Field Notes #33: Preaching on July 4: "I Wanna Get Washed Up"

(That's me wading in the Dead Sea in the spring of 1995.)

The Jordan River is not a very big river in global terms, but it is an important resource in the dry land through which it runs. For millennia, many peoples have depended on its water, often clashing over use and ownership of the currents. In the Old Testament, the Jordan often outlines someone’s inheritance; it also has served as a border of ancient Israel and as the site of army encampments in times of war. In the New Testament, it is where the first Christians are baptized—and where Jesus himself is baptized. Today, many make pilgrimages to the Jordan River to stand in its waters and remember their baptism or to be baptized. I received a blessing from an old friend in this very river when I traveled to Israel at age 8. Of course, the Jordan’s history of conflict and warfare is far from over; it is still a symbol of national pride in the Arab/Israeli conflict, and disputes over land ownership and use of the water rage on even today.

This little river becomes a major player in the story we just heard from 2 Kings. The narrative is full of irony—servants, prophets and a small water source end up being more important than kings and generals. If this were a Hollywood film, Naaman and the king of Israel would be on the movie poster, but they end up looking pretty foolish. Naaman is told that a prophet in Israel can heal him, so he writes to the king. Either he misunderstands the servant girl or just assumes that if any help can come from Israel, surely it would come from royalty. Similarly, the king of Israel is immediately suspicious of Naaman’s request, assuming he is trying to pick a fight—remember, this is an enemy general occupying Israeli land. Notice that both men make assumptions, both of which turn out to be wrong. Because of their pride, communication breaks down and Naaman almost misses his chance to be healed.

On the other hand, the servant girl and Elisha barely make cameos in the story, but they’re the ones who know what’s going on. This shows that this passage isn’t about Naaman and the king of Israel. But it’s not about the servant or Elisha, either. This story is about God. God is the main character. It would be hard to create a movie poster for such a plot, but let’s explore this a little further.

God has a hand in events from the very beginning of this passage. God’s first mention is actually pretty strange: the writer says that God used Naaman to give Aram victory. But wait, these are the bad guys. This is victory against Israel, God’s chosen people. What’s that about? I have two theories: one, that this is evidence that although God is not just at work among his people; and two, this is dramatic irony—Naaman may not realize it, but he already has reason to be grateful to the God of Israel.

The next time God’s name is mentioned, the king of Israel is getting something right: He cries, “Am I God, to give death or life?” We can pretty safely assume that this is a rhetorical question, and the answer is “No.” I could go on for a while about the implications of this—suffice to say that when answered truthfully, this question impacts our thoughts and decisions on healthcare, war, the justice system and much, much more.

Scanning the passage further, God comes up again as part of the title “Elisha the man of God.” Interesting that Naaman went first for help to the king and not to the man of God. But Elisha reaches out to Naaman anyway, saying, “Let him come to me, that he may learn that there is a prophet in Israel.” Even Elisha doesn’t get it yet: the miracle that’s coming up isn’t about his legitimacy as a prophet; it’s about God’s power and mercy. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Elisha tells Naaman exactly what he must to do be cured: wash in the Jordan River seven times. Sounds pretty simple, right? But Naaman is downright offended at this. He was looking for something more impressive. He was a victorious general, after all; he deserved it! Naaman says, “I thought that for me he would surely come out, and stand and call on the name of the Lord his God, and would wave his hand over the spot, and cure the leprosy!” “For me,” he says. Naaman thinks he deserves a special miracle, not one that requires him to wash in a dinky river in Israel. And you know what else he says? “The Lord his God.” Naaman is not claiming the God of Israel in any form but a utilitarian one at this point. You’d think Elisha would just say, “Forget it.” And maybe he did—we don’t see Elisha again in this passage.

Luckily for Naaman, his servants keep their cool. Here we go with the minor characters again. I love what they say to their master: “If the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it?” Naaman wanted a flashy miracle. He wanted a magic trick or an impressive feat with which he could earn his healing. His pride was keeping him from the thing he needed most. The servants point out, “All he said to you was, ‘Wash, and be clean.’” “Wash, and be clean.” Naaman is embarrassed, insulted even, at the simplicity of the task. “Wash, and be clean.”

Naaman’s reaction reflects not only excessive pride but also a lack of trust. William Sloane Coffin said wisely, “faith is not believing without proof but trusting without reservation.” I’m never really bothered when someone challenges me that there is no proof for the existence of God. Reason and knowledge are a part of faith, but they are not its substance. Love and trust are. Naaman had reservations that kept him from trusting, the main one being that he had a preconceived notion of what the miracle he sought would look like.

