5:1 Naaman, commander of the army of the king of Aram, was a
great man and in high favor with his master, because by him the LORD had given
victory to Aram. The man, though
a mighty warrior, suffered from leprosy.
5:2 Now the Arameans on one of their raids had taken a young
girl captive from the land of Israel,
and she served Naaman's wife.
5:3 She said to her mistress, "If only my lord were with
the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy."
5:4 So Naaman went in and told his lord just what the girl from
the land of Israel had said.
5:5 And the king of Aram said, "Go then, and I will send
along a letter to the king of Israel." He went, taking with him ten
talents of silver, six thousand shekels of gold, and ten sets of garments.
5:6 He brought the letter to the king of Israel, which read,
"When this letter reaches you, know that I have sent to you my servant
Naaman, that you may cure him of his leprosy."
5:7 When the king of
Israel read the letter, he tore his clothes and said, "Am I God, to give death or life, that this man sends word
to me to cure a man of his leprosy?
Just look and see how he is trying to pick a quarrel with me."
5:8 But when Elisha the man of God heard that the king of Israel
had torn his clothes, he sent a message to the king, "Why have you torn
your clothes? Let him come to me, that he may learn that there is a prophet in
Israel."
5:9 So Naaman came with his horses and chariots, and halted at
the entrance of Elisha's house.
5:10 Elisha sent a messenger to him, saying, "Go, wash in
the Jordan seven times, and your flesh
shall be restored and you shall be clean."
5:11 But Naaman became
angry and went away, saying, "I thought that for me he would surely come
out, and stand and call on the name of the LORD his God, and would wave his
hand over the spot, and cure the leprosy!
5:12 Are not Abana and
Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel?
Could I not wash in them, and be clean?" He turned and went away in
a rage.
5:13 But his servants
approached and said to him, "Father, if the prophet had commanded you to
do something difficult, would you not have done it? How much more, when
all he said to you was, 'Wash, and be
clean'?"
5:14 So he went down and immersed himself seven times in the
Jordan, according to the word of the man of God; his flesh was restored like
the flesh of a young boy, and he was clean.
I
took the second of two required courses on preaching at Wesley Seminary during
the summer of 2001. Ten or twelve of us gathered for an intensive, two
week course, offered by Professor Bobby McLean, preaching teacher, a
contemporary and friend of Martin King. We met every night for two weeks,
and we each had to preach twice within ten days. There was little time to
think, little time to breathe. We had to pick a couple of slots and pick our
readings quickly. Picking became a
matter of instinct--one reading had to be from the first testament--the Hebrew
scriptures--and one reading had to be from the second testament--what some call
the New Testament.
It
came time for me to pick a topic and reading, and I remembered a conversation I
had the week before with my best seminary friend, Amy Yarnall. We spoke
by phone on July 3rd. I was in Washington. She was in
Wilmington Delaware, where she served a Methodist church. What are you
doing, I said. “I am trying to write a
sermon before I head to the beach with my family.” Oh what is it on? “The healing of Namaan.” The
healing of what? It a story from
2nd Kings, full of drama--prisoners of war, feuding kings, leprosy
gained and lost. I remember being intrigued and resolving to read the
story. It was fresh in my mind when Professor McLean asked what we wanted
to explore. I’ll do Namaan, I said.
The
night came to preach and I preached the Namaan story. Namaan is a mighty
warrior and he is seriously in a bind. He is beloved by his king for his
bravery and his military know how. Recipient of the prizes of conquest. He was Dick Cheney. He was Colin
Powell. There was only one problem. He had bad skin, really bad
skin--Leprosy. You get the sense that he has looked and looked for a
cure.
One
of his war conquests is a little slave girl belonging to his wife. She
mentions one day that she knows a prophet in Samaria that could take care of
his situation. This is a great inspiring text--Martin Luther King loved
it--because it says, Now what have we
come to here? The mighty warrior having to listen to the little nobody,
the little slave girl without a name, a foreigner, a prisoner of war.
