The 4 Lepers and the Day of Good News

Intro - You can imagine the scene around the staff table - in mid-December - the Pastoral team trying to figure out the preaching schedule for the 2012 - that resulted in the youth pastor receiving the cue from the bullpen to preach this morning. I’ll leave it for you to decide whether or not we were up in the inning or behind.

I fought my intuitive tendencies to break all of you up into gender exclusive clusters of four and place questions on the screen for you to answer. Although, part of me still thinks it could have been a fun idea.

I must confess, however, how privileged I feel sharing with you this morning. It is my first time teaching many of you, and I consider it an honor to share message that God has laid upon my heart some time ago.

I also consider this a privilege because I see many new faces that I otherwise might not see. Some of you may be new to me because I am still relatively new on the Pastoral team myself and spend much of my time with the middle school through college-aged students. Some of our paths do not cross often, so I consider this time a wonderful one that gives us an opportunity to meet and know one another.

Also, your face may be new to me because you, too, are new at Hillside, and we are all meeting each other for the first time. Perhaps you came this morning because you desire to begin the new year on a fresh note. If so, then let me be one of hopefully many who says to you, “Welcome.” We are really glad to see you, and we hope you come to know this community as one of hope and authenticity and ordinary people from all slices of life, each attempting to live out the very topic of our discussion this morning: the Good News... the Good News of Jesus Christ...

On Christmas Eve, many of you heard me read the Christmas Story. In that story, an angel appears to the shepherds and exclaims that he has Good News to share! Moreover, the writers of the New Testament refer to the message that Jesus shared as Good News. So, what did Jesus say that led others to call it Good News? Where do we see stories and glimpses of it in Scripture and taking place throughout our world today?

And what does it look like for us - Hillside Church - a community of broken people, myself included - the pastoral team and staff included - you included, all of us in various stages of faith and understanding - to embody and share this very idea of Good News for others and our community?

Transition 1 - This morning, we will begin in Luke chapter 4 The first time Jesus stood up to teach in public, his inauguration address of sorts, he talked about ‘Good News.’

Move 1 - This teaching follows after he completed 40 days in the wilderness and endured temptation of all kinds. Listen carefully to what Luke records:

“Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about him spread through the whole countryside. He was teaching in their synagogues, and everyone praised him. He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:

18 “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. 21 Jesus then said to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

On that day, Jesus spoke the very words from the Prophet, Isaiah, who describes in his book the core identity markers of the Messiah. Since the time of Isaiah - hundreds of years had passed - and the entire Jewish community awaited the season when the Messiah would rise up and restore Israel, also known as the people of God, from bondage and occupation and into the great nation that God had promised them long ago with Abraham.

So, you can imagine the emotions and the astonished responses of everyone listening at the synagogue when Jesus quoted this passage and boldly made the claim in verse twenty one that the words he had quoted from Isaiah are being fulfilled in their hearing. Luke recalls that every eye was fixed upon Jesus, and the hearts of the leaders resonated deeply with the significance of what Jesus had just spoken.

Essentially, in Jesus’ inauguration address, he identified himself as that long-awaited and anticipated Messiah, the fulfillment and the embodiment of what Isaiah calls ‘Good News,’ which is the message of freedom, of rescue, of favor, and of the hope that one day our broken world and all within it would be set back to right.

Transition 2 - Now, this morning, in order to fully attempt to understand this message of Good News and what Jesus came to fulfill, we need to turn a few hundred pages to the left to the Old Testament.

I want to explore an event that took place about 2800 years ago and illustrates well this notion of Good News. It is a story that will help us grasp a clear, defined picture of Jesus’ words in Luke, along with what it means to be a Hillside Church - a Christian community - who sees as one of its core identity markers the importance of sharing the message of Good News with others.

The story is found in the Book of 2 Kings chapter 6. I want to read this story to you in its entirety, but along the way, we’ll stop at certain points to work through it bit by bit together. Some of it might appear difficult, but we’ll work through it together, so just stick with me.

