Sermon offered by Rev. Garvey MacLean, Guest Preacher
II KINGS 5: 1-5 LUKE 17:11-19
The Second Book of Kings
Chapter Five Verses one through five
Naaman, commander of the army of the King of Aram, was a great man and in high favor with his master, because of him the Lord had given victory to Aram. The man, though a mighty warrior suffered from leprosy.
Now the Arameans on one of their raids had taken a young girl captive from the land of Israel, and she served Naaman’s wife.
She said to her mistress, “If only my lord were with the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy.”
So Naaman went in and told his lord just what the girl from the land of Israel had said.
And the king of Aram, “Go then , and I will send along a letter to the king of Israel.”
The Gospel According to Luke
Chapter seventeen, verses eleven through nineteen
On the way to Jerusalem Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee. As he entered a village, ten lepers approached him. Keeping their distance, they called out, saying, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!”
When he saw them, he said to them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went they were made clean. Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God in a loud voice. He prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan.
Then Jesus asked, “Were ten made clean? But the other nine where are they? Was none found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?”
Then he said to him, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.”
A few years ago, I was told a golf story which illustrates how one’s inner attitude affects the circumstances of a person’s life. I filed it away with some notes on two biblical tales about lepers.
When Moses and Jesus come to a par-three hole fronted by a water hazard — Jesus asks Moses what club he intends to use.
“A five iron, I surely don’t want to put it in the pond!” responds Moses.
“I’m going to use a seven iron,” declares Jesus.
“A seven? You will never make the green.”
“A seven is what Jack Nicklaus would use.”
Jesus tees up, swings, and puts the ball squarely in the middle of the pond. He tees up a second ball, swings a mighty seven, and puts it in the middle of the pond. A little exasperated, Jesus picks up his tee, walks out on the water of the pond to retrieve the two balls.
In the meantime, a foursome comes up to the seventh tee and while they wait one asks Moses, “Who does that guy think he is, Jesus Christ?”
“He is Jesus Christ. He thinks he is Jack Nicklaus!”
In chapter five of the Second Book of Kings, we encounter Naaman, a Syrian general who has risen at the court of Damascus to a position of first importance. Naaman has distinguished himself in a war of independence against Assyria. Naaman, though a great soldier, is a leper. His leprosy seems to be some order of skin disease which does not disable a person in the discharge of public duties. Still any person in his position would be thankful to be cured of a painful and humiliating disease.
In Naaman’s household there is a slave girl who is both able and willing to help him. By birth an Israelite she has been carried away from her home by the Syrians in one of their raids into Israel. Now in service to Naaman’s wife, the slave girl expresses to her mistress a wish that her lord could meet Elisha, the great prophet working and teaching in Samaria. She believes Naaman’s leprosy would be cured if such a visit could be arranged.
The slave girl’s words are repeated to the Syrian king, who sends Naaman with a letter of introduction to the reigning king of Israel, Jehoram. In the letter, Jehoram is asked to affect Naaman’s cure. The Syrian king probably means that Jehoram is to bid the prophet Elisha to work the necessary miracle.
The letter, however, stirs up a tempest. Jehoram has no serious belief in the mission and power of Elisha. He looks upon the prophet with quaint alternations of cynicism and uneasiness, but without any trust and sympathy, as would enable him to apply to Elisha for counsel and assistance.
Jehoram sees the Syrian king’s letter as a pretext for a new war by preferring a request which Jehoram cannot possibly grant. In alarm and agitation, the king of Israel tears his clothes, an act, in those days, when it did not express mourning for the dead, implied great distress and perplexity of mind. “Who does he think I am!?”
On hearing of Jehoram’s reaction, Elisha sends a message reproaching the king for forgetting that God has a prophet in Israel and asks that Naaman be sent to his place. The great Syrian general goes as he is bid.
His splendid equipages draw up before the humble cottage of the prophet. Elisha does not go out to meet his illustrious visitor. He simply sends a message: “Go and wash seven times in the waters of the Jordan and you will be healed.”
Naaman is offended — offended with the substance of the message — and offended with the way in which he has been treated.
“Who does he think that I am? I thought he would surely have come out to me, and stand and call on the name of the Lord his God, and strike his hand over the place and recover the leper.”
Naaman seems to have pictured to himself how Elisha should work the miracle. The notion of going to wash in a foreign, Jewish river is intolerable. “Will not the Syrian streams — the Abna and the Pharpar do as well?”
