Sometimes I think I voluntarily, albeit subconsciously, limit my own perceptions of God and God's activities in the world.
Naaman, the Aramean, is a powerful man. He is a successful general who has won many wars on behalf of his nation and his king. Because of his prowess, he has all the trappings of power. He is wealthy, people pay attention when he speaks, he can order the deaths of others. But he also has a disease, one that causes his skin to be covered in some kind of disfiguring blemishes. Now, today doctors can distinguish between one type of skin disease and another, but back then all of them were lumped together under the term ‘leprosy.' And because of this leprosy, Naaman, no matter how powerful he becomes, will never be fully accepted, never be allowed into the innermost circles of power. And Naaman knows power, and wants more.
So Naaman is desperate to be healed, to the point that he is willing to listen to even the least important people if they have any shadow of hope for him. He first hears of the God of the Israelites not from a messenger, or from a prophet, but from the words of a slave girl, one who was captured in one of Naaman's wars, and sent to serve his wife. This girl has never been asked her opinion about Naaman's health problems. Her opinion is, in fact, less than nothing to her master and mistress. But she is the one who first brings him word of "the prophet who is in Samaria" (2 Kings 5:3) who can, she says, "cure him of his leprosy" (2 Kings 5:3).
Naaman is desperate enough to hear the gist of her message, but still arrogant enough to miss the salient details. Instead of going straight to the prophet and asking for healing (which, it is implied, is all that he needs to do), he gets a money and soldiers and weapons together and goes not to the prophet, but to the king of Israel, seeking, perhaps, to buy his healing from the people in power, or, perhaps, to coerce them into healing him through his display of might and wealth. He never even imagines that such healing might be freely given, nor that healing might come from someone who does not live in the court of the king at least. The king of Israel, of course, knows of Naaman, and interprets Naaman's display of power, combined with an apparently impossible request for healing as a pretext for war, a way to generate an insult that can only be answered by invasion. Both Naaman and the king have limited their own understanding of how the world works, such that they do not perceive how God is choosing to act in their lives and in the lives of their nations.
Then the prophet speaks, who has been silent up to now in the story. Elisha, the prophet, sends a peremptory message ordering Naaman to leave the seat of power and come to Elisha. And Naaman does so, with all his chariots, and his horses, probably in some sort of grand parade. But when he gets to Elisha's house Elisha doesn't even come out to greet him. All Elisha does is send another messenger, telling Naaman to wash in the Jordan River seven times. This is not what Naaman expected. This is outside his limitations understanding of how the world works.
And Naaman, as many of us do when confronted by something outside our realm of experience, gets angry. "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!" After all, I'm me! I'm important! And he storms off in a huff. But the challenge remains, not withdrawn or altered to match Naaman's expectations simply because of his pique. And in the end, because his nameless servants point out the obvious to him that had he been ordered to do something difficult, he would have done it at once, in the end, faced with something so simple, he opens himself up. He accepts that God may work in ways he neither anticipates nor understands, does as the prophet directs, and in so doing, receives the healing he seeks.
In his mind Naaman has limited the way God works. And so his challenge is to grow beyond his own expectations, his own sense of how the world works, his own understanding of himself as the powerful one. Only when he has shed that inner sense of entitlement is he able to receive the gift of healing. Only when he is able to accept that the power of God may come in a manner he does not expect, from a source he does not expect, and has no regard for his own apparent importance in the world, can he let the power of God restore his health.
We hold on so tightly to our own sense of how the world works, to our own plans and schedules and the illusory sense of control and power they give us. And it doesn't seem to matter whether time are good or bad. In good times we can get complacent, unwilling to challenge ourselves to grow because it's just too much work. But in bad times we often cling even more tightly to our own understandings and patterns. There was an experiment I read about recently, in which scientists asked participants to identify patterns in arrangements of dots or stock market information. Before asking, the scientists made half their participants feel a lack of control, either by giving them feedback unrelated to their performance or by having them recall experiences where they had lost control of a situation. The result they observed was that those participants who felt this loss of control "were much more likely to see patterns where there were none." Even if only subconsciously, we impose patterns on the world around us. Perhaps not so bad in an of itself. The trouble comes when our attachment to our imposed patterns leads us to limit ourselves. Then we miss or even reject what is outside our frame of reference, because we expect events, including the activity of God, to fall in line with those patterns.
