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Sunday, June 20, 2021

No God...Except In Israel

2 Kings 5: 1-15

Charles J. Tomlin, June 20th,  2021

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership 

Series: The Roots of God’s Justice 11/20

 

 

“Now I know that there is no God in all the earth except in Israel.”  

     This final theological point wasn’t made by a prophet or preacher, but made by a military commander leading one of Israel’s opposing armies.  It’s still quite disturbing and disruptive to hear, especially to contemporary minds.  Naaman, the army commander was an elite, a military strongman.  He made judgement right after he was miraculously healed from a terrible, deadly skin disease; probably leprosy.

It’s hard enough to wrap our minds around any kind of miracle, even though miracles are supposed to hard to understand.   That’s why they are called ‘miracles’.  They don’t just happen, at least not normally.  But what makes this story even more difficult, is that man who has just been healed by Israel’s God, is the enemy.   

You normally want your enemy dead, don’t you?  That’s what enemies are for, right?   When you are at war with someone, you’re urge is to kill, or at least, to capture and conquer.   If the enemy is sick, you especially wouldn’t work for their healing.  You would do everything you could to get rid of them.   In this case, you would, at the very least, just allow them to ‘go quietly into that dark night’.

But just the opposite is happening in this story.   The flow of everything that happens, you could say, seems to be going in the wrong direction.  This big military macho-man has won many victories, some even against Israel.  Why would he be the one who is helped and healed?    In fact, in one battle, he captured a little Israelite child.   He has now enslaved her as his own spoil of war.   That’s enough already to wish him dead, isn’t it?   For a northerner, Naaman would be comparable to someone like Robert E Lee.   If he’s fighting to make get more slaves, the people being forced into slavery would probably hope him dead too, wouldn’t they.  Wouldn’t you?   

This little slave girl should be secretly working against this big guy too?   She should be feeding him poison or doing something, right?   But no,  instead, she’s the one who starts the ball rolling in his direction, enabling him to find help and healing, do you see it?  She’s the one who first mentioned the possibility of going to Israel to be healed.  She suggests to her mistress, perhaps the commander’s wife: If only my lord were with the prophet who is in Samaria!  He would cure him of his leprosy.”     

Here, again, you can see first-hand what many people don’t like about the Bible.  It’s disruptive, counter-intuitive, even threatening at times to how we expect life to be.   We get used to how things are, don’t we?   That’s why we’re conservatives, and mostly republicans too.   It’s sometimes why people become Christians too.  Instead of having a hope of what might be, what new, strangely different redemptive thing God could or will do, our greatest hope is often to keep things just the way they are.   

Besides, when you come to a story like this, it confuses you about who is in and who is out.   That’s why people don’t like to read the Bible, at least not too closely.   We can’t control where the Bible goes, what it says, or what it tells us to do.  

Sometimes, people tell me they ‘liked’ my sermon, like I’m supposed to be preaching something they want or like to hear.   They don’t get it do they?   I’m not called to preach what you’d want to hear.  I’m preaching the Bible and what we all need to hear.  The Bible’s full of stuff  I don’t like to hear too, let alone preach.  Some people even try to read the Bible from an archaic translation to make sure they don’t understand too much.  

Having to listen try to figure out a story like this is why some church members don’t come to church too.  I mean, people come to church expecting God to pat us on the back and tell us how good we are doing, exactly who the enemy is,  what we should like, or who we should hate, who’s got it all wrong, and who’s got it all right, but instead, what are we asked to open our ears too?   You and I come here today, and we have to entertain a confusing, complicated and conflictive story like this.  It’s a story about a deathly diseased killer and a little girl who was forced into slavery.  But Instead of watching her work against her master to get free from him, she is working for his benefit, trying to help him heal.  Just what kind of story is this?  It goes against the grain of only Israel Lives Matter, doesn’t it?  It even goes against the grain of any suggestion that only Christian, Jewish, Arab or American lives matter, too.    It dares to say, out loud, EVERY LIFE MATTERS!

So, hearing this, you might not want to see where this story ultimately ends up.   It’s not simply trying to get us to love our enemies, but it’s headed where some modern minds really don’t want go.  It’s a story about who God is, and how God is at work beyond our little world, our part of the neighborhood, or even beyond our way of seeing God at work in our own religion too.   Our guest preacher today is a foreigner; no, he’s also the enemy who ends us telling us all who God really is.   That’s the great surprise of this story.   The truth about God doesn’t end up coming from a friendly face or a friendly voice, but it comes the enemy; one of the least desired people in Israel’s neighborhood.  And we’re just getting started.   I told you this text is disturbing.  

