How Much More?

Luke 11:1-13
July 24, 2022
William G. Carter

Jesus was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” He said to them, “When you pray, say: Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. And do not bring us to the time of trial.” 

And he said to them, “Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.’ And he answers from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.’ I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs. 

“So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish? Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

 

The twelve disciples see Jesus praying. They wait for him to say Amen, and ask, “Lord, can you teach us to do that? Teach us to pray!”

It’s a striking request, for a couple of reasons. According to the Gospel of Luke, Jesus kept praying. On the day of his baptism, he was praying when the heavens opened, and the dove came down (3:21). Many mornings, he slipped away from the crowds to pray (5:16). The night before he selected the first twelve disciples, he went up on a mountain and spent all night praying (6:12).

One time, in the middle of a prayer, he looked up at the twelve and asked, “Who do people say that I am?” And then he told them how he would suffer, die, and be raised (9:13). Shortly after that, he took three of them up a high mountain where his appearance changed – his clothes were dazzling white, his face was transfigured – and it happened, says Luke, while Jesus was praying (9:29).

He was always praying – and the twelve said, “Teach us to do that.” They wanted something of what he had. They knew he could teach them.

But it’s a striking request because they already had a prayer book. These men were Jews and they had the Psalms. They committed those prayers to memory. They recited them in their liturgies. The Psalms offer prayers for every occasion: when you rise to begin your day, when you lie down to hand over the night to God. If you need help with an enemy, the Psalms have a prayer for that. If you wish to thank God for safe passage through the mountains, or an abundant harvest, or the success of a childbirth, the Jews already had the prayers. They knew the life of faith is filled with prayers, prayers for every possible occasion.

But these twelve still wanted to know how to pray. “Teach us,” they said to the Master. “teach us to pray.”

Fortunately for us, the Gospel of Luke offers three brief lessons on prayer. The first, as we heard, is that Jesus offers a model for our prayer. We know it, we’ve heard it, we’ve prayed it – and we will pray it again in this service. You may have noticed that this is a shortened version of what we call the Lord’s Prayer. Today we have Luke’s version, so let’s walk through it.  

Begin by saying, “Father, Abba, Daddy.” We can address God with affection. Then, “Hallowed be your name.” Hallowed is Holy, apart from us, guarded and distinct. God can be addressed with affection, but God is holy and completely Other. We speak to the God who knows us all too well and we offer respect. 

“Your kingdom come.” That is the heart of the prayer. It’s the request for heaven and earth to be one. We pray that the God who rules over solar systems and goldfinches would come to rule over the situations that we know: the broken hearts, the wounded bones, the fierce injustices. We want the God who rules over everything to rule over us. It’s an enormous request.

Yet prayer is also specific: “Give us each day the bread we need for today.” He is reminding us of the old story of manna in the wilderness. God sends food from heaven for the Israelites who wander in the wilderness. It comes every day, twice on the day before the Sabbath. Yet it cannot be hoarded or else it rots. It is only bread for today. We need it. We don’t have it. We ask God for it.

“And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.” Luke takes the edge off Matthew’s version of the prayer. In Matthew, we ask for forgiveness conditioned by our ability to forgive. Recall: “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” But in Luke, Jesus assumes we are already forgiving others, in the name of a God we ask to forgive us.

“And do not bring us to the time of trial.” That sounds ominous, as if the Father to whom we pray is the One who can also test us. It reminds us of the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. After he is baptized, the Spirit of God hurls him into the wild places where he is tested by the Devil. God sends him to confront evil on its own turf. That is going to be a decisive test! Do we want God to test us? Jesus says, “Pray you are delivered from the test.”

Here is a model for prayer, says Jesus. This is lesson number one. With simple words, with direct speech, focusing on the life and death issues before us every day, always praying for God to come and rule over us and our lives.

This brings us to the second lesson. It’s not enough to memorize the words and mumble them on occasion. We must mean what we say. Infuse them with faith, hope, and love!

Like my great aunt Charlotte, who confronted me outside of a funeral home. I was in preacher school at the time, and we had just endured a cold, sterile memorial service for her mother – my great-grandmother – led by a minister who never knew the deceased. Aunt Charlotte said, “If I ever catch you reading a prayer out of a book, I’m going to wring your neck.” I don't know if she was a violent Methodist, but she made an impression.  Her point: prayer is serious. You must engage. You mean what you say. You don’t phone it in.

Maybe that’s why Jesus tells a quirky little parable. A friend has come to visit and both of you need some food. What if you knocked on a neighbor’s door to ask, “Can I get borrow some food for my guest and my family?” Is he going to say, “Go away, I’m sleeping.” Of course not. He is a Middle Easterner. He lives by generous hospitality. He won’t turn you down – especially if you keep knocking, keep asking.

With this, Jesus leans over the pulpit to wink and say, “Isn’t God much more generous than your sleepy hospitable neighbor?”

Here’s the lesson: prayer is asking. By definition, prayer requests what we do not have. So it’s more than rote words. It’s persistence. It’s persevering in matters of great urgency, not flailing at thin superficialities. Prayer is swimming from the shallow end of our need to the depths of God’s great mysteries. Because we really don’t know how to pray. Even if we have the words.

Remember the apostle Paul - schooled as a rabbi, trained in scripture, experienced in the grace of God. He confesses in one of his letters, “We don’t know how to pray as we ought” (Romans 8:26). He knows he’s in over his head. We ask for bread from a God who directs the comets and plants the sequoia trees. We ask for justice when we are inadvertently perpetuating injustice.

