2022-10-11
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text...
October 9, 2022 Hamilton Coe Throckmorton
II Kings 5:1-3, 7-15c The Federated Church, UCC
When a group of Federated pilgrims took a trip to the Holy Land about ten years ago, we visited Bethlehem where Jesus was born; saw the Mount of Olives and the place where Jesus may well have died; traveled to Jericho on the road featured in the story of the Good Samaritan; and sailed on the Sea of Galilee. It was pretty special.
One of the highlights of the trip was that Bill Mason, a member of our party, had never been baptized. Before we left, he asked if he might be baptized in the Jordan River while we were there. It seemed like a thrilling prospect to me, and our tour organizers OKed it. Now usually when someone is baptized in the Jordan, it happens at the touristy spot designated for the sacrament. As it happened, though, our local guide, Rimon, knew of an out-of-the-way place on the Jordan where we could stop our tour bus and celebrate the baptism more privately. So on the appointed day, we went to the spot, disembarked from the bus, and walked down the river bank to the water’s edge. Two fishing boats were there, along with a few men who had been fishing that day. They were talking loudly when we arrived, but soon quieted down, and the silence seemed reverent. There we celebrated the baptism. And it was beautiful and full of Spirit.
Many centuries earlier, a prominent general comes to Israel, hoping to be healed. This is the Ulysses S. Grant, the Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Norman Schwarzkopf of his time. He has fought and won the decisive battle for the nation of Aram and is revered for his valor. But he has a skin disease that is severely debilitating, and he’s desperate for relief. So, at the urging of his wife’s Israelite servant-girl, he travels to Israel in hopes of being healed by the renowned prophet Elisha.
So much in this story is suggestive and could well be the focus of a sermon. It’s the servants, for example, who are the only wise ones in the story—not what the culture would lead us to expect. And Naaman, the general, is possessed of a massive ego that assumes the prophet should come out and make a big fuss over Naaman—shouldn’t the famous hero be fawned over? These are rich details we could fruitfully explore. What strikes me this morning, though, is something else entirely. A startling wonder of the story is the unexpected simplicity in the instruction Naaman receives of what to do to be healed. The task he’s invited to is, in his mind, simply too easy.
We all know what’s necessary for us to accomplish the things we think matter. You may have had a project at work that demanded extra nights and weekends for it to come out the way you wanted. The Guardians have had to work intensely to reach the post-season and win this weekend’s wild card series. I had to do long hours of homework as a high school senior to get the hang of calculus. I can’t tell you how many miles I had to run to be prepared for the four or five marathons I ran several decades ago. Child rearing doesn’t happen without endless hours of devotion and care. Marriages don’t thrive without a certain kind of diligence and focus. The things and accomplishments we value in life demand something of us. They challenge us. They’re difficult.
That is what Naaman thinks, too. If he’s going to heal, shouldn’t he be expected to engage in some sort of rigorous discipline? This is what Medieval hair shirts were intended to do. You wore this painful garment that rubbed your skin to demonstrate how repentant you were, to show just how dedicated you were to being right with God. It was supposed to hurt, not be too easy.
And oddly, all the emissary of God Elisha asks of this great army commander Naaman is that he bathe seven times in the River Jordan. That’s it. Naaman doesn’t need to be whipped into submission. He doesn’t need to engage in some wildly unpleasant or painful ritual. All he needs to do is bathe.
Now a bath might not be everyone’s cup of tea. You may prefer a shower for any number of reasons. But at its best, here’s what a bath does: it envelops you, it holds you, it warms you, it relaxes you. It receives you and enfolds you. A bath refreshes you. It remakes you. And essentially you don’t do anything to make this happen. You just receive its blessings. Extraordinarily easy.
This, I think, is what Naaman is invited to, as well. Rather than do or accomplish, he’s urged to sit and receive. Rather than assume the only healing worth having will come to him by way of his own efforts, he’s reminded that true transformation happens as a gift. Rather than continuing in the illusion that it’s all about him, he’s woken up to the far deeper truth that it’s all about God. And there’s not anything he needs to do. There’s not some demanding agenda he needs to follow. He needs simply to receive, to be comforted, to bathe in the waters of love. Easy.