This mighty warrior is powerless to find his way to wholeness and health and
restoration without being forced to listen to the most marginalized character possible.
And the king can’t help either.
So
Namaan listens.
I
was preaching The Namaan story now in the summer of 2001 at Wesley Seminary,
and I tell a story in this sermon about Henry Nouwen--beautiful Catholic writer
and his recollection of going to Selma. He was working as a chaplain in
Kansas at the Menninger Clinic, when King put out a call for all clergy to come
down to Selma. Nouwen heard the appeal, but ignored it. And soon he
became restless in his spirit. His sleep was interrupted, often, by the
question gnawing at his spirit, “Why aren’t you in Selma?” He had many
good excuses and all of his friends said that his desire to go to Selma was a
desire for excitement. He says that he
had to decide how and to whom he would pay attention. He got in his car and drove down to Selma. In
Vicksburg, he came upon a black man standing at the side of the road, Charles,
aged twenty. “God has heard my prayer.” Charles said as he piled in
Nouwen’s car. I’ve been standing here for hours and nobody would pick me
up. No one saw me, or when they did they tried to run me over. But
I prayed and prayed to get to Selma and now
here you are. My answered prayer.
Nouwen
took a chance and heard a remarkable tale of five imprisonments, the death of
his friend Medgar Evers. He heard about conditions in Mississippi, and as
this stranger kept talking a deep fear rose up within Nouwen. He said out
of that fear I received new eyes to see, new ears to hear.
Who
we listen to matters on the road to healing and peace, I preached that
July evening. Namaan found that
out. So did Nouwen. And what we see depends a lot upon where we
stand. If Nouwen had not decided to get in that car and drive down to Selma, he never hears Charles story. His
life is never touched by this completely different person than he, the very
definition of the other. If he hadn’t decided to take a stand and stand in a
new place, his life may have turned out very differently. Where we stand depends on what we’ll see and
who we’ll hear, on our road to peace.
Where
we stand is determined by any number of factors--the color of our skin, the
degree of our financial security. It has a lot to do with class.
Middle classs white people in America
are desperate to believe that all is well, and we do what we can to reinforce
that belief. SINCE WE WON’T EASILY
CHANGE THE PLACE WHERE WE ARE STANDING, WE WILL AT LEAST HAVE TO START BY
LISTENING TO PEOPLE WHO ARE STANDING SOMEWHERE ELSE AND ASK THEM WHAT THEY SEE.
Well,
my sermon went on like that for a while. I preached on Nouwen’s
reflections on who arrived there in Selma, “God’s fools he said. Social
outcasts. Crazy, odd characters. Not a cent to their name but they came
to march with the oppressed in Selma.
I
delivered my sermon. All of the students gathered round in a circle.
Bobby McLean said, I was at
Selma. There were some odd characters there. I remember, he said in
his old, somewhat still Southern African-American voice, I remember one night
Martin looked at me and said you’re preaching tonight. Professor McLean
said that night my text was Namaan. That rocked my world.
The
Namaan story put me on a quest for deep reflections on the nameless, the
voiceless, the marginalized. The first thing you notice in that story is
that slave girl’s namelessness, her total lack of status. But also that
she holds all kinds of power, if she
would just be heard.
So
I went off on a quest for reflections on the nameless, the voiceless those easy
enough to ignore.
I
soon encountered W.E.B. DuBois, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison. It is W.E.B. DuBois that identifies a great
veil, a veil that separates the white world and the black world. “How does it feel to be a problem?” So said
a little white girl to W.E.B. DuBois
while he was but a little boy. And from
there he begins a lifetime reflection on what it means to be black in
America. To have to see oneself through the eyes of the other
world. As my professor of systematic theology writes, “It hit
Dubois. A little white girls’ particular embodiment of the question stung him into the
realization that he was “Shut out from the white world by a vast veil.”
From
the instant DuBois encountered that little girl and her question, he began to exercise an inner strength; he began to
assert his will within the veil. He embraced this veil which shut him out
of the mainstream. Through that veil he gained insight into his world,
into himself and into the other world.
