Sermonstudio

I know a man who has a severe back injury and lives with constant pain. He has seen the best doctors he can find. He has gone to a major medical center. He has taken thousands of dollars worth of treatments, but he has found no relief. He has also visited a chiropractor. He has tried acupuncture. The last I knew, he was planning to go to a faith healer.

I can't blame him. It must be awful to suffer constantly -- and to have little hope of healing. There are millions like him, people who have an ailment or an agony or an anxiety and are unable to find a cure for it.

Naaman, whose story is told in our scripture reading, was one such person, inflicted with a dreadful disease that in his day was quite incurable.

He was a high-ranking officer in the army of Syria, a country that was one of Israel's enemies. He was an important man who had the ear of Syria's king -- but he had leprosy.

Leprosy was a terrible disease of the skin. It gradually ate away skin, then bones and joints, often resulting in deformity or paralysis, and eventually death. (If you've seen the movie Braveheart, you may remember the father of Robert the Bruce, whose face was being eaten away by leprosy.)

Anyway, we can imagine that Naaman had already consulted the leading doctors of Syria. Because he was a friend of the king, it is likely that the king had even made his personal physicians available to Naaman, but it had done no good.

Now it happened that Naaman had a young Jewish slave girl in his home, and she told him about the Hebrew prophet, Elisha, and his power to heal. Naaman was so desperate that he was willing to try anything -- even going to the land of his enemies to visit a prophet he didn't believe in. After all, what did he have to lose?

But when Naaman and his entourage arrived at Elisha's door, they were insulted to find that Elisha himself did not even bother to come out and greet them. Instead, the prophet sent a messenger out who told Naaman to go and dip seven times in the Jordan River to be healed.

That was hardly what Naaman expected to hear. His sense of propriety was offended. He was to dip in dirty old Jordan, a river in his enemy's land?! What an insult! Why there were at least two rivers in Syria that were cleaner than the Jordan, and they were on home ground at that. Why couldn't he wash in one of those?

Naaman turned his crew around and left in a huff. Fortunately, one of Naaman's servants was a little more level-headed and persuaded his master to try Elisha's prescription. Naaman did. He went and dipped seven times in Jordan, and emerged completely healed.

What interests me in Naaman's story today is his resistance to Elisha's instructions, for it is not unlike the resistance some of us may feel to some of the church's prescriptions for the healing of our souls.

We've all heard those time-worn prescriptions from the church:
• read your Bible
• pray every day
• attend worship every Sunday
• trust and obey
• do unto others
• take up your cross
• believe in Jesus
• and the like ...

We may well say to ourselves, "Why, I've heard those things ever since I was a child. They are okay, but my problems today are too big for such simplistic advice. I need some real help."

And even if we don't feel that way ourselves, we can certainly understand why a person might take such a position. After all, most of us have already discovered that a life of faith, even when supported by a regular devotional life and consistent church attendance, just does not solve all our problems.

In fact, there have been times for most of us when we have discovered help from sources outside of the church and religion.

For example, if we have been saddled with a personality quirk that interferes with our inner peace, we may have found more help for that particular problem from psychology than from religion.

Or if we have been anxious and overworked, we may have found more relaxation and refreshment from recreation, such as going boating or playing golf on a Sunday morning than by attending church.

The fact is, there are many sources of help for the specific difficulties that plague we mortals. Medical science, for example, has made tremendous contributions to quality of human existence, and quite frankly, it would be foolish to ignore medical help for our ailments and then expect God to miraculously heal us.

Or consider the development of human reasoning, the education of the mind. The cultivation of thinking and general learning is certainly done better by colleges and universities than by the church.

In fact, for almost every aspect of human life, we can name an institution, a science, a method, or a school of thought that has been created to respond to problems in those areas:

• if you are physically ill, you can turn to medicine;
• if you are mentally upset, you can turn to psychiatry;
• if you have trouble expressing your emotions, you can join a sensitivity group or an encounter group; and
• if you are in poverty, the government is probably a better source of long-term help than the church.

Many of the secular "rivers" of help are very fine; thank God we have them. And further, some of them even complement spiritual growth.

Nonetheless, despite all this help, life is more than just a healthy body, a sound mind, a strong will, stable emotions, and a comfortable personality. The fact is, a person can take their healthy body, sound mind, strong will, stable emotions, and comfortable personality and use those resources to plan a bank robbery, cheat their friends, or be unfaithful to their spouse.

One of the sad realities of life is that many otherwise sound and talented people suffer from a kind of spiritual leprosy. And when that is the case, medicine, psychiatry, education, and the like are not, by themselves, the source of healing.

What is needed for spiritual wholeness is for the various aspects of the human life -- body, mind, conscience, emotions, reason, will, and so forth -- to be organized around a human spirit that is committed to God. That spirit then becomes the "manager" of the other dimensions of life and helps to keep them in the proper perspective -- focused toward God.

I know a woman who is a committed Christian. But despite her strong faith, she went through a period when she suffered some emotional distress. She decided to visit a professional counselor. She later told me that some of this counselor's advice and therapy was very helpful, but that a few of his suggestions encouraged attitudes that were so self-focused that they could be harmful to others, even to people she loved.

Fortunately, because her God-committed spirit was the managing center of her life, she was able to accept the advice that was helpful and to reject that which was obviously inconsistent with her Christian commitment.

In other words, her faith gave her a context in which to evaluate the other sources of help offered to her.

You see, what we are talking about is not whether the secular sources of help and inspiration -- like Naaman's preferred rivers of Syria -- are more appealing than the spiritual sources. The real question is, what can cure us of our spiritual leprosy?

And the answer to that question is already known to us: Go wash in the Jordan and you will be healed! Or, to put it into a more familiar phrase: "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved!"

The problem is, most of us have heard that advice so often -- many of us from childhood on -- that it has a trite ring to it. But think with me for a moment about what following the way of Jesus really means.

For one thing, it means being a part of the believing community that we call the church.

• What other institution is there that sanctions the pursuit of holiness, compassion, the meaning of life as legitimate enterprises?
• What other alternative is there that so fully provides the resources for spiritual growth?
• What other place is there where children are nurtured in faith?
• What other place energizes the examination of societal issues not only in terms of what would be helpful but also in terms of what would be right?
• Where else are deaths mourned but mourned in the hope of eternal life?

Those of us for whom church attendance is a regular practice are doing a great thing for our lives. That's because week after week we have the opportunity to view our lives from a faith context, to reorient ourselves and to keep in perspective the other rivers of help. We here share our lives with fellow worshipers who struggle with issues of their own lives in light of faith. We learn again the power of praying for one another, of caring about one another. Even when a worship service, like the dirty old Jordan River in Naaman's story, is less appealing than some of the secular sources of help, it is still a place where spiritual wholeness was promoted.

Many of us, I think, stand with Naaman pondering strange instructions. Naaman's instruction was, "If you want to be cured of your leprosy, go wash in old Jordan." Ours may be, "Learn to pray." But at the root, we and Naaman are hearing forms of the same advice that the church has been giving for centuries: "Trust God and be made whole."

It may not be the sentence we were expecting, but it's the one we need to hear.