So I understand Naaman. Here he is, a person of wealth, success, knowledge and importance, and he gets leprosy, a death-sentence in his day. Suddenly, he has the dreaded disease that turns kings into outcasts. It turns beloved family members into shunned figures on the margins of society, their very flesh rotting on their bones. Naaman expects top-notch treatment from the best healers that money can buy. Instead, he gets advice from his wife’s Hebrew slave girl. He seeks healing in the backwater country he has recently defeated in battle. Despite Naaman’s chariot-load of riches, the King of Israel doesn’t receive him. Instead, he gets shuttled off to see some unknown prophet, and the prophet won’t even bother to come out and meet with him. Elisha sends out one of his servants, who tells the great general to go wash in the muddy waters of a second-class river. Oh, how I can feel Naaman’s desperate indignation! It’s like seeking help from a renowned specialist, yet only being seen by the nurse practitioner. Then, she ignores your brilliant Internet research and tells you to take a few Tylenol and rest for a week!
Of course, the lesson here for us privileged worriers is that God doesn’t need our wealth, our power, or our knowledge in order to heal us. God can work through slave girls, obscure prophets, and muddy little rivers. God can work through poor, unwed Mary, shepherds, and babies born in stables. God can work through ordinary bread, wine, and a broken body. We need only to grab the hands of the people God sends us, no matter who they are. We need only to lower the barriers that we hide behind and allow ourselves to feel vulnerable. It’s a lesson that Jesus wants to teach us, too, in today’s Gospel reading.
Jesus strips his followers bare of all illusions of control as he sends them out on his mission of healing. With only the support of a travel companion, each Jesus-follower must head out barefooted and penniless. They must go into a world that will not necessarily welcome them or their message. Surrounded by hostility, they are completely dependent upon the hospitality of those who welcome them. They can’t demand or expect success. If they accomplish amazing things, they’re not to take the credit. There is no promise of glory, no promise of nice church buildings, or a pension fund, or pews full of families with young children, or accolades from the neighborhood. There’s merely the command to show up and to heal the sick and broken in Jesus’ name.
I still remember having disdainful thoughts on the first day of clinical pastoral education in seminary. The hospital chaplain was lecturing us newbies on the importance of simply showing up in a crisis. We didn’t need the answers, he said. We just needed to be present. “What?!” I thought, “How dumb. Just stand there while people are suffering?! What good does that do? That’s way too simple. Who wants to see a strange pastor-type they don’t even know lurking around in times of grief?” As I found out, that’s exactly what people want. Loving presence. Standing with. Nadia Bolz Weber says it best: “Of course just showing up is not as sexy as yoga, or praying the daily office or doing the Master Cleanse or a 10-day silent retreat. But showing up means being vulnerable in that empty-handed-sent-out-by-Jesus-without-sandals sort of way. It’s the vulnerability of having nothing to offer but what we have been given by Christ… the vulnerability of receiving hospitality. The vulnerability of having difficult truths spoken to you.”[1]
The lessons of today’s readings spoke to my heart more than most. So much so that I really didn’t want to have to preach on them. Like many of you, I imagine, I’ve been feeling wronged, angry, and helpless following the tsunami of Supreme Court rulings that just seem to keep on coming. It has felt like getting hit every day with a two-by-four of dread. My beloved privilege feels like it’s slipping. My certainty that everything will work out is deeply shaken. I feel as if I need to do something as an American, as a woman, and certainly as a priest. I want to be healed of our collective leprosy. I want to fix things for our country. I want to fix things for those who are truly suffering. I want to fix things for the Christians who just want to share the good news of love and healing. I want to lift the pain from your faces. But everything that I can come up with sounds too weak and common, like trying to cure a deadly disease by bathing in a foreign stream.
Even prayer. The “thoughts and prayers” of those who utter pious statements but refuse to act when children are shot at school have tainted our common recourse to prayer. I posted prayers last week on YouTube in an attempt to offer comfort after the overturning of Roe v. Wade. They were great prayers, I thought, fitting prayers, composed by a long list of Episcopal leaders from around the country. I felt good praying them online… until a YouTube viewer commented that my prayers were of no help to her whatsoever. She added that prayer would never help. And then several people agreed with her. A few days later, the Court upheld the rights of a football coach to pray a Christian prayer out loud with his public-school team on the field. “Oh brother,” I moaned. “Is that how people saw my prayers, too?” What then are we Christians supposed to do?
What the Holy Spirit showed me in today’s readings is that Jesus is asking us to show up, vulnerable and open, like sheep among wolves. The “wolves” of the Hebrew scriptures are symbols for corrupt and greedy politicians and religious leaders who devour the poor and marginalized. Jesus-followers enter their presence unprotected, vulnerable, dependent only upon God and the hospitality of others. We don’t need loud and public manifestations of faith—no hocus pocus, no difficult feats to build up our own egos, no grabbing of the microphone at football games. We just eat with those in need of good news, live among them, stay with them, live regular lives together, don’t waste time in places we aren’t wanted, and let God’s healing happen. It’s not very flashy. But such is the Kingdom of God. May we find, like Naaman, true healing there, in spite of ourselves.
[1] Nadia Bolz Weber, “Sermon on Naaman the Leper and How the Common Can Heal Us.” In Sarcastic Lutheran. Patheos, July 7, 2016. Found at https://www.patheos.com/blogs/nadiabolzweber/2016/07/sermon-on-naaman-the-leper-and-how-the-common-can-heal-us/
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