Fourth Presbyterian Church: A Light in the City

Sunday, July 3, 2022 | 10:00 a.m.

Sermon

Rocky Supinger
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 30
2 Kings 5:1–14

Last Sunday Pastor Matt preached on the story in 1 Kings where Elisha takes on the mantle of the prophet Elijah to become Elijah’s successor as mouthpiece of God to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

Elisha gets to work right away. In 2 Kings 4, the chapter right before the one we heard today, Elisha performs two miracles for people who are acutely vulnerable, both socially and economically.

First, he conjures a way for the widow of a fellow prophet to prevent creditors from enslaving her two children.

Then he prophecies that a childless woman (a real vulnerability in ancient biblical times) will have a son, and then, when that son suddenly dies, Elisha revives him: he stretches out on top of him until the child sneezes seven times and comes alive again.

Elisha is carrying on the prophetic work of helping and healing Israel’s poor and vulnerable in the name of God.

But now we come to 2 Kings 5 and a person who is not poor and not vulnerable. Naaman the military commander is everything the kind of people Elisha helps are not: powerful, successful, and influential.

Naaman is an emblem of greatness: the commander of the army of Aram, a great man held in high honor by the king himself. Naaman is a great military hero. Parades are held in his honor, and little boys grow up wanting to be him. He has earned victory and glory for his country. His greatness cannot be overstated and must not be disputed.

We are celebrating our Naaman’s tomorrow on Independence Day, people whose victories on the battlefield achieved, defended, and advanced this country’s greatness. Washington. Grant. Eisenhower. MacArthur. Schwarzkopf. Powell.

Not just those heroes, though. The Fourth of July is about flying flags for the country, its ideals, its achievements, its promise. The flags are already out there. I drove back from St. Louis on Friday with our junior high mission trip team, and we saw a lot of flags. We passed under an overpass where a man and a woman were mounting one to fly over I-55. We saw out our van windows a massive one flying from a construction crane. I’m here to report that Fourth of July preparations are well underway beneath the spacious skies of southern and central Illinois.

That feels well and good to me.

Nations celebrate their military victories and the heroes who won them. They declare holidays and put on parades, sing anthems.

You can sing anthems when you’re sick though, just because we’re waving flags doesn’t mean we are well. Greatness and health are not the same thing.

A National Geographic article published in 2020 reminded readers that four American Presidents have died while in office: William Henry Harrison of pneumonia only nine days into his term, Zachary Taylor of cholera, Warren G. Harding of a heart attack, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt of a stroke. Woodrow Wilson had a stroke, and his wife Edith stepped in to hide the extent of the president’s illness.

We might not want people to know it, but we can be great and sick at the same time.

Naaman is sick, and everyone can see it. He has leprosy. Biblical leprosy is not the disease we call leprosy today. That’s Hanson’s disease. Biblical leprosy had a long list of symptoms, but it was something more like psoriasis: patches of red, scaly skin accompanied by the whitening of the hair. Because leprosy was thought to be contagious, the Bible contains lots of ordinances for handling it.

There’s an entire chapter in Leviticus detailing what is to be done with you if you get leprosy: a priest declares you ceremonially unclean; you are to wear torn clothes, let your hair be mussed, cover your upper lip, and cry out “Unclean, unclean.” Then they burn your clothes.

Naaman is not an Israelite. He’s an Aramean, so he may not be subject to this particular Levitical code, but he’s still stigmatized by his leprosy. It diminishes his greatness. The leprosy everybody knows Naaman suffers is an asterisk in his story: Naaman the Mighty (*pity about the leprosy).

You can be sick and great at the same time.

I will be thinking about that tomorrow—that a nation, too, might be great and sick at the same time. I hope we can appreciate the things that make America great while also acknowledging the sicknesses from which it is suffering. Because America is sick, and everyone can see it.

The list of symptoms is long, but here are two that stand out from my vantage point:

A racial wealth disparity that we were born with and has gotten worse, not better, in recent years. The Federal Reserve conducts a Survey of Consumer Finances every three years, and the last survey in 2019 found that “the typical White family has eight times the wealth of the typical Black family and five times the wealth of the typical Hispanic family.

Our nation is sick with inequality based on racially designated castes.

Our love of guns is another symptom of our sickness. The Trace, an online news organization that covers gun violence, reported in May that there were 20,726 gun deaths in America in 2021, not counting suicides. That’s the highest total since they started reporting in 2014.

The year 2021 had 693 mass shooting incidents, in which four or more people were shot at the same time, and that figure is 13.4 percent higher than 2020. The Trace adds that “most mass shootings disproportionately affect Black and brown communities and receive relatively little coverage.”

Americans bought more than 20,000 guns in 2020 and more than 18,000 guns in 2021. We are the most heavily armed citizenry in the world, and you can carry a concealed gun without a permit in twenty-one states in this country.

Our nation is sick with guns.

You can add your own symptoms, I’m sure—the discoloration on the skin of our body politic that causes you to sing the “Star Spangled Banner” with a little less gusto than you might.

Because America may be great yet, but you can be great and sick at the same time, and America is surely sick.

No, greatness and health are not the same thing. But disease need not spell doom for a nation with the wealth and the resources of the United States of America. Though the diseases that plague our common life are life-threatening (figuratively and literally), I don’t believe we are consigned to a future of unmitigated suffering, because we are a nation rich in human and economic wealth.

