Stepping Into the Stream of God’s Healing Love

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Fourth Sunday After Pentecost by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean and Rector.

I don’t know about you, but I frequently have moments in the liturgy where something that I have said thousands of times, reveals itself to be heard in a new way. The liturgy is a living space of charged, transformative, encounter with God into which we are invited anew each time. It’s not just that you can’t step into the same river twice. I remember being at daily mass in seminary as we rolled from the opening acclamation to the collect for purity and on into Gloria, when I was stopped in my tracks by the line, “You take away the sin [singular] of the world.” Surely, it should read sins, no? It’s always my first impulse to think there has been a printing error, something out there that needs fixing, rather than to think there might be something for me to see, that it’s me who needs fixing.

So I asked Fr. Lewis, my Greek professor, whether “sin” in the singular was correct. “Oh, yes! Certainly!” “So, what’s the sin that Jesus takes away?” “Yes! That’s the question.” “Well, what’s the answer?” He smiled a wry, mischievous smile, but didn’t answer and went back to his refectory roast beef, mashed potatoes, green beans, and gravy. We moved onto other topics–what needed to be done in the chapel for upcoming feast days, my dismal progress in koine Greek, the likeness of the roastbeef to Michelin tires–but the question “What is the sin of the world?” continued to work on me.

I’d had enough experience with questions like this to know that it wasn’t going to be an intellectual answer, a snappy solution that would wrap everything up nicely in a tidy bow so that I could move on to bigger and better things. No, this was a question that I had to sit with, pray with–a question I was being invited to let question me, to call me into question. So much of our upbringing in the Christian tradition is about answers. We used to pass a Bible Church on our way to our parish in Philadelphia whose marquee, week after week, proclaimed–”The Bible: God’s Answer Book.” But if we spend time with the Jesus we encounter in scripture we notice that he is a master of asking the kinds of questions that have the power to crack us open, re-orient and re-source us–”Who do you say I am?” “Who is my mother, brother, and sister?” “Why do you call me good?” “What are you looking for?” “Whose face is this?” “Do you want to be made well?” No wonder we pray for, “an inquiring and discerning heart” for our baptisands!

So, in good desert mother and father fashion, I chewed on the question like a cow chewing its cud. I spent time simply being in the presence of the question, living the question, becoming the question. And eventually, something shifted in me. Not in some grand mountain-top experience kind of way, but in a way that I saw from a different place. Why sin singular? What is the sin of the world? I, me, mine. The illusion of separation from God. The deluded notion that I have to achieve, earn, win, God’s grace and love through my own efforts. The sin of the world is what Paul calls the “old man” and what Thomas Keating following Thomas Merton calls the “false self”--the self that seeks for the happiness for which we are created in substitutes for God’s love. Looking for love in all the wrong places. And why do we do this? Because we grow up without an experience of God’s unconditional love and we seek for happiness in places the world tells us to seek–safety/security, power/control, affection/esteem. Everybody’s got a false self–that’s simply the human condition. And everybody has an habitual way they seek happiness apart from surrendering to God’s love. Discipleship is simply learning to look in the right place for the happiness we’re made and which is closer to us than we are to ourselves. 

No surprise that Naaman, like each of us, has a particular way of navigating that he thinks will bring him what his heart yearns for. He’s the “commander of the army of the King of Amar.” Power. He’s a “great man.” Esteem. He enjoyed “high favor with his master.” Affection. He’s at the top of his game. He succeeded according to the metrics he knows, yet he’s sick with a leprosy that not only threatens to disfigure him physically, but also to render him ritually unclean, an outcast. All that fame and praise and power up in smoke because of a little bacteria. That’s part of what Naaman has to show us about the “sin of the world,” the tragic-comedy of seeking for the happiness that we already are. Unquestioned, unacknowledged, the programs of the false self make us sick. They hollow us out from the inside. They disfigure us and block the healing action of God’s grace and love in our lives and hold us back from the life of flourishing God intends for each of God’s unrepeatably unique children.