Did you ever hear the joke about the man who climbed onto the roof of his house during a flood? He prayed and prayed to God to send him help as the waters rose closer and closer to the top of the house. Before long, some people paddled by in a canoe. “Come on!” they cried, “Let us get you out of here!” But the man replied, “No, I’m waiting for God to rescue me.” A little later, a family drove by in a motorboat and offered to pick him up; again the man refused. As the waters started to lap at his feet, a helicopter flew down and tried to rescue him; but he stayed put. Finally, the man drowned, and when he went to heaven, he immediately marched up to God. “I’ve been a faithful Christian all my life,” he said, “and I prayed for you to rescue me, and you didn’t! Where were you?” God replied, “Good grief man, I sent you a canoe, a motorboat and a helicopter. What more did you want from me?”

Naaman almost ends up in the same boat as that man. (Pun intended.) If the miracle wasn’t going to happen his way, he just wasn’t going to accept it. Good thing he listened to his servants.

The only other reference to God in this passage is a mention of Elisha again as “the man of God.” The story ends with Naaman washing in the Jordan and being cured of his disease. But if we look at the next verse, we see that this isn’t just a healing narrative. Here’s verse 15: “Then he returned to the man of God, he and all his company; he came and stood before him and said, ‘Now I know that there is no God in all the earth except in Israel.’” Elisha wanted to show Naaman that there was a prophet in Israel; he ended up introducing him to the God of Israel.

Here’s the interesting thing: Naaman’s faith was not a condition of his healing. His healing led to his faith. Here’s how Kathleen Robertson Farmer puts it: “It is his experience of salvation that brings about his faith, not the other way around! ...the grace of God is extended to those who do nothing to qualify for salvation.”

The response of many Christians to that statement may well be “No fair!” But if we’re honest with ourselves, the only thing we can do or say in response to this story’s message is to fall on our knees and say, “Thank God.” See, none of us can do anything to qualify for salvation. Nothing. God is not a vending machine in the sky; nor can we earn his love by being really good Christians. God’s love and mercy is offered to everyone, regardless of age, race, gender, social status, creed, culture...all that matters is their status as children of God—and that’s everybody. It’s never been a question as to whether the grace is available. The question has always been: will we accept it? All God says to us is, “Wash, and be clean.” In the musical Godspell, Jesus comes to John the Baptist and says, “I wanna get washed up.” That’s all we have to say. “I wanna get washed up.” I wanna get washed up.

In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

(My dad, brother and grandparents came to hear me preach!)

Field Notes #32: Perfectly Lonely

"Nothing to do / Nowhere to be / A simple little kind of free." These lines from John Mayer's song "Perfectly Lonely" (from his latest release, Battle Studies) popped in my head a little while ago. Ignore the rest of the song, which is about being happily single, and that's basically what I have going on today. I mean, I have things to get done, like my sermon for Sunday, but I don't have to go anywhere. I'm still in the pink shirt and green pants I wore to bed. I look like a watermelon. And I have had a lovely day so far.

I got up this morning to discover it was 66 degrees outside! That is amazing! I quickly made some coffee, grabbed my Bible, journal and a few books, and proceeded to drag an armchair and ottoman out onto the back deck. I was there for several hours, enjoying the day, reading, writing and praying, taking a "break" to walk around the track while I called my dad and brother, who got back from Brazil early this morning.

I have since moved inside, but I'm sitting in the room adjacent to the deck with the sliding glass door open so there's just a screen between me and the day. I'm letting ideas for my sermon percolate a bit more, but I'll probably commit something to paper at some point today. I'm hoping for one of those days where I take it easy and yet am productive. Love it.

Tea Party Jesus: The Words of Christians in the Mouth of Christ

This blog is hilarious. And condemning. And inappropriate. But it's not the authors who are being necessarily inappropriate--it's Christians. These are direct quotes from high-profile, self-proclaimed Christians, put into perspective by putting them in Jesus' mouth. See my earlier post that touches on Christians being jerks.

Here are a few favorites so far (I just discovered this blog):

(Tom Mullins, May 2010)

(Glen Beck, March 2008)

DANGER: Entering Church...?

My dad posted a great blog recently entitled "Crash Helmets and Inclusivity." Go read it. Don't worry, his posts are generally shorter than mine. :)

He was inspired by the renovations going on in the sanctuary at Myers Park United Methodist Church in Charlotte, NC. On all the doors to the sanctuary, there are signs that read "DANGER: HARD HAT AREA." He recalled a quote from author Annie Dillard's book Teaching a Stone to Talk: "It is madness to wear ladies' velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets." And that blog post was born.

I got to see the interior of the sanctuary the other day. It is a mess! The picture of the sign on the door is one my dad sent me, but here's a shot inside the church that I took with my phone. I love it--bright red tape screaming "DANGER DANGER DANGER" all the way around the sanctuary. If the trustees (at any given church) wouldn't throw a hissy fit, I'd suggest leaving that there and installing it in other churches (note to self: try this someday. It could be a fun sermon stunt). We forget sometimes that when we enter into worship, we are drawing near to immeasurable power--the power that created the universe! Crash helmets? At the very least!