Except that it also seems not so easy, doesn’t it. Millions have had their lives turned upside down by two recent hurricanes. A family member may be living in utter turmoil, and we haven’t the foggiest idea what to do about it. A petrifying diagnosis may paralyze us. We may feel totally lost and unable to find what we most need. And we assume that what’s going to make things better is going to be some difficult and demanding task or practice. Go bathe in the Jordan? Ha! That, we may well think, is most definitely not going to do it. There’s no way something that easy is going to bring us the healing we crave.
So knowing that the very process of healing is, in many ways, difficult and painful, rather than figuratively letting those sorrows and dis-eases be bathed in the Jordan, what our culture so easily does is run from the metaphorical river bank and avoid that pain. We numb ourselves to the distress that assaults us, or that just nibbles away at us. We self-medicate with drugs or alcohol or mindless TV or cat videos or doom-scrolling about whatever it is that haunts us. Like Naaman and his skin disease, we’re gripped by various afflictions that annoy us or plague us or slay us with their shadowed weight. And a huge part of our energy goes to fleeing that pain and running from it as fast as we can. And that escaping is, in many ways, eating us up.
In a recent talk he gave in an online summit on trauma, the physician Gabor Maté noted that 80% of auto-immune diseases are suffered by women. Women are twice as likely as men to develop PTSD, and are much more likely than men to take anti-depressants. His theory is that women have suppressed so much of themselves, and especially their own healthy anger, that the body has absorbed this suppression and has turned against itself. Women who tamp down the reality of their lives suffer, like Naaman, from a kind of debilitating disease.
Similarly, the poet David Whyte worries about the young people, and particularly the boys and young men, who are caught up in video games. He is quick to say there’s nothing inherently wrong with video games. The trouble, as so many have observed, is they become addictive. And as he says, these games are tremendously alluring because, unlike in real life, you can restart a video game. You have ultimate control. You can manipulate the world. This, of course, is totally unlike actual life, where you and I don’t have any such power. We’re subject to its whims and fancies, buffeted to and fro with little actual control. Failure happens. Change happens. Loss happens. Sorrow descends. Grief overshadows. You want control? Don’t stay in real life. Go to a video game. Escape.
And when we do that, and when young men do that, they can so often become lost to their actual lives—overtaken by that figurative debilitating disease. Life is hard. And “Addiction,” says David Whyte, “is the way we stop the process of maturation.” Whyte’s trenchant observations come in a conversation with the contemporary spiritual teacher Thomas Hübl. Hübl says, “The deepest pain is not the pain that screams. The deepest pain is the pain that is frozen, is mute, doesn’t have cameras, is not being heard, doesn’t have the word, . . .. Most of the culture is locked in that mute pain.” This is the pain that begs to be numbed, that craves being defanged. Rather than feel it, though, the demons of alcohol and opioids and pornography and video games and social media promise sedation and soothing. And in succumbing to those sedatives, the process of maturation and fulfillment goes by the wayside. No real healing ever happens.
So for us to take that figurative disease and go to the Jordan River is in some ways extremely difficult. It’s deeply painful. What Naaman is invited to do is, at one level, more than he can bear. He has to face his profound and sobering limits and pain. At another level, though, his journey to the healing river is just too easy. Once he’s acknowledged his weakness, his brokenness, his total lack of self-sufficiency, then he’s invited simply to submit to a power greater than his own. Going to the Jordan River is not, in any way, some painless lark. But it is straightforward. It is direct. And while it may in some ways seem too easy, it’s also what’s most needed. It asks simply that we be attentive to the present moment. It asks that we live where we really are, not where we wish to be. It asks that we face the truth of our lives and not to yearn inwardly or outwardly for some Shangri-la, some imagined but unreal paradise in which all will be sweetness and light. Going to the Jordan River is certainly not painless. But it is, in some deep and inscrutable way, strangely easy. And it’s just there, in that encounter with the Healer, that we are made new.
