Tenth Leper

Scriptures: Twentieth Sunday After Pentecost, 2010 C

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. AMEN.

This morning, brothers and sisters, our Lord has laid out for us a pair of stories that share remarkable similarities, despite the fact that they are separated by nearly a thousand years.  These are tales of healing, of humility, and of being made whole.

Our first story takes place long ago and far away, in the Ninth Century B.C., a time when the kingdom of Israel has been divided, north and south, by civil war and secession.  The pagan nations surrounding Israel have taken advantage of this division, raiding and pillaging the weakened halves of the Hebrew country.  And one of these raiders is a man named Naaman.  Naaman, we’re told, is a great commander, the general of the armies of Aram.  As an Aramean, he’s actually a relative, however distant, of Abraham, and thus of the Israelite people.  But hey, business before family, right?  Nothing personal.

Now, for all his triumphs and glory and conquests on the battlefield—for all his riches and might and the honors heaped upon him—Naaman has a serious problem.  He’s got some awful, creeping skin disease, the sort that threatens not only life and limb, but also one’s honor and position in society.  He’s in danger of becoming outcast.  The irony is almost palpable.  It reminds me of War of the Worlds, wherein the mightiest vanguard of the Martian invasion is felled by the smallest and humblest of earthly bacteria.  Or even of Henry VIII, father of the British Empire, crippled by venereal diseases even as he was poised to conquer the globe.

Yet Naaman is not beyond all hope.  A servant girl whom he’d captured during a raid in Israel and given to his wife as her handmaid—a girl so young and vulnerable that the Hebrew actually refers to her as “a little little girl”—has compassion on her conqueror, and tells her mistress of the great prophet Elisha in Israel.  Surely Elisha can cure her master of his disease.  Surely the God of Israel can set this malady right.  What has Naaman got to lose, after all?  And so, with what I imagine must have been more than a little desperation, the general gets permission from his king to travel to Israel with a vast entourage of gifts and a royal letter officially requesting that Naaman be healed.

Joram, King of Northern Israel, reacts in pretty much the same way you’d expect a modern president or prime minister to react were he to receive such a letter from Russia or China.  “Who died and made me God?” wails Joram.  “Obviously the Arameans are trying to pick a quarrel with us!  This must be prelude to invasion!”  In agony, Joram tears his royal garments to shreds.  Luckily, Naaman has brought as gift for the king 10 new replacement outfits.  I trust the humor was not lost on him.

So out marches Naaman to the house of the wonderworking prophet Elisha, at the head of his horses and chariots and in all his martial finery, expecting Elisha to come out, stand before him, and perform some elaborate ritual.  You know, put on a show.  The military brass do so enjoy their pomp and circumstance.  Alas, to his disappointment, Elisha simply sends out a messenger who tells the great general to go and wash seven times in the muddy little river Jordan.  For Jews of the time, such ritual bathing was a sign of repentance and forgiveness—a precursor to Jewish and then Christian Baptism.  But Naaman is nonplussed by this hillbilly home remedy.  “Are you serious?” he scoffs.  “We’ve got better rivers than this Hebrew creek back home in Syria.  I’m out of here.”

Thankfully, Naaman has some very loyal help.  “Wait, father, wait!” his servants cry.  “Are you skeptical because the prophet told you to do something simple?  Had he ordered you to do something difficult, to take on some Herculean task, would you not have done it?  Why then balk at doing this simple, easy thing?”  And so, with a weary sigh—half indulgent, half desperate, I’m sure—Naaman does as his servants insist.  And he is cured.

Ebullient, the mighty man runs back to Elisha, showing to the prophet all the honor that he’d only recently expected for himself, and crying with joy, “Now I know that there is no God in all the earth except in Israel!”  He even goes so far as to box up crates of Israeli dirt, like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, on which to worship the Lord back home in Syria.  Naaman may or may not still be an enemy of Israel, but no longer can he be considered an enemy of God.

Thus is the remarkable story of Naaman, general of the armies of Aram.  Much could be said about God’s love for the foreigner, about God working even through the heathen and unbeliever.  More still could be said about the prophet Elisha, one of the greatest miracle workers in the Bible.  But this is not a story of great men.  This is a story of little ones, lost ones, vulnerable ones.  Notice that throughout the tale, the powerful are revealed, ultimately, to be powerless in all the areas that truly matter.  Mighty warrior Naaman is laid low by a skin disease.  Great King Joram shreds his royal robes in fear and paranoia.

Salvation, in this story, comes first through a little little girl, stolen from her home, yet still full of compassion for her captors.  Salvation comes from a group of sarcastic servants, who dare stand up to their master when he is snubbed.  Salvation even comes from muddy little Jordan, so pathetic in comparison to the waters of Syria.  And salvation, at long last, comes to Naaman, when he humbles himself in the waters of repentance, and his flesh, as the Scriptures say, was “restored like the flesh of a young boy.”  It takes a little girl to save a little boy.  And we begin to understand the words of Jesus: that one must enter into the Kingdom of God as a little child.  Naaman is humbled, he is healed, and he is made whole.  Salvation comes not from the curing of his disease.  Rather, salvation comes from the mercy, faith, and love shown to him, and which he in turn lives out for others in praise of the Lord.