Sometimes prayer gets twisted out of shape when we make it all about us.  “Lord, give me this. Lord, give me that.” Prayer is not about getting what we want – it is asking for what God wishes to give us. This is a very important lesson.

We don’t pray to hit the Mega Millions lottery; that’s begging for magic. Rather, God desires to rule over us, so we pray thy kingdom come! God grants us life and desires that we flourish, so we pray for bread – for ourselves and for others.

We might secretly want an enemy to be punished; it looks like they deserve it. Yet God wants us to stop fighting and live in peace, so we pray forgive us our sins. That includes the sin of being incapable of forgiving others, and the inability of forgiving ourselves. We pray for what God wants to give us. Nothing more, nothing less. Prayer is asking, searching, knocking, all in the present tense. Here ends the second lesson.

There’s one more lesson for today. It sneaks up on us. If we’re going to ask for what God wants to provide, it’s important to know what kind of God we have. So Jesus pushes this to extremity. He says, “What father gives a snake to a son who asks for a fish?” The answer: no father. And then, “What father gives a scorpion to the daughter who asks for an omelet?” Same answer: no parent would ever do that, not if the parent loves the child. Not if the parent gave that child life.

And God is even better than that.

This is where the third lesson sneaks in. When the Gospel of Matthew reports this section of Jesus’ teaching, here’s what he says, “How much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask!” (7:11) But did you hear Luke tell us what those “good things” are that God provides for those who ask? He specifies: “how much more will your Father in heaven give you the Holy Spirit.” 

Wow. You thought you could pray for a new Mercedes and a cruise to Tahiti. What you get instead is the presence of God. The Spirit. The invisible Peace and Love of the Risen Christ.

This is the open secret of prayer. We can ask for this, beg for that, make all our requests – and what does God give us? God gives us himself. God comes to us as we pray. And the invitation is to enter the dominion of God’s love that lies at the center of all things.

I think of the business executive who loved to go deer hunting. It was the alternative to the stress and strain of the kind of job he had. He climbed into his tree stand before dawn, opened his thermos of coffee, sit and watch the forest wake up. A twelve-point buck sauntered by, so he sat there, admiring the rack, and never squeezed the trigger.

What was that all about? Paid for the license, climbed the tree, never took a shot. His answer, “I go for the peace. It helps me. It’s just like a prayer.”

How much more will a loving God  provide when you pray? God will give you the Holy Spirit. God will give his very Breath and Life to you.

Did you ever hear the prayer of Howard Thurman, the Quaker mystic? If Martin Luther King Jr. was the voice of civil rights, Howard Thurman was its soul. One of his prayers goes like this:

Open unto me, light for my darkness.     

Open unto me, courage for my fear

Open unto me, hope for my despair.       

Open unto me, peace for my turmoil

Open unto me, joy for my sorrow.                      

Open unto me, strength for my weakness

Open unto me, wisdom for my confusion.          

Open unto me, forgiveness for my sins

Open unto me, tenderness for my toughness.      

Open unto me, love for my hates

Open unto me, Thy Self for myself.        

Lord, Lord, open unto me.

So we pray. If absolutely necessary, we can use words. It would be enough to sit in stillness, watch the forest wake up at dawn, and welcome the Peace that we did not create. We open our arms to receive what God most deeply wants us to have. And if we ask for it, it’s because God has already offered it.

Prayer is the life-blood of our relationship with God. It circulates through asking and receiving, acting and reflecting, speaking and silencing, all the while filling us with the life of eternity – which is the Presence of God.

Of all the gifts God wishes for us, that is the greatest. And I pray it for you. All of you. All of us. 

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

A Right Answer Isn't Enough

Luke 10:25-37
July 10, 2022

William G. Carter  

Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.” 

 

But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

We have been waiting for this text. It’s one of our favorites, an old friend that some of us have heard many times before. We call it the Good Samaritan. And we admire the central character in the plot. Unlike the two religious leaders who step around a wounded man on the road to Jericho, he stops to see what he can do to help.

Ever since, we have named hospitals after him. There is a network of Samaritan counseling centers. Those who travel in RV’s are familiar with the Good Sam Club, which works to make traveling safer (and sponsors a NASCAR race at Talladega). There is a Good Samaritan mission in Danville, aiming to lift those who are down. We have Good Samaritan laws that protect anybody who stops to care for someone in need. This guy is our hero. We love him very much. 

As is the case with those we love, we let them get close enough to tell us the truth. The more American Christians dig into the parable, the more truth we uncover. Some of it is so true it’s uncomfortable. Here’s a short list:

1. The priests and Levites of Jesus’ day were regarded as good people. Some bad apples, of course, but most were not the moustache-twisting villains of children’s stories. They knew the Laws of Gods, knew they were summarized as Jesus states them – love God, love neighbor. Their love for God was expressed in an effort to remain pure. If the man in the ditch was bleeding, God’s commandments taught, “Stay clear from blood. It’s the life force inside us.” So we can’t dismiss those characters out of hand.
2. For another thing, Jesus seems to be picking a fight. He could have named the three travelers as a priest, a Levite, and a Jew. But he says, “Samaritan.” That’s trouble. Samaritans twisted the Bible in their own direction. Samaritans were suspicious. Samaritans were enemies. Did you notice? Jesus says, “Which one acted as a neighbor?” The lawyer doesn’t say Samaritan. He can’t say Samaritan. So he mumbles about mercy.
3. Dig a bit deeper, and the parable has an edge. The inference is that the Samaritan is a neighbor. We thought we could redline someone like that to another town. Push a bit more, and the story implies the enemy is the one who saves our life. Is there anybody who would dare teach such a thing? Pretty soon, we start to understand that parables like these got Jesus killed. That’s something that we don’t tell our children.

