HEALING IN THE MIDST OF OUR MESSINESS
2 Kings 5:1-14; Mark 1:40-45
The 6th Sunday after the Epiphany
February 15, 2009
Pastor William S. Waxenberg

Life can be messy, can’t it?  I mean we can go along for quite some time when everything seems calm and collected, but then, in a heartbeat, the messiness of life, always lurking around the edges, seeps in.

That messiness, of course, takes different forms.

Sometimes it’s relationships that are messy.  Last week I received a phone call from Eileen, an old friend.  We grew up together, and, for a time, lived next door to each other.  Eileen now lives in Chicago with her husband.  They’re empty-nesters.  That means their kids have moved out to be on their own and things supposedly calm down.  But when Eileen called me last week, she was on her way home from Washington DC where she’d spent a couple of days with her two adult children.  As we talked about her kids, she laughed and asked, “When do we get to stop being parents?”  We don’t!  Parents are always parents, from the womb to the grave.  Oh, the parent/child relationship may well change over the years.  We may become friends with our children.  Instead of our relationship being adult-to-child, it becomes adult-to-adult.  But, truth be told, when their lives get messy, their messiness overflows into our lives.  Even when we’re 90 and our kids are 65, we’ll still be their parents.  And life will still be messy.

Or think about the messiness of communications, all the misunderstandings that happen between us.  Between those we hardly know and between those we know very well.  It seems to me that this is one of the biggest problems with e-mail.  There’s no ‘tone’ button.  So we send out an e-mail and it gets completely misunderstood because the person reading the e-mail has no idea how we’re saying what we’re saying.  Been there?  I’ll bet you have!  Me too.

Or think about how messy life gets when we become ill.  We feel awful but we don’t feel awful in a vacuum.  Our illness affects those around us, even if they themselves don’t become ill. 

The messiness of misunderstanding and the messiness of poor communication and the messiness of illness get all rolled into one in our Old Testament reading for today.  Here we have the story of Naaman, the commanding general of the Syrian army who’s been struck with leprosy.  Messy.  When his wife’s servant girl tells her that there’s a prophet in Israel who can cure Naaman’s leprosy, she tells Naaman and Naaman, in turn, tells his king.  “By all means, go and get healed!” says the king.  “I’ll send a letter with you, along with gifts of fine garments, talents of silver, and shekels of gold.” 

Now for some reason the letter the king sends, however, seems to indicate that the king of Syria expects the king of Israel to do the healing himself.  But the king of Israel is no healer.  “I can’t do this,” he cries.  “Does the king of Syria think I’m God that I could heal, that I could give life or death?  He wants to make a fool out of me!”  So the king of Israel rends his cloak as a sign of his frustration and distress.  “Aargh!”  Messy.

But the messiness of misunderstanding continues to snowball.  For when Elisha the prophet hears what’s going on, he sends word that Naaman should come to him, and Elisha will heal him.  But when Naaman does go to the house of the prophet, instead of going out to meet Naaman himself, Elisha sends a messenger with the word, “Go and wash in the Jordan River seven times and you’ll be healed.” 

But now Naaman becomes angry, enraged, that a) the prophet won’t come out to do the healing himself, and b) that he’s supposed to go wash in the river Jordan, which evidently isn’t much of a river, at least when compared to the two great rivers of Damascus, Abana and Pharpar. 

The messiness of misunderstanding.  It’s been ever thus.  The messiness of being ill.  It’s been ever thus too.  And yet, in the midst of all this messiness, healing takes place.  For, at the encouragement of his servants to obey the prophet’s word, Naaman does go down to the Jordan River, washes seven times, and, lo and behold, Naaman is healed. 

But notice how Naaman is healed.  Naaman’s healed, not by magic, but by obedience to the prophet’s word.  Naaman expected the prophet Elisha to come out of his house and wave his hand, like a magic wand, over Naaman’s leprosy, and, abracadabra, healing!  But that’s not how this prophet works, not in this story anyway.  In this story there’s a word to be spoken, and there’s a faithful response to that word that is called for.

And frankly, isn’t that often how healing works in our day too?  Even in our medically sophisticated 21st century?  I mean when life gets messy and we’re ill and we go to the doctor and the doctor gives us a prescription and tells us to stay in bed, get plenty of rest and drink plenty of liquids—don’t we have to cooperate here?  Don’t we have to be obedient to the doctor’s word, that good word, which, like Elisha’s word, can, in fact, bring healing?

