February 12, 2012

Clay Nelson

Epiphany 6     2 Kings 5:1-17     Mark 1:40-45

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

I’ve put myself in a classic preacher’s bind. Last week we heard about Jesus’ healing of Peter’s mother-in-law. I shared with you at that time all the thoughts I have about Jesus as a healer. Yet now we have another story about Jesus healing a leper and I’ve got nothing to add…nada. So I’ve brought along some important world leaders from our first reading that I hope will have something to say to us. These leaders are the King of Aram, the King of Israel, General Namaan, the prophet Elisha and to balance them out a captive child.

First let me introduce General Namaan. He commands the King of Aram’s army. We are told he is a mighty warrior and he has a chest full of medals to prove it. He is a national hero and a favourite of the king. His home is filled with luxuries, the spoils of war.

Then there is the King of Aram himself. No one in Aram is more powerful. He comes from old money and entrenched power. He is the connection that gives Namaan power. He’s there to make grants and co-sign his loans.

The next person is a little girl, someone with no power at all. She has no title or name. She is virtually a nonperson. First off, she is a child. Back then children were at the bottom of the heap. The word in their language for child and servant was the same. I’m not sure things have changed much. Recently Newt Gingrich suggested that poor black children should work as janitors in their schools rather than give their parents help buying them food. In New Zealand children are powerless as well. A recent report said if someone is born poor the odds are he or she will remain poor. Not only is a child living in poverty more likely to have inferior nutrition, housing and education they are deprived of the social connections that are important to socio-economic mobility. The most recent figure for children in New Zealand who are like the little girl is 230,000. Of those 25,000 were hospitalised last year due to respiratory infections due to their environment. Doctors also treated many cases amongst them of rheumatic fever and scabbies that are rare in Europe. Last year more than 100 of these children died of preventable diseases who would have lived if they were born in Sweden, Japan or the Czech Republic. In the US one out of every three African-American children born poor in an American city will spend time in a homeless shelter before the first grade. While wealth inequality, the biggest contributor to poverty, is worse in the US, it is barely so. New Zealand is still in the lower 25 percentile of OECD countries. 

In addition to being a child, she’s a girl, owned but unable to own property, spoken for, but unable to speak in a court of justice. Even in her place of worship, she must sit in a separate area, far from the action, in the back of the spiritual bus. So the little girl who joins us today is doubly powerless. But that’s not all. She is a war victim, torn from her family and forced into slavery in a foreign country with foreign gods and a foreign tongue. And there seems to be nothing she can do about it. She has no social power. No economic power. No political power. No access to the official centre of spiritual power. She is General Namaan’s war booty brought home to enhance his upwardly mobile life style.

Now if anyone would need to have her life transformed it would be this little girl — poor, captive and undocumented. No matter how hard she works, she can never earn her freedom. She’s trapped with no way out. Nobody knows the trouble she’s seen. Nobody knows the plight of this motherless child. Nobody even knows her name.

In looking at these three we have a classic representation of the “haves” and “have nots.” They are conquerors and she is the conquered. They have connections, wealth and power and she does not. They have names and she does not. She needs to have her life transformed and they do not…er…wait a minute. Is that true? At this point the way we like to divide things falls apart. Surely the child needs a new life. She desperately needs freedom from her captivity, she needs release from her bondage…but so does Namaan. Beneath the shiny medals on his chest, under the rich fabric of elegant suits, Namaan suffers from a skin disease, leprosy, that at the time no one knows how to cure. His wallet is thick but his prognosis is poor. General Namaan the conqueror is captive to his condition.

And it is a horrible condition. It is a systemic disease borne in the blood spreading to the internal organs, deep-seated in the bones, joins and marrow resulting in the deterioration of tissues between bones, causing deformity, the wasting away of muscles, loss of feeling in fingers and toes, hands and feet. Evidently the disease has not progressed to this point in Namaan’s case, but he knew where it was going. He had a skin disease that was more than skin deep. Namaan and New Zealand have a lot in common. Poverty is a systemic problem rooted also in racism as by far our poorest children are Maori or Pacific Islander. It doesn’t just mean that children go to school hungry and breathe the air in mouldy, leaky homes or live in a car, poverty is at the root of many of our social ills: crime, drug abuse, and violence. It deteriorates the tissue of our common life, it infects our internal organs, it causes the loss of feeling and compassion. We have systemic disease that disfigures our beauty and deteriorates our common life.