Now I’ve said all this before in my dozen sermons on the Good Samaritan. What I haven’t really explored is why the story gets told. There is a lawyer: not an attorney, not somebody who went to court, not somebody who handled lawsuits. Rather, a professional expert in the Law of God – the Torah. He knew the 613 commandments, knew what they said and knew what they didn’t say. His life’s work was to immerse himself in the Bible, at least the first five books of it, and then prepare to discuss and debate what the text means.

 So he asks about life. “What must I do to gain life?” Not merely life, but the “life of eternity.” That’s the true phrase in the original language. The sense of his question was this: how do I live with God, the Eternal God? He’s not talking about something later, but something now, something that goes on and on forever. The life of eternity. How do I receive it? Good question, maybe the only question.

Jesus the Jew answers his fellow Jew with a question. That’s the Jewish way of learning. Somebody asked Woody Allen, “Why do Jews always ask questions of the rabbi?” Allen answered, “Why shouldn’t the Jews ask questions of the rabbi?” So Jesus asks his questioner, “What do you read in the Law?”

The man knows the right answer: love God and love neighbor. Deuteronomy 6 and Leviticus 19. If you’re going to summarize it all, there’s no better summary. Jesus affirms this. He ought to know. In the Gospels of Mark and Matthew, someone asked Jesus, “What is the greatest commandment?” He answers the same, love God and love neighbor. The teachers had been stapling those two commandments together for years.

We know the truth, that John Lennon said so simply, “All you need is love.” For the Jew, as for those who follow Jesus the Jew, we love upwards, and we love sideways. Love is more than a fluttering emotion. Love works for the best interest of those you love. We can work for God’s best interest or the neighbor’s.

We know the right answer, just like the lawyer does. “Love is all you need.” He knows it. But knowing is not enough. For the conversation goes on, as we heard. The lawyer asks another question, “But who is my neighbor?” And boom! With a twinge of self-righteousness, he had just fired a missile and blew it all up. If you must ask who your neighbor is, you have already been defining whom you will love and whom you will not.

So Jesus spins this parable to address the question. He doesn’t answer it directly. He tells this story. It’s a slanted story. It presses all of us to ask whom we love. Do we love only those who are familiar, like family and friends? Do we love only those who are healthy and well-adjusted? Do we love only those who have no obvious wounds?

And perhaps to flip it for a minute, can we love those who want to offer us help? That’s one of the fresh insights that I had after our men’s group spent some time with this parable last Thursday. One of one of the guys said, “That victim in the ditch – he was a Jew, right?” We looked, and the text doesn’t say. If the victim in the ditch was a Samaritan, the priest and the Levite had one more reason not to draw near. But Jesus doesn’t designate who the victim is. So we can presume it’s a Jew.

Assuming he’s a Jew, we must assume he was deeply wounded, really out of it. A first-century Jew wouldn’t want a Samaritan to touch him, not if he was conscious. So do you hear what Jesus is doing? He’s expanding the neighborhood. Rightfully so. The lawyer asked him about gaining life, the life of eternity, the life with God.

And I don’t know much about eternal life, but I know this: it’s eternal. It has no boundaries. It has no borders. There are no ethnic divisions. No worldly categories. No human judgments about who belongs and who doesn’t belong. This is God’s life we’re talking about. To be part of that, we must see what God sees: that every single creature has meaning and value. We must love whatever and whomever God loves. Which is to say, the life of eternity does not continue the divisions, the grudges, the hurts of our ages.

Sometimes I receive a visit by somebody around here. They come to say they have a hard time forgiving another who hurt them. I listen. I invite them to blow off some steam. But if there’s an impasse, I might say, “Listen, you’d better let it go. Better get over yourself. Eternity is a long time. Start practicing now.” And the best way to practice is to start forgiving. Go and do. Show some love, even from a distance.

And Jesus shows us how. Stop your hurried journey to Jericho. Step down on level ground. Draw alongside, not above. Identify the hurts. Offer what you have to facilitate healing. Accompany the wounded to a safe location. Stay for a bit in case a new need emerges. Make sure they are cared for before slipping out the door. Stop back and follow up.  

Love begins by getting off your donkey (I was going to say that another way and decided not to). Get off your donkey and put yourself out for another. That’s what love looks like.

Nobody comes to this naturally. Like the lawyer in the story, we are inclined in our own direction. So it takes a while to learn love, even longer to do it. Like the new father, so awkward that he didn’t know how to pick up his crying son and console him. Or the freshly minted math teacher who doesn’t know how to slow down a student can’t comprehend the multiplication problem. Or the in-laws who grieved at the brother’s funeral and never once checked in with widow.

Love can misfire in a hundred different ways. Could be incompetence, naivete, or self-absorption. Or emotional ineptness, hardened indifference, or good old-fashioned fear.

The miracle in the story is that someone stopped for the wounded man. Maybe he was wrong person, or maybe not. But he stopped. He showed up. He could not fix everything. He couldn’t police that terrible, lonely road from Jerusalem to Jericho, a road where a lot of travelers were attacked and robbed. He couldn’t find the robber and bring them to justice. He couldn’t chase down the priest or the Levite, even to ask, “Where’s your conscience?”

