Surprising Choice of Missionaries
Geoff Vidal	04 Jul 2010

Old Testament	2 KINGS 5:1-14
New Testament	GALATIANS 6:7-18
Gospel	LUKE 10:1-12, 17-20

We are fascinated by the fall of powerful and recently have been absorbed by the fall of Kevin Rudd and Jayant Patel. And we all like love to hear stories that tell of someone from a humble position becoming a significant person. Jesus told lots of parables about humble servants who turned out, by the end of the story, to be smarter than the people who thought they were the servants’ masters. In the reading from 2 Kings chapter 5, there’s the story of Namaan and the little serving girl. Namaan was a powerful Syrian general. But Namaan had a problem; a very big problem. He had a dreaded, incurable disease. So this story begins with a great person, a person on the top, who has a huge problem. Then the story moves to a little slave girl who had been carried off from Israel after a Syrian victory. She tells King Namaan that he ought to go to see Elisha, a prophet in Israel, who might find a cure for him. There is no reason for big Namaan to listen to this little serving girl’s advice. However he does. Maybe he’s desperate. Maybe he unconsciously knows that she may have special knowledge. At any rate, Namaan heads out of the big, powerful country Syria for little, captive, out of the way Israel. Namaan arrives at Elisha’s little home, probably expecting to meet some wise professor; an exotic guru who has some secret words to pronounce over him that will fix al his problems. Well, Elisha doesn’t even come out to meet the great man who has journeyed from afar. He sends out a servant with a prescription: Go and wash seven times in the Jordan. Powerful Namaan is insulted. “I’ve come all this way and you don’t even examine me, then you tell me to go wash seven times in that muddy little Jordan River (which, by the way, is nothing compared with all the great rivers in Syria)”. Namaan heads for home in a huff. Once again, a little servant dares to confront the great man. “If that Jewish prophet had asked you to do something hard, something great and demanding, wouldn’t you have done it?” Okay, okay, says Namaan. He submits to the indignity of slithering down into the Jordan mud hole and washes. And when he clambers back up the bank, his skin is clean and smooth “like that of a little child.” What a wonderful story of insignificant people being used by God to achieve big things. Jesus tells parables because he wants people to ask themselves “Who am I in this story?” To be honest, most of us are like Namaan. That is, most of us are white westerners, members of a powerful, secure, self-sufficient nation.. We are powerful. So, why does The Bible tell us this story of a powerful man who recognizes his need for help and journeys to this pitiful little developing country to get the medical care that he couldn’t get at home? I don’t know, but maybe like Namaan, we’ve got to be a bit humiliated before we can find the way toward healing of our own hurt … our own problem whatever that may be. Maybe we’ve got to, if not hit bottom, at least be on our way down, down off our high, self-sufficient perch, down toward honest admission of our dependency on others, our vulnerability. Hospitals are places where people are very vulnerable. Everyone sees you in your pyjamas (or worse still the hospital gown with the split down the back). And it is fascinating to watch people who are big and powerful in their normal life, now, in the hospital, reduced to complete dependency on a bunch of strangers ….. nurses, orderlies, catering and cleaning staff …. people who have less education, less income, less prestige than the influential patients. Yet when people in hospital accept their need to be looked after by people they would normally not listen to their healing begins. It’s a huge challenge to let go of our tight grip of the control we like to have on our lives … to let ourselves be cared for by others. We find that we are not nearly as big and self-sufficient as we once thought that we were. We find ourselves dependent on others; needing to reach out to someone else for some sort of healing that we could not get for ourselves, by ourselves. We experience the truth that we don’t have as much control of things as we thought. Our healing comes not from our own strength, but rather by reaching out, and being pulled up by someone else. Our healing comes from letting ourselves be ministered to by someone else … to be “washed over” in that muddy Jordan River. I don’t know why our God tends to work this way. But God does. So, if you appear to have it all and are on top of the world, got it all together but actually are weighed down by a secret problem; this embarrassing mess in our life or our family that we don’t want people to know about …. well then don’t count on it being fixed by money or power. Expect your healing, like that of Namaan, to come in some muddy little creek, at the hands of some insignificant little servant, in some small and lowly way. When a man came from a dusty, little nothing of a place and stood among his people, they all said, “We would rather die than to be saved by a Jew from a place like Nazareth.” But weren’t we wrong! Maybe if we get sick enough, low enough, desperate enough, we’ll be willing to descend, to submit, to come to the waters and to be cleansed and to experience real life. …..Eternal Life. But our healing and acceptance is not the end of it. The Gospel story in the beginning of Luke chapter 10 tells us that Jesus calls ordinary people like ourselves to come to him so that we can then go out and share the good news. What great examples we have heard of in our Parish recently. At the men’s breakfast yesterday hearing of Noel Kolkka’s pastoral ministry as chaplain at Northcliff SLSC and lst Sunday hearing of what Morgan is doing in encouraging others to come to church with him. Be encouraged and excited that, as in the Gospel story, those who go out in Jesus name (no matter how ordinary or unequipped they might appear to be) will return with joy and stories of success. There will be surprise that even demons know the power of our Creator God. The harvest is plentiful. Let us go out in Jesus name to proclaim that “The Kingdom of God is near”.