Move 2 - Let’s begin with 2 Kings chapter 6, beginning in verse 24:

“Some time later, Ben-Hadad king of Aram, mobilized his entire army and marched up and laid siege to Samaria. There was a great famine in the city; the siege lasted so long that a donkey’s head sold for eighty shekels of silver, and a quarter of a cab of seed pods for five shekels.”

Let’s pause right here. At this time, the Israelites, God’s people, lived in a land called Israel that had been divided into two kingdoms, the Southern and the Northern. The setting of this story takes place in the Northern kingdom at a city called Samaria, the capitol city, purchased by a man named King Omri for about 20 shekels of silver. By accounts of ancient historians, Samaria was a beautiful city, rivaling its neighbor, Jerusalem, the capitol of the Southern kingdom, for most beautiful. Omri purchased the city because of its location near a lush valley for farming and resources, but set on a mountain top where it could provide safety for itself from invaders and enemies.

Several kings ruled over God’s people at Samaria for many years, until King Ben-Hadad of Aram, a neighboring nation to the north laid siege to it, which means that they attacked the city and then surrounded it with troops in such a way that that no one or nothing - people or resources - could go in or out of the city...

In fact, our story reads that the conditions in Samaria became so grave and severe that a donkey’s head sold for 8 shekels of silver - nearly half of what Omri paid for the entire city of Samaria! This would amount to the equivalent of thousands of dollars.

Now, I am reading your minds and I know many of you must be thinking, “Hmmm, donkey’s head... sounds like ancient delicacy!” In fact eating a donkeys head is like eating a Jack in the Box cheeseburger. It would be something that you ate followed by hours of unpleasant stomach torture and bathroom visits - of which you paid thousands of dollars to get - you get the picture. I know some of you who would pay thousands of dollars not to eat at Jack in the Box. Yet, on the Samarian black market, donkeys heads sold for half the cost of the city of itself.

And what about a quarter of a cab of seed pods? For those of you reading other translations, you might read: dove’s dung, or what my students sitting in the back would call, bird poo. It was used for fuel to make fires, and sold for 5 shekels of silver or something around a thousand dollars.

Conditions got so bad over the course of the siege that people would sacrifice huge sums of money for basic, staple items, even items that would otherwise be tossed out or disregarded. Conditions were desperate.

Now, let’s continue to the next passage in 2 Kings, and I must warn you that conditions worsen in Samaria, and the next story is both disturbing and atrocious:

“As the king of Israel was passing by on the wall, a woman cried to him, “Help me, my lord the king!” The king replied, “If the LORD does not help you, where can I get help for you? From the threshing floor? From the winepress?” Then he asked her, “What’s the matter?” She answered, “This woman said to me, ‘Give up your son so we may eat him today, and tomorrow we’ll eat my son.’ So we cooked my son and ate him. The next day I said to her, ‘Give up your son so we may eat him,’ but she had hidden him.” When the king heard the woman’s words, he tore his robes. As he went along the wall, the people looked, and they saw that, under his robes, he had sackcloth on his body.”

Now, let’s stop there. Things became so bad in Samaria that for sheer survival, mothers were forced to eat their own children........ (pause)........ Let that sink in for a moment.

Transition 2 - When I fist heard this story some years ago, I sat in my seat aghast, stunned that such a story could exist in history, let alone in Scripture. I thought to myself, “Well, I am sure glad that we live in a different world with 2800 years of human advancement.” But then I turned on NPR in my car and thought, “Really?” Has our world really changed in the last three millennia?

Move 3 - I listened to an NPR article that listed 2011 as a year of upheaval, natural disasters, and conflict. Yet, at the end of every year, journalists, commentators, and writers observe the same thing and list that year as the worst of the decade or the year of greatest conflict and so forth. And while that kind of sensation certainly sells newspapers or appeals to our interest to watch a show, the reality still exists that conflict, upheaval, bloodshed, and the like - similar to what took place in Samaria 2800 years ago - still ravage our globe.