Toni
Morrison’s collection of essays, really lectures, Playing in the Dark, comes to
illuminate a will that refuses to see the self through the revelation of the
other world, the white world. While DuBois said that one ever feels this
twoness--an American, a Negro. She writes, “American means white,
and Africanist people struggle to make
the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after
hyphen.
Playing
in the Dark argues that white America, as reflected in the white American
novel, reveals America’s ambivalence toward blacks. She aptly calls this
ambivalence American Africanism, which signifies an entire range fo views,
assumptions, readings and misreading that accompany Eurocentric learning about
black people.
This
veil plays out in this way, according to DuBois. The problem of
anti-black racism, means that the
African American in order to have a true self-consciousness, must constantly
measure self consciousness against racist images. It is peculiar
sensation, DuBois writes, this double-consciousness, this sense of measuring
one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.
His question, How is it possible to be both black and American, is the very
heart of Baldwin’s entire writings--America means white, Baldwin always said,
and is the heart of Playing in the Dark as well.
The
old Anglo-Saxon world is at the root of those views, assumptions, readings and
misreading that define white attitude towards African Americans. The
phrase that Morrison uses is American Africanism, which captures nicely the
misreading by whites (Americans!) of people of African descent. The old pioneers in search of the city of
God, Morrison argues, fled apostate lands, and came after adventure.
Here, the desire for freedom is preceded by oppression; a yearning for God’s law
is born of the detestation of human license and corruption, the glamour of
riches is in thrall to poverty, hunger and debt. The pioneers in other
words sailed to America in quest of a blank slate. But she argues this land
that would wipe the slate clean and make possible a new beginning was inlaid
with the Old World’s contradictions: Those who had bowed low to the Crown
became sovereign, the vassal became powerful.
The tension she identifies in this way:
One
could be released from a useless, binding, repulsive past into a kind of
history-lessness, a blank page waiting to be inscribed. Much was to be
written there: noble impulses were made in law and appropriated for national
tradition; base ones, learned and elaborated in the rejected and rejecting
homeland, were also made into law and
appropriated for tradition.
In
these essays, Morrison wants to show how in America this tension between noble
and base impulses gets to be explored in popular fiction--Herman Melville,
William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, through the slave population.
In
those writings, time and again the characters of color are nameless, are
speechless except in cases where the white person is served; and are
mythical--either savage or harmless servant.
The Namaan story, writ over and over.
In
Morrison there is a deep African american spirituality, what my professor
defines as the African American’s ability to see from within the veil, that is
to see one’s own virtue and one’s oppressors vices and to rail against
anti-black racism because of a dogged inner strenth. The spirituality of
Morrison is this: the insight is this: that the pendulum exposed in white
literature about African Americans--jungle savage or harmless servant--exposes
and measures the souls of white folk, not the souls of black folk.
Out
of that veil, you see Morrison comes to a place of liberation and freedom.
Because she wishes to be healthy, not racist, Morrison has forged a well
integrated self-consiousness, within the veil. She knows she is a problem
to the other world, and overcomes two warring ideals lest they break her: Fate
has mined her American language with “hidden signs of racial superiority,
cultural hegemony and dismissive othering. How to render blacks truly?
How to maneuver ways to free up the language from its sometimes sinister,
frequently lazy, almost always predictable employment of racially informed and
determined chains. Living in a nation of people who decided tha their world
view would combine agendas for individual freedom and mechanisms for
devastating racial oppression presents a singular landscape for the
writer. So, we get from her, from her
wisdom within the veil, Beloved and the Bluest Eye. We get from her the
beautiful image of her holding up the mirror so that white america might yet
see.
Of
course, the person that we celebrate on this day, did that very thing, within
his own veil in the middle half of the 20th century. And that
of course is the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King.