But we know what he did. He paused from his journey. The robbers might still be hiding behind a rock, so he’s risking his own vulnerability. But he stops anyway, to offer some humanity. And this, of course, is what Jesus has done for all of us – offers his own vulnerability in the fullness of his humanity.

So you want life, life with God, the life of eternity? Jesus says, “Do this and you’ll live.” For life comes from love. And doing love is the only life worth living. And it takes a while to learn this. Takes a lot of practice.

Some years ago, Robert Wuthnow, a researcher from Princeton University, was researching how some folks have learned to care for others. He talked to Jack Casey, a volunteer fireman and ambulance attendant. Casey had recently been called to the scene of an accident. The driver was pinned upside down in his pickup truck, and Jack crawled inside to try to get him out of the wreckages. The gas tank was leaking onto both Jack and his driver, and there was the imminent danger of an explosion.

The driver was distraught. “I don’t want to die,” he said. “I’m afraid I’m going to die.” Jack said, “Look, don’t worry, I’m right here with you. I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to stay until they get your free.”

Later, after the other rescue workers had freed him and taken to the hospital, Jack stopped by to see how the driver was doing. The man took one look at Jack and said, “You’re crazy. I can’t believe you did what you did. The truck could have exploded. We’d have both been burned up.” Jack sat quietly, waited him out, and replied, “I felt like I couldn’t leave you.”

Wuthnow was curious. In the interview, he said, “Jack, can you remember a time when somebody treated you with such kindness?” He thought for a minute and recalled a moment twenty years before. Jack said, “I was just a child, and I needed to have some teeth extracted. They told me they were going to put me under with anesthesia. I was scared I would not wake up. A nurse nearby saw the fear on my face. She came over, sat down, put her hand on my arm, and said, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll be here right beside you no matter what.”[1]

It was the same thing he said to the truck driver twenty years later. Even though he couldn’t consciously remember the story at the time, it shaped how he responded to another human being in peril. The nurse had shown him some love. He had learned how to “go and do likewise.”   

So do you want to live? Really want to live? Live so deeply that it’s like you are living with God? We know the answer. Of course we know the answer. But it’s not enough to know the answer.

Jesus says, “Do this … and live.”

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

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[1] Quoted in Thomas G. Long, “Dancing the Decalogue,” The Christian Century, 7 March 2006, p. 17. https://www.religion-online.org/article/dancing-the-decalogue-ex-201-17/

Swallowing Your Pride

2 Kings 5:1-14
July 3, 2022

Naaman, commander of the army of the king of Aram, was a great man and in high favor with his master, because by him the Lord had given victory to Aram. The man, though a mighty warrior, suffered from leprosy. Now the Arameans on one of their raids had taken a young girl captive from the land of Israel, and she served Naaman’s wife. She said to her mistress, “If only my lord were with the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy.” So Naaman went in and told his lord just what the girl from the land of Israel had said. And the king of Aram said, “Go then, and I will send along a letter to the king of Israel.” He went, taking with him ten talents of silver, six thousand shekels of gold, and ten sets of garments. He brought the letter to the king of Israel, which read, “When this letter reaches you, know that I have sent to you my servant Naaman, that you may cure him of his leprosy.” When the king of Israel read the letter, he tore his clothes and said, “Am I God, to give death or life, that this man sends word to me to cure a man of his leprosy? Just look and see how he is trying to pick a quarrel with me.” But when Elisha the man of God heard that the king of Israel had torn his clothes, he sent a message to the king, “Why have you torn your clothes? Let him come to me, that he may learn that there is a prophet in Israel.”

So Naaman came with his horses and chariots and halted at the entrance of Elisha’s house. Elisha sent a messenger to him, saying, “Go, wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh shall be restored, and you shall be clean.” But Naaman became angry and went away, saying, “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! Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? Could I not wash in them, and be clean?” He turned and went away in a rage. But his servants approached and said to him, “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 he went down and immersed himself seven times in the Jordan, according to the word of the man of God; his flesh was restored like the flesh of a young boy, and he was clean.


This is the story of a man who had everything. Naaman was the commander of an army: he had power. He was a friend of the king: he had prestige. He won his battles on the field: he had success. He was a mighty warrior. He was a great man. Naaman had everything – except his health.

Despite his greatness, he had one of the skin diseases that the scriptures refer to as “leprosy.” Not a precise diagnosis in our own time, but we have a pretty good idea what it meant. Leprosy was the one disease nobody wanted. It threatened your life, but more than that, it cut you off from others. As soon as the trouble spots appeared on your skin, the rest of the world deemed you unacceptable. It was a social disease.

When others learned you had it, they insisted you stay away. There was no known cure. You weren’t going to ever get better. Nobody would come close enough to take care of you. Your blood vessels would shrink, first in your extremities. You would lose all feeling in your fingers and toes. The sickness would create terrible scars. It would change your appearance. You could have all the power, prestige, and success in the world – but there was no cure. You would wither slowly, with no help from anyone else.

Naaman was a man who had everything, and none of it mattered.

So naturally, he leaned forward to listen when his young servant girl offered a way out. She was a slave, stolen from Israel in one of his army’s raids. She was a nobody. We never learn her name. She served as a domestic servant for Naaman’s wife (we don’t know her name, either). But she had two things Naaman does not have: knowledge that could lead to healing, and compassion for him.

