Proper 9 - Year C

I have a short story for you today—one I didn’t even know about until I watched a show with my daughter. It’s about a man named Naaman, a powerful general from a country called Syria in the Old Testament. But Naaman had a big problem—he had a disease called leprosy that made his skin very sick.

Now, the only person in the story who showed care for Naaman... was someone you’d never expect: a young servant girl, taken away from Israel to work in Naaman’s house. Even though she had been taken from her home, she wanted him to know about the God who could heal him. That’s kindness!

So Naaman listened—and traveled to Israel. There, the prophet Elisha told him to dip in the Jordan River—not once, not twice, but seven times! And when he obeyed, he was healed.

This story was so important, even Jesus talked about it:

Luke 4:27 “There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.”

You’d think the crowd would’ve clapped, right? But... they got mad. They didn’t like hearing that God helped someone they didn’t like. But God’s love isn’t just for people we agree with—it’s for everyone.

Maybe someone at school has been mean to you. Maybe you’ve felt left out, or hurt. It’s okay to feel that—but this story reminds us that we don’t know what others are going through. Sometimes the kids who hurt us are hurting inside too. So what can we do?

We can pray for them. We can ask Jesus to help them feel loved—just like He loves us.

Let’s pray:

Lord, thank you for these kids. Thank you for the chance to teach them about your love—a love that doesn’t come from being powerful or important, but from kindness and compassion. Help us to grow hearts like children again: full of joy, full of trust, and full of love.

Amen.

Welcome Statement

Good Morning Church, I hope the Children’s Moment prepared you for what we are going to learn about today. Today we are going back to the basics of loving both enemy and neighbor. The reason I think this is important, is it seems that there is a sort of crisis of meaning that my generation and on is experiencing, and I am witnessing other generations not respond to that in the way I expected for followers of Jesus Christ. I see constantly on the news and on social media, the viciousness of our own brokenness, people calling others nasty names, people wishing for the downfall of their enemies, or for what they perceive as enemies. To be frank with you, my heart aches and grieves seeing all of this take place. I grew up in a Church that taught me that above all else, God’s love must come first in our lives. I know growing up I wasn’t always perfect at this, but my parents, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, even my cousins who would pick on me, all showed me what that unconditional, sacrificial love was. It’s not something that is earned, it is gifted, and it is rooted in Jesus. The first story we are going to read is you guessed it, in 2 Kings about the General Naaman in Syria.

Old Testament Reading - 2 Kings 5:1-14

2 Kings 5:1–14 NRSV

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 given victory to Aram. The man, though a mighty warrior, suffered from leprosy. Now the Arameans 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 his lord just what the girl from the land of Israel had said. And the king of Aram said, “Go then, and I will send along a letter to the king of Israel.” He went, taking with him ten talents of silver, six thousand shekels of gold, and ten sets of garments. He 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, 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.

Why Seven Times?

The first thing that stood out to me was that Naaman had to wash himself in the Jordan 7 times, before he was finally healed. I think there is a two fold symbolism going on here. The first one is a connection to Creation. We read in the Genesis account that God created our world in 6 days, and rested on the 7th, this shows a cycle of birth, and a cycle of renewal. The 7th time for Naaman is when he could finally rest from his pain of leprosy, and found himself made new. This also showed a level of persistence, James argues for example that faith is dead without works, in the Old Testament the “spirit” was not in the hearts of all people who believed yet, and so physical actions counted more during this time, so we see Naaman showing his faith or trust in God by humbling himself to persistently bathing until what he was told would happen to him. There is another irony here, the Jordan River was where the Israelites crossed into Canaan to establish the Kingdom of Israel, So having someone outside of the nation of Israel be bathed and blessed here is very ironic.

Loving Your Enemies

The concept that I think is most foreign to modern audiences in this chapter, is the fact that someone who was essentially in slavery, a child at that, was wishing for the wellbeing of the person they were serving. This is a very Christlike posture. Today, we would have someone arrested (hopefully) for trading people as slaves. This of course isn’t the case across the world, slavery is very real in some countries unfortunately, but the love revealed here is child-like, it is scandalous, becuase this Daughter of Israel is showing deep care for others made in the Image of God who don’t look like her, and definitely don’t live like her. What’s even more scandalous is that Elisha acquiesces the request, and heals Naaman, he of course humbles Naaman first, a sort of point of where Naaman finds himself Convicted by God to trust in Him, but nonetheless, Elisha heals a foreign man of Leprosy.

Jesus makes it clear how important this is, as his first sermon in Luke describes so plainly:

Luke 4:27–30 NRSV

There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.” When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.