The prophet’s conduct and message are insulting; and Naaman angrily stomps off! The leprosy however remains with him — as bad as ever. With the passing of time, Naaman’s passions cool.
His trusted retainers point out to him that,
“After all, you are not asked to do very much. If the prophet enjoined you to perform some great duty, you would have obeyed. Why should you hesitate when obedience is so simple, so easy?”
“Who do you think that you are?”
“You are an important, mighty, illustrious general of Syria seeking the adulation of a Jewish prophet?”
“You are a leper in search of a cure?”
Naaman listens and chooses to obey the instructions of the prophet. The seven-fold washing in the waters of the Jordan does the trick. Naaman’s flesh becomes as the flesh of a little child, he is clean.
In gratitude and joy the great Syrian general pays a second visit to Elisha. He comes to thank the prophet for his wise and accurate counsel, and to announce his conversion to Israel’s faith: “I know there is no god in all the earth but in Israel.”
He begs Elisha to receive a present of money and clothes; but the prophet steadily declines. After asking the prophet’s advice as to how he should deport himself while waiting upon the Syrian king, Naaman departs for Syria.
“Who do you think you are?”
Naaman made a choice between a perception of himself as a person of first importance in the Syrian court and a perception of himself as a leper in need of a cure.
The change he effected in his inner attitude brought about a dramatic change in the circumstances of his life.
Naaman’s action points to a fundamental fact in human experience.
What life in the long run does to us
depends on what life finds in us.
Paul of Tarsus seems to have had this reality in mind when he wrote: “We know that to them that love God all things work together for good.”
Omit the first half of the declaration and the remainder is incredible. All things by themselves do not work together for good and we may not, pretend they do.
The Apostle, however, does not omit the first part. What he says is intimate and personal, addressed to us one by one.
Into any situation, if we bring one set of interior attitudes we will get the corresponding result, but if into the same situation we bring other attitudes we will come out somewhere else altogether.
What happens to us from without doesn’t determine the consequence.
What happens to us from without pulls our triggers and explodes us; the consequence depends on what is in us to explode.
Reluctant as we naturally maybe to apply so searching a principle to ourselves, we do in daily life see it operate. We can change any situation by changing our internal attitude toward it. A gentleman in his early sixties remembers back to his childhood and how his mother sent him one day to pick a quart of raspberries. He writes:
“I did not want to pick a quart of raspberries and I dragged reluctant feet to the berry patch in rebellion against an evil world where a small boy who wants to do something else has to pick raspberries. Then a new idea came: it would be fun to pick two quarts of raspberries and surprise the family. That changed everything. I had so interesting a time picking two quarts of raspberries, to the utter amazement of the household, that, although it happened a half a century ago, I never have forgotten it.”
Although, the gentleman remembers the incident, he has often forgotten the philosophy of it: what the circumstances and compulsions of life do to us depends on what they find in us. In that philosophy lies the realistic answer to the oft-repeated question, Is life worth living?
It is the question which brought the ten lepers to Jesus.
People are prone to make fortune the determining factor in the matter of life’s worthfulness. One draws a line through humankind with good fortune on one side and ill fortune on the other; and imply that people who find life abundantly worth living are merely and mainly on the fortunate side of life. Life is worth living for the prosperous, the fortunate, who by heritage or achievement have been given the world’s cushioned seats. But, for the baffled, the stricken, the cruelly handicapped, for whipped and beaten persons, life is not worth living.
However, fortune is not the determining factor. When we consider Jesus, poor, homeless, crucified, or Epictetus a slave and crippled, when we consider contemporaries like Helen Keller or Mother Teresa — we realize that personalities to whom life has been most worth living have been commonly not on the fortunate side of the line. They have not sat in the cushioned seats of the world. That is because nobody ever finds life worth living, one always has to make it worth living. All the folk to whom life has been abundantly worth living have made it so by an interior, creative, spiritual contribution of their own and such people are not in fortunate circumstances.
The ten lepers stand off and appeal to Jesus: “Have mercy upon us.”
Is life worth living? Most people seem to think that is a question about the cosmos. It is a question about the inside attitude of you and me.
Who do you think you are?
A business man, apparently with no academic or theoretical interests, asks a media preacher: “Am I a thing mechanistically determined or am I a person who might control my life and circumstance?”
He wants to know because life has him in a corner and it is important to know. Life has some of us in that corner and when ever our minds face such a situation they begin tricking us. For when we are making a success and everything is going fortunately, we tend to believe in freedom and to think ourselves responsible actors, but when we are failing and desperate difficulties oppress us, we tend to think that we are being preyed upon by fate and that life is victimizing us. When we enjoy prosperity we are doing it; when we suffer adversity, something is being done to us.
