King: Naaman, I’m sorry that you seem to be getting worse. All avenues we’ve tried for your healing appear to have failed.

Naaman: My Lord, if you would, that is what I wish to speak with you about. You see, I am at my wit’s end. We have exhausted all reasonable and unreasonable approaches. Yet still, the itching and the unpleasant appearance. I am ashamed to even be seen.

King: You have earned my trust and my appreciation. What have you come to me to ask for?

Naaman: Sir… and please do not think less of me for mentioning this. But you recall the raids we have conducted in Israel. On one of those plunders, they brought to my wife a young Israelite girl. She serves us faithfully.

King: Go on.

Naaman: She contends that in her home land, there is a powerful prophet in Samaria– of all places. She says, and I know this is preposterous, that if only I were there with that prophet, my illness would be cured.

King: Hmmm…

Naaman: I’m sorry I even brought it up. I will return home at once and live with this.

King: No, no. Israel. Israel. Oh, alright. Go at once, and I will send with you a letter to the king of Israel to smooth the way. Everything will be just fine.

Life gives us a lot of things that we have to suspend our disbelief about. One day at our denomination’s general assembly, I was having breakfast with a friend.

He’s a fellow pastor, and he asked me what I was preaching about on that Sunday. And I told him it was the Naaman passage of healing from 2 Kings 5. My friend said something that gave me a lot of perspective.
You see, today we have a story that we have some things to get past: if we are going to get the benefit of why the story was told, why it was included in our Bibles, and why our faith should be strengthened by it.

This doesn’t ask anything of us we don’t do pretty often. In fact, here is what my friend told me that helped. He says there are at least four arenas of life where we humans willingly suspend our disbelief. When we’re watching movies or sitting in a live theatre, we willingly suspend our disbelief in the name of entertainment. We do so on a regular basis. When we read a fairy tale, there are aspects we can’t explain. Can’t make it add up with real life as we have experienced. But we accept them as parts of the story. In foreign travel, there are constantly language and cultural details that we don’t understand. But for the sake of peace and travel, we set them aside and even say, “When in Rome…” And the Bible is the fourth one, where we are called to either suspend our disbelief, or we have to just give up and close it off.

It is a book where a virgin gives birth to our Lord. A place where there are Angels and Demons, water that parts, people who don’t die, life that is created with mere words and diseases that are healed the same way. Water becomes wine… and Law becomes Grace… and fire burns but is not put out. Oh, but the fire does speak.

My friend observes that four year olds will break your spirit by endlessly asking one simple question: why? They ask “why?” ceaselessly and with all sincerity.

Yet adults when encountering these types of Bible stories will often ask “how?” instead.

How is understandable, but it’s also a question that will never be answered satisfactorily in stories like the one we have today about Naaman’s healing. But why? That one we can work with.

The ancient Hebrews that this story was written for asked “Why?,” just like our younger friends.

“Why?” is the question of Bible study. It is the question of Theology. It is the question that will take scripture and lead us closer to the very heart of God.

In this story, we are called to trust God. IF we can move past asking “How?”

We could trace a thread of “lesser to greater” in this story, with the young Hebrew girl portrayed as moving from no respect to being THE one who recommended Naaman’s path to healing. She was an instant hero of sorts, I’m sure. Even if the passage doesn’t show us that.

We could follow the geo-political realities of the time, and follow the intrigue of two kings exchanging communications and navigating a stance of distrust they had for each other, as their paths crossed in the attempt to get this important military official healed.

The letter did not smooth the way. It almost touched off a war. The Israelites and Arameans didn’t like each other and didn’t trust each other. Naaman didn’t trust Yahweh, the God of Israel either.

“Why…we have fine rivers right here at home. Why wouldn’t washing in our own rivers be just as good? Why do I have to go to Israel and get into the Jordan?” he was asking.

There are cultural and ritual implications hanging in the balance for Naaman, who somehow is being extended extra grace to hold his position while seeking a cure for a disease that was thought to have normally rendered people socially marginalized, jobless, and physically separated so that they didn’t infect others.

