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Meeting God in Others Spencer C. Lawrence, Church of the Cross, Hoffman Estates, IL, October 15, 2006 I think I have told you about a couple I knew long ago. He was the pastor of the church where I did my field education when I was a student at McCormick Theological Seminary. She was his wife. I liked them. They were creative and innovating, but they were a little different. She claimed to have the ability to see into a person’s soul by looking at his or her eyes. She believed she could determine a person’s spiritual state by doing this. In confess that I found that a bit unnerving. I didn’t make a lot of eye-contact with her. He claimed to get messages from God. He called them “promptings.” Now I wasn’t uncomfortable with that, except that most of his promptings were for other people. I recall him telling me one day that the Lord had prompted him to tell me that I – after I had been serving in a church for a year – should come and work for him running a school in their church. I didn’t. I thought the Lord might have “prompted” me, too. It’s people like that that make what I am about to say a little unbelievable: i.e. that God can speak to us through other people. Today’s lesson tells the story of Naaman. He was the general of the King of Aramea’s - what is now Syria - armies. He was very successful. The king valued his services. The only thing Naaman didn’t have going for him was that he had leprosy – this also could have been a kind of skin disease. At any rate, whatever he had, he wasn’t getting any better. One day while he was out in the field, a servant girl – and Israelite who had been taken prisoner in a battle – told his wife that there was a prophet in Samaria who could heal him. She was speaking, of course, of Elisha. So Naaman went to the king and asked for time off and some financial assistance to go see the prophet. The king readily agreed and sent lots of presents to the king of Israel to pave the way for Naaman to see the prophet. When he arrived in Israel with all the presents the king of Israel was stunned. He didn’t want them. He couldn’t heal Naaman. Word came to Elisha about what had happened, and he sent a message to the king to send Naaman to him. So Naaman came and when he arrived he didn’t even get to see Elisha. Elisha sent a messenger to tell Naaman to go take a bath in the Jordan River seven times and then he would be healed. Naaman was offended at this. Why the Jordan? Why seven times? Why not one of the rivers in Aramea? He hadn’t come all this distance with this much stuff to be told by a dusty prophet that all he needed to do was to take seven baths in an insignificant river. Who had ever heard of such a thing? So Naaman packed up and left. After he was some distance away, still mumbling about the idiotic prophet, one of his servants said, “If the prophet had told you to do something difficult, you would have tried it. Why not try this? What could it hurt?” So Naaman agreed and they went back to the Jordan River in which he bathed seven times. When he came out of the water after the seventh time, he looked and saw that the leprosy was gone. He had been healed. The prophet was right after all! Naaman immediately returned to Elisha and tried to give him the stuff he’d brought with him, but Elisha wouldn’t accept it. After all, it was God, not Elisha, who had healed him. In the end Naaman asked if he could have two cartloads of dirt from Israel so he could build an altar back in Aramea to worship of God of Israel. Elisha agreed. God had not spoken directly to Naaman. Instead, God had spoken to him through other people. God had spoken through the servant girl, through Elisha’s messenger and through the servant who traveled with him. Because Naaman listened to them, God healed him. God speaks to us in a variety of ways. God speak to us through Scripture. God speaks to us in worship – through the hymns, the prayers, the anthems and, once in a while, I hope, the sermon. God speaks to us when we are quiet, when we are silent, when we are listening. God also speaks to us through other people. Just as the Word made flesh in Jesus Christ was more convincing than the word of the prophets, the word made flesh in other people is also easier to believe. In today’s lesson, it’s clear that the people who spoke God’s word were not the most likely people – at least from a human perspective. Naaman had expected to speak to the king or at least directly to the prophet. But that wasn’t to be. We often expect that God will speak to us in an extraordinary way or through an extraordinary person. Someone with the looks of a movie star or someone with a string of advanced degrees or someone who has a penchant for amazing experiences with God. That’s what we expect. God, however, has a different idea. Instead of the king or the prophet, God used two servants and a messenger. We, too, often meet God in the least likely people. In Matthew 25 Jesus told the familiar parable of the sheep and the goats – how the Son of Man would separate people at the last day the way a shepherd separated sheep from goats. The sheep – the favored animal in Scripture – were placed on the right and allowed to enter God’s Kingdom. The goats – not favored at all – were placed on the left and prohibited from entering God’s kingdom. What was the determining factor? Those allowed to enter the kingdom had given Jesus a cup of water, some food, clothes and visited him when he was in prison. Those prohibited from entering God’s kingdom had not. When had they done this? When they had done it to the least, Jesus said, they had done it to him. As hard as it is to believe, one way we can meet Jesus is by reaching out to those in need: by giving someone a drink, by helping someone find work, by providing someone a meal, a bus ticket, clothes to wear, a place to sleep or visiting someone in prison. A few years ago a minister member of the Presbytery of Chicago was honored both at a presbytery meeting and at the General Assembly because he had taken the part of a prisoner on the Illinois’ death row who, it turned out, had been falsely charged and convicted. That pastor’s involvement in his case earned him the undying gratitude of the prisoner’s family and resulted in the prisoner being released and committing his life to Christ. That pastor met Jesus in the prisoner. While we may never have such an opportunity, we have plenty of ordinary