What I'm Reading #9: Feasting on the Word (David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, editors)

Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume 3: Pentecost and Season After Pentecost, edited by David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor

OK, I'm not reading this cover-to-cover, because that would be silly. But this is a preaching resource based on the Revised Common Lectionary. Val gave it to me, and it is awesome. Feasting on the Word is a new series published by Westminster John Knox, and I have Year C, Volume 3: Pentecost and Season After Pentecost (which is where we are in the liturgical calendar right now). It's edited by two greats in the world of Biblical studies and preaching, David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor.

Each week, there are 4 texts, and Feasting on the Word approaches each one from 4 different perspectives: Theological, Pastoral, Exegetical and Homiletical. I just read the entire entry on the Old Testament passage for this Sunday, and it got me all jazzed up, which is why I'm writing this now. :) If you're a preacher or a writer or just someone interested in how to approach the Bible from different perspectives, check this out.

Field Notes #31: Exploring the Campground

Before I came to Hill's Chapel UMC, this is what I thought was meant by the phrase "camp meeting": Dad doesn't wear a robe for 6 Sundays during the summer and we sing really old hymns.

I quickly learned that this is not what people around here are talking about when they mention camp meeting.

I started hearing words like "tents" and "weekend," and finally someone explained to me that the Rock Springs Camp Meeting goes on for 2 weeks and people actually stay in tents (which are really more like shacks that cost upwards of $40,000). My first reaction felt something like morbid fascination. I've never thought of myself as a city girl, but since coming here I've realized that to some extent I definitely am one.

Well, today Don Grice took me and LeaAnne out to lunch, and when he found out neither of us had seen the campground, he insisted that we take a tour after we ate. Camp meeting doesn't start until August, but there were already people there working on their tents and getting ready--and they knew right away that LeaAnne and I had never been there before. I was amazed. Someone had told me that parts of the campground looked like a third world country, and they were not wrong. Don showed us the inside of his family's "tent"--they have concrete floors, carpet, a second floor and a balcony, so their place is nice by comparison to many others.

After I got over the initial shock, I realized...this place is AWESOME! Thousands of people come to camp meeting, and yet you can let kids run around unattended without worrying about them getting lost or hurt, and everyone has benches and porch swings, and the arbor is actually really beautiful. I totally want to stay an extra day or two in Denver to experience camp meeting.

I didn't have my camera on me, but I took a bunch of pictures with my cell phone. Check these out:

Intimacy Fail: How Technology Destroys Our Social IQ and Cripples the Greatest Commandment

Last night, I watched the movie Surrogates, starring Bruce Willis. Here's a bit of a plot summary from IMDB: "People are living their lives remotely from the safety of their own homes via robotic surrogates--sexy, physically perfect mechanical representations of themselves. It's an ideal world where crime, pain, fear and consequences don't exist." Discrimination disappears: everyone is good-looking, and race doesn't have meaning in a world where someone's skin tone may not necessarily reflect their cultural background. Infectious diseases are all but wiped out: robots cannot transmit bacteria and viruses. Injury and death are completely avoidable: surrogates can be thrown from bridges, shot in the head and beaten, with no consequence to the operator except the need to repair or replace their robot.

The flip side of this utopia is the reality that people don't actually interact with each other anymore. Bruce Willis' character lives in a world where his wife mourns the death of their son (during the pre-surrogate age) by locking herself in her room and living entirely through her surrogate. This married couple only interacts through youthful, physically perfected versions of themselves, and they hide their pain from each other by barricading their true selves in lonely isolation.

Of course, we don't need futuristic robot avatars to separate ourselves from each other. We're doing it already. It makes me think of the opening lines of the movie Crash: "It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something." Impersonality is the law of the land, whether imposed consciously for self-protection or unconsciously out of habit.

I recently read an article from the humor and video site Cracked.com entitled "7 Reasons the 21st Century Is Making You Miserable." (WARNING: Cracked is not known for being politically correct or polite. If you have issues with strong language a crude humor, don't read this. I'll summarize it for you anyway.) Here are those 7 reasons:

#1: We don't have enough annoying strangers in our lives.
#2: We don't have enough annoying friends, either.
#3: Texting is a [crappy] way to communicate.
#4: Online company only makes us lonelier.
#5: We don't get criticized enough.
#6: We're victims of the Outrage Machine.
#7: We feel worthless, because we actually are worth less.

