7th Sunday after Pentecost, July 3 2016
2 Kings 5.1-14; Psalm 30.1-12; Galatians 6.1-16; Luke 10.1-11, 16-20
St Andrew’s Scots Memorial Church, Jerusalem
Great things sometimes happen when a congregation irritates its minister.
Thirty years ago, in a small town in Maryland, twenty miles from the city of Baltimore, a mostly middle-class congregation did just that.
A financial downturn made many in the congregation anxious. Race riots in Baltimore and many other cities exacerbated the anxiety. The entire town was suddenly security conscious. Paranoia infected the small talk on street corners and in barbershops. Neighbours were double-locking their doors and installing alarm systems. Men and women who had never held a gun were buying guns. To the minister’s dismay, all of this was seeping into his congregation.
For twenty years, he had been their pastor, preaching the good news that Jesus has overcome the world, defining their neighbour with Jesus’ story of the good Samaritan, teaching them not to be conformed to the world but to ground themselves in the freedom for which Christ had set us free. How could they so easily and so unthinkingly absorb the world’s distrust and fear?
It was time for Galatians, he decided – Galatians, Paul’s angriest letter, provoked by a report that gentile converts in a congregation that Paul had created had abandoned the life of Christian freedom for the security of the Jewish law. His congregation faced a similar temptation. Suburban life had softened and blurred the sharp edges of the gospel and left them desperate for security and undefended against the anxieties of the day.
He started with Bible study – 14 people in the church basement. It flopped. The 14 were giving more attention to stirring sugar into their Styrofoam coffee cups than to the Spirit words that pulsed in Paul’s metaphors and syntax. Paul’s passionate, fiery letter was on the table. Nobody was getting it.
Later that day, he shared his great new idea with his wife: “I’m going to teach them Greek,” he said. “If they read it in Greek, Paul’s somersaulting, cartwheeling, freedom-trumpeting Greek, they’ll get it.” She smiled at him sweetly and said, “I can’t think of a better way to empty out the classroom.”
So he abandoned the Greek project and spent the week instead doodling in English with the opening verses of Galatians. How would Paul write to his people in the language they used when they weren’t in church?
Over the next nine months, the group worked on his doodles, trying to get Paul’s Greek into the American words and phrases they used when they were at work, at home playing with their children, or out on the street.
After the second week, as he was cleaning and straightening up the room, he saw that all the Styrofoam cups were half-full of cold coffee. He knew then that he had them.
The Bible study became a course of sermons for the whole congregation and then a book. Years later, an editor asked him for more of the same. He was reluctant. The editor persisted. His wife agreed. He resigned from the congregation and set to work translating the Greek and Hebrew of the whole Bible into an American English vernacular. It took him ten years.
The minister was Eugene Peterson; and his translation, published as The Message, has brought the Bible alive even for many whose English is not American, helping us in the necessary task of recovering and submitting ourselves and our culture to God’s shaping word.
In St Andrew’s, we read from the New Revised Standard Version. It seems more appropriate for worship. But how might our readings today speak to us and transform us?
*
Our long reading from 2 Kings – and it is only half the story – offers a quiet critique of power. The great men are satirized. Only the slaves talk sense.
Naaman, commander of the army of the king of Aram or Syria, is a great man: a mighty warrior whose victories bring a smile to his master’s face. Yet for all this, Naaman is a leper – a term not confined in those days to the illness modern medicine knows as Hansen’s disease but used more widely to cover a range of curable and incurable skin conditions. (I throw that in for free.)
The Syrians can conduct raiding parties into Israel that bring back slaves but they have no answer for skin disease. Happily for Naaman, one of these raids brings back as a slave a young unnamed Israelite woman who finds herself in his household, serving Naaman’s wife. She knows the answer: If Naaman stands before Elisha, the prophet who is in Samaria, he will cure him.
The king of Syria sends a letter to the king of Israel: perhaps he thinks that Elisha is a court prophet in the king’s employ. But Elisha is his own man – or, put differently, Elisha is God’s man. It’s the same thing.
The king of Israel chews the carpet. “How am I supposed to cure leprosy? Is the king of Syria trying to pick a fight with me?” But Elisha says, “Let Naaman come to me.”
Naaman shows up at Elisha’s house with all the trappings of wealth and power: horses and chariots and slaves. He stands expectantly at the prophet’s door, but Elisha does not come out to greet him. He sends a message: go wash seven times in the river Jordan.
And the great man is offended and goes off in a huff. But his unnamed slaves talk him out of it: “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 does that, and his flesh is restored like the flesh of a young boy.
Why, in the story, does Elisha not come out? Perhaps it is to show that the cure is effected not by his power but by the power of God.
*
In our gospel reading, Jesus of Nazareth, still on the road to death in Jerusalem, does some delegating. He sends out 70 ahead of him – some manuscripts say 72.
Why these numbers? Many conjectures have been offered. The most likely is that Luke is seeing Jesus yet again as the new Moses, leading us out of slavery to death and sin.
In the book of Numbers, an overburdened Moses is told to delegate: to choose 70 of the elders of Israel to bear the burden of the people along with him so that he may not bear it all by himself. And the Lord takes some of the spirit that is on Moses and puts it on them. But Eldad and Medad, who are not among the 70, also receive the spirit, and so there are 72.
The 70 or 72 sent ahead by Jesus are in the same case. They are charged to share his burden and have something of his spirit. They are sent out as lambs among wolves, a mission that seems hare-brained but actually is not. At the heart of their mission is the message of peace, preached to a people many of whom are disinclined to peace with either their Samaritan neighbours or the hated Roman occupiers. At the heart of their commission are the words: “Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals”: Do not rely on possessions, rely only on God.
What Jesus says to them, he says also to us. When as Christians or as church we rely on property or power, we are tempted to compromise. We preach a gospel that does not upset the powerful.
Jesus knows that if he continues on the way, the leaders of his people in Jerusalem and the occupying power will reject him and kill him, but he does not turn aside from his chosen path. He does not renounce the freedom given to him as one sent by the Father. Instead, he offers the same freedom to his followers – then and now.
*
We come, finally, to Galatians. Eugene Peterson, in the story I told about how he came to write The Message, begins with the opening verses of the letter. Today, we come to the end.
For freedom Christ has set us free; but with freedom comes responsibility. Here Paul has three things to say.
First, bear one another’s burdens – but don’t take that as an excuse to let others do the heavy lifting. Each of us must carry our own load. Second, sow to the Spirit and not to the flesh, and do not grow weary in doing what is right. Let us work for the good of all and especially for the good of the church. Third and not least, it doesn’t matter who we are but only what we have become and are becoming. It doesn’t matter whether the men among us are circumcised or not: we are being created anew by God.
As then, so now. We can be gentile Christians or messianic Jews; but what matters is whether we are being renewed by Christ’s Spirit. The cross of Christ crucifies us to the world, so that we become children of God, not children of the world. We become the world’s resident dissidents.
And the acid test of that is how we live and what we do.
Sources
Lissa M Wray Beal, 1 & 2 Kings, Apollos Old Testament Commentary (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2014)
Gustavo Gutierrez, Sharing the Word through the Liturgical Year (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997)
Eugene H Peterson, Eat This Book (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2006)
Working Preacher
NT Wright, Twelve Months of Sundays: Reflections on Bible Readings, Year C (London: SPCK, 2001)
Tom Wright, Luke for Everyone (London: SPCK, 2001)