Maybe a simple way to illustrate this is to focus on the experience of grief. The poet Whyte says, “The only cure for grief is grief itself. The only way you get through grief is through grieving.” There is little that we’re more likely to run from than grief. Who wants to be wracked by sadness, tormented by sorrow? What can be more difficult than grieving the loss of a spouse or parent or child or best friend? Such losses may tempt us to self-medicate, or to steel ourselves and pretend to everyone that “Everything’s fine.” To be sure, of course, there are times when we have to keep everything together. Long-term, though, that’s a strategy that’s doomed to fail. Willing ourselves not to grieve, or pretending that we don’t feel distraught, can never erase the searing upheaval that cleaves our world into before and after. Acknowledging the pain, letting those wracking sobs come—that’s the only way through the loss and the pain. As the poet Whyte says, “Grief is its only remedy.” And it’s in that grieving that healing comes.
Naaman, the general from Aram, has clearly acknowledged the pain of his illness. Against what surely must have been his better judgment, he heads off to see this unknown prophet Elisha in the land he and his country, Aram, have just defeated. For Naaman, there can be no pretending. The pain of his skin disease is a relentless anguish. It undoes him.
And what marks him as a model for you and me is his trust that there is something more than this searing loss he’s been experiencing. He has to admit to the loss. That’s the painful part. But he also has to trust that that loss is not all there is. And while that is in some ways incredibly demanding, it is also sublimely simple. Even as defeated as he must feel, Naaman opens himself to a healing that he could not give himself. He goes to Elisha to find the wholeness and peace that have eluded him. Hard as it is, that healing path is also really so simple.
There’s a remarkable song of Leonard Cohen’s called “Come, Healing.” It’s full of Cohen’s characteristic mesmerizing lyrics. And there in the middle, he sings this captivating line: “The heart beneath is teaching to the broken heart above.” In other words, we all, at one time or another, and likely more often than we acknowledge, have suffered broken hearts. All those losses and failures that break our hearts in ways small and large.
And that broken heart above—the heart that’s on the surface, the heart that feels the slings and arrows of life—that heart is always being taught by “the heart beneath,” the heart that sustains us, the heart of God that walks with us through all that grief and loss. That holy heart, “the heart beneath,” is always teaching us and carrying us and sustaining us with the hope we likely can’t muster on our own.
In his grief and suffering, Naaman lets himself go to the great and soothing and transforming “heart beneath.” And Elisha, the messenger of that “heart beneath,” says to Naaman simply, “Go bathe.” Go immerse yourself in healing love. Go be filled by a grace that you simply have to open yourself to. This is the step that seems too simple to Naaman. And, much to his shock, it’s the very step that makes him whole.
Sylvia Boorstein is a practicing Buddhist who some thirty years ago wrote a book called It’s Easier Than You Think. This, I suspect, is what the story of Naaman and his apparently too-easy bathing in the Jordan River is teaching us: it is easier than we think.
Let’s finish this morning with a simple step into the healing waters. An easy way to pray, an easy way to interrupt the vicious cycle of pain and guilt and grief, is to remember in whose arms we are always held. And an easy way to do that is to say a simple repetitive phrase as part of our daily prayers. Here’s a phrase that I speak throughout the day to call me back to what Leonard Cohen calls the healing heart beneath: “In your presence, I find peace.” That’s it. “In your presence, I find peace.” Breathe in on the first phrase, “In your presence,” and breathe out on the second phrase, “I find peace.” In on “In your presence,” and out on “I find peace.” Let’s spend some moments with that breathing and simple prayer: “In your presence, I find peace” . . ..
So in our distress and grief and failure, may we come back to that healing heart beneath and let that healing heart speak those reframing words to and through us. Too simple? Maybe. But maybe instead they’re just the words we need to hear and to speak. With whatever is going on in us, we look to the Holy One: “In your presence, I find peace.” The simple, grace-filled, healing waters of God. May it always be so.