2 Kings 5:1-15c
Naaman, commander of the army of the king of Aram, was a great man and in high favor with his master, because by him the Lord had granted victory to Aram. The man, though a mighty warrior, suffered from leprosy. Now the Aramaeans on one of their raids had taken a young girl captive from the land of Israel, and she served Naaman’s wife. She said to her mistress, ‘If only my lord were with the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy.’ So Naaman went in and told the king just what the girl from the land of Israel had said. And the king of Syria said, “Go, now, and I will send a letter to the king of Israel. So he went, taking with him ten talents of silver, six thousand shekels of gold, and ten sets of garments. And the brought the letter to the king of Israel, which read, ‘When this letter reaches you, know that I have sent to you my servant Naaman, that you may cure him of his leprosy.’ When the king of Israel read the letter, he tore his clothes and said, ‘Am I God, to give death or life, that this man sends word to me to cure a man of his leprosy? Just look and see how he is trying to pick a quarrel with me.’ But when Elisha, the man of God, heard that the king of Israel had torn his clothes, he sent a message to the king, ‘Why have you torn your clothes? Let him come to me, that he may learn that there is a prophet in Israel.” So Naaman came, with his horses and chariots, and halted at the entrance of Elisha’s house. Elisha sent a messenger to him, saying ‘Go, wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh shall be restored and you shall be clean.’ But Naaman became angry and went away, saying, “I thought that for me he would surely come out, and stand and call on the name of the LORD his God, and would wave his hand over the spot and cure the leprosy! Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, far better than all the waters of Israel? Could I not wash in them and be clean?” He turned and went away in a rage. But his servants approached and said to him, “Father, if the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it? How much more, when all he said to you was, ‘Wash, and be clean’?” So he went down and immersed himself seven times in the Jordan, according to the word of the man of God; his flesh was restored like the flesh of a young boy, and he was clean. Then he returned to the man of God, he and all his company; he came and stop before him and said, ‘Now I know that there is no God in all the earth except in Israel.”
Psalm 111
Hallelujah! I will give thanks to the LORD with my whole heart, in the assembly of the upright, in the congregation. Great are your works, O LORD, pondered by all who delight in them. Majesty and splendor mark your deeds, and your righteousness endures forever. You cause your wonders to be remembered; you are gracious and full of compassion. You give food to those who fear you, remembering forever your covenant. You have shown your people the power of your works in giving them the lands of the nations. The works of your hands are faithfulness and justice; all of your precepts are sure. They stand fast forever and ever, because they are done in truth and equity. You sent redemption to your people and commanded your covenant forever; holy and awesome is your name. The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom; all who practice this have a good understanding. God’s praise endures forever.
2 Timothy 2:8-15
Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendant of David - that is my gospel, for which I suffer hardship, even to the point of being chained like a criminal. But the word of God is not chained. Therefore I endure everything for the sake of the elect, so that they may also obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus, with eternal glory. This saying is sure: If we have died with him, we will also live with him; if we endure, we will also reign with him; if we deny him, he will also deny us; if we are faithless, he remains faithful - for he cannot deny himself. Remind them of this, and warn them before God that they are to avoid wrangling over words, which does not good but only ruins those who are listening. Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved by him, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly explaining the word of truth.
Luke 17:11-19
On the way to Jerusalem, Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee. As he entered a village, ten lepers approached him. Keeping their distance, they called out, saying, ‘Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!’ When he saw them, he said to them, ‘Go and show yourselves to the priests.’ And as they went, they were made clean. Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. He prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan. Then Jesus asked, ‘Where not ten 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 he said to him, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.”
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Kindred in Christ, it would be worse than neglectful if I didn’t name the recent big news this morning. Now, I’m not pretending to be political, though I can’t say I don’t care who you vote for, but republicans or democrats of independents aside, we have got to address the rampant rape culture in this country. We can do all kinds of pointing of the finger against ‘those’ people, rather we claim it’s some supposed evils of radical Islam being all against women’s rights, or we pretend the problems of misogyny belong to somebody else. But the tapes released this week of Trump talking about sexual assault like he’s ordering a sandwich, and the amount of support he is still getting, the excuses being made that this is just ‘locker room talk,’ or it’s just ‘men will be men,’ reveal again that we have in this country a serious problem with sexism, and it is absolutely not okay.
Does anybody remember when Obama was first running against Hillary for the Democratic nomination? The conversation in Hyde Park, Chicago, where I was living at the time, were around whether it was more socially acceptable to be racist or to be sexist. We’ve seen that both issues are really big, and if we can’t name them we can’t deal with them. Now we’re trying to excuse this mess, pretend it took us by surprise. But one in three women in this country has been sexually assaulted. One in three. And most of that happens before they are even adults. Why in the world do we allow this world to continue in this way? Half of the human population is being treated like property, like entertainment, like disposable commodities. It doesn’t matter that a woman might be somebody’s wife or mother, whose daughter she is, a woman is her own person, and to treat her any less is to deny the Image of God, to spit in the face of the God who made her.