opportunities in our own communities and neighborhoods. It could be something as simple as volunteering at a neighborhood school, reading stories to children and helping with their home work. Or you could volunteer with SonQuest. The children who come are so excited about this ministry they often start knocking on the church door as early as 6:00 P.M., even though we don’t start until 6:30 P.M. We continue to need helpers who can care for children who are not their own. Or you could visit shut-ins who are attached to our church. They are also so grateful. I remember a time Karen and I went calling on a couple of shut-ins in our church in Ohio. I visited with one and Karen the other. It turned out that only the lady I visited had actually come to our church, while the one Karen visited was a total stranger. She was so excited that someone came to visit her that she thanked Karen profusely. Now it’s not that these kids or the elderly or the sick or the imprisoned are actually God. But rather as we attempt to love them we join with God who is already loving them, already working in them, already helping them. We become God’s hands and feet, and we meet God as God works through us to assist those in need. We can also meet God in those who seem odd to us. Some people can be so odd, in fact, that we’d rather not be around them. Rather than meeting God in them, we often let these folks become a distraction. In C. S. Lewis’ book The Screwtape Letters – on which, incidentally, Kara Wilkins has based a reader’s theater for All Saints’ Day – a senior devil, Screwtape, instructs a junior devil, Wormwood, on how to use other people to distract a new believer. He wrote: When he [the new believer] gets to his pew and looks around him he sees just another selection of his neighbors whom he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbors. Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like “the body of Christ” and the actual faces in the next pew. It matters very little, of course, what kind of people that next pew really contains. You may know one of them to be a great warrior on the Enemy’s [God’s] side. No matter. Your patient, thanks to our Father Below, is a fool. Provided that any of those neighbors sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous. Noticing peoples’ idiosyncrasies may not tempt us to give up the faith, but it can make us want to distance ourselves from them. You know what I mean: not talk to them or leave the room when they come in, and, if they come over to talk to us, “discover” that we have something to do and excuse ourselves. Unfortunately, when we distance ourselves from them we run the risk of not meeting God in them, not hearing God speak to us through them. When I was a student at the University of Illinois I knew a young man who was very committed to Christ. He put me to shame. One winter, he went without heat in the trailer he lived in to save money so he could buy foreign language Bibles to give to students studying those languages. I remember sitting in German class one afternoon, when he walked into the classroom and asked if he could give all of us a little packet which included the New Testament in German and a little religious tract he had written. The professor was so stunned that he allowed him to do it. I was so embarrassed that I couldn’t look up at him. After he had finished he left quickly – I think he as a little nervous, too – and the rest of us continued on with our German lesson. Later he tried to sell his books on university property. Officials told him he couldn’t. Then he decided to give them away. Still the university was unhappy and arrested him. The ACLU got wind of his case and decided to represent him in court. While he was waiting to go to trial he decided to organize a protest in front of an administrative building. This was on November 22, 1963. He announced that he was going to read the Charter of Christian Liberty. Only later did we learn that he was planning to read the entire New Testament letter to Galatians We stood there in the November wind, hearing rumors of an assassination attempt on President Kennedy, trying to support this young man. While I was embarrassed to be associated with him, I was also in awe of his courage. He challenged me to be bolder in sharing my faith. While he was more than a little odd by my standards, God spoke to me through him. Sometimes God speaks to us through people who are a little different. God can speak to us through people who criticize with us. Some psychologists suggest that people who criticize us are really trying to make contact with us; they want a relationship with us. A wife may criticize her husband, not because she hates him but because she wants to be closer to him. A church member may constantly criticize his pastor, not so much because he’s angry but because he wants to be better friends with him. Criticism isn’t simply expressing dissatisfaction it is also asking for a closer relationship. Sometimes God speaks to us through the criticism of others. And it’s not because God wants to punish us. It’s because God wants a closer relationship with us as well. The prophet Nathan came to David when he was sitting in court passing judgment on cases coming before him. Nathan told him of a rich man who had many sheep, but who stole a sheep from a poor man. He asked David what should be done. David said the rich man should be punished. Nathan pointed a boney finger at David – why do prophets always have boney fingers? – and said, “You are the man.” David was guilty because he had taken another man’s wife and then saw to it that the man was killed in battle. Nathan was critical of David because God was critical of David. Yet God didn’t want to make David’s life miserable. God wanted David to repent and change his ways. God spoke to David through Nathan’s criticism. The point is not to dismiss critics as cranks, but to listen to them and try to discern whether God is saying something to us through them. If so, God is not trying to drive us away, God is trying to draw us closer. God can speak to us through other people. Very often they are the least likely people we would expect to hear God speaking through. Sometimes they are the least. Sometimes they are a little odd. Sometimes they are our most frequent critics. As uncomfortable as it is to listen to them, God can use them to make us more like Jesus. | |||||
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