Naaman the Leper 2 Kings 5 Proper 9C Ordinary 14C Pentecost +7

We find in the tale of Naaman the Syrian a masterfully told narrative. Immediately upon reading, we are caught up in the plot, or the problem. There is a great man, honourable man, strong man, but he has contracted a disease. However, the word for leprosy used here is not the worst kind that would separate him from everyone. It may have been something so simple as eczema or psoriasis, but any skin disease was considered suspect because after all it could be leprosy. Then we have a shock: an un-named slave girl suggests the cure. What is even more shocking is that Naaman listens to this unnamed slave girl.

The cure lies in the power of a prophet in Israel. The prophet is unnamed, but we know who it is because we have already been reading about the miracles of Elisha in chapter 4: he causes the widow’s oil lasted longer than it should have, he raises the Shunammite woman’s son, he purifies some poison stew, and he feeds 100 people with very little food, we the readers have no problem believing that Elisha can cure Naaman’s leprosy.

But there is this one little problem. Israel and Syria do not have a good relationship, if you turn over to chapter 6 you find that Syria and Israel are at war. How in the world will a commander of the army of Syria (Aram), march into Israel and ask for healing? He does it with dignity and pomp and circumstance and lots of money, like any VIP would do. Surely the king of Israel won’t turn down a load of money. 10 talents of silver A talent could weigh anything from 50-80 lbs and silver today is worth about $225 a pound. 6,000 shekels of gold would be 150 lbs of gold, gold is worth about $400 a pound today, and 10 changes of clothes in a day when most people wore their clothes until they rotted off of them. But the king of Israel takes it as a trick.

Meanwhile Elisha knows what is going on and sends a servant and says to send Naaman to him that ‘he may learn there is a prophet in Israel’. What does the VIP expect when his chariot and his entourage stops at Elisha’s door? The red carpet? Flashing paparazzi photography? Of course. After all this is the treatment that commanders receive. Instead he gets nothing but a servant, possibly a slave to deliver the healer’s message: go dip in the Jordan river seven times. And he has a righteous fit. I’ve tried to think of a similar situation and what I thought of was Donald Trump with all his money arriving at a tribal shaman’s house asking for a cure. It looks this ridiculous. And then for the healer to send a servant? That is dishonourable. This means the prophet is not even giving him the time of day to see him. This is when you have stage 4 cancer and your oncologist sends a medical assistant to give his or her orders, and you never see the doctor. But his servants see the heart of the problem. It’s just too easy. If it was difficult, would  you have done it? Of course you must give a difficult task to a hero in order to make the story sell. Perhaps he will kill a giant with nothing but a slingshot, or take on  the 12 tasks of Hercules that start with killing a lion, and killing the nine headed dragon… Perhaps he will have to fly a fight plane through a trench and make a precise shot to destroy the death star, or take the one ring and throw it in the fire of mount doom, At very very least he should have to lift a heavy hammer and defeat his evil brother.

 Naaman hoped for such a task, instead he is told to dip in a dirty river. Talk about anticlimactic! For instance: would the so called Oklahoma river-that we know is really the Canadian make you clean? No, it might give you Ecoli. And everyone knows that Syrian’s rivers are much better than Israel’s little stream called the Jordan. His servants persuade him, just as the servant girl persuaded him to try this in the first place. He is clean, he is cured, he rejoices and wants to worship the God of Israel, which shows not only is he physically healed but spiritually as well. Elisha won’t take payment and Naaman wants dirt, probably because he believed that gods were geographically located and if he had Israel’s soil perhaps Israel’s god would give him favour. But there is a subtle message in the fact that he brought with him gold and silver and took back dirt.

In the story of Naaman, God has turned everything upside down. Social conventions, status quo, the responsibility of kings and governments, and in the midst of this we even ask ourselves the question of who has the right to health care? The story is even more topsy turvy for us, because a Syrian is a powerful man and the Syrians we know are now refugees wondering the earth. But this story addresses the issue of the nobody as the Syrians wander the earth. Who had the power in this story? Well God of course, but who has the voice of God, the authority? The servants. God’s cure is given in grace, not with difficult tasks to complete. And God has absolutely no respect for the boundaries, geographical, social, political, and economic that we humans erect.

 Surely, the boundaries that we place around God’s love cannot and will not hold God back.

Jesus refers to this story in Luke 4 when he addresses the synagogue in his hometown

Luke 4

“Truly I tell you,” he continued, “no prophet is accepted in his hometown. ²⁵ I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. ²⁶ Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. ²⁷ And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian.” ²⁸ All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. ²⁹ They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him off the cliff. ³⁰ But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way.

Is it any wonder they wanted to throw him off the cliff?