“If only my lord were with the prophet of Samaria,” she says, referring to the prophet Elisha. “He would cure him of his leprosy!”

So Naaman, who had everything but good health, lacks one thing more: the power to cure himself. Fortunately, for him, he has a good reputation with his king. He goes to the palace and tells the story. He reports the good news. The king says, “You must go. I will send a letter to the king of that region, and some money, too.”

Some money indeed. Do you know how much money he sent? “Ten talents of silver” – by my estimation, about $14 million. Not only that, six thousand shekels of gold – we can’t imagine what that was worth! Suffice it to say, health care is expensive, but not that much. The king of Syria, Naaman’s boss, is making an extraordinary gift. Either that, or a bribe. He really wants his leprous general to be made well.

No doubt, you noticed the king of Israel was upset, not by the appearance of a leprous soldier from the land we call Syria, but by all that money. It’s too much. And he doesn’t know the first thing about healing a leper. What if he can’t make Naaman well? Is this some kind of mobster deal, where if he doesn’t deliver, he’ll swim with the fishes?

In a fit of anxiety, the king of Israel exclaims, “Who does he think I am? God? I have no power to give life or death. The king of Syria is setting me up!” And he rips his clothes in despair.

So we have a problem here. Naaman is powerful but can’t heal himself. His king sends an extraordinary sum to buy off the healing, because he’s powerless to do anything else. The king of Israel rips his clothes because he’s powerless to do anything, either. All of them are powerless – please notice that. It is the primary condition for salvation: helplessness.

But here comes word from Elisha. They call him the Man of God. He’s the One that the slave girl has heard about. “Send Naaman to me,” he says to his own king. “Send him to me, and we will teach him there is a Prophet in the land of Israel.”

So Naaman rolls up on his chariot. He is surrounded by chariots. And he has horses. Big horses, war horses, impressive horses. General Naaman comes with a staff and an entourage because he’s a really big deal. He rolls up in front of Elisha’s house. The horses whiney. The armor on his chest is shining.

And do you know what Elisha does? Absolutely nothing. He pours himself another cup of coffee. Finishes the sports page. Yawns. Waits. Outside, Naaman is waiting. He waits. And what does Elijah do? Nothing. He sends out a servant. He doesn’t even bother to go outside. The servant pads out there on his sandals. Looks up at Naaman, says, “My master says, ‘Go jump in the Jordan River seven times. That’ll cure you.” Then he turns and goes back inside.

Naaman is sitting there in the hot Israeli sun, and he is getting hotter. Really, really hot. He’s hot enough to throw something against a wall. Or lean over the front of the chariot, put his hands around his bodyguard’s throat... I mean, he is furious. He is incensed. He sees red. He is really mad.

But he’s enough of a grownup to step away. Or stomp away. As he stomps, he makes a little speech: “I’m the General of the Aramean army. I am particularly important. I’ve come all this way. I’ve brought loads of money that, for some reason, nobody wants. I thought the least this guy could do is step outside, wave his hands, and make the spots disappear. I thought he could call on his god and cure my illness. And he wants me to jump in that little creek over there? We have real rivers in Damascus! They are better than all the trickles in Israel. If that’s all it took, couldn’t I wash in them?” And he was enraged.

Naaman stomped for a while. A good long while. None of his servants said a word. Just let him be. He’s an important man. A great man. A friend of the king back home. And that’s such a long way away.

So…after a while, one of the servants cleared his throat, and said, “Father…We’ve come all this way. We didn’t see the prophet, but we heard from him. If he had told you to climb a mountain, you would have done it. If he said, ‘fast for forty days,’ you would have done it. If he commanded you to do something hard, you would have done it. All he said was, ‘Wash and be clean.””

Naaman was a great man. An important man. A wealthy man. A powerful man. But not powerful enough to wash the leprosy away. He took a long breath. Didn’t say a word. He immersed himself in the Jordan River. And again, and again. Seven times. And when he climbed out, dried himself off, his skin was pure as a baby’s bottom. No more leprosy.

Now, the story goes on a good bit from there, but there’s enough for us here to chew on.

Is the Jordan River magic? Some might think so; you ought to see the tour buses pull up and sell tickets! I merely pass on what my tour guide said: “There’s a herd of cattle upstream.” It’s only water. Fresh water, reused water, whatever. It’s only water.

How about the prophet Elisha? Is he magic? Truthfully, he’s quite rude. Doesn’t bother to meet up with Naaman. Doesn’t care about the soldier’s authority, wealth, or status. In the best sense, doesn’t even seem to care for Naaman to the exclusion of anybody else. His initial retort was simply, “Let’s show this guy there is a prophet in Israel.”

Ok, so what about that? He’s a prophet. A Man of God. Does this mean he is loaded with magic? Well, no, but he has access to power – and the power doesn’t come from him, That’s the point at which the whole story resolves. The power is God’s power. It cannot be purchased. That means somewhere there’s still ten talents of silver and six thousand shekels of gold that God didn’t take. But there is power – power to heal and restore - and it comes through Elisha’s speech. That’s the only tool of God’s prophet. He works with words, God’s words. And the words reveal that God wants that Syrian army commander to have his skin washed clean.

What did Naaman have to do to become well? On the face of it, nothing. It was the Word of God that cleansed him. It was the gift of God that healed him. He didn’t have to do a whole lot. Well, he did have something to do. Two things, really. He had to obey what God told him, third hand; the message came through the messenger of God’s messenger. And he had to make himself available. Those are the two keys: obedience and availability. God did all the rest.

