Lord Jesus, thank you for the gift of relief. Amen.
These days, we’re all looking for relief of one sort of another. Maybe it’s relief from aches and pains, perhaps from bills and interest piling up on your credit card statement, it could be from anxiety that you’re carrying related to work, school, children, or parents. Or maybe, just maybe, you’re weary of all that’s in the news: war, bitterness, buffoonery. Whatever it is, we are living in an exhausting and bewildering time – and we’re all searching for relief.
Right now, there’s a lot of money to be made in the relief and distraction business. The reason why some people are able to make a living out of just posting videos on YouTube is the monetization model – essentially, their paycheck comes from the ads that we watch while they’re distracting us with mindless scrolling. But maybe you’re higher class than that, so it’s not videos of other people shampooing carpets or chopping vegetables that speaks to you – but it’s streaming shows on one of the seemingly unlimited subscription services. Others have a cable news network on nearly constantly – even if we’re not watching it, just the noise distracts us from the piercing self-awareness that comes with silence. All of these coping mechanisms revolve around what many sociologists call the “attention economy” – a robust economic system that thrives on our desire to be distracted.
And if it’s not distractions that we turn to for relief, it might be a prescription, hobby, or drink that does the job. And this isn’t, at all, to say that things like gardening, puzzles, or necessary medications are a bad thing – it’s just that they can only address the symptoms of living in such a fractured and fragile time, not the root cause. Which is why, no matter how grand the vacation is, how consistent we are at meditating, or how many contingency plans we have in place, we’re still desperately searching for relief.
We’re all a bit like Naaman, the commander of the army of the king of Aram, which we would call Syria today. Martin Luther King once preached a sermon on this text that he titled “Great… But.” The text uses twenty-three Hebrew words to describe Naaman’s prestige and accomplishments. He had achieved greatness and had what most would describe as a “great” life. But. But, and only one Hebrew word is needed to describe this: leprosy. Whether it’s the story of the princess and the pea or this one from Second Kings, one but, even in the midst of greatness, can send us into a tailspin, looking for relief. Because things can be great, but the physician saying, “We found something on your scan,” or the HR person saying “I’m sorry, but tomorrow will be your last day with us,” or seeing the democratic norms of our country trampled on changes everything.
Life is precious and precarious, and we are reminded of this often. Thanks to advances in medicine, we don’t worry about dying prematurely as our ancestors did. It used to be that the Church offered promises and hope to people living with death as a daily reality. And, yes, all of us will die; that has not changed. But it’s quite reasonable to go years, even decades, without ever seeing a corpse. In the span of human history, this is an anomaly. People are not flocking to the Church because they are worried about getting right with God before they die.
Nor do many people worry about Sin. Historically, the Church was seen as the dispenser of mercy and forgiveness. But few of us believe that God punishes us for our mistakes and failings and because of moral relativism and our culture’s sense of “you do you,” few people come to faith to deal with a guilty conscience.
For most of Church history, these two things, Sin and Death, have been existential threats that most people in fear of and for which the Church provided relief in the form of forgiveness and Resurrection hope. I do want to be very clear about it – mercy and Resurrection are still gifts of God which have been entrusted to the Church to dispense lavishly. And we need those things as much as ever – it’s just when people are searching for a Church, rarely are “how robust is the Confession and Absolution” and “how hopeful are the funeral sermons” on the list.
Instead, what so many are yearning for is stability – and this is the relief that we, the Church, have been given to provide. What a lot of us are searching for is a place where we can put our trust and not be disappointed, a place where we can belong and never worry about being canceled, a reason to believe that all shall be well despite the chaos that surrounds us. The Church, if we are to speak to our tired, anxious, and confused society must be a place of rest, of comfort, of peace, of relief – and that’s exactly what we have in God’s abundant grace.
Grace means that there are certain things that we can absolutely count on and take for granted because they aren’t up to us. No matter how well you fit into society’s stereotypes, regardless of how impressive your résumé is, whatever doubts, mistakes, or flaws you bring with you, you are known, chosen, accepted, and blessed by the God who creates all things. And because God loved us before we even took our first breath, there’s nothing that we can ever do to lose our belovedness.
All of those things that we’ve been praying about in the Prayer of St. Francis over the past several months – they really are true, there really is a better way than the mess that the world gives us, love really is the greatest of all things. In giving, we do receive; in pardoning, we are pardoned; in dying, we are born to eternal life. These are not opinions, wishes, or delusions – these are truths written into the very fabric of Creation by the God who is love.
This is the holy work that we have been given to do: to simply rest in God’s enoughness instead of trying to produce our own, to enjoy our forgiveness, to receive and trust the peace of God that passes all understanding. There’s a lot of confusion out there about what it means to be a follower of Jesus or a member of the Church. Faith isn’t about making the world a better place, it’s not about saving souls, it isn’t even about being a nicer person. Faith is about finding our relief in God. That’s it.