What I want for Christmas

1. No more hurting children. When will adults learn that children are the most treasured gift anyone could ever receive? When will we learn to treat children as people with feelings? When will we learn to take our children to church when they wake up and cry Sunday morning to go to Sunday School?
2. No more hatred. Jesus talked about murder beginning in the heart with hatred. If people learn to forgive and control their feelings by giving them to God, there would be no more violence.
3. No more hunger. According to the United Nations World Hunger Program, every 3.6 seconds someone in the world dies of starvation. I see my Christmas wish coming true when I see a community willing to help its hungry people.
4. No more gossip. Nothing can be more destructive to a church or community than idle words that spread like wildfire. This Christmas have a deaf ear and a mute mouth. If you don’t hear it you can’t spread it. If you do hear it, don’t spread it. If you hear an item of concern about an individual, ask that person, not everyone else in town. Give people the benefit of the doubt.
5. No more alcoholism.
Don’t buy the liquor this Christmas. You might drink too much, get angry, hurt someone you love—even your child or your spouse. It’s not worth it. Drunk driving accidents go way up around the holidays. We don’t want anymore tragedy. Leave the alcohol alone.
6. True Peace. The biblical idea of peace is found in the Old Testament concept of shalom. Much more than an absence of war, this peace permeates into the very heart of humanity. It means more than serenity, more than calmness, more than safety. It is the idea of complete harmony between God and humanity that leads to complete harmony within oneself, with creation, and with others. As we continue to read the Bible, we find the only way to shalom is through God’s Christmas gift to the world, his Son Jesus Christ. If you search for this peace, ask Jesus to forgive you of all wrong and to come into your life. Contact a local pastor for spiritual guidance.
7. An optimism of grace. This optimism tells me that my list is not just idle wishes, it is the hope of Christmas, the desire of a God who sent his only begotten Son into the world to make all these wishes come true.

Ordinary 28C Episcopal Reading Ruth 1:1-18 For the love of a Mother-in-Law

Naomi & Her husband Ed moved to Austin, TX, from Norman, OK, in the 1980s because of the oil bust. They bought a house near Austin but they never lost their ties to Oklahoma. Especially Oklahoma Sooners football. Every year they cheered for Oklahoma. They wore red and white when everyone around them wore an ugly color of orange. They were saddened when their two sons, Mark & Charles decided to attend University of Texas instead of University of Oklahoma, but they could do nothing about it. What hurt them more was when their sons married Longhorns. Mark married a University of Texas cheerleader. Ruth did not even own anything red and white. Her car was orange, her shoes were orange, even her apartment was painted orange.

Time passed and Ed had a heart attack and died. Mark & Charles took good care of their mother, along with their wives Orpah and Ruth. One awful day Mark & Charles were driving home from a Red River Shootout game and were hit by a drunk driver. Naomi, Orpah, and Ruth were devastated. Naomi decide she would return to Norman, OK. She managed to sell her home in TX and buy her old family farm outside of Norman. She offered a home to Orpah and Ruth. They are packing the U-Haul when Naomi turns to them both and says, Orpah, dear, Ruth, darling, you don’t have to come with me. Go back to UT get your master’s degrees or maybe meet another man and remarry. Orpah gets in her orange pickup and drives away. Ruth says to Naomi,

"I will go with you to Norman. I will buy a Sooner T shirt. I will learn to listen to Boomer Sooner without choking. I will wave an OU flag. I will paint my car red. I will leave behind my loyalties to Texas and embrace Oklahoma because I love you and want to take care of you."

Ruth. Identity. Who is she now that her husband is dead and she is a foreigner? Will those labels haunt her? Foreign poor widow woman? Yet she loves Naomi. Is love enough to give us identity? Last fall I experienced one of the longest illnesses I have ever had (next to depression anyway). I was diagnosed with mono. Yes, I’ve heard all the jokes, and the only people I kiss were not sick (my husband & 2 daughters) and they never caught it.

Anyway, for a few days I did nothing but sleep. I got up to take my kids to school and pick them up, grab a bite to eat from the fridge, and fell back in bed. I missed so many weekends with my daughters as their daddy took them to the state fair, etc, while I lay at home on the couch with swollen glands, sore throat, and extreme fatigue. Walking from the car to the house wore me out. Walking for 20 minutes put me in bed for 2 hours for months afterward. At one point I look at the ceiling and asked God if I would ever recover. He answered what if you don’t? Then I ask what good am I to my family if all I can do is lay here? A question I’m sure many of the ill ask. God told me all I had to do was love. Loving my husband and daughters was enough. Yes, I did recover. A year later I can finally walk 3 miles at a time without having to sleep for days. I can do aerobics again and stay awake all day (most of the time)…but I find myself much more sensitive to the ill.

Ruth loves Naomi. She lets that define her. The cruel labels of poor foreign widow do not.

We glimpse the Kingdom of God and we find out God’s world is just the opposite of ours. The women have power and baby boys become king.


