Naaman 2 Kings 5 April 29, 2012 Travis Collins Syria has been in the news a lot lately because of the uprising of Syrian citizens in protest of Syria s dictatorial President Al-Assad. And just this week Israeli leaders stepped up their calls that Al-Assad should step aside. The tension between Israel and Syria is not new. Syria borders Israel in Israel s northeast corner in the region known as the Golan Heights. And the animosity between the two dates back as far as Naaman (who lived about 900 B.C.) and beyond. At the time of today s story, Israel was subject to Syria. The story begins with these words, Now Naaman was commander of the army of the king of Syria. He was a great man in the sight of his master and highly regarded. You might be thinking, I thought this series was about ordinary people. Naaman doesn t sound so ordinary to me! Well, it s true that he was commander but he was a leper. He was a great man but he had leprosy. He was highly regarded but he had leprosy. This was an important man with a big a big however! (You thought I was going to say something else, didn t you?) A lot of folks have a however. Their lives would be nearly perfect. Except for the however. A family gets out of the car and walks into church to the smiles and admiration of all who see them. They re the ones whose pictures you want on the landing page of the church web site. However things at home are borderline dysfunctional. A woman is a brilliant lawyer. Attorneys fear her. Richmond Magazine features her. Lady luck favors her. However her addiction is harder and harder to hide. You know the guy: All the girls want to date him; all the guys want to be him. His life is as perfect as his teeth. However his laziness and self-centeredness are going to catch up with him soon. There are all kinds of howevers. Things would be good however And anybody who has a however can learn from the story of Naaman. Naaman s however was leprosy. Our family spent a good deal of time with lepers when we lived in Nigeria. I was the interim pastor of a church of lepers. When the village burnt, Keri was one of the first outsiders on the scene. I remember driving a man from the village to the bank in town. I remember the reactions to him. We ve seen the feet with no toes and the hands with no fingers. The distorted facial features. The lesions. The shame. The embarrassment. That was Naaman s however. 1
We need to back up the story a few years to a raid on Israel carried out by Syrian marauders. Maybe they were army. Maybe they were young hoodlums who raided Israeli villages across the border from Syria just because they could. One day, or probably night, they swooped into a village and forced their way into a house where they found a girl and they decided to have her for themselves. If it went down like I figure those things must have, they had their way with her and then, done with her, sold her. She ended up a maid for Naaman s wife. By the way, our church is joining members of the Woman s Missionary Union across the country trying to find ways to help young ladies in similar situations. A few Wednesday nights ago we had Holly Austin Smith speak to us. Holly was a suburban teenager who didn t like her family. She met a man at the mall who befriended her, showed interest in her, and invited her to run away with him. What she didn t know until she was in the car with him was that he was a sex trafficker. He abducted her. She ended up selling herself for his profit on the streets of Atlantic City. Thank God she was arrested and thus rescued. Two Friday nights ago some of our folks were on Jeff Davis Highway reaching out to people on the street. They met pair of tenth grade twins, out there as most are, because they believe they don t deserve any better. We re trying to figure out how to help young ladies like that. The young lady in this story the young slave from Israel said, Ma am, I believe if you could get Master Naaman to go to this prophet I ve heard of back in Israel, maybe his leprosy would be healed. Naaman s wife told Naaman and Naaman told the king of Syria who sent Naaman to the king of Israel, but the king of Israel had no clue as to what to do. Elisha was a close confidante and counselor to the king, so he sent a message to the king and said, Chill out, King. Send the leprous army commander from Syria to me. The king gave Naaman directions and verse 9 says that Naaman and his entourage with all their horses and chariots (today s equivalent of a row of black limos) pulled up to Elisha s house. It must have been quite the scene. But Elisha the prophet didn t come out. Rather, Elisha sent someone out to talk to Naaman. (I don t know why Elisha didn t come out. The Bible s many stories of Elisha tell us that Elisha was neither fearful nor arrogant. So, for what I assume was a good reason, Elisha didn t come out to receive Naaman. He sent a messenger instead.) And the message Elisha sent was this: Go, wash yourself seven times in the Jordan river. If you do, your skin will be healed. Well, Naaman the Syrian was furious. Verse 11 tells us that Naaman said, I thought that he would surely come out to me and stand and call on the name of the Lord his God, wave his hand over the spot and cure me of my leprosy. One, Naaman was offended that Elisha hadn t come out personally. And second, Naaman was offended by Elisha s message. Naaman thundered, I came all this way to have a pulpitpounding preacher send some gopher to tell me to go jump in the river?! Let s go home! 2
But Naaman s servants had a gut feeling that there was something genuine about this advice of Elisha. So they swallowed hard and said to their master, We think you d be making a mistake by not following this man s directions. Naaman paused and thought about it. He changed his mind and humbled his heart took their advice. That part of the story offers us another quick lesson. It is an act of courage to speak truth to power. And it is an act of humble wisdom for people in positions of power to listen to those lower on the org. chart than they are. So Naaman went to the Jordan not as a man with a big ego but as a man with a big however. Not as a hero but as a humble man. Not as a commander but as a common fellow with an uncommon need. There s a lesson in that, too. Spiritual obedience requires a willingness to submit ourselves to things that seem rather simple, even odd, to us. In our world spiritual obedience requires an intellectual humility. Not intellectual dishonesty. Not intellectually laziness. But an intellectual humility. And in our world that often begins with the Bible and a decision to believe it is the word of God. The willingness to say, There are things in those pages that I don t understand. And I realize there are various ways to interpret specific passages. But I choose to believe it is the revelation of God to humans and, as best I understand it, I