When you get home, I want you to try an experiment. Open up the family atlas or turn the globe to the continent of Africa - put your finger anywhere on that beautiful continent, and in the one inch diameter around your finger, in that ring, take notice of the thousands of people suffering and dying from AIDS on a weekly basis.

At this moment right now at the Horn of Africa - Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya - as I speak to you over the duration of my message, thousands of people - namely children - will have died due to starvation and malnutrition, easily preventable deaths, caused by famine but fueled by dictatorial regimes who have withheld food and other food producing resources from starving families.

A few days ago, the Sudanese military confirmed the death of a man named, Khalil Ibrahim, the leader of the Darfur rebel group - you may know have heard of this man from organizations like Invisible Children, who brought awareness to his heinous actions. Do you know what he did? He and his gang snatched young boys from their families, gave them large doses of drugs accompanied with very little food and water, put machine guns in their hands, and sent them into neighboring villages to kill anyone not part of their rebel group.

Since Christmas, senseless killing continued in Syria with suicide bombers detonating themselves in public squares and killing dozens of innocent people.

All of this has happened as I sat and prepared the sermon in which I am sharing with you right now.

I can go on and on, as we all can. And we all know of junk here at home in Marin and around the Bay.

All of this leaves with me a deep sense that the world is not as it should be. Samaria, the city we just discussed, was not as it was supposed to be. The enemy camped around the city gates created an environment so heinous that it ceased to reflect God and function as it was intended to live.

And I would say that this is also true of our world right now. We can often feel like the enemy is encamped around our world preventing us from living in the way we should.

Think with me for a moment and use your imagination. Go into your bedroom, close the door, look in the mirror, and look into the eyes of that person. Ask that person in the mirror this question, “Is life for this person as it should be or not?” If we take a good, deep gaze into the eyes of that person, some of us can acknowledge that those eyes appear lonely and confused and in deep need of love.

Some of you may look into that mirror and see weighted eyes and slumped shoulders because you feel like you can no longer hold the weight of your marriage... a career dream unrealized or completely shattered... financial strain... and a life that feels like it possesses no purpose other than getting to the next day and the next day and the next day and the next day.

And so I know that many of you look in the mirror and see the eyes of a person who feels like the world, like Samaria - where things are not as they should be - where you see that other person in the mirror through tears because your eyes are desperately crying and longing for some Good News, some bit of hope that tomorrow does not have to be a replay of the hopelessness of today.

Now, let me acknowledge that some of you know what this means because you have experienced in your own life the very events that Jesus came to fulfill in Luke 4. In my short tenure here thus far, I know that some of you understand the reality of rescue and restoration because God has did indeed rescued you from the bonds of some nasty addiction or poor decision. Some of you know what it means to experience sight and see the directions of life in a fresh way because God has restored your vision. Some of you know what it means to live in prison, in bondage, in chains, in ruins. And then because of the grace of God, you walked away a free person and now live your life to the fullest extent. I know that for some of you, when Jesus stood up and read the words of Isaiah - of freedom for the captives, of sight for the blind, and good news for the poor - it resonated deeply within you as a reality true for you. And I hope this morning that you see what you ought to do with that Good News and the experiences of what God had done for you.

But, on the other hand, some of you might not know what this Good News means for you at the present moment. Some of you right now live in prisons built of your own making and are living without freedom. I know that some of you live embattled and oppressed lives because of your wrongs and poor decisions, and you feel tortured everyday by them - unable to escape from a situation that occurred years ago. Some of you are blind and can’t see which way to go in life. I, especially, want you to hear the Good News and understand it for what it is and what it could be for you.

