February 12, 2006

Glynn Cardy

Epiphany 6     II Kings 5:1-14

Teenagers are acutely aware of who is on the 'in' and who is on the 'out'. Most adults are too, though we try to be more sophisticated about it. Most people want to be on the inside if it means being included, accepted, and appreciated. Most people find being on the outside difficult, even if they pretend they don't. Societies have explicit or implicit borders about who is on the inside and how to join. Sickness, disability, and race are some of those borders. Ask any immigration consultation. 

Religions too have explicit or implicit rules about insiders and outsiders. There are boundaries about who is acceptable and who is not. One of the temptations of any religion is to equate its boundaries with God's boundaries. Presumption is dangerous. It is not difficult to find boundary verses in the Bible. Israel saw itself as the chosen of God, and other races as the 'unchosen'. In Amos 3:2, for example, God purportedly says “You only have I known of all the families of the earth.”

Christianity also has suffered similarly with bloated ideas of its own self-importance. Jesus' words: “No one comes to the Father except through me” [John 14:6] have usually been understood as divine sanction for Christianity's alleged superiority. Yet, as I pointed out recently in my sermon on Jonah, there is a subversive stream within the Bible. There are writers and stories that challenge religious elitism - which is often just plain old racism in holy drag. These stories often have a plot reversal where an insider is cast in a negative light and the outsider is portrayed as superior in virtue or faith. Think of the stories of Tamar [Gen 38], Ruth, Jonah, the woman at the well in John 4, the Syro-Phoenic ian woman [Mark 7:26], and, from our reading today, Naaman.

There was a history of conflict between Israel and Syria [aka Aram]. Recently, so II Kings 5 tells us, it had been Naaman who had led the Arameans to victory over Israel. It is fair to surmise he was not a popular man in Israel. He was an outsider, a man they feared and hated. A skin disease – probably psoriasis or eczema - afflicted Naaman. It was not what we would call leprosy. While Naaman's disease was no doubt irritating, the real illness was the personal and social stigma that went with it. Like Israel, Aram believed that such 'impurities' deemed one ritually unclean in the sight of God. The disease made him an outsider among his own people.

Naaman was part of the hierarchical male world. The message of hope though, in a topsy-turvy fashion, came from the bottom of that world. A girl, a slave, and an Israelite enemy, lit the spark. It took significant humility, as well as desperation, from both Naaman and his master, the King, to act on her advice. The King of Aram, who thought very highly of Naaman, petitioned the King of Israel, his defeated enemy, and offered significant payment. It was to be a king-to-king deal, as that was the way deals got done.

The King of Israel though did not have a master-to-servant relationship with the prophet Elisha. Prophets were a law unto themselves. Elisha also was a fierce opponent of the gods of Aram. Religious tolerance and inclusivity weren't his thing. Appeasing kings, especially foreign ones, wasn't part of his repertoire either. The King of Israel thought the King of Aram would know this. He thought the King of Aram was trying to bait him. He thought he was going to suffer. He rent his clothes in despair. Prophets always like it when Kings rend their clothes in despair. Rending shows they're desperate, and susceptible therefore to leverage. So Elisha stepped in to help the King of Israel, and Naaman came to pay Elisha a visit. 

Elisha then indulges in a little power game. Naaman expects to be treated with all the dignity and respect his position demands, but Elisha doesn't even appear. He just sends out an encrypted message: 'Go bathe seven times in a Jewish river you pompous foreign, heathen scumbag'. As you might imagine Naaman has had enough. He has humbled himself enough. He does not want to submit his honour to any more abuse. He imagined himself being instantly cured, not ridiculed.

Yet once again, by topsy-turvy subversive grace, he listens to the advice of his servants and does as he has been instructed. Grace though doesn't heal him, faith does. Not Elisha's bigotry but Naaman's willingness to listen to underlings, and in so doing lower himself, is the therapeutic potion. These things seem to affect God. Naaman dipped himself in the Jordan. Plunging into a foreign religion and river. Lowering himself to listen to servants, even a girl, and take orders from a foreign pestiferous prophet. The outsider, Naaman, dived in. Seven times. Humility and healing went hand in hand.

Although in the aftermath Naaman pledges allegiance to the God of Israel thus becoming an insider, the Bible also tells us that he went back to Aram and assisted his King to worship in the temple of the deity Rimmon. He was an outsider that became an insider, but then remained on the edge – the borderland. The borderland is that region where many of us camp. That place between being an insider and outsider, where creativity and freedom are cherished, but the night winds are cold. Where we live in the tension between belonging yet not fitting in; between believing yet rejecting many beliefs; between faith and skepticism. It is a good place, but often hard and lonely. St Matthew's exists for people on the borderland.

The saga of Naaman has a salutary ending, omitted by our lectionary. A Jewish insider, Elisha's servant Gehazi, is overtaken by greed. He connives to obtain the gifts that Naaman has offered Elisha but Elisha had refused. Gehazi is then struck with the skin disease that originally had afflicted Naaman. “The story that began with [an illness] ends with it, with the difference that its victims have been reversed: the Aramean outsider has become clean, and the Israelite insider has become unclean” [i]

The Gehazi addition is not to warn us about the dangers of greed so much as to warn us of the dangers in presuming. Don't presume that race, religion, heritage, and connections automatically mean that God will bless you. And don't presume the opposite either. Don't box God in, on the inside or outside. God, like the wind, blows where she wills.

To our peril we ignore, shun, and vilify the outsider, and smugly imagine that we have a monopoly on truth. This has been writ large last week in the controversy surrounding the lampooning of the Prophet Mohammed. Freedom of speech is critical in a democracy, and critical for any powerful religion, like Christianity, where piety, power, and corruption can too easily coalesce. Yet freedom of speech is like driving a car. You can do it recklessly, displaying your machismo, or responsibly, displaying your tolerance. Too many of the responses to both the cartoons and to the protests reek of cultural superiority, insider and outsider language, intolerance, and certitude. Presumption is the mother of all stuff ups.

[i] Frank Spina, The Faith of the Outsider: Exclusion and Inclusion in the Biblical Story, 2005