From the Pulpit:

God Bless America, Land that I Love  …
 

Yesterday as I left for the farmers’ market I saw young families heading to our neighborhood park, all dressed in red, white, and blue, some with crazy hats and sunglasses, little kids on bicycles and being pulled in wagons for the Fourth of July parade. Before
we left for church this morning we mounted the stars and stripes on the back fence where it will wave in the breeze to everyone who drives or walks past our house, and tonight you can be pretty darn sure that we’ll watch the festivities on the Mall in Washington, D.C. and then switch over to the fireworks over the Manhattan skyline. We have already observed the mandate to eat barbecue,
so I don’t know what else we have to cross off the list of obligatory patriotic expression on this national holiday.

We call it Independence Day, and of course we know that it is the celebration of the thirteen original colonies overthrowing British tyranny. But over the last two hundred and thirty-four years that word ‘independence’ has taken root in the American psyche in a way that merits consideration. We speak pretty proudly of being fiercely independent, self-sufficient, non-conformist. And in these days of World Cup soccer nationalism has become a religion in itself. Because of the time difference between here and South Africa, bars are opening at six o’clock in the morning and filling up with fans who are dressed and painted in the colors of our flag or of their home country’s flag, drinking beer for breakfast and watching the shenanigans of fans gone wild as they cheer on their football teams.

I’m preaching to the choir here because you who are present are the ones who have not allowed our national holiday to trump our Christian holy day. And to be fair, those who are not with us today may well be attending church as they vacation and are not necessarily out on the lake or the golf course. On the other hand, Willie is playing at the Backyard beginning at 10:00 . But you are the ones whose faces I see and are here to consider with me two very interesting passages of scripture as they offer commentary on the issues of this day.

The story of Naaman in Second Kings is fascinating to me precisely in that it is a story in which all norms and expectations are transgressed. Naaman is just about the last person you’d expect to be hearing about in a story of the power of God’s healing.
Talk about patriotism. Naaman is the enemy of the northern kingdom of Israel . He is the warrior who killed the king and defeated the army with his might. OK, so the king was evil personified. There is that. It was Ahab, the worst of the worst, and now it is two sons down the line, and they are only marginally better. But Naaman the great warrior has been afflicted with leprosy, and his wife’s slave girl suggests that the great prophet Elisha can cure him. Who is the slave girl? She has been captured from Israel and in the great pecking order of society she is the lowest of the low.

But Naaman is so desperate that he sucks up his pride and packs his caravan with all sorts of riches to appease the king of the country he has recently crushed and heads to Israel to find this healer. When he shows up at the palace the king shreds his clothing
in revulsion. But Elisha hears about Naaman’s arrival and sends word to bring him over to be healed. Now a strange thing about this story is that Elisha never appears on stage. He simply sends a servant out to tell Naaman to dip himself in the Jordan seven times,
and that really sets Naaman off. Does this prophet not realize who he is? That he is the hero of the great kingdom of Syria , and that everything in Syria is superior to Israel including the rivers? He’s supposed to wallow in that muddy ditch? It takes some cajoling, again by servants, but he follows these crack-pot directions and is healed of his leprosy. That’s where our reading leaves off. I don’t know why, because what follows is that not only is his skin cleared, but Naaman opens his heart to receive the love of the God of Israel. He is not only cured, but he is made whole, and returns to his land with wagons full of Israeli soil so that he can worship the one true God who has healed him.

The power of the story is in its irregularities. It doesn’t follow even a bit of common wisdom. Everybody is the wrong person, nobody does what they are supposed to do as defined by the social mores or the political boundaries that are designed to keep everyone in their place. The lofty are snubbed and the lowly are elevated. Naaman’s scourge of a shaming illness received at the hand of a defeated enemy is the medium of a healing beyond anything he could have imagined.

And then we have the story in Luke’s gospel where Jesus sends out seventy apostles to do his work. And he sends them out all but bare-naked. No money, no change of clothes, no self-defense, no shoes. And he warns them that there’s not going to be  any Motel 6 with its light on. No, they are to depend on the hospitality of the villagers, of people who don’t have much to share. And they may very well be turned away and laughed at.  And if they are taken in, they will have to eat what is put before them. That alone is not easy. If my host proudly presented me with a bowl of okra, I don’t know if I could swallow it. They are walking into what may be hostile territory with no control over the conditions they will endure. Accepting hospitality may be even more challenging that extending it.

And so on Independence Day we are given these two lessons that are actually contrary to any theology of independence. Their messages contradict any belief that we might succeed or survive because of our true grit. Naaman and the disciples don’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps but are empowered by humility and interdependence. In the end this is all about letting go of our expectations about giving up our illusion of entitlement and power. Years ago I was given four rules, and I have shared them with many of you before, but every Sunday there is someone here who has not heard all the old familiar things and whose heart is ripe
for their wisdom.

The first rule is show up. Just show up. That’s a challenge for Naaman and the disciples. I’m supposed to do what? Go where?
Eat that? The second is to pay attention. Look at what is actually before you, not what you expect to see. Listen deeply to what is being said. It may surprise you. It will surprise you. Third. Tell the truth. Don’t bend things to fit with what you think you know or how you want things to turn out. Even if it doesn’t add up, even if it is offensive to your customs or your logic, tell the truth. And
last, don’t be attached to the outcome. Sorry to tell you, but it’s not all about you. God works wonders in ways that leave us with our mouths hanging open. When we are doing God’s work, it’s going to turn out God’s way. And God’s way is always better than our way.

And I’d add a fifth rule. Give thanks. Give thanks for the surprises that greet us when we stop thinking that our boundaries of nationalism, of culture, of custom, of superiority, of wealth, of education, of ethnic identity, of social status are what define us.
Give thanks for the gift of the unexpected, the gift of true hospitality, the gift of discovering that in God’s eyes you are more beautiful, more powerful, more gifted than you’ve ever dreamed, and so are the outsiders, the foreigners, the aliens in our land and in theirs, and you will find that every gift you have been given and every gift they have been given is for the healing and delight of the world.

We hear the words “God bless America ,” and even though it is a sentence that my fifth grade grammar teacher, Miss Jensen,
taught me is an imperative statement, what I actually hear is “God has blessed America , and we give thanks.” All the patriotic songs that will be sung, the flags that will be waved,  all the cannons that will fire off at the end of the 1812 overture, all the fireworks that will explode over the Mall in Washington and over New York harbor and over our own Ladybird Lake – what if this year we see them not as expressions of our pride in a nation that is strong and rich and safe but rather as our expressions of gratitude that because in our history, boundaries have been transgressed again and again so that we may be empowered to worship God as we know God and as God’s ordained servants to take God’s blessing to be God’s blessing, and to get to work, to welcome the tired, the poor,
the oppressed, not in the name of the greatness of our nation but in the humility and grace of our Christian identity, in the gratitude that having been blessed we have been given the power to be a blessing.

Amen.