Naaman's complaint

Sermon Notes, Sunday, July 7, 2019, 4 Pentecost "I thought that for me he would surely come out,” Naaman, great, noble, highly favored. Lepper. That pretty much describes him. All his greatness, all his favor, all his nobility is neutralized and comes to naught in the condition of his leprosy. If we want a modern equivalent, it’s cancer. All our works of achievement, all our fame and fortune melt before a diagnosis of cancer. Leprosy in Naaman’s time was a death sentence: slow, painful and irreversible. And while we now have some great hope in reversing the course of cancer, the reality is the disease still strikes fear within us. The cure remains beyond our sure grasp. We may stop it, but for how long? I don’t want to dwell on either leprosy or cancer this morning. They are human conditions that result in asking a deep spiritual question: “Where is God when I need him?” Leprosy and cancer are intense calls for God’s healing hand. We expect God to respond. The Psalmist in Psalm 30 says:  O Lord my God, I cried out to you, * and you restored me to health. 3 You brought me up, O Lord, from the dead; * you restored my life as I was going down to the grave. Our hope and prayer is that God will do for us what he did for the writer of Psalm 30. Like Naaman, we expect that God will answer our need with a dramatic act of restoration. And when that doesn’t happen, we are left to lament with Naaman, “I thought that for me he would surely come out.” This is a high risk moment for us. The moment when we wonder if God cares for us at all. The seed for that crisis of faith lies buried in the everyday soil of our lives. We have an expectation of God that is not supported by scripture. We believe that God cares for us by attending to us at every turn, favoring us by protecting us from every harm and delivering us from unseen evil. Then, when pain and sorrow intervene, when evil is manifest, we turn on God because he should have been there and wasn’t. We never feel more helpless and more alone than when we believe God has abandoned us. But has he? Let’s look at our relationship with God. The first thing to learn is that our relationship with God is determined by him, not us. He invites us to commune with him, the initiative is his. Genesis 1:26 speaks of the creation of man for God’s purposes. Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the live stock, over all the earth, and all the creatures that move along the ground.” We didn’t demand to be created, no more so than a baby can demand to be conceived. We are created by God to serve his purpose. His purpose does include communion with God. We have an idyllic picture in Genesis of God walking in the garden in the cool of the evening in the company of Adam and Eve. And that’s a clue to a second lesson. God is not always walking with Adam and Eve, he visits them and withdraws from them. They are left to do the work he gave them to do, and then he visits them and communes with them in the joy of creation. This has always been God’s way with us. We do not have a smothering parent God who stands between us and every pitfall. We have a loving parent God who allows us to make mistakes. In today’s Gospel reading Jesus sends out 70 followers into the world. “The Lord appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go.” They are sent to do the Lord’s purpose but in doing so they go out apart from Jesus himself. They are at risk, and Jesus knows they are. “See, I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves.” God sends Adam and Eve into the garden knowing that Satan is out there somewhere waiting to pounce on them. He sends them anyway, because love demands that they must be free to make a choice, for Him or against Him. So too does Jesus send his disciples out. But we cannot say that he abandons them to the world. He sends them off with detailed instructions on how to handle the obstacles they will meet. When they are up against the wolves, they will remember his words and know what to do. Jesus makes his presence known in more than one way. He is the Word made flesh and he speaks to us through his word. If we are in doubt that he is present, we have his word to assure us. Just as the words of Elisha were sufficient for Naaman’s healing, so is the word of God sufficient for ours. But if we wait for calamity or sickness or evil to be reminded of God’s presence, we are going to fail. We need to factor into our everyday lives the sure knowledge that we are God’s people and he is our God. Such knowledge needs to be foundational to us. It’s only because we know that God is with us in times of comfort and peace that we can trust him to be there in times of struggle. The writer of Psalm 30 has just such an experience. While I felt secure, I said, "I shall never be disturbed. * You, Lord, with your favor, made me as strong as the mountains." 8 Then you hid your face, * and I was filled with fear. And there you have it. The dramatic question is what will happen next? Is his fear going to prevail or will the grounding of his knowledge of God’s presence prevail? The answer comes in the last 3 verses of the Psalm.  Hear, O Lord, and have mercy upon me; * O Lord, be my helper." 12 You have turned my wailing into dancing; * you have put off my sack-cloth and clothed me with joy. 13 Therefore my heart sings to you without ceasing; * O Lord my God, I will give you thanks for ever. Eternal gratitude for God’s eternal lovingkindness. The certainty of God’s love overcomes his doubt. Instead of facing a crisis of faith, he sings forth his praise. Our God is not a part-time God who abandons us when we need him most. Neither is he a suffocating God who insulates us from every risk and every temptation. He is the Father who loves his children enough to risk losing them, but will never abandon them. A child who travels far from home does not believe that distance from her father means her father loves her less. She is in truth more aware of her father’s love across the distances that separated them. So it is with our Father in heaven. Let us pray, Heavenly Father, teach us to be always mindful of your love that we may find you a present help every day of our lives. In the Name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.