7 Pentecost Sermon

The Rev. Kathleen M. Sturges

Expectations matter. They can be a force to either help or hinder us. They can open us up to possibilities or close us down. It well known in medicine that if you give a patient a sugar pill and tell her that it will help with pain, that that the expectation will cause her brain to release endorphins which bring pain relief. Hand a glass of wine to a connoisseur and if he “knows” it to be of high quality and high price he will rave about the exquisiteness of a bottle of 2 Buck Chuck. Tell one runner that the jitters she feels before a race actually helps her to run faster and another runner that those same jitters will slow her down and often they will perform according to expectation.

Expectations matter. They can help or hinder, open us up or shut us down. And expectations play a big role in our reading from the Old Testament as we are introduced to a man called Naaman. In his story how God is at work in plenty of ways through the unexpected and how one’s expectations can either open someone up or shut them down to the working of the Spirit.

Now Naaman is a mighty warrior, but he does not fight on the side of Israel. Rather he is a commander in the Aram army, the enemy of Israel. Naaman is a successful and powerful man, but he has something rather unexpected in his life: he has leprosy.

Now the term translated here as leprosy and in all the biblical texts is actually a generic term that describes a large number of skin disorders. It’s rather unlikely that Naaman suffered from that disfiguring, nerve-destroying leprosy we know as “Hansen’s Disease,” for he is not barred from contact with others. Nonetheless he is suffering. And perhaps that is what makes Naaman open to the counsel from an unexpected source.

For in Naaman’s household there is a lowly servant girl, an Israelite who had been captured in one of Naaman’s army’s raids. Surprisingly, she takes pity on Naaman and tells her mistress that there’s a prophet in Israel who could heal him. It speaks to Naaman’s desperate condition that he heeds her advice, packs up and heads out into a hostile and foreign territory to seek a cure. Jumping ahead Naaman arrives at the home of Elisha the prophet, but Elisha does not go out to greet the mighty Naaman. Instead, Elisha sends a servant with a message. Now I didn’t have a lot of extra time this week to research the hospitalities codes of biblical times, but I suspect it may be similar to our codes of conduct. When a guest comes to your house you do not stay upstairs to read a good book, or finish making the beds, or fold laundry. You wouldn’t send your youngest child down to greet a guest with the message that the tea is hot and the cookies are out on the table and just help yourself. That would be rude and your guest would take offense.

It seems that something like that is going on here. Naaman arrives only to be intercepted by E Elisha’s servant who communicates this message, “Go, wash in the Jordan seven times and you will be healed.” The message itself is really good news. Naaman can be healed and the path to healing is easy peasy lemon squeezy! But does this make Naaman happy? No. He becomes enraged - this is not what he expected. In fact, Naaman has very clear expectations of how this healing would go which we hear in our reading. “I thought that for me he, the prophet Elisha, would surely come out and stand and call upon the name of the Lord his God and would wave his hand over the spot and cure the leprosy!”

You can imagine Naaman frustrated and furious stomping around muttering to himself, “This is not what I thought would happen! And on top of that my home country has much better rivers than the Jordan....” Things were not going as expected and because of that Naaman almost misses the chance to be healed. But to Naaman’s credit, even in his anger he is able to hear the voice of reason which comes, once again, from an unexpected source, his servants who say, “Father, if the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it? How much more, when all he said to you was, ‘Wash and be clean’?”

So Naaman goes down to the Jordan river to wash. As he lowers his body into the water not once, but seven times many things are washed away including his pride, his false sense of control and his misguided expectations. And as he rises up out of the water he is made clean and healed by the Spirit of the Lord God of Israel.

Expectations matter. They can help or hinder - open us up or close us down. It certainly was the case for Naaman. He expected to be healed so he made the journey into Israel to see Elisha the prophet. But upon arriving Naaman had such a narrow and specific idea of how the healing would occur that he almost missed what God’s Spirit was actually doing.

And so it is with us. When we expect that God is with us it opens us up to seeing more of the Spirit at work in our lives and in the world. However, we all, I suspect, are full of specific expectations about God - how God should operate, whom God should bless, what the timetable should be and in what fashion. When we narrow our expectations to such a degree we run the risk of missing all the ways, the unexpected ways that the Spirit is actually at work. Like Naaman, we need to wash ourselves of our pride, our false sense of control, and our misguided expectations so that we can be open to the ways of God. No doubt it is the Spirit’s will that we all receive the blessing of healing and wholeness, but more likely than not, it will come in unexpected ways.