2 Kings 5:1-14
Forsaking Tribal
Gods
James Sledge July
3, 2022
Naaman Bathing in the Jordon Woodcut from the Cologne Bible, 1478-80
I love July 4th, patriotic
music, and fireworks. I’ve always felt very fortunate to live in the US, and I
love all the history that is so much a part of the Washington, DC area. But
I’ve never been very comfortable with the intersection of worship and July 4th.
Even in this fairly liberal congregation, I’ve had people get upset that the
worship around the 4th wasn’t patriotic enough.
I once had a colleague who decided to confront such thinking head on. He chose the July 4th weekend as the Sunday to remove the American flag from the sanctuary, and he preached a sermon on why. It did not go over all that well.
More common is some sort of nod to the holiday by singing a patriotic hymn, making sure to give thanks for the nation in prayer, or, my favorite, putting some 4th of July illustrations in a sermon that isn’t about the 4th at all.
My queasiness about bringing July 4th into worship grows out of two very different ways in which patriotic worship tends to go astray. On the one hand, it easily devolves into worshiping the nation. Worship that it supposed to celebrate and glorify God ends up celebrating and glorifying various aspects of our country.
On the other hand, patriotic worship has a troubling tendency to recast God into to some sort of local, tribal deity who is especially concerned with America. It is all well and good to say, “God bless America,” but that too often carries with it the unspoken caveat, “over and above all others.”
My issues with patriotic worship have always made me deeply appreciative the lectionary’s Old Testament reading for today. Every three years, this passage shows up on the Sunday between July 3rd and 9th which means it’s always close to July 4th. And this passage totally blows up the notion of God as a tribal deity. In fact, it undermines a lot of popular notions of divine power and access to that power.
The reading begins by introducing us to Naaman, commander of the army of Aram, by whom, oddly enough, Yahweh had given victory to Aram. In the ancient Middle East, gods were generally thought to be local, and battles between kingdoms were thought to be proxy fights between the gods. But here we are told that Naaman has been victorious because of Yahweh. Apparently Israel’s God is no tribal god. And it turns out that their God doesn’t work in ways that people expect gods to act.
It seems that Naaman has leprosy, which in the Bible is a catchall term referring to any sort of skin disease. (The leprosy of more modern times which sometimes confined people to leper colonies and left them horribly disfigured, was unknown in biblical times.) Naaman’s disease is not so serious that it keeps him from discharging his duties buy it no doubt causes him a great deal of distress.
In Naaman’s household there is a slave girl who has been captured during a raid on Israel, and she serves Naaman’s wife. She alerts the wife to a great prophet in Israel who can surely heal this leprosy, and so Naaman goes to his king.
The king wants to help and so he sends Naaman, along with a letter of introduction and a great deal of gold, silver, and garments to the king of Israel. Apparently both Naaman and his king assume that any great prophet will be in the service of the king, which, in a way, means that the prophet’s god is in the king’s service as well. That’s the way tribal gods often work.
But the king of Israel is greatly distressed when Naaman shows up with all his goodies and a letter requesting that the king cure him. All the king can think of is that this is some sort of pretext for an invasion. They bring payment and ask for something the king can’t provide, then attack over the refusal to help. Curiously, there is no mention of a prophet by Naaman or either king. Tribal gods apparently operate through the royal chain of command.
Fortunately, the prophet himself intervenes. We aren’t told how Elisha comes to know about the king tearing his garments in distress, but the prophet tells the king to send Naaman his way. This powerful prophet of this strange God is not part of the royal court, but apparently his God is perfectly happy to heal one of Israel’s enemies.
So Naaman and his horses and chariots and gold and silver and garments head over to Elisha’s house, but there is no welcoming party for the great warrior. Neither does the prophet give any grand show of holy power. Instead a single messenger comes out to Naaman and says, "Go, wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh shall be restored and you shall be clean."
This is not how powerful prophets of powerful gods are supposed to act. There should be fire or smoke or lightning bolts or something. There should be magic incantations and pomp and circumstance. Does this prophet know who he’s dealing with, how important he is? Naaman stomps off in a rage, perhaps contemplating the very thing Israel’s king had feared when he first read the Aramean king’s letter.
Happily, however, Naaman’s servants come to the rescue. Why should he storm off because the prophet didn’t put on the right show or traffic in the pomp and circumstance of the powerful? Why not give it a try?
In this strange
little story, it is a slave girl and some servants who guide Naaman into the
healing presence of Yahweh while the presumed avenues of power are fruitless.
This God is not in service to any king and does not traffic in the typical ways
of power. After all, this is the God who was born in a manger and whose
greatest act of power is a cross.
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When God gets invoked on July the 4th, it is all too often the sort of god that Naaman is expecting, a god in service to empire who is only too happy to do the bidding of the powerful. Such a god is every bit as popular today as it was in Elisha’s time. It is part and parcel of the idolatrous Christian nationalism movement. And I’m convinced that the worship of such tribal gods is partially responsible for the church’s poor standing in the world. Tribal gods are simply too small and too petty to look like real gods to those who are outside the tribe.
But we do not worship a petty god in service to any tribe or political party. We worship a God who heals Naaman the enemy, who in Jesus reaches out to those on the margins and confronts the powers-that-be yet prays for those powers when they execute him. We worship a God who would undermine the world’s power structures, lift up the lowly and despised but bring down the mighty. We worship a God who in Jesus invites us to take our place in God’s dream for a world set right, a God whose power often looks to the world like weakness.
At least we do when we turn aside from the tribal gods who people would enlist in their own, petty politics of hate and exclusion and worship the cosmic God of all the universe known to us in Jesus.
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