It's Not Complicated, but It's Not Easy
2 Kings 5:1-14
A Sermon by the Reverend Ron Parker

"Naaman, commander of the army of the king of Aram, was a great man and in high favor with his master.... The man, though a mighty warrior, suffered from leprosy." (2 Kings 5:1)

Naaman had two problems:  first, he was a great man, highly favored by the king; second, he had leprosy, a disease considered shameful in his culture.

"Wait a minute," you say, "This sounds like only one problem -- one problem and one great benefit."

I suppose, in one sense, that's true: leprosy is a problem, the favor of the king is a good thing.

What made them both problems was not the external circumstances of the king‚s favor and his skin disease.  What made them problems was that he let them define his internal sense of who he was.

The externals of the king's favor and a skin condition turned into the internal states of pride and shame:  two debilitating attitudes.
Perhaps a little background helps us understand this story.  Aram, the country where Naaman was a military commander, was considered a pagan country.  Israel, whose capital was in Samaria at that time, was the nation that followed the one God, Yahweh, and saw itself as God's chosen people.  Aram and Israel were enemies.

I like this story for the way it turns some attitudes on their heads by unexpected twists.  The first, of course, is that a great military commander has what is considered a low-class disease.  The next twist is that the possibility of a cure comes, not from the great doctors at the Mt. Sinai Medical Center in his home country, but from a foreign domestic worker in his household, a young woman whom his troops had abducted from Israel. (The story doesn't tell us whether he had paid her social security taxes.) Not only a servant, but a foreigner.  

Naaman is desperate enough to listen, but he doesn't really take her advice.  She says that there is a prophet in Israel who could heal him, but Naaman sets out with lavish gifts for the King of Israel. When Naaman arrives in Samaria with his retinue and all his gifts, the King of Israel thinks Naaman is trying to pick a fight by tempting the him to play God, so he rends his clothes as an act of contrition.
The king rending his clothes must have been big news in Israel, because word of it got to Elisha, the prophet to whom Naaman had been directed by the servant girl.  So Elisha sends word that Naaman should be sent to him.

I like the description of what happens next. The text says:
"So Naaman came with his horses and chariots, and halted at the entrance of Elisha's house. [horses and chariots, grand entrance]  Elisha sent a messenger to him [didn‚t come out himself], saying "Go wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh shall be clean."

It's as if we‚ve driven all the way Rochester, Minnesota, to the Mayo Clinic to see a famous doctor and the receptionist says, "The doctor says drive over to LaCrosse and wash in the Mississippi River."
"Wait a minute," Naaman says, "I thought the famous doctor would see me and order blood tests and CT Scans and write prescriptions and refer me to specialists.  Just wash in the river?  I could have stayed home and gone for a swim in the Sacramento or even Coodornices Creek."

Sometimes I think medical care is more for our egos than our ailments.

Enter another of Naaman's servants with some more simple advice: "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'?"

Well, to give the story a good ending, he goes and washes in the Jordan and is healed.  And then, in the part we didn't read this morning, he serves the writer's purposes further by becoming a believer in the Israelite God, perhaps suggesting that he was healed internally as well as externally.

****

I grew up hearing the saying, "Beauty is only skin deep." Later, one of my teen-aged friends quipped, "but ugly is to the bone." We all laughed at his cruel cleverness.  And my guess is that in our adolescent struggle to find out who we were, most of us believed that beauty was to the bone as well.

Some of us were born beautiful (to the bone), others of us feared we were somehow inherently ugly.  Skin conditions, which loomed large in our teen-age years, were prone to define who we were.  And we didn't realize that cheers on the football field or grades in the classroom were also a skin condition, and not a definition of who we were.  If we didn't do well in sports we were a wimp.  If we didn't do well on the SAT, we were stupid.  If we were a star quarterback, we were cool.  If we got 800 on the SAT, we were smart.

These things were only skin deep ... but we let often them define us to the bone.

What I want to suggest here is that the conditions and circumstances of our lives do not define who we are.  Rather, who we are is a result of how we respond to those conditions.

Oh, oh ... I'm suddenly feeling like I might be repeating  a sermon Odette preached a few weeks ago.  Actually, I'm thinking of the children's time.  I'm just like you -- I can always remember the children's sermon better than the one that's supposed to be for the adults.  

Remember when Odette invited Charles to come down from the choir and share that while he was HIV positive, that didn't define who he was.  And Odette said that her diabetes didn't define who she was, either.  Both of them knew that who they were was defined, not by the conditions they found themselves in, but by the fact that they were children of God.

In other words, HIV and diabetes are only skin deep, unless we let them define us to the bone.

That's a simple truth, but it‚s hard to remember; it's not complicated, but it isn't easy.  It is so much easier to let external circumstances and other people's opinions define us than to remember who we are.
*****

My bit of dabbling in the martial arts and eastern traditions has sometimes helped me with this business of who and where we are. There is a story of the Tea Master and the Samurai that‚s been told in many different forms in different times and places.  In medieval Japan, a samurai was considered the greatest fighter, but the tea master was even more highly respected for his clarity and centeredness.  

If it helps you to visualize this story, you can just look to the tenor section in our choir. Think of Brandon WilliamsCraig, our resident Aikido black belt, as the Samurai swordsman.  Sometimes seated next to him you will find Elliot Jordan, the tea buyer for Peet's. Well..., if that doesn't help, just forget about it and listen to the story.

A tea master was walking through the streets of Kyoto when he accidently bumped into a samurai and brushed against his sword with the back of his hand.  To the samurai this was extremely disrespectful, as the sword was like his soul.  So he demanded that the tea master fight him in a duel.

The tea master tried to apologize and explain that he meant no harm, but the samurai was irate and demanded that they should fight at dawn the next morning at the city gates.  The tea master knew that there was no way he could defeat the samurai, but he could not dishonor himself by failing to meet him in combat.

That evening, the tea master went to the home of a friend and asked to borrow a sword.  He asked if the friend could give him a quick lesson in handling the sword, since he had no experience in fighting.

 The wise friend thought for a moment and then said, "You know nothing of fighting, so learning something now is hopeless. Here is my advice. When you arrive at the gate tomorrow morning, perform the tea ceremony, and then stand before the samurai and simply hold the sword above your head and do what is necessary."

When the tea master arrived at the gate the next morning, the samurai was already there with a crowd of onlookers.  The tea master said, "Before we fight, I must perform the ceremony of tea." Then he set about building a fire an performing the ritual.

The samurai watched with increasing fascination and amazement at the calm focus of the tea master as he made the tea.  When the tea master had finished, he stood, picked up the sword, and held it above his head as he had been instructed.  He showed neither fear nor anger, neither arrogance nor submission.

The samurai slowly lowered his own sword and said, "I have killed many opponents, but never have I seen such calm in the face of certain death.  I ask if I might become your student."

So what‚s going on here?  I think what this story tells us is that the outer accouterments of physical strength and technical skill mean nothing if the inner spirit is not calm.  The samurai saw it. Naaman, in our Old Testament story needed to see it -- to see that his accomplishments as a warrior and his shame at his affliction, were not who he really was.

And... we need to see it about ourselves.  We are neither our accomplishments nor our possessions, neither our collection of skills and nor our talents.  We are not our failures; we are not our weaknesses; we are not our illnesses; we are not our appearance.

Who we are -- when we can slough off all the things that we are not -- is a calm and peaceful center of love, embraced by God.