“What you see around you are people unable to love each other.”Ruth teaches us to love. She left everything to love an old mother-in-law. That is the true loves story here. It is not a young attractive woman finds young attractive man, fall in love, get married & have a baby. It is a cursed foreigner (here I ask you to insert whatever slang term you have heard for foreigners in our land. I won’t say them aloud) the only home she knew and the only god she knew for the love of an old woman and her mother-in-law to boot. God took that and turned it into this story about the ancestor of King David.


An old woman and a cursed foreigner took a huge risk and called a powerful man to use his power to save them. They risked everything. If Boaz would have called upon his servants to kill her, no one in power would have ever missed a foreigner. If Boaz would have refused to listen to her and simply assumed she was there why most women came to the threshing floor, to take advantage of the men’s drunken state in hope of making a few bucks. If he had even called the men’s attention to her by speaking loudly…her reputation would have been ruined forever.


They called up on him to follow the law of God and save them. Reminds me of a group of people that called upon a president to sign a certain bill. JFK signing the civil rights bill. Reminds me of a group of religious leaders who rose up to protest their gov’t’s doubling the gas prices and oppress the people. Reminds me of a group who asked congress to call a mass killing of a certain race what it is: genocide


Many times this asking of people in power to change doesn’t turn out so well. For Ruth it did, but it doesn’t for everyone. Some people--including one of her descendents--end up on the cross when they challenge the powers that be.

The Sounds of Silence, a sixties hit by Simon and Garfunkel, describes people as afraid to love and afraid to hope because of their disconnect with each other. When I preached this sermon on Oct. 14, 2007, I ended with a video of Simon & Garfunkel singing this song...let their words inspire us to love each other in order to change the world: as Ruth did. Click the link to watch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZGWQauQOAQ

Ordinary 15C Luke 10: 25-37 Small Town Social Justice

Monday, Sept. 24, my 2 daughters & I took a road trip to a state park. After we swam for a while, we drove to a small SW OK town where I went to high school. I only lived there 2 years, but graduated from HS there....had not been back for over 10 years and neither one of my children had ever been there. It is a town of less than 2000, so there is not much site-seeing to be done...


After a brief hike cut short by the sound of a rattler in the grass, we got in the car and drove the 10 miles to M------. If you have never driven in SW Oklahoma or West Texas you cannot imagine what it is like to drive where the land is flat, flat, flat, and you see so much sky you wonder why God made hills. We are about to M----- with the music cranked as high as it will go and my 7-year-old says, "Mommy, I just heard a pop." I said, "So." She said, "Mommy the car is shaking." I still didn't notice anything...then I heard this awful sound...and well, turned off the radio. Blowout. We are in the middle of NOWHERE. M---- is about 2 miles away...so I drove at 25 with blinkers on until we got to town. Pulled off in a parking lot and got out to look at my shredded tire. I started digging in the back of the station wagon for the jack and spare. A loud, old 68 Ford pickup with 2 guys in the truckbed rattles by. I see them turn around. The 2 guys in back jump out before the truck stops. They almost have the tire off the car before the hit the ground.

"Need some help?"

"Sure. But my jack is sorely lacking."
"Don't worry. We can lift the car if we can't get the jack to work. We ain't afraid of work."
The two guys bent over the tire are 20-somethings...wiry, tall, heads shaved, wearing nothing but boots and jeans. Tattoos cover their heads, faces, backs, chests, arms, hands....Their dad and older brother stood back and watched If this had been the city I might have been scared, but I figure if I started talking we'd figure out we went to high school together.
"I'm Kelly."

"We're the _______." They say in unison. I vaguely remember the family name. I ask them if the remember my brother.
The guy behind the truck. "Yeah I remember him."
They have the tire changed by now, and tell me where I can get a decent used tire for a fair price. They jump back in the pickup and tell me to follow them to the tire shop. So I do. Tattoed arms waving, they point to a tiny auto shop.

I don't know how you remember high school, but there are certain families that are labeled in small towns as losers. I don't know how it started with this family, but they had a certain label. It may have been something their great-grandpa did...but teachers and kids at school have a certain idea of a kid with a certain last name. Sometimes the kid chooses to live up to it, sometimes they try hard to overcome it.

Here I am in a tiny farming town in southwest Oklahoma living inside the parable of the Good Samaritan. Believe me, no one would have guessed the dust covered 90 Ford Taurus I drive is the car of a college professor. At the moment I looked like an Okie (I do say it proud, Vince Gill, but I did look like one). My station wagon is loaded down with junk cause we have been on a day trip at the lake. My 2 kids & I have just been swimming and digging clay. I had my hatch up and junk spread around on the gravel, just trying to dig for the spare tire. Did cars drive by and see my distress? Oh yes. Who was it that stopped? The guys that got beat up in school because their family was labeled. I have never seen myself in the parable as the one on the side of the road....