Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost
November 19, 2023

Pardon for a Necessary Compromise

Tom Are Jr.
Interim Pastor

Matthew 25:14–30
2 Kings 5:1–19

In my judgment Naaman, the Syrian general, experiences one of the most remarkable moments in the entire Hebrew scripture. And in addition to that, he is healed of a skin disease.
 
Naaman is the commander of the Aramean or Syrian Army. He’s Israel’s enemy. In battle, Naaman was victorious, but Naaman also had a skin disease, perhaps leprosy. Naaman goes to great links to find healing, all to no avail. But along the way he discovers that it is Yahweh, Israel’s God, who can change his life.

Naaman travels to Israel and greets the king. It is an unhappy circumstance for the king, as he can’t heal leprosy and assumes the more powerful Aramean king will hold him responsible. He tears his clothes, a sign of grief and death. He is in a bind. That’s when Naaman is summoned by the prophet Elisha. Naaman arrives, but Elisha doesn’t even come out of the house. Elisha just sends the butler to give Naaman instructions. “Go wash in the Jordan. You will be fine.” Naaman is offended. “I thought for me he would come out and call on the name of the Lord, wave his hand over the spot, throw some woofle dust in the air, and say a ‘shazam’ or two.”

In spite of Naaman’s enemy status, and in spite of his pride, he is healed. When God chooses to show blessing, being the enemy of God’s people is no barrier. The love of God can be offensive that way. Grace is always extended to those who are imperfect.

Here’s where the story gets interesting. Naaman, now healed, has to go back to Syria. Before he goes home, he says, “I now know that there are no other gods but the God of Israel.” But then he asks for something strange. He asks to take some dirt with him.

You see, Naaman has a problem: Naaman has had an experience of God, which has changed how he sees the world. But the part of the world in which Naaman lives is Syria. He is Aramean. Syria had always been home. And yet his experience of God has changed his worldview, so that what he has always assumed was home is not completely home anymore. So, before he goes back to Aram, he needs some dirt. A little holy ground. We don’t know what Naaman did with this dirt. I don’t know if he uses that dirt to set up space for an altar, if he scattered it around his block creating a holy zip code, or if each morning he sprinkled a little dirt in his shoes in order to remember that he is walking on holy ground. What seems clear is that his new faith changed what he thinks of home.

I think sometimes the clearer we get about the life of Jesus, the more we understand the call of Jesus, the less we feel at home in this world.

In Jhumpa Lahiri’s wonderful novel The Namesake, she tells of a Bengali family who immigrate to the US. They leave what was home and try to discover home in a new land. Instead they discover a kind of homelessness, as over time they learn there is too much Bengali in them to feel at home in the US, but also they absorb enough of America in them to no longer feel at home in the old country.

Ashima, the mother of this family, describes her new life this way: “Being a foreigner … is a sort of lifelong pregnancy — a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is … a parenthesis in what had once been ordinary life, only to discover that that previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding” (Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake, p. 49).

I wonder if Naaman would describe his new life this way.

He has discovered God but realizes that the world in which he lives doesn’t align with the ways of God. He can neither deny the way of God nor can he deny the ways of his world. This tension comes to a point in a shocking moment in the text. He pleads with Elisha, “When I go back and I have to escort the king of Syria into the sanctuary of the Syrian god, when I bow down in the sanctuary of Rimmon, may the Lord pardon your servant on this one count.” Do you understand what he is asking? He is saying, These are my people but my faith means I do not fit in with them. I must live with them, but I no longer fit with them. So, when I go back and my life fails to show the difference my faith makes, when my life fails to show my fidelity to God, when I go and live where everyone is worshiping another god, can you pardon my being there? Hebrew Bible scholar Dr. Richard Nelson, says that Naaman is a man threatened by his faith; he needs a pardon for a compromise he knows to be imperfect (Richard Nelson, First and Second Kings: Interpretation Series, p. 177).

When Naaman requests this pardon, we might expect the prophet to quote the commandments: you shall have no other God’s before me. Or the Torah: you shall be holy as the Lord your God is holy. But no. In one of the most amazing moments of all the Hebrew scriptures, the prophet of God says, “Go in peace.”

Go in peace. God’s grace is always extended to the imperfect, to the compromised.

I think this is the honest struggle of the spiritual life. Sometimes the clearer we get about God’s call in our lives, the more complicated our lives become, because the culture we assumed was home, is no longer home for us.

I think, like Naaman, we all live in the shadow of the house of Rimmon. We all live in a world that is so different from the life that Jesus talked about that it can seem God is a long way away. So, we all need a little holy ground — a little dirt sprinkled in our shoes to remind us how we are to walk in this world.