The Word from the prophet is that God wills for wholeness, health, and restoration. I have no trouble broadening that intention to include us all. God wants us to be clean. Purified. The stigmas washed away. And God know, there are plenty of stigmas, right?

- It might be a disease that isolates
- A tough or broken marriage,
- A kid with an addiction,
- A series of bad decisions that can’t easily be undone
- An act of public embarrassment,
- A difference of opinion that separates you from those you love.

There are plenty of “social diseases,” if we called them that. And the only thing that can make us well is the grace of God, the power of God, the healing cleansing mercy of God. One of the lessons we learn from Naaman is that we might have to get out of God’s way – which means we might have to get out of our own way. Because pride insulates us from true healing. It can be a form of arrogance that pushes God away.

This is a personal matter. And it’s also a community matter, too. In fact, did you know that Naaman makes a second appearance, this time in the preaching of Jesus? It was there, in his hometown, as he stood on the Sabbath to announce the God’s kingdom was at hand, that the promised Jubilee had come from the heart of God, that all people would be welcomed, loved, restored. All people! Jesus said this, as he spoke on the words of the prophet.

And then he said, “Doubtless, you will quote the proverb, ‘Physician, heal yourself.’ But I tell you, in the days of Elisha the prophet, there were many lepers in Israel, and none were cleansed but Naaman, the Syrian.” And they were furious with him, and pushed out the door, and pushed him to the edge of a cliff, because he dared to say that God comes to love the stigmatized, as much as God comes for any of us. They couldn’t see it because of their own pride. (Luke 4:16-30)

Yet the cure comes from God, released in the syllables that come from God’s prophetic heart. And if we really want to be well, the same two invitations are given to us: obedience, that is, do what God says; and availability, put yourself in the place to receive what God provides.

So we put ourselves here, a place of enormous availability. God has met us here before. And we hear the Word from God in Christ, “Take, eat, this is my Body, you are my Body. Take, drink, all that separates us from God and one another is cancelled and forgiven. 

And we look down: such a little piece of bread. Just a dollop of juice. God’s not telling us to eat a huge loaf or drink down a gallon. And we have better bread and juice back home. But here we are, nothing extravagant, with just enough for us to obey and make ourselves available.

Listen: when we eat and drink at the Lord’s Table, look around. We’re part of something.

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

At All Times

Proverbs 17:17, John 15:12-17
Dialogue Sermon – Bill Carter and Guy D. Griffith
June 19, 2022

“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.”

Bill Carter:

Let me read Proverbs 17, verse 17: “A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.” (RSV)

I've been carrying that one around for a long, long time. I keep it tucked into my pocket. The proverb is there to remind me and acknowledge what I know to be true from my experience. And this is one of the great one liners of the book of Proverbs. Each proverb in this book of 31 chapters is distilled from human experience. You live for a while. You pay attention, you boil experience down to a single truth and you say it in a single line, and then you carry it around because this is what life is about.

“A friend loves at all times, a brother is born for adversity.” The wise Sage (or group of sages) who compiled this book had a lot to say about human relationships. Every chapter, almost every line. And in this verse, friendship is marked by accompaniment, by someone who is with you by companionship, both in troubles and in celebrations. In that companionship you learn – and practice - making time and space for one another.

So here's one of my all time, best friends. We've been friends for 40 years. But what is a friend? All of us know friendship, but we find it hard to define. Yet we know it when we see it. We know it when we experience it. We know it when we have a friend and the friend has us.

Guy Griffith:

It was such a joy on Thursday to spend a little bit of time with some of the men at your church, talking about our passage from John's Gospel, chapter 15. John's gospel offers an intimate view of Jesus. Some say it's like a Rembrandt painting where all the light focuses right on Jesus, and the rest is in a little bit of darkness. This passage from 15 comes from a section where Jesus is concluding his time with the disciples. He knows that the end is close. These are the last important things he can say to his friends.

What's so interesting about that we don't have or see a defined doctrine of the Trinity, but here in this part of John's Gospel, Jesus is constantly talking about my Father and the Spirit together.

So we, we have a practical experience of the Trinity. John Calvin, the father of the Presbyterian church uses the image of God's fountain, a fountain overflowing as the example of what the Trinity is. God's love overflows because there is such closeness between the Father, Son, and Spirit. They weren't holding it back but letting it out to others and to us.

That's a vision of what does friendship means. It's born in the very depths of God's relational being. We are created for relationships.

Bill and I had a professor at Princeton Seminary named Jim Loder, and Jim had the best definition of love that I've ever heard. You can write this down. It sounds a little bit like a dictionary definition, but the more you live with it, the more you like it. He said, “Love is the non-possessive delight in the particularity of the other.”

I can't possess the friend. When I see Bill, I don't want to change Bill. I want to celebrate who Bill is as God's gift. And the Trinity invites us into that kind of intimacy of God's love overflowing, as we see and appreciate the uniqueness of the other and want to be in their presence. We move not from the sense of hierarchy, but a mutuality. We care about one another, not pretending to be more important, but just standing side by side.

Bill Carter: 

When we thought about how we would preach this sermon today, we might have had one of us stand in the pulpit and the other at a shorter music stand. But here we are sitting side by side because this is what friendship is. It's side by side.

And there are a lot of counterfeits to friendship. We learned this very early, like the school kid who has a day ruined by discovering they've been betrayed, or shredded by gossip, or overheard some kind of  false witness, some distortion of truth. Or discovering, as one of my kids discovered, a social hierarchy. She came home one day and said, “I'm not one of the popular kids.” I said, “Wait a second. You're in kindergarten.” There had already been kind of sorting out who's popular and who's not.

