naaman said next, but can’t you just picture him saying nothing?  Just storming down to the riverside, knocking over peasant women with dirty laundry, stripping off his armor and splashing in.  But it wasn’t over in a day.  Remember, this was a holy cleansing ritual, so it probably required 7 baths in 7 days.  It got me to thinking:  What an amazing antidote to power.  God is brilliant.  The river was the center of village life; there was no indoor plumbing, and no fancy royal bathhouses.  These people, whom Naaman had until that week only seen as his nameless and faceless “enemy,” now were all around him.  Together, they drank from the river, they bathed in the river; they washed their clothes and dishes in the river; they socialized for hours at the river.  How might this mighty commander’s attitude toward war and conquest have changed if he was required to camp there so close to the people he’d grown so accustomed to killing?  He was bound to start to care about them. 

This wasn’t magic, you see, of the kind men of power expect, where you things get done instantly, or else.  This was a holy miracle, and holy miracles take time.  This is what God the peacemaker is up to:  not healing a little leprosy here and there, but healing power.  Bringing all great powers – from glorious armies to arrogant kings to mighty generals – bringing them to their knees.  Teaching them about love, and about humility.  Teaching us too.  Want to know how it’s done?  It’s still happening today.  I’ve seen it.

Back in 1995, I took the youth of my former church, First Congregational Church of Berkeley, on a week-long mission trip up to the Russian River, to help the folks up there muck out from the some devastating winter floods.  We were working with a local agency to clean up and repair some of the homes most severely damaged.

The first work day, Monday, we were using sledgehammers and picks and shovels to break up a concrete driveway ruined by mud slides, and loading it into a dump truck.  Destroying things with power is fun!  Only problem was the truck driver – I’ll call him “Bud.”  Bud was this tough local guy, working off some community service for a DUI.  The agency’s director, Carol, had warned us about his bad attitude, especially toward women like us, in authority.  He’d been known in town to beat his wife, and he had been pretty mean to other service groups, and was notorious for finding ways to avoid work.  He lived up to his reputation.  After 2 hours of hard labor, when we had the truck loaded and ready to go on its first trip to the dump, we couldn’t find him.  We were in a pretty foul mood, as we piled up more concrete and waited.  When he finally arrived, he acted as if he couldn’t have cared less how much time he’d cost us.  But he did stay with us, resentfully, and watched as we worked late filling the truck with the last load of rubble. 

That was Day 1 – the first of seven baths at our river of love, and, in my humble opinion, he still stank!  If he called me “little lady” one more time, as I gagged on his cigarette smoke, I was afraid that his head might meet the working end of my sledgehammer.  But trying to set a Christian example, I had a meeting with my youth, and we talked it over.  To my surprise they started spouting off all kinds of Christian stuff, and they said I’d taught it to them!  Jesus says you can’t beat power with power, they said.  You beat power with love.  Well, OK, I said.  If Jesus said it and I’d preached it, it must be worth a try.  But secretly, I didn’t think that sexist creep deserved our help.

On Day 2, Tuesday, he began helping a little, talking some, mostly telling crude jokes while we tried to clean toys at a house with small children, but it was progress.  On Day 3, Wednesday, on a crew that was scraping a house to be painted, he started telling the real stories – about his bad marriage, and the drinking.  I couldn’t help but cringe at our little 9^th graders hearing about some convict’s ugly divorce, but the kids were loving it.  (I guessed it wasn’t any worse than watching Jerry Springer at home.)  On Day 4, Thursday, he finally was working really hard as we mucked out the basement of an older lady’s house, and he started really dumping out his life’s muck (seems he'd never paid child support; he'd cheated on welfare, and on his taxes), but we stuck with him.  On Day 5, Friday, after he'd confessed the worst and we still seemed to like him, he was really urging the kids on; he was such a positive example of hard work.  On Day 6, Saturday, he was so eager keep working, he recruited a group to work an extra half-day on what was supposed to be our only day of recreation.  They were finishing an extra-nasty job of ripping out smelly ruined carpet, and he promised to bring his teenage daughter with him to church Sunday.  (They’d not been on speaking terms since his divorce, but now he said he was ready to try again to ask for her forgiveness.)

But on Day 7, Sunday there was no sign of him.  We had no idea where he was.  My teens were really hurt, especially because they were singing in the worship service.  I said, “Probably he’d kept the fourth commandment and rested.  He earned it.”  But I prayed we wouldn’t see him in town later stumbling out of a bar.  The miracle came on our last day, Monday, as we were leaving.  He showed up grinning, clean, and shaven in the parking lot.  We all gave him big goodbye hugs and a church t-shirt; we even met his daughter, whom he’d brought to meet us after all.  God is good.  God is brilliant!

You see, God has a place for us when our illusions of power and self-importance aren’t working so well any more.  We don’t have to fly to Israel to dip in the River Jordan, but we might think to spend a little extra time immersed in a community of love.  Many of us, like Naaman, may be outraged that the river of God’s healing grace is not more impressive or more difficult to enter than, say, a little white Congregational church.  But each one of us, as we wade into the stream of God’s steadfast and eternal love, becomes a part of it, across all times and across all nations.  We join a river more powerful than any force on earth.  Thanks be to God for this Good News.  Amen.