will submit to it as the authority for what I believe and practice. For us it s not a willingness to dip in the Jordan, but often it is a willingness to submit intellectually to the Bible. Why, by the way, did Elisha ask Naaman to dip in the river? Well, why did Jesus spit on the ground and apply the paste of saliva and dirt to the eyes of the blind man? Why does the Bible s book of James say that when we are sick we should call spiritual leaders together and ask them to anoint us with oil? I think because they are tangible symbols of God s presence and power. Naaman the leper submitted intellectually and dipped seven times, and when he walked out of the Jordan river his skin was as smooth as Michael Buble s voice, as pure as a mother s love. He could have been in a Dove s Body Wash commercial. After he was healed Naaman wanted to give Elisha a significant contribution for Elisha s services. Naaman insisted, but Elisha refused. More importantly, Naaman declared, Now I know that the only true God is Yahweh, Jehovah, the God of Israel. Not the gods of my land, but your God, Elisha. Then Naaman made a couple of really odd requests. One, he wanted some Israeli dirt to take home as a spiritual souvenir. Two, he asked for forgiveness in advance for going to the temple of another god. Back home in Syria, Naaman said, out of cultural obligation I m going to have to go with my king to the 3
temple of the Syrian god, Rimmon. And when my king bows down I m probably going to have to bow down as well. Hope that s all-right. Elisha simply answered, Go in peace. The Bible leaves us hanging on that one. We re not quite sure what the answer to that question is. That s a loose end that doesn t get quite tied up. On the one hand Romans 10 says that those who are saved have to be willing to declare openly that Jesus is Lord. Yet there are those in countries like Afghanistan where openly declaring to be a Christian can cost you your head. Maybe it s because this is a gray matter that God doesn t give us an easy answer here. Well, at the heart of this story is Naaman s however his leprosy and his healing. I want to close by talking about that. Healing, I mean. We pray for people s healing practically every time we get together. On Monday mornings I see the prayer cards and there are always prayers for someone s healing. I know that people tack their prayer requests to the cross at James River and I m certain there are constant prayers for healing. Last Sunday night I was at the Robious Hall Campus and they do prayer requests as part of the service. A number of them were for healing. We even offer a service specifically for prayers of healing once a year. In our last prayer service I was out of town and thus not present, but I heard about it. After the service began a man began dialing his cell phone. Beep, beep beep. And he started talking! Now, all our services are reverent but a service of prayer for healing is almost mystical. And this man was talking on a cell phone! Some of those around him admitted later that they were aggravated and agitated. They wondered, How could he? Someone confessed later that she thought, Why doesn t someone stop him? The man got in line to pray with a minister, still talking on his cell phone. The man stepped up to Norman Burnes and said I ve got my friend on the phone. She s in the hospital. Would you pray with her and for her? Delores Kimbrough later noted that was kind of like the story of the men who wanted to get their crippled friend to Jesus but the crowd was too big. So they climbed up on the roof, tore a piece of it off, and let their friend down by ropes right in front of Jesus. Delores said this man tore the roof off.technologically. The lady couldn t get to the service so he brought her in via cellular technology! Are we really serious about praying for healing? Do we really believe that our prayers might actually result in a miracle? Or are we going through the motions? I m going to share with you a story from a thirty-year-old friend of mine. He is sound theologically, mature spiritually and healthy emotionally. He reluctantly told me this story, and only because it served a real purpose at the time. Because it is so personal, he keeps it quiet. Yet he agreed to let me tell it. Almost three years ago he was diagnosed with cancer. Lesions that developed in his head turned out to be cancerous. But something happened. This is how he described it 4
Though I've always believed that God could actually intervene in the world theoretically and was certain that he intervened in the "spiritual" aspects of people's lives, I'd say that my modern mind has had trouble believing that God could intervene physically. I believed it... but struggled to believe it at the same time. To make a long story short... there was a particular day that the lesion that I had substantially decreased overnight. I remember that day because it was very strange. 5 days later I received a phone call from someone I've not spoken to in probably 20 years. She told me that in the middle of the night 5 days ago (not knowing anything about my situation at the time)... she received a dream in the middle of the night in which I appeared and Jesus appeared next to me and Jesus put his hands on my head and was removing things from it. There were some particular things he was pronouncing over me which are too close to me that I still can't share them... but one of them was that he was removing my affliction. I continued to go through the process that doctors were suggesting and a month and a half later after several different tests... they basically came back and said we can't find anything (My doctor) is still perplexed at my situation and not entirely sure what to make of it medically. My friend has been released from monitoring. I can t explain that other than to assume God did for him something as humanly inexplicable as what He did for Naaman. Stories like that are rare. They are so rare that we do not have unrealistic expectations. But they are not so rare that we have no hope.. I don t understand it, but sometimes it seems that God marshals and stimulates the curative capacities of the human body. As if God says, OK, immune system. I m gonna need you to do something beyond what you re accustomed to! And people experience something baffling to us all a miracle, divine healing. Oh, I believe some miracle stories are manufactured, just made up. On the other hand, I believe that from time to time bona fide miracles occur and are either kept quiet because of their personal nature or mistaken for mere coincidences. On Easter we all said, We are the Easter people! To be a follower of the resurrected Savior is to be a person of hope. To be a follower of Jesus is to believe that with God nothing is impossible. And when God does unusually wonderful things, then ordinary people get to live extraordinary stories. 5