Receiving life as a gift really is the name of the game. In the beginning of Genesis, we see that God is in the blessing business. Before Creation had done anything to deserve it, God blesses. Going with the grain of this blessing instead of against it is what faith is all about. It’s what Jesus shows us how to do. It’s what the Spirit equips us to do.
One theologian has said that great challenge of faith is accepting our acceptance. And this challenge is what we see Naaman struggling with in the passage from Second Kings. The first obstacle to resting in the peace of God is our conflict with others, which is so often rooted in a fear around scarcity instead of trusting in God’s abundance.
The subtext of this encounter is that of mistrust and animosity. Naaman is the commander of the Syrian army, who has just fought and conquered Israel. That’s why the young slave girl who knows about the God of Israel is in this story. She’s the spoils of war and was taken captive. We know the parable that Jesus tells about the Good Samaritan with the shock of that story being that the despised and vilified Samaritan is the one who acted as a neighbor to the Jewish man in need. Well, it’s a similar dynamic here. The idea that a prophet of Israel would be willing or invited to help the Syrian general is shocking. And, at first, Naaman rejects the relief offered to him – “I’m not going to wash in that dirty Jordan River. That’s where those filthy Israelites bathe.”
The first barrier that we have to get past in order to find our relief in God’s love is to set aside our conflicts with others, with our sense of being in competition. It’s not only hard, but impossible to rest in God when we’re fighting with our neighbor. These days, we do love to have our enemies – our people who we are opposed to, our scapegoats for why things go wrong. To be clear, we can’t control other people and make them act any more peaceful. As much as I wish I knew how to get warring tribes and nations to make peace, I don’t. But I do know that when I trust that God is enough, I’m far less jealous and suspicious of my neighbor.
The next obstacle to our relief is our sense of pride. The prophet Elisha, when told that he’s supposed to heal Naaman, exclaims, “Am I God?” The assumed answer is “no,” but sometimes I think we forget that. Self-sufficiency is an absolute lie. We just celebrated Independence Day, which is fine as a day commemorating when we declared our self-governance as a nation. The problem is that we think that independence applies to us as individuals as well.
We can be so self-confident, so self-assured that we know what is best, that we have the full picture and others are mistaken, that we are entitled to all good things. This is why Naaman offers such an obscene amount of money for his cure. He lives in a world in which his resources mean that he can get whatever he wants, where he feels entitled to his salvation. Now, I know we don’t measure transactions in terms of talents of silver, shekels of gold, or sets of garments – so the rough conversion is about $750 million dollars in today’s money.
Perhaps none of us have that sort of money to throw around, but it’s not the amount as much as it is the attitude. We live in a consumeristic meritocracy, where we assume we can earn anything we want, and if that fails, we can just purchase it. But there are some things that are not up for sale – dignity, love, forgiveness, belonging. And these aren’t up for sale because the price tag is too high, but because these things are given away freely by our gracious and loving God. But to accept a free gift can be a challenge to our prideful egos. To embrace grace is to acknowledge that we need something that is beyond our ability to grab for ourselves. This is why I say that faith is about receiving life as a gift, not a reward. And since love is freely given, it means that we don’t lose anything when we extend it to others.
And a final barrier to enjoying the relief of grace are our expectations. Naaman was expecting something bigger and grander than being told to go wash seven times in the Jordan River. Perhaps he was expecting an audience with the famous prophet Elisha. Maybe he was thinking there would be some lighting and a voice from heaven. Who knows what he was expecting, but it wasn’t this.
God often subverts and exceeds our expectations, but rarely meets them. God comes not as a King, but in an infant born to a lowly, unwed Jewish girl. God wins the victory not with a sword, but by giving up his life on a Cross. God blesses us, not with power, prestige, and wealth, but with relief, with the sort of peace that the world cannot give and cannot take away. What makes the relief of God such a relief is that it so often comes in the most unexpected and surprising of ways. God’s grace often catches us off guard, which is how it slips past our usual defensive mechanisms.
The relief that is offered to us is described in Galatians as a new creation and in Luke as the nearness of the Kingdom. Our relief is that there is an alternative to the feelings of inadequacy, the constant worry of measuring up, the ever-changing landscape that leaves us feeling unstable. What stands in relief to the division, confusion, and anxiety of the world is the radical love of God that is making all things well. The challenge is accepting our acceptance, not as the reward for our good deeds, but as a gift that is ours to enjoy and share with an unstable and anxious world.
Naaman almost missed out on the relief that God was extending to him. And I worry that we might make the same error – that in looking to build our own fortresses, we overlook the mansion that has already been prepared for us by Jesus. It’s a hectic and crazy world, and the great gift of faith is the stability that comes in knowing that our belonging is secure and that we can take our belovedness for granted. It’s an amazing gift that we have received and this is our calling right now: to be a place of relief.