My friend John runs his own business. He’s quite successful. He once told me, “Tom, I love coming to church, but I’m not sure what to do with it. I feel alive with what we talk about here, but I have to confess that, when I go to work on Monday, the values and life there seem so far from what we talk about on Sunday it seems like they are two different worlds.” He said, “I’m trying to figure out how to bring faith with me to work.”

I think he was saying, “I need two mule loads of dirt.”

I do too.

In my early weeks with you, I have remembered a moment in my early weeks at Village Church. I was desperately trying to learn names and faces. It was a struggle. I was driving to make a hospital visit, and I drove past an ACE Hardware, which reminded me I needed some wood screws for a project I was working on. I shouldn’t have stopped, because I was in a hurry. But I stopped. I found what I needed and stood in line at the register. The bar code was smudged, and the clerk couldn’t ring up the item. “I’ll go back and get another one,” I said. I got another one. Waited in line again. This time the clerk noticed the package had a hole in it. “I think you better get another one. It’s a broken package: some of the screws may have slipped out.”

So, I go back a third time. Find one with package integrity, an intact bar code. I wait in line again. She rings it up, and the little paper that prints the receipt — well, it was out. “This will just take a minute,” she said. She was a little optimistic about that. Finally she printed out my receipt and with a big smile said, “Have a nice day.” I said (I shouldn’t tell you things like this; you would never do things like this), “I’ll try — with what’s left of it.”

Then she said, “See you Sunday.”

Oh my. The ways of Jesus are not always our ways. We all live in the shadow of the house of Rimmon. And the life of faith we offer is often a compromise.

Senator John Danforth, a previous senator from Missouri, is also an Episcopal priest. In his book Faith and Politics, he talked about a time he attended a noon service on Ash Wednesday. After the service he was returning to work, but as he reached his car, he took his handkerchief and wiped the ash from his forehead. He sensed the distance between worship and work and was embarrassed to show the world he had been to church. But once removing the sign of his faith, he was more troubled. He was embarrassed that he had been embarrassed by his faith (John Danforth, Faith and Politics, p. 56). He had a chance to take some dirt with him, but he left it behind. Do you know what it is like to sometime live caught between those embarrassments?

Naaman realizes that this is what grace does to us. It reorders what is important in our lives. And we no longer fit easily in our culture. We discover, once grace has touched us, we aren’t at home anymore, because our home is in that promised day of God that Jesus talked about, and we aren’t there yet.

So, we must make the best choices we know to make, even recognizing they are imperfect, even when they are a compromise.

Sue Monk Kidd’s book The Secret Life of Bees narrates the life of sisters, all named after the warmer months. August is the matriarch, and May is the most in need. These wonderful women welcomed into their home a fourteen-year-old runaway named Lily. The house is pink. and one day Lily asks August about it.

“How come, if your favorite color is blue, you painted your house so pink?”

August laughed. “That was May’s doing. She was with me the day I went to the paint store to pick out the color. I had a nice tan color in mind, but May latched on to this sample called Caribbean Pink. She said it made her feel like dancing a Spanish flamenco. I thought, ‘Well, this is the tackiest color I’ve ever seen, and we’ll have half the town talking about us, but if it can lift May’s heart like that, I guess she ought to live inside it.’”

“All this time I just figured you liked pink,” Lily said.

August laughed again. “You know, some things don’t matter that much, Lily. Like the color of a house. How big is that in the overall scheme of life? But lifting a person’s heart — now, that matters. The whole problem with people is …”

Lily interrupts: “They don’t know what matters and what doesn’t.”

“I was gonna say, the problem is they know what matters, but they don’t choose it. … I love May, but it was still so hard to choose Caribbean Pink. The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.” (Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees, p. 146)

I think what we are doing here is reminding ourselves what matters and then trying to encourage one another to choose it. Week after week, what we are doing here is trying to learn how to carry some dirt — some holy ground — from Jesus back into our lives. Following Jesus means that we look at our world and realize we are not at home here. We live in a particular zip code, but grace has sprinkled holy ground from another kingdom into our shoes. It makes us walk differently.

Naaman asked, May the Lord pardon your servant who lives a necessary compromise. And in the most amazing moment in the whole Hebrew Bible the prophet of God said, Go in peace.

Honesty is always welcomed here, so let’s be honest: our lives will be a mixture of faith and failure, of fidelity and fear. The lives we offer God will be a compromise, but choose the best you know how — and remember grace is offered to the imperfect, the compromised. Remember that, and go in peace.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church