Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
February 15, 2009

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.

There are some characters in the Bible that I just love. I love them because they’re so human. They are so fallible. They are so much like us. Jonah is my favorite. When God tells him to go preach God’s word to the enemy capital Nineveh he wants no part of it. He says I’m outta here! That’s why he ends up in the belly of a whale and gets vomited up onto the beach. When he finally does go to Nineveh he assumes that they won’t listen to him, or to God, and that therefore God will destroy them. When they do listen and God decides not to destroy them, Jonah goes off and sulks. He’s angry because God didn’t do what Jonah wanted. God did it God’s way not Jonah’s way, and Jonah wasn’t the least bit happy about it.

There’s another one of these characters that I love because they’re so human in our story from 2 Kings this morning. It’s Naaman, the commander of the army of the king of Aram, the region we know as Syria. The story tells us that he is “a great man” and a victorious military leader. He had a problem. He had leprosy. We don’t exactly what his condition was because the word that gets translated leprosy could refer to just about any abnormal skin condition, but Naaman had some kind of a skin disease. When he learns that there is a prophet in Israel who could cure the condition, he prevails on his king to send an emissary to the king of Israel with an immense amount of money and other gifts to persuade the Israeli king to enlist the help of the prophet to cure Naaman of his condition. The Israeli king assumes it’s a trick, a provocation—also a very human reaction. But once he’s convinced by the prophet Elisha that it isn’t he sends Naaman off to the prophet to get his cure.

Which is where, to me, the story gets really interesting. Here comes Naaman, the great man, to see the lowly Hebrew prophet Elisha. He comes in all his military regalia, with his horses and his chariots and his entourage of servants. It must have been a glorious sight. I imagine banners flying, shields and swords flashing in the sun, and a great cloud of dust rising into the air as the party of the mighty warrior draws near to the what must have been a very humble dwelling of the prophet. I’m sure Naaman thought he was presenting a thrilling and imposing spectacle that would impress this Hebrew prophet no end.

And what happened? Very little, actually. Elisha didn’t even come out to see the show. He didn’t come out and bow down before Naaman’s magnificence. He didn’t pay any attention to it at all. He sent someone else, presumably a servant, to bring word to Naaman about what he must do to be cured of his condition. And all the servant said was “Go, wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh shall be restored and you shall be clean.” Nothing more. Just that simple instruction to go wash in the river, a perfectly mundane and ordinary thing to do. Something so simple it hardly seemed to Naaman that he needed to travel all the way to Samaria to hear it, and not even hear it from a prophet at that but only from the prophet’s servant.

And Naaman was angry! He said “I though that for me the prophet surely would come out!” He’s affronted. He’s insulted. His vanity has been hurt because this lowly Hebrew prophet, a prophet from a people Naaman has defeated in battle, didn’t even come out to speak to him in person. And what the prophet said through his servant didn’t fit Naaman’s idea of what was fitting for the healing of a great man like him. He wanted a show. He wanted theatrics, with a lot of shouting and hand waving. And all he got was a servant saying go wash in the river. It just wasn’t right! It didn’t befit a man of his great importance! It was all so wrong! It was all so pedestrian! It was all so easy, and Naaman was mad. Yet when his servants suggested that if he was willing to do something hard to be cured he surely should be willing to do something easy, he did what Elisha had directed and was cured.

I love Naaman because he’s so human. So many people today who think of themselves as important and powerful would have reacted the same way. Maybe we would have reacted the same way too, and I think there’s an important lesson for us in this story of Naaman and Elisha. The story calls Elisha “the man of God.” In the story Elisha represents the way of God against Naaman’s way of the world. We see in this story that God’s ways are not the world’s ways, and we see a couple of different aspects of that important truth.

First, we see that God is no respecter of human pretensions. Naaman is awfully impressed with himself. Elisha isn’t impressed with him at all. Elisha didn’t even come out of the house to see him, much less bow down before him and pay him the homage he thought he was due. We learn that God is not impressed with Naaman’s self-importance and with his external display of that internal arrogance. Not at all. Yet God, acting through Elisha, doesn’t scorn or reject Naaman either. He treats him as an ordinary human being. He treats him the way God would treat anybody. Everyone is equal in God’s sight, just as this story tells us they were in Elisha’s sight.

Second, and I think even more importantly, we see an important aspect of God’s grace in this story. Every time I read this story I think of how Naaman wanted his cure to be difficult, and it reminds me of how Christians keep trying to make God’s grace difficult. We keep trying to make it something we have to earn. We keep saying that to earn God’s grace we have to live a certain way, or believe certain things, ways that are hard to stick to and beliefs that are hard to maintain. And it just isn’t true. God’s grace is free, even freer than Naaman’s cure was. We don’t even have to go wash in the river. Grace is God’s free gift, and it is for everyone, not just for those who live “the right” way or believe “the right” things. That’s how it is, and we don’t like it any more than Naaman liked being told to do something as simple as go wash in the river. We keep trying to make it hard.

And that puzzles me. I meet so much resistance when I say that God’s grace is free and for everyone, and I’ve thought a lot about why. I’m not sure I have the answer, but I have a couple of ideas. I think that we want grace to be something we have to earn because then we can take credit for it. It can be something we won through our own effort, and it makes us feel good that we did it. If grace is all God’s doing, there’s no way we can congratulate ourselves on having done what it takes to gain it. We didn’t do anything to earn it, and we don’t like that any more than Naaman did.

And I suspect that we don’t like the idea of free grace because if grace is truly grace, if grace is truly free, then grace is truly for everyone. There is no distinction between people who have God’s grace and people who don’t. We don’t like that, because it takes away our opportunity to feel superior. It takes away our opportunity to judge others as less than us. It takes away our opportunity to tell others they have to be like us, to live like us, and to believe like us. And we don’t like it.

But as the story of Naaman tells us, God has no interest in our feeling superior. God is no respecter of our spiritual accomplishments, just as Elisha was no respecter of Naaman’s worldly ones. God pours out free grace for everyone, whether we like it or not. So we really do need to get over it, just as Naaman needed to get over his pretensions and his preconceived notions of how God is supposed to do things. God’s grace is free, and God’s grace is for everyone. And we cry: But that isn’t what we want! We want to earn it, just like Naaman. We want to be spiritual warriors just as Naaman was a worldly one. We stand outside God’s humble dwelling and demand that God respect our sense of self-worth and superiority, just like Naaman did with Elisha.

And just like Elisha did with Naaman, God pays no attention to our pretensions and our desires, grounded as they are in the ways of the world rather than in the ways of God. God sends servants—Jesus most of all—to say my grace is free and my grace is for everyone. You can’t earn it. You don’t have to. You can go wash in the river, that is, be baptized, if you want as a sign that you accept my grace. But you don’t even have to do that. My way is not your way, God says. My way is free grace. You say it isn’t what you want. Well, God says. I’m sorry, but that’s how it is. And when you really think about it. that is the best news there ever was or ever could be. So we get over it. And we say. Thank you, and Amen.