Sorry for my month long absence. I have often thought about sermons for this spot, but my life has been somewhat tumultuous with a change in my employment status. Nonetheless, I'm back, and glad to be writing again. I enjoy what folks have to say in the comments, and I hope you enjoy my meandering around less common ways of approaching more common texts. As always, if you think someone would enjoy what they see here, I hope you'll pass it along.
Sixth Sunday after Epiphany
2 Kings 5:1-14
I would have been a great Luke Skywalker. Not, as in, I would have been better than Mark Hamill in the movie. I mean the actual Luke Skywalker. I would have been an awesome Jedi. Standing up against the evil Empire, discovering the the horrific truths about my family, saving the world from darkness with fancy bright sword work. It's hard to watch Star Wars without thinking: oh, that should've been me!
Or king. I would've made a great king of the world. I would have been benevolent and just, appropriately dutiful. I would have worked hard for the common people, not becoming too bogged down in the fancy material life of the court. I could have been a great king.
I don't know whether this is a sickness relevant to only some part of the population, or maybe even just to me (although I don't think so--surely all those people lining up for the new Stars Wars movies did not do so because they wanted to imagine that someone else was a Jedi). But I'm pretty sure I would have been a great *fill in the blank*, as long as the position were grand, heroic, and appropriate to my age. I have longed to be a fighter pilot, veterinarian, folk healer, shaman, Jedi, king, and wise old wizard with equal longing, because I'm pretty sure I could have done all those things not only well, but damn well. Not to mention the acclaim these things would bring me. If God would simply ask it of me, or will it to be, I'm ready. Jedi, here I come.
At least a little, this desire is subject to the old folk wisdom about the grass always looking greener on the other side of the fence, when in fact that grass probably tastes much like the stuff over here. It's fun to imagine being someone else, and there's even a certain fun in the ache we feel over how much better the whole world would be if I were a phenomenal jazz guitar player.
I'll even go so far as to say that this kind of imagining has some strong positives. Imagination is one of the key organs of both spirituality and ethics. The things that I imagine myself as, Jedi or guitar phenom, make visible to myself the kind of person I'm striving to be. I can see where I'm growing, and by changing who I want to be, I can slowly change who I'm becoming. It is entirely true that we become what and who we love.
But, having wandered this far, stick with me a moment longer. There is a difference between the positive ways we imagine becoming our role models, and the desire, certainty, or thought that we would have been better off if God had simply made us a *fill in the blank*. When we grow toward something, that can be helpful--when we huff up, as my mother would say, and say: I would have done that so much better, something different is happening. When we reject where we are, our life, and say: if only God had made me a Jedi! something different, something bad happens.
I think this is why I find Naaman's story so compelling. Naaman already was a Jedi, or close, at least. An important and successful general, a man of tremendous wealth and station, but in the end, also a leper. He wanted health--he wanted to be 'clean', to use the old term.
So, having heard about a great God and a prophet, he went to seek them. The snotty, self-centered king of Israel takes this as an invented slight that could lead to war, but the mention of that Israelite king seems to be almost another brief, biting judgment on the inherent egocentricity of the whole king-thing by the author of Kings--it seems odd to me we call a book by the thing it hopes to undermine. Anyway. Back to Naaman.
Then the prophet, refusing to meet Naaman in person, tells him to go wash, and that will heal him. And this infuriates Naaman. Why? What is that feeling he has?
It is this: if Elisha had asked for two thousand dead, that would have been fine. Naaman could imagine that God would make him yet again a great hero of an army. If Elisha had asked for Naaman to stay awake for seven days straight, Naaman could have pushed his body beyond the limits of its endurance, becoming a great ascetic--he could imagine that God could call him to this work. If Elisha had asked Naaman to woo the heart of a dozen Israelite princesses, he could easily imagine becoming a lover for God.
But wash? Are you kidding?
Naaman may have already been a Jedi in Aram, or whatever the more colloquial title for 'Jedi' would have been, but as is often the case, even this did not stop him from wanting to be a bigger hero. Slayer, womanizer, politicker, ascetic? Naaman would have embraced any of these titles to get in good with God.
But God asked only for a wash, and this almost killed Naaman. Wash? Is God insinuating that Naaman smells bad? That the water back home is inferior to the water in Israel? That Naaman could have fixed his problems by doing what everybody else does? Is God suggesting that Naaman is merely a mortal?
Of course he's angry--and in a great moment that speaks for the value of friendship, the cooler heads of his servants and companions prevail and he does as he's told, finding health.
Naaman's difficulty is does not want to accept his life as it is. He imagines that if God is going to speak to him, it must be in this grandiose way. A fighter pilot, off of aircraft carriers, surely that's what God wants of him. Certainly not the person who puts new snacks in the snack machines on the aircraft carrier.
But God gives him the harder challenge: accept who he is, mortal and human, and he can be healed.
That is the fundamental challenge of the spiritual life, for Naaman and for us. We are charged with accepting who we are, accepting this particular place where we have ended up, and seeing God here. "Even among these rocks" is how T.S. Eliot, the poet, describes the experience. Of course, we grow and change, and our contexts change, and we move, and we do new things. But none of those things happens magically--they grow organically out of where we have been. We do not magically become Jedi.
And what's more, we do injury to ourselves when we sit around and fantasize about how much better we'd live life if God had made us as Julia Roberts or Vladimir Putin. When we think about how much better life would be if we were superheroes, we slowly cloud the world around us until we can pretend we aren't here. And once reality is gone, truth is gone, and once truth has left, God has a great deal more trouble getting our attention.
It is the difference between working to become Gandhi and imagining that I am already Gandhi. It is the difference between Elisha asking for a double portion of Elijah's spirit, and Naaman imagining his heroic acceptance by God. In the first case, we focus and grow. In the second, we build an illusion that prevents light from coming in or going out.
Practically, this has some obvious possibilities for us. It suggests the truth of some folk wisdom I'm rather fond of: you can shit in one hand, and wish in the other, and wait to see which is filled first. Wishing is different from visioning. Would that new presidential administrations, churches looking for clergy and vice versa, people looking for a church, and all of us could earn the truth of that. Sometimes, we wish we were good at confrontation, but that really just gets in the way of envisioning what it would be like to be good at conflict and working to it. We wish there were a perfect place to meet God--some place without all these terribly boring people, like a church--and that interferes with our envisioning building a spiritual relationship with God and building on it.
God's call to us is not to wish we spent more time in prayer. God's call is to work at it. God's call to us is not to pretend we have become prophets for justice. God's call is to work at becoming those prophets. And, of course, God's call to us is not to imagine that we have become Jedi. God's call to us is to work toward becoming Jedi, a whole order of people devoted to protecting the life of those around them.
Our wishing only calls to mind the lightsabers of being a Jedi, the false piety and posture of prayer, and the self-righteousness of prophetic justice. Call and vision look, well, a good bit more real--annoyed at dogs that interrupt our prayers, struggles to find money and time to donate to public health, and giving up our lives for others.
But hey, Naaman came around-- a little wetter, a little wiser. Here's hoping for the same health for all of us.