Some connections are also purely situational. You're seated next to one another in classroom, or play together in a sports team or a band, or work side by side. And when that situation is over, you discover that the bond wasn't quite as tight as you thought.

Sometime back, my wife told me how she had developed a friendship with somebody with whom she worked. The friend left for another job. And in that departure, the friend could not mark they had anything other than a work relationship. It was purely situational, got them through the work days, but didn't last.

So Guy and I met on the very first day at Princeton Seminary in New Jersey, 40 years ago this September. I was unloading my Toyota station wagon, pulling out an electric piano and an amplifier, with only room for a few clothes. And I roll the load to the elevator on my hand truck and hit the button to go to the second floor. The door opens and there he is, head full of curls, in a stained shirt. And I laughed out loud. I thought, “Here's somebody who's just as off balance as I am.” And it brought out the truth. We were both pretty good students, but spent the next couple of weeks wondering how in the world we ever ended up in a school like that.

Guy Griffith:

We had a Dean who wisely told us that, “The first two weeks you'll wonder what you're doing there. And after that, you'll wonder what everybody else was doing there.” Some of the best advice we ever got! Bill and I lived next door to each other that first year. We began to be exceedingly close.

And one of the, the first qualities that we think about when it comes to friendship is a similar perspective. Things don't completely overlap, but there's enough similarity. And for us, that includes the passion for the church and the love of the church.

Bill Carter:

But there is not a complete overlap. Guy played rugby in college. I don't really give a wit about that sport. And he's never quite learned what a 13th chord is in jazz either. Yeah.

Guy Griffith:

I'm not sure I've known anything about jazz, as a matter of fact.

Bill Carter:

But we have a shared understanding and perspective, a commonality of viewpoints. Frederick Buechner describes one of his first great friends, and this is a wonderful line. He says, “Jimmy was another who saw the world enough as I saw it to make me believe that maybe it was the way the world actually is.”[1]

Or the passage from C.S. Lewis in his book, The Four Loves, where he talks about the love that his friendship. He says, it's the experience of standing by somebody. And you realize that you aren't alone, that you've both been viewing the same situations from the same perspective. Up until then, you thought you were on your own. [2]

Guy Griffith:

Yeah. I think another quality is intentional participation in one another's lives. We talk about who's on your speed dial. Bill has been on my speed dial since 1982. That was before we had speed dials. Bill started a clergy group, while I dropped out of it early because I was not a lectionary preacher and my ministry responsibilities called me in other areas. And I needed to have my continuing ed time that way. But when that group concluded, we've started another one with another close friend from seminary and other friends along the way. So there's been intentionality about that.

Beyond that, nothing that has happened personally or ecclesiastically that we haven't been there for one another. I participated in his ordination service, installation services, weddings, and he at mine, preaching installation services, standing with me at weddings.

Bill Carter:

We’ve been there for one another's divorces and remarriages too.

Guy Griffith:

Exactly. And celebrating our kids together as well.

One of the stories about his wedding: he called me right before he and Jamie got married and said, “I have a challenge. Somebody's asked me to do their wedding at the same time as my wedding. How am I going to do that?” And it's like, “Bill, don't do that.” So we came up with the plan. I would leave the sanctuary in my tuxedo, go to . . . where was it?

Bill Carter:

The Dunmore Holiday Inn.

Guy Griffith:

And between the wedding and reception, I would marry this couple and then come back. It was it didn't quite pay for my trip up here, but it wasn't bad. Close. Yeah. It was pretty close.

Bill Carter:

This continuing connection, this weaving of life, is a third dynamic as friendship moves from coincidence to intention. Over time you develop even more in common than you realized, no matter how much you had in common to start with. My first church was eight miles from the house where Guy grew up.

Guy Griffith:

When he went there, my dad was not in particularly good health. My dad had emphysema and multiple sclerosis and his world had really diminished. He would walk with a cane in one hand, an oxygen bottle in the other, and waddle from the house to his car, drive to his courtroom where he served as a municipal judge. And then waddle from the courtroom three doors down, and at every lunch and every dinner in the same restaurant. But he was really starting to decline.

I asked Bill to watch out for him. And Dad ended up in the hospital right before I got ordained. I called and asked, “Would you go visit Pop in the hospital?” And the first thing he did was ask Bill, “Hey, I've got a legal pad over there, grab that. I want to rewrite my will.” So that night Bill called and said, “Hey, I know what you're getting.” This is helpful stuff.

Bill Carter:

Not only was Guy’s father in the hospital. He was in St. Luke's in Bethlehem, the very hospital where one of my kids is winding up her rotation for medical school this week. These are not coincidences. The same kid also went to a school that I had never heard of before I met Guy. American University, his Alma mater

Guy Griffith:

The best school in the country. Why wouldn’t your daughter want to go there?

Bill Carter:

What else happened to bind us together?

Guy Griffith:

Well, this speed dial thing. We talk once a week. Yeah. So I get this call from Bill, “Hey, I have a member moving down to Nashville. You want to invite her to church?”

Oh, who is that?  “Susan Kelly, our director or music.”

Sure enough, I took Susan out. We went to this great barbecue restaurant. Who knew she was vegan? Took me a little while to figure that out, but Susan joined our choir and has been such an incredible blessing. In fact, she and Alan are in Spain with our church choir on a tour right now.

