Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
February 12, 2006

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

I suppose it isn’t true of everyone, but on the whole people love spectacle. We like things flashy and showy. We like lots of glitz and glamour, lots of noise and hoopla. There’s a great song in the musical Chicago that sums it all up really. In that show the character Billy Flynn sings:

Give ‘em the old razzle-dazzle,
razzle-dazzle ‘em.
Give ‘em an act with lotsa flash in it
and the reaction will be passionate.
The song goes on to make the point that enough gaudy showmanship can conceal the fact that there’s no substance to what you’re doing. I knew that song long before I knew anything about the musical that it comes from. I always thought it was about show business, and I thought it should be about trial work. I was surprised and delighted when I saw the movie of the musical and discovered that the song actually is about trial work. Billy Flynn, you see, is a trial lawyer in the show, and he’s singing about how he can get anyone off by so dazzling and confusing the jury with showmanship that the facts won’t matter to them. I’ve done enough trial work to know that there’s more truth in Flynn’s lines than most lawyers would like to admit, and yet I don’t think the point is limited to trial work. We like spectacle in everything. We like it in our movies and in our theater. We like it in our sports and in our politics. We’re pretty much suckers for spectacle in all aspects of life.

We’re even suckers for spectacle when it comes to God. We expect God to act in miraculous, spectacular ways. It’s no accident that the most popular movies about God focus on those Biblical accounts that have God acting in precisely that way. The classic example is Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments. Talk about spectacle! The plagues on Egypt! The parting of the Red Sea! God on the mountaintop roaring from the clouds and giving Moses the Ten Commandments! Now that’s entertainment! And I think it is how we’d all secretly like God act all the time. Come on, God! Make it obvious! Put on a show! Razzle-dazzle us! It sure would be a lot easier to follow a God who acted like that all the time, and we probably think it would be a lot more fun and a lot more satisfying too.

The problem is, God doesn’t work like that. Of course there are Bible stories in which God does act like that. I mean, Cecil B. DeMille wasn’t working from scratch. He had Biblical material on which he could base his spectacle. Still, I think that if you look at the Bible’s picture of God as a whole, you’ll see that for the most part God doesn’t work that way. You may not have heard the story of Naaman from 2 Kings before this morning. After all, DeMille never made a movie about him. His story doesn’t lend itself to epic filmmaking. Yet I think it tells us a great deal about our expectations of God and about how God doesn’t usually meet those expectations.

Let me recap the story for you: Naaman, the commander of the armies of the king of Aram, a.k.a. Syria, is living is Israel and has leprosy. By a circuitous route, word comes to him that the prophet Elisha can cure his disease. So Naaman goes to see Elisha. When Naaman arrives, Elisha doesn’t bother to step outside to meet him. He just sends him word by a messenger that Naaman should go and wash himself in the Jordan River seven times, and he will be made well. Whereupon Naaman becomes righteously indignant. He was offended that the prophet would not come out to see him. He was, after all, a man of great importance in the world. He expected an instant, on the spot miracle. He certainly wasn’t expecting to be told to go do something so ordinary, so unspectacular as simply bathing in the nearest river. He stormed off in a huff. That’s not how it’s supposed to be! Cecil B. DeMille can’t do anything with that! Where are the fireworks? Where’s the earthquake, the thunder and lightening, the whirlwind from heaven? Those things are how God is supposed to act, Naaman thought, not through something so banal, so ordinary, so boring as going and washing in a river. And certainly not through some obscure prophet who won’t even come out and wave his hands over me. This just isn’t right!

That’s such a human reaction, isn’t it? We always want God to do things our way. We want God to respect our importance, and we want God to put on a show. The problem is, that’s not usually how God does it. God is no respecter of our person, of our lofty position in society or our lofty impressions of our own importance. God has no need of spectacle. That’s what this story is telling us. The word of God can come to us from unlikely people. It doesn’t have to come from some great prophet. In Naaman’s case it came from a mere servant. God’s work doesn’t have to be spectacular. In the story of Naaman, God did indeed work through something as ordinary as bathing in a river. Naaman’s people finally prevailed on him to follow the prophet’s advice, and when he did he was cured. No smoke and mirrors. No fireworks. Just God acting through everyday people and everyday activities.

That’s how it is, folks. If you want to find God, don’t go looking for the spectacular. Of course, if there is something spectacular going on, God may be acting there too; but if you look for God only in the earthquake, the storm, the fireworks, you’re going to miss finding God most of the time. If you want to find God, look in the ordinary things of your life. Look at your family. God is probably speaking to you through them. Look at your friends. God is probably in them too. Look at the world around you. To be sure, God is in the mighty river, the thundering cascade, the exploding volcano; but God is also, and I would say God is more so, in the little stream that runs through your backyard, in the rosebushes and dahlias growing right outside your kitchen window. God is in the sound of the neighborhood children playing. God is in the silence of a country evening broken from time to time only by the sound of a passing train. God is in the gentle embrace of a mother and the warm embrace of a lover. God is in our friendships. God is in our work. God is in our little church, quietly working with us, prodding us, encouraging us. God speaks quietly, through the ordinary, everyday things of our lives

Those things aren’t spectacular. They aren’t flashy. There are no fireworks. Cecil B. DeMille would turn down any script based only on those things. I can’t make an epic out of that, he’d say. I can’t razzle-dazzle ‘em with those things, he’d say. And of course he’d be right. And maybe it’s because we’re too much like Cecil B. DeMille that we miss God in those simple things all the time. Like him we want pyrotechnics when it comes to God, but that’s not how it is. So let’s get over our fascination with the spectacular and start looking for God in the simple things, the ordinary things, the every-day things. The simple thing of bathing in the Jordan convinced Naaman the Syrian commander that there was indeed a prophet in Israel. May the simple things of our lives convince us that there is indeed a God in our world. Amen.