All of us know what it means to feel this way: imprisoned... embattled... barely hanging on... blind to the actions of both ourselves and others. We know what it means to live lives without any direction... without any peace. And we also know what it means to live in desperate need of someone speaking a fresh word of truth and love into our lives.

Is it any wonder why on this day, January 1st, that millions of people make New Years resolutions? And is it any wonder why a majority of them fail by January 15th? I literally witnessed a woman on our plane yesterday from Atlanta open a document on her computer titled 2011 goals. She renamed the document 2012 goals, saved it, and then closed it. Same goals, different year. These issues are difficult human issues. They affect everyone. We don’t need to boil our children in order to experience desperation. We see it. It may not be cannibalism, but we know what pain feels like, and no one escape its clutches. It is the radical equalizer among all people.

Perhaps, you look in the mirror, and you see what I see sometimes in myself - long ago you decided to follow Jesus, but at night you lose sleep because you look at the picture of who you could be in Jesus but see how far away you are from it, and it makes you feel like you are starving.

I can remember a season of my life during the summer between my second and third year of seminary - about 4 years ago - when all of the hidden skeletons in my life started to dance... and I realized that life for me was not as it should be. It entailed the disintegration of unhealthy relationships, the realization of my own poor decisions and their consequences, and so forth. They wanted to come out, and my vices for keeping them in no longer sufficed. And during that summer, everything came to a kind of crossroads. It was like those hidden things in my life began unraveling, and I could do nothing to stop its momentum. I am sure many of you can relate to this feeling.

And on one August afternoon, it became more than I could bear. I remember sitting on the driveway of my home, feeling the weight of my chains burying me in the ground. I called my mentor and talked through my thoughts with him. And in that conversation, he spoke a fresh word of Good News. He penetrated through the thin veneer of my silk-thin facade and into my pain, and there, he embodied the true words of Jesus and spoke peace into my life. He incarnated the very substance of what Jesus came to fulfill in speaking the Messianic words of Isaiah in Luke chapter 4. And this morning, I want all of us to hear this Good News - and become a community who embodies it to share it with others.

Transition 3 - Your life and my life and the life of this world is like a city besieged by an enemy, abusing its power, starving us to death and driving us to madness. Now, are you willing to go so far as to ask the question, “Why is it like this?” In Samaria, in 2 Kings, the people of the city asked this question, and do you know what happened, the King gave them an answer. Let’s continue with what he says in verse 31 and witness what happens to Samaria.

Move 3 - In verse 31, The king said, “This disaster is from the LORD. Why should I wait for the LORD any longer?”

Hear this statement, the king attributes the disaster and all of the bad things taking place as a result of God. The king thinks that God is making this happen.... (pause)

Does this sound familiar to you? When bad things happen to you, do you blame God?

Before coming to Hillside, I served at a church for a brief time, and while there, I actually did not work with middle and high school students. I worked with young adults and adults, mostly people in their 20’s. And all the time, I met with people who wanted to talk about relationships. And typically, the people who wanted to talk about relationships were ones whose relationships were dive bombing into the massive abyss called the Break-up. A couple of months into my time there, I had a conversation with a guy named Jack. And he looked like a Jack - probably 7 feet tall and 520 pounds. I will never forget this conversation because it typifies the kind of conversations that I had about relationships.

We met at a Starbucks at like 5pm - the busiest possible hour to meet there - and he walked in already in tears. I knew right away that it concerned his 5 month long girlfriend, and I was already beginning to imagine all of the possible scenarios for what could have happened to make Jack cry. I asked him what was the matter. He told me through his tears, “God ended my relationship, man.”

I said, Jack, tell me what happened. He told me that the first couple of weeks went great. But then after they had started sleeping together a couple of months into their relationship, things started going down hill. He told me that he moved in with her to attempt to repair the damages, but the conflict escalated into verbal abuse between one another. Jack even told me about a situation that took place at a bar. After a few drinks, he noticed a man across the room looking at his girlfriend - “the wrong way” - and he aired his grievances by punching this man in the face and spending a night in the local jail.