So today we have a story from the First Testament where a woman who has been stolen from her homeland as the spoils of war basically saves the life of the man who basically destroyed her life. Did you notice her there in the folds of the narrative? She was only briefly mentioned, but it’s very important that she was there. “Now the Aramaeans on one of their raids had taken a young girl captive from the land of Israel, and she served Naaman’s wife.” Did you hear that? The Aramaeans were Israel’s enemies, had abducted and scattered God’s people, and here one of the girls they stole, and probably abused as a sign of victory during their conquest, here she is declaring the power of her God to the very people who tried to tear her away from that God by stealing her from her culture and her people by force.
It might seem like the ‘man of God,’ Elisha, is the hero of the story. He is, after all, the one who proclaims the word that sets Naaman on the healing path. Naaman is used to getting five star treatment, having the red carpet rolled out for him, and he’s none too happy that Elisha only sends a servant with a word for a simple thing. Naaman is used to getting what he wants, getting a spotlight, being the most important and powerful one in the room. Even with leprosy he commands a certain respect. He was important enough for his king to send him to the king of the country they had conquered, which is quite an admission of powerlessness and had to be embarrassing. But without that girl they had stolen, none of this healing would have come about. Without the dressing room conversations of the women, none of this story would have happened.
See, our Scriptures aren’t angled toward the full inclusion of women as equal human beings, that’s how we’ve gotten away with making women second-class for so many generations. That’s what you get when a bunch of men with narrow world views, under social pressure and with assumed power, put the books together and decide what’s true and what’s worthwhile. But every now and again we find stories of strong women heroes among the mix, even when they’ve been ignored or mistreated. If you read with an eye to where the women are and where they’ve been left out, you’ll find a lot more than we’ve been led to believe. You might also be surprised at how little is there, which is why we need to lift up those missing voices as often as possible. Not only women, but any minority group, any outcast people, any colonized group. Tomorrow has been called Columbus Day since the late 18th century, but lately folks are remembering that it’s a day named after a man who brought about the destruction of an entire nation of people. In fact, our national church body made public repudiation of the so-called ‘Doctrine of Discovery’ this past summer, and cities across the country are re-directing the holiday toward an Indigenous People’s Day celebration.
Because our God is no respecter of persons, but God does stand on the side of the oppressed. Just when we think we know who’s in and who’s out, we are reminded by Paul in his second letter to Timothy, that “the word of God is not chained.” We cannot contain where grace and mercy begin and end, who is considered ‘worthy,’ who ‘deserves’ healing. That’s happening here in the story of Naaman, here. God’s own chosen people have been overrun and scattered by an enemy nation - a fate they were well warned about because they were awful to the widows and orphans, to the poor and outcast among them - and God not only used the so-called ‘enemy’ to finally bring about justice, God did not withhold healing salvation even from Naaman, who would to the Israelites be called a terrorist today. God even used one of the prisoners of war to bring about that salvation.
Maybe it's the ones who have been outcast by society who are more aware of God’s mercy and welcome. The ones with nothing left to lose. The ones who have already been thrown away who understand what value there really is in belonging without earning. If you didn’t have any of the things you measure your worth by today, job or family or community or history or whatever, do you understand that you would still belong to the kingdom of God? None of those things that we find our power in are actually where our power comes from. No amount of privilege or authority can determine our salvation. If we depend on privilege or authority to save us, we’ll be lost, we’ll lose ourselves and our connection to the rest of God’s people. Because power and authority fluctuate, standards change, but the power of God to create and heal and save is not dependent on the changing tides of our beliefs or behaviors or moods at the moment. It does not go in and out of style.
People of God, the life we are created for, the world we partner with God to recreate each day, is rooted and grounded in that promise of steadfast love, that bigger-than-us truth for the salvation of the entire cosmos, including all of humanity. We do not own one another like property to be pushed around and used for entertainment without our consent, but we do belong to each other. We do not have the power to erect lasting barriers between types of people based on our whims and traditions of segregation. God does not respect those divisions between us. God will see to it that the outcast are made central, again and again, even if we do not acknowledge it openly. God lives among the trafficked, among the abused, among the homeless and those who have been thrown away by our arbitrary standards of value. That is who Jesus was, who Jesus is, as a refugee and as a political figure standing against both the oppression of the Romans and the pure-blood pieties of his own religious leaders.
We are part of this story, friends, like it or not. We are part of this salvation history in the here and now. What does this new reality look like in your life?
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