I don't think we are born with such limitations. I was at a conference a few weeks ago, and during the conference there was worship every morning and night. And because the conference focused on the Celtic Christian tradition, much of the worship came out of that tradition, was meditative and contemplative in nature. It was not always what we might expect on a Sunday morning. Each evening, as part of the worship, after an opening meditative chant, there was a "drumbeat meditation." In the five minutes or so of silence a drummer played a simple frame drum, about two and a half feet in diameter and about six inches deep, with a very simple rhythm. One evening a young boy was there. He sat in his parent's arms for the meditation, remained remarkably quiet if somewhat squirmy, appropriate enough for his age. At the end of the service I went to speak with him. "What did you think?" I asked. "I liked hearing the heartbeat" he answered. Not, ‘the drums.' ‘The heartbeat.' He had been to none of the lectures. He had no preparation. No one had even read the instructions on the worship sheet to him, the instructions that read, "Drumbeat meditation. Listen for the heartbeat of God in all things." All he had heard was the drum, doom-DOOM...doom-DOOM...doom-DOOM... And he got, immediately and effortlessly, what the rest of us adults were working so hard to embrace.
God calls us, as followers of Christ, to an attitude of openness, a willingness to encounter the world not in a way that excludes whole areas of life from the possibility of the Spirit's activity, but in a way that seeks out God's presence even in the most ordinary of moments. Even in the moments in which we have been given no preparation, in which we bring no expectations. In moments of utter joy, and moments of frustration and pain. Moments such as when Jesus, fresh from his triumphs in Capernaum, on his way to proclaim the Gospel in the surrounding villages, is able to stop long enough to see the spark of God in the presence of a leper, regardless of what the rest of society says about him, despite the fact that Jesus had not set out that morning with the express purpose of finding a leper on the side of the road and healing him. In that moment, manifestly an interruption that the rest of us would have brushed aside as outside of our limited expectations of how God works, Jesus is overcome with emotion. And in that grip of that emotion he is able to perceive God acting beyond the normal boundaries, and to align himself with that activity, even though it means changing his plan, reworking his mission.
We spend a great deal of time with our youth and children here at Holy Trinity nurturing their sense of God. That sense, which is hardwired into every child, that at some level, the whole world is wondrous, is impregnated with the Spirit of God, is holy. We tell stories of the people of God, of God's activity in the world in unlikely places and with unlikely people, to our three-year-olds, our pre-K and Kindergarten, our 1st and 2nd grade, our 3rd and 4th grade. Right now our middle and high school youth are learning about other religions, not just because it's useful to know something about Buddhism and Judaism, and Hinduism, and Islam, but because by knowing more, they may begin to see hints of how God might act in areas we don't often encounter. We take our youth out into the community here in Greensboro, at Glory Ridge, north of Asheville, beyond our borders on mission to Ecuador, on pilgrimage, most recently to England, because by traveling beyond our own borders, our own comfort zones, by pushing ourselves, we begin to see that wherever we go, God is already there, already acting, inviting us to align ourselves with the divine Spirit.
There's a song called ‘Holy Now' written by one of my favorite singer-songwriters, named Peter Mayer. I won't sing you the whole song right now, but I will tell you that the gist of the song has to do with the singer's expanded understanding of what is holy in our world, of the holiness of our world which is permeated with God. The chorus repeats over and over again, everything, everything, everything is holy now. Everything, everything, everything is holy now. As his horizons have expanded, as his limitations have been pushed back, he writes in one of the verses that in his childhood, ‘holy water was rare at best, / barely wet my fingertips, / now I have to hold my breath, ‘cause I'm swimming in a sea of it. / Used to be a world half there, / heaven's second-rate hand-me-downs. Now I walk it with a reverent air, / ‘cause everything is holy now.' This doesn't mean he's somehow attributing divinity to everything around him, I don't think. Instead, he perceives the activity of God in the world, the miracles of everyday life that we too often take for granted. In the bridge of the song he writes "the challenging thing becomes / not to look for miracles, / but finding where there isn't one."
All too often we seek God, like Naaman, only to reject the offerings that come our way because they don't fit our conception of what God should look like, or act like, or because they come through someone we don't expect. But every time we grow beyond our limitations, every time we see God in a place or in a manner we had not before, our capacity for apprehending God expands, and our ability to experience the healing, transformative power of God deepens. And as we align ourselves with this new reality, as we grow into who we already are, we find ourselves swimming in a sea of grace.
Amen.
Key passages: 2 Kings 5:1-14; 1 Corinthians 9:24-27; Mark 1:40-45; Psalm 30