Sermons

Third Sunday before Lent
Sunday 12th February (10.20am) at Lidgett Park Methodist Church

Simon Cowling
Readings: 2 Kings 5. 1-14; Mark 1. 40-45

Lord, may my words always be nourished by your Word and our lives enlivened by your Holy Spirit. Amen.

Paraphrasing Peter on the Mount of Transfiguration, I want to begin by saying how good, brothers and sisters, it is to be here. Covenants, I think, should be like the Word of God: living and active; and although it goes without saying that clergy are merely one factor in covenants between churches, I am delighted nevertheless that, at our local level, the national covenant between Methodists and Anglicans is alive and active enough for Neil's and my ministry to have mutual recognition at an official level.

"Sir, if the prophet had told you to do something difficult, you would have done it. Now, why can't you just wash yourself, as he said, and be cured?" The servants of Naaman, the commander of the Syrian army, speaking to their master after his brief encounter with Elisha's servant, show that they have a good deal more insight than their master does. Here is Naaman, having travelled all the way from Syria, via the King of Israel, to see the great prophet Elisha about his dreaded skin disease. Surely the least Elisha can do is come out to greet him himself, perhaps offer some prayer and lay hands on him like a holy man should? But no. All Naaman gets is the prophet's servant at the door, and a message that he should dip himself in the Jordan seven times. Naaman's expectations are challenged and, whether through ignorance, pride or weakness, he fails to meet that challenge. It's left to his servants to prod him in the right direction. All this reminds me, in a way, of a story told by the priest who led my ordination retreat. He'd been brought up in a tough Birmingham parish where, when he was a boy, there had been a very saintly, very scholarly, parish priest. The content of his sermons had been almost as incomprehensible as his cut-glass accent. His replacement was a Brummie, born and bred. His sermons were much more down to earth and his accent familiar to his parishioners. One day a parishioner said to the new parish priest, "You know, you're a real contrast with our previous vicar. He was so saintly." Though you might think it unduly harsh to say so, I think that parishioner was, in some senses, a bit like Naaman. Of course, he probably didn't have the same elevated social background as Naaman, or indeed a dreaded skin disease, but he did have some false assumptions about holiness and a good deal of ignorance about the many and varied ways in which, and people though whom, God speaks and acts. For Naaman, the form of a complicated religious ritual conducted by the prophet Elisha in person, held more promise than the content of a simple instruction from Elisha's servant to bathe in a river; for the Birmingham parishioner, someone who was readily comprehensible, who spoke in a Brummie accent, could not really be saintly.

Naaman's false assumptions, as we have seen, are challenged by his servants. This leads me to reflect further on the role of servants in this wonderful story. At three key points God works, not through the powerful but through the humble. Firstly, Naaman only sets out on the journey that will eventually lead him to Elisha's door after hearing about a remark made by his wife's servant girl - who happens to be an Israelite taken into Syrian captivity after a raid. "I wish that my master could go to the prophet who lives in Samaria! He would cure him of his disease." There is no indication that Naaman even had a conversation with the girl himself, but it is her insight that causes him to act. Secondly, as we have seen, it is Elisha's servant who conveys the instructions that Naaman is to follow, much to the Syrian commander's anger. Finally, in the words I quoted much earlier, it is Naaman's servants who tell him that he has nothing to lose by doing what he's been told to do, however simple and straightforward the instructions might be

I wonder if one way of looking at this particular thread in the story is in the light of the New Testament term 'Gospel', Good News - a term that crops up three times in the first chapter of St. Mark's Gospel. It's been observed often that those who are most receptive to the Good News that Jesus proclaims and embodies are often, on the face of it, the unlikeliest of characters. To take just three examples from St. Mark: Levi, a tax collector and therefore an outcast, who recognises Jesus' authority, leaves what he is doing to follow him and who later feeds Jesus in his home; the anonymous woman in the crowd, with a flow of blood that has made her unclean for twelve years, who knows that by simply touching Jesus' clothes she will be made well; finally the Syro-Phoenician woman, both female and a foreigner and therefore marginalised on two counts. She presses an initially reluctant Jesus to heal her daughter because she recognises his power to do so. And how could I fail to mention the unlikeliest character of all? A young woman in Nazareth who describes herself as God's 'lowly servant', yet who receives with grace and humble acceptance the Good yet terrifying News that she is to bear God's Son.

If these, the unlikeliest of people, are so receptive to the Gospel, to the Good News, perhaps it is in these same people that we shall find the Good News, that we shall, as it were, find Jesus. In the end Naaman does recognise that it is God who has healed him: "Now I know that there is no god but the God of Israel." But in order for him to get to this place of acknowledgment he has had to learn to listen, not to kings or prophets, but to servants whom he might otherwise have thought of no account. They are, we might say, the bearers of Good News for Naaman. In the same way, as well as recognising that Jesus is good news for the poor, the captives, the blind, the oppressed, we need to recognise that it is often in the poor, the captives, the blind and the oppressed that we shall find the Good News, that we shall find Jesus. In women, perhaps, like the one Michael Taylor, a former director of Christian Aid, encountered in South America:

In Brazil I sat with a woman - a mother - on a bare hillside. She and her people have lost almost all of their land, Nothing would grow on this woman's hillside. There was one dirty stream at the bottom of the hill with a few fish, otherwise there was nothing to eat. Two yards in front of where we sat was a small circle of wooden crosses. It was where she had buried her children, beneath the dust She had no food or medicine to keep them alive. I sat beside her as part of a world that crucifies her and shuts her out - that refuses to stretch out its hand to feed her and clothe her and visit her or comfort her children. Yet, like the crucified, her arms are open wide in welcome. She greets me as a friend. She offers to share what she has, and she thanks me for coming.

Lord, take from us our false assumptions of where we may find you and transform with your healing and wholeness our ignorance, weakness and pride. Amen.

© St Edmund's Church, Roundhay