We’ve had three absolutely incredible surgeries for three different children here in our own congregation during the past 18 months.  Two of them involved removing the back part of the child’s skull, breaking it into several pieces and replacing it.  The third surgery happened just last Wednesday when Henry Schulze had his cleft lip repaired.

  Now, in each case, there was a word that went forth from the prophet—in each case, the doctor—who has been blessed with the gift of healing.  And in each case the parents of these kids had to cooperate and do what they were told to do.  They were obedient to the prophet’s word, the doctor’s word.  And through that word God did his healing work.  God restored that which was broken.  But it took cooperation.  And without cooperation between healer and the one who needs to be healed, there is no healing.

Indeed, I think one of the most important questions in the New Testament is Jesus’ question to the paralytic as he lay by the pool at Bethsaida, waiting for someone to carry him into the water when it was stirred up by an angel.  Jesus asked the man, “Do you want to be made well?’  Do you want to be healed?  Do you want to cooperate by being obedient to the word?  (John 5:2-9a)

Today’s gospel story is a messy healing story too.  So much is happening in this short story that shouldn’t be happening.  It’s a mess.  First, a leper comes to Jesus, which he shouldn’t have done.  He was supposed to stay away—from Jesus and from everyone else.  He was a pariah.  Because leprosy was such a contagious disease, he was supposed to move about only with other lepers, staying as far away from everyone else as he could.  And, wherever he went, when he saw others approaching, he was supposed to cry out, “Leper!  Leper!”  But this leper left his comrades and he came to Jesus. Messy.

The second thing that happens in this story, which shouldn’t be happening, is that Jesus touches the leper!  He should have never done that.  It was forbidden.  He touched someone who was unclean.  He violated the law.  Messy again.

And then once the leper is made clean, two more things happen that shouldn’t.  Jesus tells the man not to tell anyone what Jesus has done for him, but the man goes berserk and tells everyone, which, I suppose, is what any of us would do.  But that has its own consequences, because now Jesus can no longer go into the towns round about because now he’s seen strictly as a miracle worker.  Or…or can Jesus no longer enter the towns because, by touching this leper, he’s now so identified himself with the leper that Jesus too must stay out in the countryside?  Double messy.

Indeed, it’s messy, this story.  Things are happening that shouldn’t be happening.  But they happen because, we’re told, Jesus is “moved with pity.”  Literally, Jesus is moved with compassion.

Or as another manuscript has it, “Jesus is angry.”  Angry?  Angry at what?  Angry at the leper?  Or angry at the man’s leprosy, angry at the man’s disease, angry at anything that challenges the reign of God? 

Compassionate anger, we might say.  So here’s the thing: Jesus is still filled with compassionate anger as he enters our messy lives in order to bring healing—healing to our broken bodies, healing to our crushed spirits, healing to our emotional distress, healing to our sin-sick souls.  He’s still crossing the boundaries, entering the messiness of our own lives, the lives of those we love, and the lives of those we don’t even know.

A couple of weeks ago, our bishop, Kevin Kanouse, and fourteen others from our synod, left Dallas for our companion synod, Sierra Leone, a country on the west coast of Africa, and the poorest English speaking country in the world.  They’re a part of a medical team that went to Sierra Leone to open a clinic, sponsored by the Lutheran church in Sierra Leone, a country that has approximately one doctor for every 25,000 people.  Along with the medical team, there was a 20-foot container filled with medical supplies given by congregations throughout our synod.  Even before the clinic was set up and opened, word spread throughout the country that healing was on the way.  And people from all over the land began arriving in Freetown to seek an appointment: 500 last Monday, 500 last Tuesday, and on and on it went.  Or, as our gospel text has it this morning:

…people came to (Jesus) from every quarter.

They came in the messiness of their lives.  They came to be healed by Jesus through 21st century healing prophets: through the doctors and nurses sent to them by the grace of God.

Healing.  As I heard someone say recently, “It’s a God thing.”  Elisha was a man of God.  He was a prophet, and into Naaman’s messy life he spoke God’s healing word.  And into our messy lives?  Well, Jesus was born in Bethlehem and became the very Word of God to us, in order to bring healing, comfort and hope.  His healing is a sign of his promise:

The time is fulfilled, the reign of God has come.

Amen.