What is most disturbing about this story is not only that an enemy is healed and helped, but that this enemy is telling us who our only, one true God must be.   Who does Naaman think he is?  He’s an outsider, a non-believer, who’s now reminding them—-and us to—we who are God’s people, what is the first and most important of all the Ten Commandments: “You should have no other gods before me”.  This is the truth God requires from us, Israel’s enemy says.  How dare him?   Who made him the preacher of the day?  Who let him in the door and allowed him to stand in the pulpit and preach?   I’ll tell you who did.  God did.   This is God speaking God’s truth.  God is reminding Israel and reminding us of the most important truth and it comes through an enemy, an outsider.  Though Naaman, God reminds us we can only build our lives and our hope upon him.  Only this God, Israel’s God, is the one, true and only God.   

All this sounds very restrictive, exclusive, narrow-minded and intolerant, doesn’t it?  We don’t like a God who demands such single-minded allegiance.  We want to put other gods up there too; God, but also country, and then comes family, of course, and then comes our bank accounts.   We gotta live, don’t we?   

Now let me interject that the bank account problem shows up right after this text when the prophet Elisha’s servant, Gehazi, working against the prophet Elisha’s wishes, runs after Naaman right after he’s just been healed; right after the prophet refused to take payment or the credit.  Gehazi overrules Elisha and accepts a small fee.   Then, because of his disobedience and greed, suddenly, the leprosy that left Namaan jumped straight on Gehazi.  His skin suddenly turned ‘as white as snow’.   I’m going to spare you of any more details, but just remember this;  it’s the one and only true God that Namaan preaches.  This means that no other god, no other god you go after, or no other god you create in your own mind, is allowed.   There is no cure in any other.  There is only disease, destruction, and death.  

So, this whole story hits hard; right between the eyes of our own ways of seeing things.    This story reminds us how jealous, how demanding, and just how restrictive, Israel’s God is?   But, again, why is this ultimate truth about God coming clear to us right here; from a stranger, and from a foreigner?   Why is Naaman the one who preaches this truth?   

 

HURT: HE SUFFERED FROM LEPROSY, 5:1

 

         We only understand when we see just how desperate Naaman was.  He was a leper; a lonely, quarantined, dying man, seeking a cure for his terminal illness.    I mean, in this story, when he goes to the prophet’s house, Elisha won’t even go out to greet him.  We can certainly feel that kind of pain since Covid 19, can’t we? This also tells us two other things;  This leprosy was real and even the prophet didn’t actually have a sure cure within himself.  Only God could cure this.  

         So, it causes us to ask ourselves too, what kind of ‘hurt’ will we suffer in life, that will finally bring us to seek the one and only true God?   We all suffer in life, and many times, we will get through those difficult, painful times.   We’ve got all kinds of modern medicine that offers either a cure, or can help us live with what we’ve got.    All these wonderful ‘miracle drugs’, can do wonders for us.   We depend on them.   We save or keep insurance so we can one day afford them.   We demand good health care so that, when we do get sick, we will have them available to us.   It makes us feel more secure.  Sometimes it can even make us feel invincible too.   

But then one day, the doctor looks at us an says, what I’ve heard doctors eventually tell every patient they have,  ‘There’s nothing more we can do.”   Nothing?   “I’ve done every test, I’ve given every medicine, and we’ve tried every single treatment, and now, a good doctor, if he’s honest and direct, might finally say,  “You’re in God’s hands now!”   

         The truth is, however, that we were always in God’s hands, or at least, we can say that we were always on the ‘terminal’ list.  It’s not something we like to think about, but the Bible---especially in the days before medicine and all the false security that it sometimes gives---these stories in the Bible that are so raw and real, remind us of how life really is.  It reminds us that we all have a condition that we can’t get over, without God’s help.  It’s called being ‘human’.   This is bold, barefaced truth right at the heart of the story of Naaman.  A very strong, big man is humbled and forced to face his own mortality and humanity.   He might be the winner of many battles, but now, he is facing a battle he can never win and a ‘hurt’ he could never heal on his own.   

 

 

 

HELP:  WHAT THE GIRL...SAID,  5:4

 

         What makes this story even more disconcerting, and humbling too, is that the real hero and helper to this big, strong fellow, wasn’t a doctor nor even the prophet healer, Elisha himself; but it’s all goes back to the little slave girl.   We don’t even know her name.  Naaman probably didn’t know her name either, until he came back home a new man.  But it was this little girl who dared to get beyond any hurt feelings toward her master, who was still her enemy, and she offered him a chance to find help and healing too.   

         When you see what this little girl does, you realize immediately, it’s not something we would have done in this situation.  If we were in her shoes; if we were captured and made into a slave, or if we had a chance to let this man die, that could help us, and our whole country too, would we have done what she does.  

     So, what she does wasn’t very patriotic.   She’s doing something that most would suggest she could at the very least, have left alone.  At most, if she had the chance, she could have saved a lot more lives by making some move against him.  Well, maybe she’s too young to understand politics.  Maybe she’s too naive to understand the art of war.    Maybe she’s just plain ignorant of everything the world thinks is important.   Whatever she is, or wasn’t, here, at first glance see appears like a dumb little girl responding from her heart, rather than taking too long to think about what she just did.