I saw that some of that wealth in action this week in St. Louis. One particular malady afflicting that city is population loss: fewer than half the people who called St. Louis home in the 1950s do so today, which is an urgent problem for education, because the city’s schools don’t have enough kids.

But we spent Thursday morning with a man named Tom, who has developed a treatment that is showing some promise: a three-and-a-half-acre farm on a highway embankment that is a shared science classroom for multiple elementary schools and that feeds those schools with fresh produce.

Speaking of military greatness, Tom was a captain in the Marines. After his military career he moved to St. Louis and spent the next four decades building influence with city leaders. He’s served on more than forty-five government, business, and nonprofit boards, including the one that brought a light rail to the city and one that redeveloped the downtown riverfront.

Tom is somebody who knows how to get things done. He has a lot of powerful connections, from the mayor’s office on down. So he leveraged the wealth of those relationships to recruit architects to draw up designs for his idea for the farm; to invite several university presidents to invest in it and lend their names to it; to secure permits from the federal department of transportation; to win over four different elementary schools with no connection to one another; and, of course, to raise money from the city’s philanthropic community, which of course is filled with people who know Tom personally.

Tom knows how to use resources and influence to solve a problem.

So does Naaman. When Naaman learns that there is a solution to his problem out there, he marshals his privileged standing before the king, his access to wealth, and the power of his position. The king sends an official letter on his behalf. Naaman goes out with a literal king’s ransom of silver and gold and clothing. Soon enough he’s at the front of a military deployment of horses and chariots, beating on the prophet Elisha’s front door.

This is what is possible in a nation of such wealth and power. You have access to the best care money can buy. You can throw practically unlimited resources at remedies rumored in faraway places. Forget the treatments; you can buy the doctors. Naaman is ready to open Aram’s national reserves to a prophet healer he heard about from his wife, who heard about if from the girl who does her hair.

In a nation with wealth like this, nothing is out of reach, maybe not even miracle cures.

Naaman went to buy a cure, to have somebody wave a hand and chant some words and cure his leprosy. But he’s not getting that. Because Naaman is not dealing with an apothecary or even a doctor. He is dealing with a prophet of the Lord. He is dealing with God, and God deals less in cures than in healing, in restoration, in regeneration.

Healing can’t be bought like a cure. Naaman is stunned to discover that his greatness has no purchase here, that he can’t throw his military might around with the prophet to get what he’s after the way he always has with everyone else.

Instead, the great Naaman is offered a healing that asks him to divest himself of the might of his chariots and to let go of his privileges and his titles, to leave the gold coins on the shore.

And he almost can’t accept it.

He reminds me of the rich young ruler who asked Jesus what he had to do to inherit eternal life. “Sell all your possessions, give the money to the poor, and then come and follow me” is what Jesus told him.

He can’t do it, and Jesus explains to his baffled disciples that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.

Greatness can get in our way. It’s certainly in Naaman’s way, because it causes him to be insulted by the healing Elisha offers him—not a shaman’s song and dance, not a mystery ointment, only a bath in a river, and a river that is in Naaman’s estimation laughably inferior to the rivers back home.

Greatness is in Naaman’s way. It’s preventing him from receiving the healing God knows he needs.

The good news for Naaman—and for us—is that even when greatness gets in our way it doesn’t get in God’s way.

Because God has people in this story, too. Elisha the prophet, yes. But also a young girl taken as loot in a raid and made to serve the raiding commander’s wife. If not for that young girl’s courage, Naaman’s wife would not have heard of a promising cure in Samaria, which means she would never have told her husband about it and he could not have asked the king to send him there.

Also Naaman’s servants, people so powerless they address their boss as “Father.” Without them, Naaman would have left in an indignant rage. But they are less burdened by greatness than their boss is, and they are able to see what he can’t.

Naaman is going to be healed because his healing does not depend on him; it might be the only thing in his life that doesn’t, and that’s what makes it so hard. But God’s got people in this story, too, and they are easy to spot: they’re the ones who aren’t great by the standards of wealth and power, who never have been and won’t ever be; the Israeli girl and the servants will never be heard from in this story again. And without them, Naaman would still have leprosy.

But he doesn’t. Because he’s practically pushed into the river. He’s immersed in the muddy Jordan water, and he comes out clean. If that looks a little bit like a baptism to you, your eyes are not deceiving you.

Just below the confluence of the Missouri and the Mississippi rivers north of St. Louis is a place called Confluence Farms. It grows produce for communities with limited access to fresh food, much like our Chicago Lights Urban Farm does. We spent Tuesday and Wednesday morning last week at Confluence Farms with Leah.

A few years ago, Leah left her career and joined Confluence Farms. She’s growing sweet potatoes and carrots and kale that she gives away every Tuesday to her neighbors thirty miles south in St. Louis.

She talks about how that change in her life is healing her and how regenerating depleted soil is sowing new life for the people who receive its produce. She talks about how she’s trying to share what she’s learning with other Black farmers, who she knows often don’t have access to adequate resources. She’s seeing healing, as people restore relationships to the land and to their communities.

God’s got people, agents of healing, who don’t appear great and who you probably don’t even know are there. But there they are, if we have eyes to see them and ears to hear them.

We gather around this table in worship as God’s people, fed here by a meal that is more than a meal. And then we are sent out from this meal to be God’s agents of regeneration to a nation badly in need of healing.

May that be so.

Amen.