Let me return to Namaan. He has this horrible disease and needs to be cured if he is to live. Business as usual won’t work. His connections and wealth won’t make a difference. The King can co-sign loans and make grants, but he can’t cure leprosy. The only connection that can help is one he has never taken notice of. One he has never seen or treated as an equal. I like to imagine he was a kind master. He probably gave her used clothes and leftover food, furniture and bedding, a small allowance when he felt generous. At Christmas he may have given her a turkey, lollies and toys. Maybe in the summer he even sent her to summer camp. But he didn’t really consider that she might have anything of value to offer him other than maid service. After all, she is motherless child and no one even knows her name.

The circumstances of this child’s life are enough to make a grown person weak. The injustices she lived with could have broken her spirit; shattered her faith, but this little girl found enough room in her heart to have compassion on Namaan. This child found room in her heart to care about the man who tore her from her family and bound her as a servant. She cared about his distress. She worried about his misery. So she told her mistress about a prophet in her homeland that could cure him of his misery.

The way the story is told the miracle comes at the end when Namaan is healed. But I think this is the miracle. This little girl found it in her heart to do something supernatural — to meet hatred with love and violence with non-violent action. This wounded child found it in her heart to point out the way to Namaan’s healing, to his rebirth.

She didn’t do it as a victim. She didn’t do it to curry favour. She did it as a witness to a truth spoken of by Martin Luther King, Jr many years later in a Birmingham Jail: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.” And so this child living in poverty sets in motion a series of actions on the highest level of international government with her words.

The King of Aram sends a letter to the King of Israel introducing Namaan who takes with him heaps of diplomatic gifts signifying status and wealth. He is still captive to the system of worldly power plays, leveraging influence.

The King of Israel is a little confused. He can’t cure Namaan. But then Elisha the prophet, of whom the little girl spoke, invites Namaan to come to see him. So off Namaan goes with his horses and chariots, silver and gold, and ten sets of clothing. Ten sets of clothing? Really? The man has leprosy and he’s worried about how many suits he has? He seems to be one of those people who prefer changing clothes to transformation.

Well he expects Elisha to be impressed by his commanding appearance. Perhaps he expects a big fancy reception where he knows he has just the right outfit to wear to. But Elisha is unimpressed. He just sends a messenger to say if he wants to be healed go to the Jordan River, strip off his designer duds and wash himself seven times.

The General is outraged. He feels dissed. Elisha should have greeted and cured him personally, not sent some loser messenger. And how humiliating to be told to wash in that muddy creek they call a river. The rivers in his homeland are renowned for their crystal clear waters. Some folks, like Namaam, prefer a distant river. Sometimes transformaton looks clearer in the distance. Sometime it’s easier to write a check and send it to help some ministry somewhere else than welcome our own neighbours with different backgrounds.

To Namaam’s huffing and puffing and suggestion of better rivers to wash in, Elisha tells him to shush. He isn’t the general in this battle. Come off your high horse and go wash if you want to be released, revived and made new. That this is an upside down kind of battle is seen in his servants giving the orders, telling him to do as the prophet says. His healing began with his first humbling steps toward the river. His healing took place as he immersed himself in the muddy water. Our healing will begin when we immerse ourselves in our communities, in the reality of our brothers and sisters, with all of the conflicts and confusion, the humbling recognition of our own ignorance and need for direction, the joys and disappointments, the injustices and the victories. 

As he came out of the water his flesh was like that of the little girl’s. Like her he is now connected to the true source of power. Not power from the throne of Aram, but power bringing transformation through connection with one who seemed to have nothing to offer, a child in poverty, a child who showed herself to be a mighty warrior resisting and rising above all the injustices that could have crushed her capacity to love but didn’t.

Perhaps if Namaam can be healed of his systemic illness through the love of a nameless child we can hope the same. The 230,000 children who remain nameless to us in poverty might point us in the right direction.