         But when you think about, it is from this kind of loving, merciful heart that any kind of help comes to any of us, isn’t it?  In the midst of a war, a battle, or in the midst of a tragedy, it’s the Red Cross, the Blue Star of David, or maybe even the Red Crescent, that often stands for helping hurting people.  They each stand for the kind of faith in God that calls for caring and compassionate respond to human hurt and need, whoever they are.   

     Besides, are these flags, symbols, religions or gods really in competition with each other, or are they pointing to different v cultures based upon the same God behind all our human differences and misunderstandings?   You don’t think about those differences when you hear the call of the very God who moves us beyond ourselves, our own points of view, or our own religious understandings, so we can grow in our understanding by reaching out to respond to the need, hurt and pain of another human being.   

If every religion, including our own, thought, believed and acted like this little Israelite girl, having a religion that always chooses to care over conceit, I don’t think any religion would have to rule over the other.  We’d just decide to let God be true, as Paul said, and then let us all be ‘liars’.  In other words, we’d come to understand that the true God can’t be found in fighting over personal beliefs, because the true God remains bigger, unexplainable, and finally incomprehensible to all of us.  This is what makes God, God, and not us, or our beliefs.   

No, the true God can only be found by the actions of love, kindness, and help given to another human being in need.  This is what the little slave girl understood.  It is this very healing love that put Naaman on the right path, even before he was healed of his leprosy.  How this little slave girl acted, is how this story is calling us to caring, missionary action, which isn’t simply to preach, but to reach out and bring ‘truth’ into the world; just like Jesus said, even by loving and caring for the enemy,  even doing good for them.   Naaman was put on the path of finding the true God, through the actual feelings, actions, response and help that was placed into the heart of this this little Israelite slave girl   When we find God here, in her heart, I think we know not only ‘who’ this God of Israel is, we will also know something most important about ‘what’ this God of Israel is like and what he wants to do in and through us.

 

HEALING: ALL HE SAID...WAS, ‘WASH, AND BE CLEAN’?” 5:13

 

    The healing that comes to Naaman wasn’t only a physical cure of his leprosy, but it was a spiritual cure of his heart and in his soul.   That’s what his full and final acknowledgment of Israel’s God is about.  That’s also what Naaman’s willingness to humble himself and to wash in Israel’s waters is about.  God wasn’t just healing Naaman’s body, nor was he trying to introduce him to Israel’s natural resources.  The prophet was God’s instrument to bring saving light and insight into Naaman’s mind, heart and soul.

     Her name was Dorothy.  During the first day of speech class, the teacher was going around the room, having the students introduce themselves. Each student was to respond to the questions "What do I like about myself?" and "What don't I like about myself?" 

Nearly hiding at the back of the room was Dorothy. Her long, red hair hung down around her face, almost obscuring it from view. When it was Dorothy's turn to introduce herself, there was only silence in the room. Thinking perhaps she had not heard the question, the teacher moved his chair over near hers and gently repeated the question. Again, there was only silence.

Finally, with a deep sigh, Dorothy sat up in her chair, pulled back her hair, and in the process revealed her face. Covering nearly all of one side of her face was a large, irregularly shaped birthmark - nearly as red as her hair. "That," she said, "should show you what I don't like about myself."

Here was a young lady devastated by her hideous birthmark.  She was desperate for indiscriminate love.

What does healing mean, not just the healing of a body from a terrible birthmark, or even leprosy, but the healing of a heart from hate, from hurt, or from even deeper and darker dispositions?  Can we say what healing means and how ultimate healing comes to humans in both body and spirit?  Healing can be complicated.  Healing can also be very simple.

Which brings us back to Dorothy, the student with what she did not like about herself - her large, irregularly shaped birthmark  covering one side of her face.  What could bring healing to her?

Moved with compassion, the professor leaned over and gave her a hug.  Then he kissed her on her cheek where the birthmark was and said, "That's OK, Honey, I think you're beautiful.". 

Dorothy cried.   Other students gathered around her and were offering their comfort and hugs.   As she dabbed the tears from her eyes she said, "I needed someone to hug me and say I’m OK.  My mother won't even touch my face."

Dorothy,  like Naaman, had not only a physical ailment, but also bore a layer of inner pain deep within.  She was desperate for a healing love.

The way of healing can be complicated, but the process of healing begins very simply.  Naaman’s healing began deep in the compassionate, caring, loving heart of mercy of a little slave girl.  

While the words of this ancient text don’t and could never tell us everything about what hurt we might be going through, nor does it give us detailed prescriptions for our healing, it does point us directly to the greatest healer.  So, If you are hurting today, as Naaman did, do what God asks you to do.  Obey and follow his indiscriminate loving voice.  Wash yourself fully and completely in the cleansing waters of Israel’s grace-filled Love,, made crystal clear through Jesus Christ.  See what healing comes to you, both in your body and in your soul.  Amen.

            

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