I'm not going to go into detail on all of these, but here are some basic points made in this article. Today's technology allows us to be selective about how and with whom we interact; therefore, we can more easily avoid dealing with obnoxious people. However, this actually makes us less able to cope with the annoying people with whom we inevitably must communicate from time to time. This article also points out that e-mail and texting allow us to avoid deeper levels of honesty and leave tons of room for miscommunication; it cites studies that found only 7% of communication has to do with the actual words we use--the other 93% is nonverbal. This means that when you talk to someone purely using words on a screen, you're only getting a tiny fraction of what they're really saying.

The other thing does is that it allows us to throw things out online that we wouldn't say to someone's face. Online bullying is a real issue for kids and teens today that I, for one, simply didn't have to deal with much at all. When I was a kid, people just talked about you behind your back; now, they'll ridicule and threaten each other online. The lack of immediate consequences (or, sometimes, any consequences at all) can bring out the worst in people.

Christians are not exempt from this. Jonathan Acuff, author of www.StuffChristiansLike.net (his book Stuff Christians Like is now available for purchase), recently wrote for CNN's Belief Blog. His post, "Why Christians are Jerks Online," gives two reasons for the preponderance of hateful Christian blogs, bitter Twittering from churchgoers, and Christian hate mail. First, what Acuff calls "The Business Traveler Approach"--going on the "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas" rule, Christians are often able to separate their offline and online selves, believing that despite their commitment to the commandment to love one another, what they say on the internet "doesn't count." The second reason, one that really hit home with me, Acuff terms "Room Cleaning Christianity."

"Think of it like college. When you’ve got a final paper due Monday, you will be amazed at how energetic your desire is to clean your room. You will scrub tile with a slow toothbrush if it means avoiding the bigger, more difficult work of writing your paper. The same thing happens with Christianity. Loving your neighbor might be simple, but it’s not easy. [...] So instead of dealing with that, we get online and police people. We find small things to focus on that will distract us. I think God wants us to discuss the little stuff, but we make it an idol when we practice room cleaning Christianity at the exclusion of love. And we tend to become jerks."

As a member of the Facebook group "Nothing Gets My Room Cleaner Than a Paper Due Tomorrow," I can identify with this metaphor. And Acuff's explanation connects directly to a conversation I had recently about how to be committed to your tradition without being an arrogant jerk. Sometimes we lose any trace of humility in our attempt to elevate adiaphora (non-essentials) to the state of dogma (essentials) when really we're just putting off dealing with real issues and real people.

As if this post weren't already too long, thinking about all this made me recall a book I started reading and really need to finish: Marva J. Dawn's Reaching Out Without Dumbing Down: A Theology of Worship for This Urgent Time. Dawn points out that the overload thrown at us by the internet has gotten us used to learning random trivia that has no impact on our actual lives (remember Cracked.com? Totally my guilty source for exactly that kind of thing). Dawn writes, "television [and the internet, etc.] has habituated its watchers [and users] to a low information-action ratio, that people are accustomed to 'learning' good ideas (even from sermons) and then doing nothing about them." She also emphasizes the point that our technology-addicted culture decreases our ability to form intimate human relationships: "We talk about the weather and the latest ball scores, but we don't understand each other as if we belonged to each other, and we don't really want to know the answer to 'How are you?'" Ouch.

I need to go ahead and admit something that you're probably already thinking: writing this entire blog has been totally self-indicting. I am the queen of Facebook, email and texting. Even making phone calls to close friends makes me nervous. I have definitely made attempts to counteract this tendency to keep a computer between myself and others--when I ran a summer camp last year, I got tired of all the volunteers communicating simply via email and called a meeting for the sole purpose of acknowledging and pursuing the incarnational nature that our faith is supposed to have. We didn't talk about anything we couldn't have done over email, but it was so much more fruitful to sit around a table with coffee and donuts and just talk and pray together.

And now I've compiled all this information and educated myself and maybe some of you. My question to myself and to my readers now is...what am I--what are we--going to do about this? First off, I'm going to get off the computer and go to lunch with a parishioner and our administrative assistant. And I'm going to pray about the possibility of going on a technology fast sometime in the near future. Some fellow Duke Divinity School students did this for a class last year, and it was interesting--it felt like they dropped off the face of the planet for a week, and yet until I was 16 or 17 I barely ever used the internet, and I didn't have my own cell phone until I was about 18. It's amazing how quickly I've become addicted to my gadgets. Recently my boyfriend thanked me for not bringing my laptop over to his apartment when I came to hang out because it removed the temptation for me to disappear into my computer and ignore him. I immediately felt ashamed that he would have to thank me for such a thing.

Are we willing and able to acknowledge that despite the amazing things technology can do (because obviously I'm not anti-technology--it's an incredible tool), it also presents a danger in limiting our personal relationships? Are we willing to have contact with others where we are not fully in control of how much time and energy we invest in that interaction? Do we really want to know the answer to "How are you?", even if the answer might make us uncomfortable or, heaven forbid, take up our time?