After telling me about these instances, he peered deeply into my eyes through his tears and asked me, “Why would God do this to me? I loved her!”

My heart broke for Jack because not only was he in deep pain, but he missed the plot on the Good News of what God ants to do for each one of us.

I responded to him by saying, “Look, Jack, you took part in inappropriate sexual behavior with a woman whom you barely knew, moved in with her in order to mask the tension taking place between the two of you, engaged in verbal abuse, and then physically assaulted another man while drunk because he looked at your girlfriend the wrong way. Jack, this is not God’s fault. You brought harm onto yourself and caused your relationship to end.

As heartbreaking as this story is, How often do we blame God for our woes? For our missteps?

Transition 4 - The King of Samaria did the same thing. He blamed God for the disaster of his city and plight of his people. But yet, from the outset of the first book of Kings, the current desperation of Samaria resulted from hundreds of years of wicked Kings making poor choices on behalf of the people of God, creating enemies, and ruling through the lens of power and greed, instead of humility and love. Many of the Kings, including the one in our story, disobeyed God, which all led to the culmination of this incident.

Now, just after the King talked to the woman who boiled her son, In the beginning of the next chapter in 2 Kings, the prophet Elisha comes in the picture. Now he was a man of God. He heard the King blame God for the circumstances in Samaria. Listen to how Elisha responds to the king in verse 1:

“He replied to the King by saying, “Hear the Word of the Lord... This is what the Lord says, “About this time tomorrow, a seah of the finest flour will sell for a shekel and two seahs of barley for a shekel at the gate of Samaria. The officer on whose arm the King was leaning said to the man of God, “Look, even if the Lord should open the floodgates of the Heavens, could this happen?” Elisha answered, “You will see it with your own eyes tomorrow.”

Move 4 - Now, let me explain to you what Elisha just said. He heard the cry of the King. He heard the King blame God for the circumstances, and rather than responding to it, he spoke through it. Elisha did not even dignify the king’s claim. Essentially, Elisha told the King that God did not make this happen. In fact, God had nothing to do with it. And even though this devastation is a result from the wicked ways of the this king and the king before him, God - in his faithfulness and grace - will fix it. God will set Samaria back to right, and God will restore his people in such a way that as soon as the next day comes, everyone will have plenty to eat and drink... and for pennies.

The king responds by saying, “No way!” That can’t be! How could anyone do that... even God could not turn around this predicament! Even if the floodgates of heaven should open and pour down upon Samaria, the city and everyone in it is ruined! The King felt no hope that God could turn this mess around.

In your mind, go back into your bedroom to that mirror. Look into it once again. Look into the eyes of that person and ask yourself: Can God change that person around? Can God restore the mess that I am living in and redeem me?

I bet many of you feel hopeless that God can. I know this because I, too, have looked into that mirror and saw the eyes of a man who felt hopeless that God could turn me around. I could not believe that God could be so gracious. Even if a friend came up to me and told me, “Ryan, tomorrow, God will change this all around.” I would have said, “Even if the floodgates of Heaven were to open and reign down upon me, no way! That could not happen.” Have you ever felt this way? Is this how you feel now?

Listen to what I am about to tell you: God has done something for us that has changed everything. Listen to the Good News that turns everything around, beginning at verse 3 of chapter 7:

“Now there were four men with leprosy at the entrance of the city gate. They said to each other, “Why stay here until we die? If we say, We’ll go into the city - the famine is there, and we will die. And if we stay here, we will die. So, let’s go over to the camp of the Arameans and surrender. If they spare us, we live; If they kill is, then we die.

“At dusk, they got up and went to the camp of the Arameans. When the reached the edge of the camp, no one was there, for the Lord had caused the Arameans to hear the sound of chariots and horses and a great army, so that they said to one another, “Look the king of Israel has hired the Hittite and Egyptian kings to attack us!” So they got up and fled in the dusk and abandoned their tents and their horses and their donkeys. They left camp as it was and ran for their lives.

