Trinity 17

A sermon preached on Sunday 9th October by Olga Fabrikant-Burke, Assistant Curate at St Bene’t’s.

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be always acceptable to you, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

Is your Jesus a philosopher? Now, don’t get me wrong, Jesus was without doubt a first-class philosopher with sublime and sophisticated teachings under his rugged belt. But are we in danger of viewing Jesus as a mere philosopher who gives us clever thoughts to think and then sends us on our merry way? And yet, according to many historians who study the origins of Christianity, Jesus' reputation as a miracle worker is the one thing that is firmly established in the historical record. Even if the said historians do not accept the possibility of miracles in principle, that Jesus was regarded by his contemporaries, supporters and critics alike, to be an effective healer seems hard to argue with.

We are more used to philosophers than healers. We are perpetually tempted to tame God, to bring him to heel so that he meets our expectations. But  God surprises us. Today’s brief scene in the Gospel of Luke scuppers all our attempts to domesticate Jesus, repackaging him for consumption in polite Cambridge society. Jesus heals. He heals strange skin diseases. He performs miracles. Jesus surprises us. He is like one of those mysterious men of God, like a prophet of old, who does mysterious things.

God acts in surprising ways, contrary to our expectations. And our Old Testament reading this morning takes this a step further. Not only does God surprise us, but he even surprises us in surprising ways.

Enter Naaman. Naaman was a powerful military figure, yet this man of great authority suffers from a debilitating skin condition. His physical affliction probably comes with enormous social stigma attached, especially for this international mover and shaker.

Unlike many of us, Naaman appears to believe in miracles—in fact, miracles may well be the only thing he has left to believe in. From all accounts, it does not come as a profound metaphysical shock to him that healers exist. On the contrary, Naaman jumps at the faintest hint of a rumour that there is an effective healer in a distant land. In a sense, Naaman is prepared to be surprised. In fact, he is in pursuit of a Big Bang of a surprise.

But God manages to find a surprising way in which to surprise even Naaman. Naaman expects a flashy and fancy surprise, involving a dramatic outpouring of the supernatural and the spiritual. He would have been delighted, had Elisha the famous healer waved his magic wand and said some arcane incantations in some enigmatic and extravagant way, with lightning bolts coming down from heaven, and blinding light piercing the mesmerised spectators. Naaman was even ready for a trying challenge that would have put his famed courage to the test. 

Go and take a few dips in a dirty river, comes the response. Probably not unlike the river Cam. How disappointing. Whereas for many in our modern world God may well be too offensively supernatural, for Naaman God proved disappointingly not spiritual enough. For some of us, the surprise lies in the healing; for some of us, like for Naaman, the surprise lies in the decidedly mundane means of healing. 

So, God surprises us in surprising ways. Or, perhaps to be more precise, unsurprising ways. Go and bathe yourself in a backwater of a river and be clean. How many times have we missed divine surprises because they were too unsurprising?

There is no fanfare, neither are there any trumpet blowers. There is just quiet obedience. And, that, I think, is the true surprise, for Naaman and for all of us—the stark call to obedience. The heart of the matter is that Naaman is used to doing things his own way rather than following instructions. Naaman’s issue is not a lack of faith, but a lack of obedience. So God catches Naaman off-guard with this unexpected call to obedience. ‘Go, wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh shall be restored and you shall be clean.’ The call to obedience cuts to the heart of Naaman’s expectations and upends them.

And what about us? How often have we ended up neglecting God’s gentle instructions guiding and leading us, his still small voice speaking to us? It may be that we, like Naaman, felt that the divine instructions came across as too simple and too unspiritual. Or perhaps we were simply used to doing things our own way. When we ask for a surprise from God, the call to obedience is not what we have in mind.

Obedience is not easy, and it is such hard work for many reasons. For one, God typically asks us to do surprising things that make absolutely no sense to us. Spare a thought for Naaman. It simply does not compute that in order to be made clean, he had to wash himself in unclean waters. Logically speaking, the mightier and cleaner rivers of Damascus would have been a far better choice. The truth is that more often than not, God does not reveal to us us all his plans, let alone the reasoning behind them. He does not give us a blow-by-blow account of his decision-making or share with us the roadmap that carefully spells out all the twists and turns that lie ahead of us. The call to obedience is as simple as it is stark: “Follow me.” Or “Go, wash in the Jordan seven times.”

But Naaman’s story reveals another reason why obedience proves so difficult. Naaman, at one level, was actually prepared to obey this strange God of Israel, the LORD. He was a faithful pagan and was probably not in the least bit perplexed by the existence of a deity, a celestial being, with the power to heal and even perhaps with the authority to demand obedience as appropriate. But the surprise, for Naaman as it is for us, is that God’s call to obedience rarely comes in a vacuum. Instead, it comes in a community, and usually in a community of thoroughly unexpected and undesirable people: the last, the least, and the lowly. 

The great and powerful Naaman has to submit to the advice of a young slave girl, who is also a foreigner to boot, and has to obey the word of a slightly unhinged prophet who lives far away from the royal court. He must listen to the voice of his servants. We may well be prepared to obey the God enthroned among his cherubim, but would we obey the surprising God who appears in the slave, in the young girl, in the eccentric and annoying man of God, in the widow, in the orphan, and in the sojourner? And what if he comes to us in the one crucified? To listen to God’s voice is to listen to the seemingly insignificant voices. That, too, is a surprise.

To his credit, Naaman does, in the end, choose to walk the path of obedience. And the reward of his obedience is, at first blush, healing. His skin disease is no more, and his long-suffering flesh is restored. But we all know that obedience does not always result in such immediate and tangible blessings. Our story is not naive either. Notice that at work in v. 14 is a clever word play that is easy to miss but one that reveals the moral of this story. “His flesh was restored and became clean like that of a young boy.” The Hebrew for “young boy” is na’ar qaton, which is the masculine equivalent to the description of the young girl (na’arah qatannah). Put simply, the great and powerful Naaman becomes like the enslaved young girl. The true reward of obedience is spiritual transformation—spiritual healing. The endless chatter of idols in Naaman’s heart gives way to the still small voice of God. Finally, he sees and hears. Finally, Naaman sees and hears, and obeys, the God of surprises, who even surprises us in surprising ways. “There is no God in all the world except in Israel.”

Amen.