As Harry Emerson Fosdick once wrote: “Just so do our doctrines become names for our feelings.”
There is a rhythm to be observed in individual lives and in the history of thought — days of prosperity accompanied by belief in freedom; days of difficulty accompanied by belief in fate. However, at no time in a person’s life does one so deeply need to believe one is a free, creative person as when one is in trouble.
Early in his career, Beethoven felt the darkening shadows of his inevitable deafness. At first he was in despair. “What a sorrowful life I must live now, ” he wrote; “How happy I would be if my hearing were completely restored . . . but I must draw back from everything, and the most beautiful years of my life will take wings without accomplishing all the promise of my talent and my powers!”
So it looked and, what is more, so it would have turned out, had it not been for something else inside Beethoven.
“There is no greater joy for me than to pursue and produce my art,” he wrote in another letter; “Oh, if I were only rid of this affliction I could embrace the world! . . . I will seize fate by the throat; most assuredly it shall not get me wholly down — oh, it is so beautiful to live life a thousand-fold.”
Beethoven declared: “I will seize fate by the throat!” and he did it.
When life puts something up to us, we need not react; we can respond. That is different. That takes our spiritual contribution in.
Paul described that response as “loving God.” He was not thinking of devotion to any far-off deity. He was walking in the deeper levels of the Christian faith: “God is love, and you that abide in love, abide in God, and God abides in you; that you may be filled unto all the fullness of God.”
Paul was thinking of the inner depth of personal religion, where faith gives life meaning and purpose, where character is unified and organized, integrated and directed. Our freedom lies in our capacity to make that spiritual response to life. In this truth lies the practical answer to one of life’s most puzzling facts — its impartiality.
Birth and death, joy and sorrow, sickness and health, love and loss, happiness and tragedy — no respecters of persons — come to each regardless of one’s character and one’s response. All things come alike to all. In the face of that fact, Paul hurls his challenge: “To them that love God, all things work together for good.”
In one sense both claims are true. It is as the Gospel parable suggests, one person builds a house upon the sand, another on rock, and the floods come and the wind blows. Thus at that stage all things come alike to all. But in the end it is not correct for in the end one house is gone.
Things do not come out alike for all. Some souls go to pieces; some souls have something in them so that all things work together for good.
All things will happen to us — life and death, joy and sorrow, romance and loss, friendship and bereavement, happiness and tragedy, all things. And while, to be sure, since each of us must come to journey’s end, some circumstances will be final, but for the most part what all things do to us will depend on what they find in us.
PRAYER
Eternal God: As we come to you offering our praise, we thank you for your peace, your quiet, your comfort, and your safety. Surely you restore our soul and up lift our spirit. Yet the images of the world outside remain in our thoughts. We see the images of brutality in the wars that cripple and destroy people in Europe, Africa, Mid East; we see the immorality and self-righteousness of our leaders which deter them from being for those who are in need; we see the indifference and selfishness of the successful who opt to pass by those fallen by the way.
We pray to you as the Sovereign of life and ask that you restore our world according to your plan for creation. Move us beyond our attachment to race, culture, and nationality, and give us a sense of belonging to the whole human family. Make us more loving, more caring, more aware of the needs of others. We thank you for the hope that fills our lives, and for all the possibilities we have for new journeys and discoveries along the paths that we walk. We know that Christ is with us, and that his spirit dwells within us. By his love, let us be assured of our worthiness to the whole of your kingdom.
You have given each of us a portion of life which is uniquely our own, and as we share that part of life with one another, we are thankful for the wonderful mixture of our humanity. Let us see the beauty in every face and feel the warmth which comes from every heart, and there we shall find you also.
Come now near to all hearts here gathered and hear them and us a s we pray for those with special concerns this day: We pray for those who are hospitalized or confined to home . . . . We pray for those who have recently lost a loved one . . . We pray for those whose jobs bring them a great amount of stress and conflict . . . We pray for young people who are searching for the right values to live by . . . And we pray for all those who are in need of your hope, that they might not call this a hopeless world . . .
Gracious God send your mercy upon all who seek you. Let your spirit come alive in each one of us and fill us with the glory of your presence. We do not belong to the night or the darkness, but we live according to the light of your love. You are the God who saves us, and in you our hearts rejoice now and forever more. Amen.