“The men who had leprosy reached the edge of the camp, entered one of the tents and ate and drank. Then they took silver, gold and clothes, and went off and hid them. They returned and entered another tent and took some things from it and hid them also.”

Let’s stop there. The scene we just read means that the promise that Elisha made came true. It came true in a wild and unexpected way, but now every person living in the city had an opportunity to receive all of the food they could possibly need. And the only people who knew this fact were four lepers.

Do you know what a leper is? People who suffered from leprosy suffered from a skin disease that made them unhealthy and what the community called, unclean.

For a leper, if the community of which you were a part named you unclean, this disallowed you from attending any community events, including temple worship, public festivals, and other community functions. Those lucky enough to become healthy were deemed clean and able to rejoin the community. If not, however, which many weren’t, then you were forced to live outside of the rest of the community so not to spread your disease and infect others. This kind of quarantine makes sense in terms of public health, but it is a devastating consequence to the person, their families, and their community.

Imagine being banished from your family, your job, and your life as you knew it from circumstances outside of your control.

And now these very people have everything they need - more than they need. Has anything changed in the city? No... people are still starving and desperate and living as though the Arameans are camped outside their front door. Listen, God did something that changed the mess altogether. And there are four lepers who know about it. And everyone living inside the city is living as though their besiegement is still true, even though it no longer is. There is nothing else to be afraid of. The army is no longer there!

When Jesus read his first sermon in Luke 4 and said on that day, in the hearing of those present, he was fulfilling the words of Isaiah to bring good news to the poor, sight for the blind, and freedom for the captives, he said these things knowing that he was the one who would defeat the enemy and bring peace for all of us who live in desperate situations. The anguish, the pain, the hurt, the turmoil, the hatred, and the fear that has the whole world and many of you in its grips right now has no power over you.

When we feel like these things have power over us, it feels like we live in Samaria... surrounded by empty tents that possess all of the food we could ever need or want.

Transition 5 - Upon hearing what happens next, I must warn you, it makes us responsible for something. As you interact with people in your workplace, your family, your friends and so forth, and with people who are starving and cannot buy a donkey’s head for eight shekels of silver, people living under siege even though the army is gone, for those who understand the good news, we become responsible.

Listen to what the lepers say to one another as they plundered and hid all of the food and wealth from inside the tent, beginning in verse 9...

“Then they said to each other, “What we’re doing is not right. This is a day of Good News and we are keeping it to ourselves.”

If you know Good News, why keep it to yourself? When I was younger and heard these statements, I used to think, “How can I share the good news? I am not good at sharing my faith.” You can share the Good News by simply going up to someone who does not need to receive anything from you and do something loving for them. Or by simply sharing your own personal story of rescue.

Let me close with a short personal story of my own. of A couple of years ago, I sat next to a man on a plane. We struck a friendly conversation on the ground. And as we talked, he asked me the question that I call the ‘kill question.’ At the time, I was studying in seminary to prepare for ministry, and I discovered that when people would ask me what I did for a living, it would typically kill the conversation. People would learn that I am a Pastor, and then look away, as though our conversation all of a sudden transformed into a confessional.

He asked me the question, I told him what I did, and then he looked away. A moment later, he turned back at me, with tears in his eyes, and mind you before take off, and said to me, my life is in a really difficult place right now, and I could use some hope right now.

We talked all the way to baggage claim. On that fight, we talked about things, and realized that we had a lot in common. We talked about some of the things in his life taking place, but we talked mostly about the hope and peace of Jesus - the Good News! To this day, he and I are close friends. He took part in my wedding, and almost a year to the day of us first meeting, he and I attended a mission trip to El Salvador to build clean water wells together.

This year, in 2012, be a good leper. Receive the Good News and share it. Be a Good Leper.

Let us pray,