A.He is
the commander-in-chief of the Syrian army.
1.
He has received every honor
that military skill or good fortune can bring...
2.
He lives in “the oasis of
Damascus,” also known as “the garden of the world.”
3.But Naaman
hasleprosy.
4.
A proud man, he is not too
proud to listen to the advice of his wife’s little
Jewish maid captured in a raid.
a.
She tells him about a
possible miracle cure down there in Israel.
b.
Desperation is a strange but
necessary equalizer.
5.
Naaman responds in the only
way he knows how–in a show of grandeur.
a.
He sends a fine wardrobe and
a locker full of gold to the King of Israel with a cover
letter.
b.
All that accomplishes is to
frighten the Jewish king.
6.
The king sends him to the
prophet Elisha. Naaman makes an appearance at the door
of Elisha’s simple cottage with some fine horses and
chariots!
7.
One estimate of the value of
the gifts Naaman offers is over $100,000!
a.
Yet the price which Naaman
is to end up paying is so much greater!
b.
(Money never buys peace of
mind.)
c.
It can never really bring
you to your knees before God.
B.He is
told to “‘Go wash in the dirty river!’”
1.
Naaman immediately thinks of
the two rivers at home in Damascus:
a.
The Abana and the Pharpar.
are clean and beautiful. The banks of those rivers
attract tourists. People love to swim in their waters.
b.
By way of comparison, George
Adam Smith’s Historical Geography of the Holy Land,
“declares that the Jordan River scours along, muddy
between the banks of mud, careless of beauty, careless
of life.”
c.
Back in 1980, I flew from
Frankfurt, Germany, for the first time behind the Iron
Curtain, into Belgrade, Yugoslavia. I had a room
in the newer section of that ancient city in a brand new
hotel, the 9th floor, on the banks of the mighty Danube
River. That evening I walked along the riverbank along
with all the locals who were out strolling. The water
sparkled in the dying sunlight which likewise reflected
off the old city’s towers around the bend in the river.
The next morning I walked out onto my balcony. The sky
was overcast. I was shocked when I looked down at the
Danube. It was muddy and ugly. Neither could I see the
downtown city of Belgrade around the riverbend. In fact
I couldn’t see anything. Could this even be that same
enchanting river of yesterday?
2.
Naaman is really ticked off
on two counts; he’s about to lose his cool.
a.
First of all, that Jewish
prophet did not have enough courtesy to come out of his
house to receive him–he must talk to the servant in the
yard!
b.
Secondly, Elisha fails to
heal him in some publicly spectacular way befitting of
this great soldier’s rank.
c.
Instead the manservant
Gehazi tells General Naaman to go wash in the muddy
river...not just once, but 7 times!
3.
I met a man named
“Einertson” at White Sands Missile Range in
southern New Mexico a few years ago at an official Army
retirement ceremony for a friend, Head Chaplain Colonel
John Snider . He came over and spoke to me. Einertson
was in fatigues like the other military personnel.
Obersvant person that I am, I failed to notice the two
stars on the shoulders of his sweater, I asked him where
he worked, and he said: “a funny-shaped builing in
Washington.” Here was the chief of Army chaplains; to
me he seemed like just a regular guy.
4.
The vivid contrast between
those rivers in 2 Kings offers us a theological
statement, an insight into where General Naaman is.
C.Naaman
has leprosy of the spirit, leprosy of the mind.
1.
He is ego-centric:
the world he lives in revolves around himself.
a.
But today this supreme
commander-in-chief must kneel to an unknown, foreign
God.
b.To be
obedient to their God, he must kowtow to
Jewish commoners.
2.
The purpose of the washing
is not merely a ritualistic cleansing required in the
ancient laws of the Old Testament, but so that this
renowned military hero may know and believe that “there
is a prophet in Israel.”
3.
Naaman’s leprosy is
apparently not the serious, life-threatening disease we
know of today as Hanson’s Disease, where limbs
turn white and fall off. In the old days all one had to
look forward to was a horrible death.
a.
His affliction is only an
obnoxious skin disease.
4.
His spiritual leprosy is
more than skin deep.
5.
Naaman is powerless to act
before Yahweh the Almighty God of Israel. He needs help.
In his untouchableness he needs others to reach out and
touch him.
a. He really needs
some “holy water.” There is a time in all our
lives where we need some holy water,
b. and the
paradox is that we sometimes find it nowhere else than
in
the
muddy pools of life.
D.The
story has a “Guideposts Magazine” type ending: Naaman
goes, immerses himself in the Jordan River. He washes
and becomes clean.
1.
His conversion is
unscripted: it is sudden, unexpected, out of character,
a.
but it is real!
b.
he is washed clean of the
leprosy of sin and pride.
c.
he becomes the servant of a
new God.
d.
it is almost like a believer
baptism done by immersion.
2.
I remember a priest, Ron
Kurth. His specialty became a ministry in the prison,
among folks everyone else in society regarded as moral
scum.
a.
As this priest allowed
himself to be immersed among the convicts, his own
attitude became transformed:
b.
Kurth said, “In the faces
of the prisoners I see the face of Christ.”
II.
WHERE DO YOU OR I GO TO FIND
HEALING OF OUR SPIRIT? AND, WHO ARE THE
UNTOUCHABLES IN OUR LIVES? THE TWO QUESTION’S ARE
BUT THE TWO BLADES OF A DOUBLE-EDGED
KNIFE. (page 2)
A.In other
words, what redeems an untouchable in my black book? It
has to do with where I find the purifying mercy of
God in my life,
1.
and in the lives of the
people who became servants of Elisha through their
obedience.