When
King was a student at Boston University, the big theological foundation there
was called Personalism. One other thing
that Bobby McLean my preaching professor told me was that a whole slew of
African American students at Boston nearly became Unitarians, because of this
idea of personalism. In fact, Bobby McLean spent half a year as the
interim at First and Second in Boston, one of our oldest Unitarian
parishes. Personalism gets right to what we are talking about here around
the whole issue of Namaan and the slave girl, and DuBois, Baldwin and Morrison
and their veil. Personalism is a
uniting theology that says, at the root of all of theological reflection, must
be a deep and abiding respect for the human personality--unique, divine and of
ultimate importance. The idea of the
human person is tied up with the idea of the Divine Person---that the divine
person is diffused if you will in each
human being and therein lies our optimism about humanity’s movement toward the
good.
This
kind of image of God in all persons is related to what Forest Church suggests
might be the best model of God in the 21st century--the hologram, no
matter how much it is split up, it still works. It still has impact.
The
great question, this cycle of the Commission on Appraisal, the body that looks
at big issues confronting Unitarian Universalism is this: Is there a core to
our faith. I nominate Personalism. King never really left
personalism as a theological construct, though he modified his view of human
nature over time to be a tad more realistic. That the human personality
is ultimate because each carries the image of the divine is a unifying faith of
an unrepentant liberal.
The
second thing King does is remind us that the church has power, social
power in social contexts. A
famous quote: The gospel at its best deal with the whole (person), not only his
soul but his body, not only her spiritual well being but her material well
being. Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men
and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic condition
that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually
moribund religion awaiting burial.
The
last thing that I want to say about King is that he had hope. He believed
in the coming of justice and peace. He believed that God worked in history--as
did our greatest Unitarian thinkers--Theodore Parker, James Luther Adams,
Channing. In his speech, Facing the
challenge of a new age, King wrote: I have talked about the fact that God is
working in history to bring about this new age. There is the danger that
after hearing all of this you will go away with the impression that we can go
home, sit down, and do nothing, waiting for the coming of the inevitable.
You wil somehow feel that this new age will roll in on the wheels of the
inevitable, so that there is nothing to do but wait on it. If you get
that impression you are the victims of
an illusion wrapped in superficiality. We must speed up the coming of the
inevitable.
To
speak of God working in history is to speak of concrete human experiences,
concrete human dilemmas, especially around social and political power.
A
time for confession. I believe that my
personal political views need not dominate the views of my sermons--I believe,
in other words, that there is room within Unitarian Universalism for all kinds
of political views and we are called to be the church not to be a political
action committee. But I do believe that politics and religion sometimes
meet, as in King’s Letter to a Birmingham jail, and there are times when the
minister must address concrete political realities. The confession is
this: In this day, it is perhaps an overwhelming task.
I
survey the Administration in power and I do not know where to begin. I need your help. I cannot do it all
alone. We need to build this place into a laboratory for the human spirit
and that means that we must all take up the important, concrete questions and
issues of our day.
Are
you most concerned with the secretiveness of this administration? The
clinging close to the chest information about how decisions are made about war,
about Iraq, about Korea? About
Columbia, the Phillipines? I grow concerned.
Are
you most concerned about the unilateralism, the kind of Texas stagger that
insists that we need not have our allies on board in order to go to war in
Iraq?
Are
you most concerned that the victims of repression--Iraqis and Afghanis and
North Koreans are going to hear that the only solution we can come up with are
additional weapons of mass destruction, that our imagination is so limited that
we can conceive of no other way out of this mess?
Are
you concerned that the Democrats have completely lost their way?
Are
you concerned that there is a war on the poor in this country, that as we speak
social safety nets are being quietly and efficiently taken away?
Are
you concerned that the 30th anniversary of Roe V. Wade will be
the last? That there is a quiet
war on women as a recent column in the New York Times suggested?
This
King that I lift up on this day is one that asks us to respond to the fierce
urgency of now, in love and faith and hope.
Asks us to ensure that we remember the dignity of each person, the call
to compassion and hope. That everyone might have a voice, that everyone
might have a name, that everyone might have peace.
January 19, 2003, Unitarian Church, Davenport, Iowa. Roger Butts