July 8, 2007
6th After Pentecost
2 Kings 5:1-14 and Luke 10:1-11, 16-20
The Rev. Dr. George Hermanson
When we begin a journey we usually do a lot of planning and sorting. Check the weather forecasts. Lay out our things. Wonder if we are taking too much or not enough. Worry. Seek for just right information as we go into a far country.
Planning is big on our agenda -for we want to make the best use of our time and we want to arrive without too many distractions. There is an irony to all of this because we live a time a great prosperity, yet with great dissatisfaction. We have genuine shortage of time, and deep shortage of deep spirituality. There is a deficit in meaning and both rich and poor are afflicted by this deficit. To fill the emptiness many turn to consumption which in turn commodifies us. Rather than growing free time for compassion, we are even more closed in - worried, scared. Prosperity has exacted a terrible price from its favorites.
Many have used this discontentment to manufacture satisfaction. Charlatan gurus and televangelists use this appetite for spirituality to offer trivial experience. There is a fundamental need in humanity for meaning, and deep experience, and if that is not met then we seek it in all the wrong places.
In business, and life, there are those who are called life coaches. They sit down with us and lay out what is necessary to build a life or a business. It is a expanding business. Churches seek out those who will help them grow, as if there is a technique that provides a simple solution, a silver bullet to what ails us. There are tons of self help books out there to make us more - whatever that more is.
This same demand is also found in the health business. A world in which persons seek clearly articulated techniques that guarantee healing, for example, new age approaches such as that of Louise Hay’s, You Can Heal Your Life, or the best-selling book, The Secret, that proclaims that we can get what we want for ourselves by practicing some form of positive thinking. There are religious ideas of “name it and claim it” healing and prosperity theologies.
Our texts spoke to a time of dislocation and switching loyalties. When we see them in that context we are able to mine meaning for our times of dislocation and switching loyalties. The text speak about how to live in a far country. They are about healing, acceptance, hospitality and the common good. The vision of God preached in them restores the community’s well-being and overcomes those attitudes, practices and programmes that drive a wedge between people. Bruce Epperly had this to say:
The healing of Naaman presents a countercultural vision of the pathway to wholeness. This narrative asserts that healing can occur anywhere, by any practice, through any mediator, and at any pace. In this healing story, an unlikely person seeks healing, the powerful Naaman. Naaman finds a path to healing from an unexpected source, a Hebraic slave girl, who testifies to the power of her God. Naaman encounters an unexpected healer, Elisha, a Hebrew, who points the general to an unexpected healing modality, a dip in nearby and rather undistinguished Jordan River.
Naaman is initially angry at the prophet for suggesting such a simple healing. But, once again, the general receives counsel from an unexpected source, his servants who remind him that “if the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it? How much more, when he said to you, ‘Wash and be clean’?”
Surely, this healing encounter is a challenge to all who see healing as primarily dramatic in nature. God seeks healing in every circumstance and virtually any encounter can be a source of personal transformation, embracing body, mind, spirit, and relationships. God’s aim at healing is both intimate and universal.
When we say “yes” to Christ’s question, “do you want to be healed?” a lively and expanding world of healing possibilities opens up for us. Most of these are, like the Jordan River, are right in front of us.
Psalm 30 is realistic in its poetry of a person seeking insight in a time of despair and dejection. By seeking God the poet lives in the hope that God will transform his mourning into dancing. This deep seeking is a trust in a God who is experienced in human relationships Such seeking awakens us to new life and possibility for transformation. Opening ourselves to God through protest and pain as well as petition and praise enables God to be more directly present in our lives as we move from “disorientation” to “new orientation.” (Brueggemann)
Luke’s gospel portrays Jesus’ followers going out into the world with no safety net. They are sent out into a far country without backup plans. What they do have are the symbols of holy hospitality. It is not about food handed out at the door. It is a recognition of the truth of we get by relying on the kindness of strangers, ( Blanche Dubois in a street car called desire.)
In our texts we get a wider sense of a world community - no us against them - we are all moving to a far country where those things that divide are broken down. Inclusion and restoration of the stranger, the enemy general into the protective custody of God, these are the values that matter. The alien belongs to God.
The public space is also personal space. in a shared reality. The symbolic and actual eating together evokes an attitude of hospitality. “Whenever you enter a house, eat the food offered.” This is an act that heals - redefines hospitality. The old idea was before one could only eat proper and sacred food. Now what counts is openness to the otherness of reality. The companions of Jesus are sent out into a far country with only one attitude - inclusion. This is the attitude of seeking well-being for others and that seeking heals not only the other but oneself.
We feel this truth intuitively when we speak of giving good vibes or praying for others who are different and often at a distance. We know that envy and hatred beget broken relationships, we have felt that even in our family systems. We know what heals is care of the other, and that care also heals us.
Shaking the dust off is a metaphor for not holding onto hostility. For we know we can load down our shoes, our spirits, with negativity and it can block us. There is an expression that if we drink the cup of resentment we poison ourselves. Move on, don’t hold on to hostility, turn it into hospitality.
All of these passages are a marvelous gift to us. We too have the authority to heal and offer hospitality. There are the words - “ I give you the authority.” It is handed over to us. It is not borrowed power nor temporary authority. It is our ours. Jesus heals and we are told to go and do the the same. We do this in the name of God not Jesus. We live out of the grace of God and don’t need to justify our actions by secondhand sources. We are not waiting for something to be done to us. We are asked only to act and teach.
We have all that is needed for the journey into new locales and strange places. We can move into the far country for we are companions in the journey of healing and restoration. We are those called. No longer do we live out of a society of fear, envy, and anger. We have been touched by love. We have been restored by grace so we can go out to sow grace and to help the world reap well-being.
George Hermanson