2.
Also, servants of Jesus who
do not count equality with God a thing to be grasped but
clothe themselves in the weakness of others’ –even dying
for them on crosses they have made.
a. The
person who started Habitat for Humanity, also the guy
who owned Fuller Brushes, he began Habitat in the Congo,
one of the most impoverished countries in the world.
3.
As Naaman comes up out of
the Jordan, he returns to Elisha to confess:
a. “‘Now I know that
there is no God in all the earth, except in Israel.’”
B.What
makes anyone an untouchable, or vice versa; what makes
me an untouchable?
1.
… the gays and lesbians
folks our church bashes, the street children John
Coleman tells us about who may have broken into your
car, the sex offenders, one of whom has molested a child
you know, the illegal aliens who come to work at
ConAgra or Tyson for minimum wage?
a.
Does it depend on whether
our sacred cow is being milked?
b.
If it doesn’t even touch my
life, why should I care? But I must!
2.
A soldier was finally coming
home after having fought in Vietnam. He called his
parents from San Francisco. "Mom and Dad, I'm coming
home, but I've got a favor to ask. I have a friend I'd
like to bring with me."
"Sure," they
replied, "we'd love to meet him."
"There's something you
should know," the son continued, "he was hurt pretty
badly in the fighting. He stepped on a land mine and
lost an arm and a leg. He has nowhere else to go, and I
want him to come live with us."
"I'm sorry to hear
that, son. Maybe we can help him find somewhere to
live."
"No, Mom and
Dad. I want him to live with us."
"Son," said the
father, "you don't know what you're asking. Someone with
such a handicap would be a terrible burden on us. We
have our own lives to live, and we can't let something
like this interfere with our lives. I think you should
just come home and forget about this guy."
At that point, the son hung up the phone. The parents
heard nothing more from him. A few days later, however,
they received a call from the San Francisco police.
Their son had died after falling off a building. The
police believed it was suicide.
(L.A. 2/13/2000, p. 3)
The
grief-stricken parents flew to San Francisco and were
taken to the city morgue to identify the body of their
son. They recognized him, but to their horror they also
discovered their son had only one arm and one leg.
st
and 2nd Kings seem to teach about hate and
fear, not trusting foreigners, but this story goes the
other way.
a.
This is a story that follows
the genre of Ruth or Jonah and the stories in Luke about
outsiders.
2.
It is almost comical, in
ways pathetic–as we get a picture of this great military
man cut out of the same mold as General Colin Powell.
Naaman’s Syrian army lords it over the lesser
Israelites, yet now he is reduced to driving his chariot
through the crowded streets of a Jewish town up to
Elisha’s door and may speak only to a servant.
3. Unlike Jesus Elisha never touches the leper,
but touches Naaman in his
untouchability.
a. And two servile
Jews brings a foreigner to his knees
(1)
a maid who has been taken
into forced indenture,
(2)
and Elisha’s servant Gehazi
who himself is a scoundrel.
b. Naaman
became an eager missionary for his new-found faith; he
wants to take it back to Damascus with him.
B.
Pre-figuring Jesus, Elisha responds now in person to
Naaman, “‘Go in peace.’”
1.Go
home as a whole person.
2.
Every time Jesus says this,
he also says, “Do not be afraid.’”
a)
Don’t live in fear of your
past, you are no longer untouchable, you are no longer
diseased, you are a whole person, You are a child of
God.
3.
Have you read William
Young’s best-seller, The Shack? Do you recall
what the God figure, or Papa is doing when meeting
Mack? Papa cooks up a meal in order to touch and purify
the lives of hurting people
4.
God says, “Don’t look back,
don’t put your hand to the plow and then turn around and
look behind you to the first time you came to this
shack.”
a)
There is the terrible
temptation, isn’t it? to let our past determine our
future…
C.The
powerful witness of Jesus’ healing in the Gospels is
that he never fails to reach out and touch the lepers,
or the other untouchables.
1.
The contact of Jesus with
lepers did not signify his acceptance of these people in
their diseased state. Quite the opposite, it indicated
his love for each one and his will for them to be
different.
2.
He always tells them to be
obedient in their new lives:
a)
either to go and show
themselves to the priest
b)
or in this case to go home
and keep quiet.
c)
Go in peace and give thanks
to God.
3.
Jesus’ gut level reaction to
lepers does something else:
a)
it exposes the moral and
spiritual leprosy of his 1
b)
the people who are really
“unclean” in the presence of God
c)
who need some of the real
“holy water” which cleanses.
4.
I love to tell the story of
Father Damien: In the mid-1800's, a young Belgian,
Joseph de Veuster was ordained and took the name, Father
Damien. The bishop of Hawaii shared with Father Damien the
difficulty he was having in finding a permanent priest for
the colony of Kalaupapa on the island of Molokai.
Kalaupapa was something of a concentration camp where
desperately-ill lepers, those with Hanson’s Disease, were
forced to live. Father Damien volunteered for the Kalaupapa
post. He found the lepers there living in subhuman
conditions. He forced the government to provide building
materials and medicine. He built pipe lines for clean water,
as well as a small church.
After 16 years of sharing their lives, one Sunday Damien
stood before his people and started his sermon with
these words, “We lepers...
In April of 1889, the now emaciated priest,
blind, deaf, barely able to speak, and
confined to his bed, declared, "The work of the lepers is
assured, and I am no longer necessary, and so (I) will go up
yonder."
(L.A. 2/2000, p.2, line 7.3)