Not a Political Commentary

For those that suspect I might have a political intention for this message. I really don’t. It is true that God’s word does not align with the word, and so if you follow God’s word to its conclusions, it will make you sound politica when you really don’t mean to be partisan, and it can make you enemies of all stripes and colors. The reality is, this is how Radical God’s love is, whether I like it or not. The neighbor beside me isn’t the only person I am concerned about, I’m concerned about my neighbors in Ohio or Pennsylvania, my neighboring Countries, the entire earth. I have seen people use the terminology Ordo Amoris, a latin term meaning ordered love, from Augustine’s work City of God to argue why we must tend to our own first before we help others. The problem is, this ordered love isn’t that simple. 2 of Augustine’s quotes to this matter: “A rightly ordered love (ordo amoris) is to love things in the right way, in the right measure, and in the right order.” -

To love rightly is to love God as the highest good, to love ourselves and our neighbors in God, and to love other things according to their place in relation to God and ourselves

To put this in plain english: We rightly love God as highest good; ourselves as God’s creatures; our neighbors as ourselves; and the rest of creation in relation to ourselves and God. To love anything outside this order is disorder.

So let’s break this down a bit. God is what we are called to love first and foremost, because he first loved us. We are then to take care of ourselves so that we can then in turn be able to take care of others. There is a nuance here of course, that sacrifice is often required of God’s love, but even Jesus had days where he rested. The garden of Gethsemane was him preparing his heart for the days to come in the Passion of his death. But He notes here, to love our neighbors in God. All neighbors, believers or not, are made in the Image of God. Really? This guy over here who has done nothing good with his life is made in God’s image? Absolutely, yes. That’s the scandal. Christ didn’t come for those who had it together, he came for the broken. God’s love doesn’t have a limit. it isn’t scarce, a resource to compete over. This is why Paul was harsh to the churches who indulged in Communion unrightly, becasue they were treating it not with respect and reverence, but as a time to indulge in bread and wine.

That’s the weird part of this order, Augustine doesn’t really describe proximity or geography as a condition, and he’s not arguing that only the next in the order comes in line if we have fulfilled all needs of the previous step in the ladder. If it was, we would be giving all our love to God, but not his people, and that’s obviously not how God works. Our love is a reflection of God’s limitless love. When we love neighbor, we love God, because they were made in the image of God. When we love creation and take care of it, we are loving God back by stewarding what he has entrusted us with, but ultimately we are called to always come back to the altar, and worship him directly first. This is why Jesus went to the Garden, it wasn’t just about paying the atonement, it was about serving the Father in Heaven. This becomes really important. Because this is how our Church functions. It is true we generally help with our own immediate surroundings, family, church members, friends, our community, but we are a global church. We see through the United Methodist Connection, where we don’t stop there, we donate and help at different disasters, I know people who have continually went to the southern part of our state helping those clean up after the floods. I witnessed on the internet these past few days an outpouring of prayer for the victims in the texas flood and those kids who are lost and not found.

This is the multi-faceted, sacrificial love we are bound to. Conditional love says, I must receive something first before I will love back. God fulfilled our earthly request by loving us first, then we realized, that love was unconditional, and we too must be unconditional in our love. We do have to prioritize our love, and order it well, we must steward well, but this idea that you can only love to the next order of things, by fulfilling all of the previous level, is just silly. This would mean, because I haven’t helped every single person in my family who is without, I shouldn’t pray for those victims, or I shouldn’t bother with donating money or spreading awareness, becasue there’s always a bigger fire somewhere else. What if, we lived like the early Church did, where we didn’t care where the fire was, if there was a fire, we addressed it? We picked people out of the muck regardless of if they were a Samaritan or a Jew? What if we stopped worrying so much about what tommorow might bring. and live the life God called us to live today, to bring about his Kingdom? This is a call for us to repent, of our own fears, our own anxieties, frustrations, and anger, and to turn back to the kingdom. Mark 1:15, my favorite verse of the bible says the following

Mark 1:15 NRSV

and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

What if we simply did what we were called to in the beginning, to repent, and believe in the Good News God has for us? What if? Let us Pray.

Closing Prayer

Heavenly Father, we thank you for your unconditional love, that has transfigured our hearts to love like you loved us. Lord, our world is aching for the realness of your mercy, for the love that only you can give. Lord, help us to share that Good News of Great Joy, of Life, that all may know who you are, that maybe, we could make the pain hurt a little less, and we can watch your Kingdom flourish in our lifetime. I pray

Amen.

Doxology / Benediction / Closing

As you go out this week, go out with the Good News that Christ is persistent in his love for you. He doesn’t simply stop at 7 times, but 70 x 7, and then some for all of the mistakes we have made as a people, as a church, as a community, as the body of Christ. No, there is no mountain that cannot be moved when we have Christ on our side. Let us this week share that Good News, that no despair can stop the Kingdom of God from coming to fruition, that Christ is indeed bleeding into our world, and revealing himself in the Spirit.

May you Have a Blessed Sunday, and rest of your Week! Amen!