July 4, 2010 - Proper 9, Year C (RCL)
It’s week number six
in the season after Pentecost,
and week number six
in the stories of the prophets,
week number six
of miracles
and outspoken speech.
Last week
we heard how Elijah the prophet
was carried up to heaven;
this week,
we’ve heard
of the healing of Naaman.
Another Sunday, another miracle.
But this one, I think,
is different.
This miracle
isn’t just good news for the person who was healed,
or even their family.
This one
had national, maybe even international
ramifications.
Sometimes
when we hear stories from the bible,
they feel a little it like fairy tales.
“Once upon a time, in a land
far away, there lived a man called Naaman...”
We forget that these are real,
and the events often had not just local importance,
but shaped the lives of whole nations.
And today’s Old Testament reading
is one of them.
So to help us understand what it was like,
let me retell it,
as it might happen today.
In the last few weeks
we’ve heard a lot about the war in Afghanistan,
and about the replacement of General McChristie
with General Petraeus.
Petraus
is one of the great military figures of our time.
He’s served in Haiti, in Kuwait, in Bosnia-Herzegovina,
in Iraq, and now Afghanistan.
But it’s the time in Iraq that he’s best known for,
developing strategies that brought stability and a large measure of security
to that troubled place.
At the end of his time in Iraq,
when he passed on the command,
Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that General Petraeus "played a historic role" and created the "translation of a great strategy into a great success in very difficult circumstances". He also told Petraeus he believed "history will regard you as one of our nation's greatest battle captains."
All this
is a matter of public record.
Now we move into the realm of imagination.
Imagine
that General Petraeus
has a problem.
He’s developed some sort of allergy,
a rash
that has spread all over his skin,
and it’s driving him crazy.
And no one
seems to know what to do about it.
The doctors at Walter Reed Army Medical Center
have been trying to treat him,
but have failed.
The CDC has been called in
and can’t identify it.
Nothing
can get rid of the itch.
Finally, after months of unsuccessful treatment,
his wife comes to him with a strange story.
You know Hamdan, he’s one of the guys that does the mowing,
the Iraqi refugee,
well, one of the other gardening guys heard him say
“If only the General were back in Iraq. There is a holy man
who lives in the marshes near Basrah,
and he could heal him.”
And Petraeus, fed up with hospitals and doctors and the incessant itching, thinks, “Well, I guess it’s worth a try. It can’t make it
any worse.”
And so he goes to the President, and because the President knows
that Petraeus’ leadership is the best hope for stability in Afghanistan,
he gives him leave to go to Iraq,
and writes a letter to the President of Iraq, and also sends a gift of enough money
to build a new hospital.
And so Petraeus arrives in Baghdad
with the gift and the letter,
And this is what President Jalal Talabani reads,
"When this letter reaches you, know that I have sent to you my servant Petraeus, that you may cure him of his allergy. Signed, Barack Obama."
And President Talabani panics.
He has no idea how to cure General Petraeus. What hope does he have
when the best doctors in the world
have failed.
Surely this is a US plot
to replace him.
Meanwhile,
out in the marshes, Abdullah the holy man
hears about the visit of General Petraeus, and hears about President Talabani’s panic.
And he sends a message to President Talabani.
“Tell the General come to me." So General Petraeus and his aides
head out in his armored humvee,
first to Basrah,
and then out into the marshes.
Until finally they find
Abdullah’s hut.
And a young man comes out,
not Abdullah himself, but one of his students.
“Go wash in the water over there, seven times,
and your allergy will go away.”
And general Petraeus gets angry.
“This Abdullah, he’s a fraud. Didn’t even come out to meet me. Afraid, I bet.
And if all I needed to do was wash,
surely the water back in D.C. was less polluted than this.
Even the Potomac!”
But his aides come to him.
“Isn’t it worth a try?”
And so they drive down a rough track,
and eventually come to a shallow channel between the reeds,
and General Petraeus gets out of the Humvee
and strips off
and splashes the muddy water.
Seven times
he pours water over himself.
And at the seventh,
the itch stops,
and the redness and blistering fades,
and he is healed.
The biblical story ends there,
but we can imagine what happens next.
The story of his healing
reaches back to President Talabani,
and back to President Obama,
and through the military command,
and no one quite knows
what to make of it all.
Because the simple word of a holy man
has succeeded
in a world where power and money and expertise
have all failed.
As far as I know,
General Petraeus
doesn’t have
an unexplained allergy.
And he hasn’t made a quiet visit
to a holy man in the marshes of Basrah.
But that’s what it would have been like, the story of Naaman,
a story not just of an individual’s healing,
but of the complex interplay
between government
and religion.
Today, as you know, is the fourth of July.
It’s a national celebration, and while our Book of Common Prayer
provides special readings and prayers for it,
for what we call a minor feast,
they don’t take precedence over a Sunday.
Because Sundays are always major feasts,
the celebration of the Resurrection,
and so we celebrate that first and foremost,
and so stick to our normal readings.
And yet, this reading from the Old Testament
is a good one for this day, for the sixth celebration of the resurrection after Pentecost,
and the fourth of July.
Because it reminds us of the complexity of the relationship
between our faith
and our nation,
the complexity we experience
as citizens of the United States,
and citizens of the Kingdom of God.
Naaman
was a powerful man
in a powerful nation.
And yet, his power was of no value
when it came to his illness.
He was forced to depend
on a totally different kind of power, the power of God.
It’s a power he had experienced before, though he probably didn’t know it;
he experienced it in battle, when his nation won victory over the Israelites,
a victory given them
by God.
God had worked on the large, international scale, using armies and kings;
but now God was working on the small, personal scale,
using a prophet.
Here in the United States
we have a formal separation
of church and state.
We say,
this is where the government’s authority covers,
and this is the church’s.
And that’s well and good.
Each institution,
church and state,
have different roles.
But we need to be careful.
Because church
does not equal God.
The institution of religion
occupies this space
but God
is the God of all the world.
God works in and through,
and sometimes even against
all human institutions.
And while today we celebrate our independence from England,
won over two hundred years ago,
we are never
independent
of God.
God’s rule
reaches across national boundaries,
across race and ethnicity,
and into every human life.
And so today, as we celebrate,
remember the God who created us,
who calls us,
who has power beyond human power,
beyond governments and beyond borders,
to heal and to save us.
It is God
who has blessed us,
God
whom we serve.
© Raewynne J. Whiteley 2010