Bill Carter: 

This kind of deep connection leads to another quality of friendship, which is honesty, complete honesty. I see his quirks and foibles with 200% clarity, and he sees mine. We are relentless in busting one another's chops. 

Guy Griffith:

Indeed.

Bill Carter:

There's this kind of understanding when we're going through trouble. We understand both the trouble and also the resources. And we push one another. We've been pushing one another to embrace and work through work challenges.

Or in your case for the past 32 years. I pushed him and said, “Would you buy a headstone for your father in Wilkes Barre? Which we went to go see this week. It was finally planted where it needed to be. There's this mutual accountability. It's not just keeping in touch. It's deeply being there for one another.

Guy Griffith:

And I think another thing we looked at was this mutual concern and support which is never one-sided. Love goes both ways.

Bill is often the person I call when I've had a real heartbreak in ministry. This summer, when I was traveling out west, I thought of a young woman in my congregation, who was a single mom with a great young daughter. She was visiting her parents at their home on the Russian River in Idaho. She looked like a 1940’s starlet, good looking, an incredibly important young woman in our congregation, with the gift of encouraging other young moms. She was out for a run. A logging truck took a corner too fast and flipped over on her. I can barely talk about that without the emotion being real.

Who do you call when you have to do a funeral like that? You call your friend. Yeah. Because he's had those things as well.

Bill Carter:

At the same time we've shared an interest, not only in our vocation as pastors, but as Christians, and going deeper into the love of God, and constantly nudging one another about that. Usually down with good humor, which is one way to cope with stress. Neither of us are beyond sending obnoxious birthday cards to one another.

Or push it a little further, sending obnoxious postcards to one another - in care of one another's offices where the secretaries can read 'em. Yeah!

Guy Griffith:

In fact, Nancy in your office could tell stories from over the years.

One other thing about making the priority of time with one another. I served a church in Charlotte for about five and a half years, and Bill was coming down to preach at the Massanetta Springs Bible Conference. Well, that's crossing the Mason Dixon border, so it's in the neighborhood. I don't know how far away it was, but I went up and I was so glad I did, because poor Meg and Katie were absolutely miserable about being there. At least Uncle Guy could be with them. Finding time to spend with one another is important.

And this gets to that last quality. We want to talk about it that there's nothing “useful” about friendship.

Bill Carter:

Say more about that.

Guy Griffith:

Friendship means I'm not interested in using the other for selfish purposes, for nothing reductive or manipulative. The purpose is solely to enjoy one another.

Bill Carter:

Here’s one of the things we've decided to do this summer, I challenged Guy by sending him a copy of a book that I owned, a collection of sermons by Eugene Peterson. I said, “Let's read this together this summer.” One day he calls me up and says, “Turn to page 19, a sermon about Abraham being the friend of God.” And what did you find there?

Guy Griffith:

Two things I'll read out of it that really captured my mind. What's unusual about Abraham and Moses is that they are called friends of God in the Old Testament. And Peterson writes,

 

Here is another element contained in the word friend. Friend is totally about the relationship, not a function. There's an everyday ordinary quality to it. We find ourselves friends with people not for what they can do for us, but simply for who they are. And if we suspect we're being singled out for someone's friendship, because of what we can do for that person - social privilege, economic advantage, et cetera – we are apt, and rightly so, to resent it. God was not Abraham's friend who ordered to network with him. And there was no hint in the story that Abraham considered God's friendship an invitation into the world of celebrities. Abraham found every day, practical ways to express appreciation or loyalty to God, and God found everyday practical ways to express appreciate and loyalty to Abraham. Abraham was not in love with a dream or aspiring after an ideal. He was God's friend, period. The evidence? The relationship was worked out on journeys and at water holes.[3]

And then this:

 

This is how friendship works. Friends remember one another in both common and uncommon ways. They call one another at the spur of the moment. They remember special days. They visit simply for the pleasure of the others' company. Things don't have to get done in friendship. Friendship is not a way of accomplishing something but a way of being with another in which we become more authentically ourselves.[4]

I think that's perfect.

Bill Carter:

It is. So on this unusual sermon today, we reflect on a forty-year friendship. We do it not just to tell our story, but to spark you to reflect on your stories, that you might consider your friendships, your relationships, those people who are on your speed dial. They are bound to you with hoops of steel. This is the “fullness of life” that Jesus invites us into.

Guy Griffith:

During my sabbatical time, I’ve been thinking of friendship as a sacrament. In our Protestant tradition, we say we only have two sacraments, baptism and the Lord’s Supper. The standard for a sacrament is Jesus did them and told his folks, “You do them too.”

I want to argue that, if a sacrament is a means of grace, it's a way we experience God's grace. Then friendship should be included as a sacrament, too. Jesus was a friend. And as John's Gospel tells us, he told his friends to be friends as well. And we experience God's love, this great gift of God's presence. “No one can see God,” scripture says, “except in one another.” And so we experience God's grace in these gifts of friendship, as I have with you for forty years.

Bill Carter:

And lest we forget it, here is the proverb for today: “A friend loves at all times and a brother is born for adversity.” Thank God for that. Amen.

---

[1] Frederick Buechner, The Sacred Journey (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1982) 70.

[2] C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1960) 96.

[3] Eugene H. Peterson, “Friend of God,” As Kingfishers Catch Fire (Colorado Springs: Waterbrook, 2017) 19.

[4] Ibid, pp. 19-20.