Somehow, Naaman was getting a chance to see things through and not lose his great power and wealth, so high did he rank.

But why did this story get told? What are we supposed to find in it?

Like any, there are many reasons I suppose.

You might notice that if you view the Bible as a whole, that Jordan is one mighty busy river! So many big things end up happening there, not the least of which will happen hundreds of years later when our Lord is baptized in these same waters.

Elisha’s power as a prophet is on display here, but all the more so is God’s. Here, we see early on that God’s power will be limited by no cultural differences, not boundaries and no situation.

We could notice the disparity between the “haves” and the “have-nots” in this story is on display. With the options, possibilities and leeway available to one, but not to the others.

We could explore that in this passage…

But today, at least, I find fascinating what Naaman didn’t trust. What Naaman, maybe understandably I suppose, struggled to give in and trust from God. He couldn’t get it all to add up rationally.

In 1999, after 35 years of living on the farm where we were raised, my parents sold and moved to a new home about 5 minutes away.

Through some underhanded trickery, Elizabeth, my wife, ended up giving my Dad a kitten that we had come into— and that we weren’t going to keep. She gave the cat to my Dad as a birthday present. We delivered it to that new house they were living in. They became inseparable, the cat and my Dad.

One afternoon, my Mom wanted to watch the Atlanta Braves baseball game but my Dad wanted to watch a Nascar race. He decided to retire to the kitchen where there was another tv.

She came in and saw my Dad sitting in one chair, with that cat in another right beside him. “What are YOU two doing?!” “Well, we’re watching the race,” my Dad said. “And how do you know the cat is watching the race?” my mother asked. “How do you know she ISN’T?” my Dad responded.

We could read this story sympathetically to the young Hebrew girl and with judgment toward Naaman. Setting her up as the person of more faith, and Naaman as lacking until after he had experienced the transformative and life-changing power of God in the river.

Jesus did have something to say later about faith without sight, now that I think about it.

But then again, let me ask you this– what is there of God that you don’t readily trust?

God asks us to love people we aren’t ready to love. “How do you know that’s going to work, God?” we ask. “How do you know it won’t?” God responds.

God asks us to do things we don’t feel ready to do yet. Things we aren’t comfortable with. “How do you know I should move out of my comfort, God?” “How do you know you shouldn’t? What if there are GREATER things awaiting you IF you move away from your comfort?” God might respond.

God asks us to do things that risk or give away something we want to keep for ourselves. Our time, our wealth, our power or status. “How do you know that’s going to work, God? We ask. “How do you know it won’t?” God responds.

God asks us to act more like Christ and a little less like ourselves. Giving up our biases, prejudices or assumptions. “But I like my biases, prejudices and assumptions, I say…how do you know that life works the other way?” we ask God. “How do you know that life doesn’t work BETTER my way?” God responds.

Go dip yourself in the Jordan River, Naaman. “Why aren’t my own rivers in my country just as good?” Naaman asks. God responds, “How do you know that you won’t find health…that you won’t finally LIVE…once you humble yourself in the Jordan like I’m asking you to.” God responds.

We are called to trust God.

We read a story like Naaman, and a voice inside us says “What was WRONG with that guy? Why wouldn’t he just do what the God of Israel asked of him?”

When all the time, we are asked in some way within our own lives to do something that Jesus would do. But to us, it sounds like we’re being told to go across the border into a foreign territory and dip ourselves seven times in a river that we don’t want to.

We’ll have that one habit that God might like for us to drop, but it seems so small that surely it can’t be big enough to be important. There will be that one step the Holy Spirit prompts us to take, a word we should speak up and have the courage to say, a stance we should take on an issue, or a higher integrity standard we know deep down we ought to live by.

Instead, we can be vulnerable like Naaman to thinking surely THAT can’t be the thing that will make a difference. The thing that would make me healthier and make life for others around me better.

God responds, “How do you know that you won’t find LIFE unless you do?!”

We are called to live. We are called to trust God. Amen.