Shades of Naaman’s story flicker throughout our Gospel reading as well.  Hundreds of years have passed between Joram and Jesus, and the Northern Kingdom has long ago fallen to pagans, who populated the land with their Samaritan descendants.  Samaritans are half-breeds, defiled, rejected and shunned by the faithful Jews who survived the fall of the Southern Kingdom.  As Jesus travels along the borderlands of Samaria, 10 lepers cry out to Him for aid: “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!”  Unlike Naaman a thousand years earlier, these lepers have actual leprosy, as we would recognize the disease today.  It’s a horrible blight, a dying by inches, where pieces of you rot and fall off even while you’re still alive.  Truly it is a living death.

Jesus, like Elisha, makes no dramatic sign.  Instead, He gives to them a simple command: go to the Jewish priests of the Jerusalem Temple—priests being the only people who can legally proclaim a leper cured, and thus return him to his family.  To their great credit, the lepers go on their way, rotting and diseased, trusting only in Jesus’ promise—or at least deciding that they have nothing to lose.  And as they go, lo and behold, they are cured.  Their flesh is restored!  Once they show themselves to the priests, they will be able to go home again.  Thanks be to God!  But one of the ten is not a Jew but rather a Samaritan, a half-breed.  He is descended from the broken remains of Joram’s fallen kingdom.  The Jerusalem Temple is not his Temple, and the Jewish priests not his priests.  He will not be welcome in Judea.

So the Samaritan turns back to praise God with a loud voice, prostrating himself at Jesus’ feet and thanking Him—a gesture, by the way, which the Hellenistic world associated with worship.  The Samaritan is worshipping Christ to praise God.  And Jesus, with what I imagine to be a smile, says, “Were not 10 made clean?  But the other nine, where are they?  Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?”  Then our Lord says to the Samaritan, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you whole.”  As with Naaman, the Samaritan has been made whole not in the healing, but in the joy and faith that follow God’s grace.  He, too, has discovered the one true God.

I say this because what actually happens here is astounding.  At first blush, it’s easy for us to criticize the nine Jews who go on to the Temple, poo-pooing their lack of gratitude.  But aren’t they just obeying exactly what Jesus has told them to do?  Moreover, good Jews believe that the Temple is the true House of God; that’s exactly where Jewish people should go to return and give praise to God.  Nine cured lepers run to the Temple.  One returns to Christ.  And shockingly, scandalously, Jesus says that this is the only one who has returned to God.

The Samaritan has seen what his fellow ex-lepers have yet to realize; that God is not in the Temple in Jerusalem.  God’s true Temple, God’s true House—the place where God descends to live and dwell amongst mankind—is Jesus Christ.  Jesus is the Temple.  Jesus proclaims us clean.  Because Jesus Christ is God on Earth.

This, dear Christians, is the faith that makes us whole.  This is the faith that brings the dead to life.  And this is the faith, revealed through servants and half-breeds and foreigners like us, through which Jesus Christ even now is saving the world.

Thanks be to Christ, our Temple and our God.  In Jesus’ Name. AMEN.

Prayers of Intercession:

With the whole people of God in Christ Jesus, let us pray for the Church, for those in need, and for all of God’s Creation.

Steadfast hold Your covenant, O God of right relation

           Faithful hold the faithless when we fail in our station

By our witness draw more people into life with You

           Saint we sinners thus to spread Your promises come true

Clean, refreshing waters send to lands where rain is rare

           Quench disease and thirst, O Lord; in Jesus—hear our prayer

To those now facing illness, be both present and at hand

           Guide all those in healing arts and with them strongly stand

Deliver justice to the sick, who face a rocky slope

           Prove to them diseases cannot ever conquer hope

Hear the cries of those who seek out access to healthcare

           Especially the children, Lord; in Jesus—hear our prayer

Suffer with the persecuted, Christians all abroad

           Driven from their homelands, murdered for their faith in God

Envelop them in freedom; ease their burden for Christ’s sake

           And turn the hearts of all of those who seek their lives to take

Giving thanks for all the saints in whom Your fire flares

           We join them in their praise of You; in Jesus—hear our prayer

Lord, we pray for those we lift before You, both silently and aloud: for Berllin, Dave, Mike, Pat, Chuck, Birdie, and Aaron; for those who struggle with demons of addiction, that they be liberated on this Sabbath day; for the proper functioning of good government, which helps its people to live good lives; for the remembrance of birthdays and weddings; and for the joyous hope of all grandparents who await the arrival of a new generation.

Into Your hands, O Lord, we commend all for whom we pray

Trusting in Your mercy to light and guard our way.  AMEN.