Of course, because this is God’s topsy-turvy world, it’s a young servant girl, a captive from the land of Israel, who serves as an instrument of grace in Naaman’s life. It’s remarkable that Naaman even had the capacity to hear the unnamed servant girl’s words. A mighty and powerful military man on the heels of a great victory, what need has he of the words of some captured servant girl from a foreign land? And yet, Naaman seems to perceive–as through a glass darkly–that his whole identity, his program for happiness that he has so successfully pursued and accomplished is very shaky. It’s built on shifting sands. It’s a precarious house of cards that can topple at any moment. Somehow, the lowliest of all, the person of no account, and no status, the foreigner, the captive servant, and a women to boot opens Naaman to the healing, peace, happiness, and freedom for which each of us is made. How can Naaman’s sworn enemy be the source of his healing? How is it that the last, the least, the lost, and left behind, actually saves the first, the best, the found, and the mighty?

Once he admits he’s sick–once he’s realized that he is powerless over his addiction to power/control, affection/esteem–his healing begins. But it comes in fits and starts. Of course, someone like Naaman thinks it’s the King of Israel who will heal him. Go to the top dog. But that’s not how it works, is it? The King sends him to a weirdo prophet nobody instead–Elisha. And even after meeting Elisha, Naaman thinks he must do something hard, something heroic, or be healed in a river whose grandness matches his rather grandiose assessment of himself: “Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel?” 

Importantly, we learn that Namaan is enraged. That’s a really important detail to notice. Whenever the strategy we’ve adopted to pursue happiness in the wrong places doesn’t work, our reaction is usually anger. Yes, even in keep it sweet Utah, people get angry when their unacknowledged programs for happiness are frustrated. But if we’re alert, awake enough, curious enough, light-hearted enough, we can see that this little anger is an opportunity to see a little more clearly, to open our hearts more widely, to notice our requirements and demands of how we think life should be bumping up against our life as it is. Anger, like Namaan’s leprosy, like any unwanted intrusion, can be a means of grace in our life showing us where we’re stuck, where we’re holding on. Stuckness can be a door to deeper freedom.

And interestingly, it’s right there, in the unremarkable, muddy trickle of a stream, in the midst of Namaan’s ordinary life just as it is that his healing is accomplished not by some effort, or performing some heroic feat in a spiritually appropriate locale, but by simply admitting his own powerlessness, and stepping into the stream of God’s healing, restoring, transforming love. Nothing special. Nothing extra. Just immersion in God’s love and rising from the waters and his flesh is restored like a child. A new creation.

Namaan has to come, I think, to a place where living his life with the false self and its addiction to power and prestige as its guiding strategy is shown up for the fool's errand that is. He has to realize the emptiness and hollowness of what Paul calls “boasting in the flesh” to know his belovedness just as he is. Naaman is a potent example of what Paul calls “being crucified to the world” of what it looks like for our lives to be rooted and grounded in the love of God–”Who holds our souls in life, and will not allow our feet to slip” (Ps 30: 8). Not my frantic efforts that bring me happiness, not the successful execution of my strategies and tactics for gaining happiness, but God’s work in me–”Come now and see the works of God, how wonderful he is in his doing toward all people.”

That’s the lose your life part. Sometimes we have to be stripped, our efforts come to nothing, for us to open the love that is always already irrigating our hearts under the chatter, busyness, the fear-driven stories of worry, scarcity, problem, and lack. That’s the death we die in baptism (remember you are baptized!). All we have to lose in our anxious, fear-addled, leperous self-reliance that puts us constantly at odds with our life just as it is. Rising, we are reborn and we practise–with the help of our parents, god parents, and church family–living from and embodying for others the unconditional love of God for each and everyone one of us without exception.

My prayer is for us to be willing to cultivate a child-like disposition, being willing to be little, last, least–to rely on nothing but God in Godself (no purse, no bag, no sandals) and there to find our names written indelibly and indissolubly in heaven. My prayer is for us to recognize, wake to, right here, right now, even in this little muddy trickle of a Jordan we call our daily life–springs rising up to eternal life. You take away the sin of the world… wailing turned to dancing, sack-cloth transfigured into garments of joy. Glory to you, yes, Glory to you.