The Twelfth Sunday after Trinity – Pr. Faugstad sermon
Text: 2 Kings 5:1-15
In Christ Jesus, who through His own flesh delivered the eternal cure for our sin and death, dear fellow redeemed:
If you think of the stories of King Arthur’s brave knights or perhaps of the courageous heroes in modern war movies, you can get a sense of Naaman, the commander of the army of the king of Syria. He is described as “a great man with his master and in high favor” and as “a mighty man of valor.” He was a man’s man, bold, and strong. We can suppose that he wasn’t afraid of anyone, that he never backed down from a fight. Wherever the danger was greatest or the odds were most against him, Naaman went forward.
And Naaman won. He was held in high esteem by his master because he was so successful. A ruler cannot be effective without loyal and capable men around him ready to carry out his orders. But neither the king nor Naaman realized where their success came from. We learn in today’s reading that “the LORD had given victory to Syria.” Syria’s strength was part of the LORD’s plan. And so was Naaman’s leprosy. Leprosy was a serious and debilitating skin disease. Naaman had probably prayed to his own gods for relief and healing, but none came. It bothered him enough that even his servants were aware of his struggle.
We don’t expect to see weakness in our heroes. We’re surprised when our nation’s leaders get sidelined by the cold or flu, or when elite athletes pull a muscle and have to take time off. These instances are good reminders that the people we look up to are human also. Because of sin in the world, hardships come on the strong and the weak, the wealthy and the poor, the famous and the obscure. This also teaches us that the people who seem to have it all probably have troubles and pains that we wouldn’t want to touch with a ten foot pole.
So Naaman, who knew military strategy, who knew his way around a battlefield, had been outflanked by a skin disease. He had no answer for it; he couldn’t beat it. It was going to kill him. And now we see the LORD’s strategy in play. Through a little girl who was carried away from Israel and made a slave in Naaman’s house, the LORD made Naaman aware of a prophet in Israel. The little girl confidently told Naaman’s wife that this prophet “would cure him of his leprosy.”
If Naaman’s skin disease did not bother him very much, he would have ignored what the little girl said. What would a Syrian commander want with an Israelite prophet! But that was not his response. He took the message to his king—as farfetched as it sounded—, and the king sent Naaman to Israel with a letter and a load of gifts. Naaman was willing to try even this if it meant he could be healed.
When he was sent to the house of the prophet Elisha, what Naaman expected was that he would have the opportunity to make the case for why he should be healed. Or perhaps he thought he would flatter the prophet and impress him with the gifts he had brought. Certainly it wasn’t every day that Elisha had such esteemed visitors come to his door with all their horses and chariots.
But Elisha was not impressed by these things. He was nobody’s tool but the LORD’s. When Naaman arrived, Elisha didn’t even come out of his house to greet him. He sent a messenger with simple instructions: “Go and wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh shall be restored, and you shall be clean.” This is not at all what Naaman expected. In fact, he found it very offensive. The prophet wouldn’t even speak to him directly?!? He was supposed to wash himself in the dirty waters of the Jordan River?!? No thanks.
Many people make the same judgment about the Christian Church. “If Christianity were true,” they think, “and if the Christian God is supposedly a God of love, then why wouldn’t He come and make the problems in the world go away? Or if He truly cares about His people, why wouldn’t He at least make their troubles go away?” When told about the basics of the Christian faith, they say, “How can regular water make me a child of God? How can eating bread and drinking wine be a Communion with the body and blood of Jesus? How can these simple things bring salvation?”
Looked at from the unbeliever’s perspective, we can see how strange this all seems. We don’t have anything like Naaman expected—someone waving his hands and saying the magic words and all our troubles disappear. How could washing in the Jordan River seven times do anything good? People expect that salvation should be harder to come by. Shouldn’t we have to do something to be saved? “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”
Initially, Naaman rejected the Word. He drove away in his chariot angry, perhaps thinking thoughts of war against Israel for treating him like this. Then his servants meekly approached and said, “Did you not hear what the prophet said? Has he actually said to you, ‘Wash, and be clean’?” So Naaman consented. He went down to the Jordan and dipped himself “according to the word of the man of God” once, twice, up to seven times—the number for perfection, holiness. And what happened? The flesh that was infected with leprosy “was restored like the flesh of a little child.” He was clean.
Now bold Naaman, mighty Naaman, Naaman the conqueror returned to Elisha’s house and said, “Behold, I know that there is no God in all the earth but in Israel.” What had changed him? Was it the water? Did it have some special quality that when applied resulted in healing? No, it was the Word of the Most High God. The Word attached to the water brought healing to Naaman. The Word brought faith to his heart.
Naaman had been conquered by the LORD’s Word, and he didn’t even see it coming! Many other enemies of the LORD have also been conquered by Him and brought into His kingdom in the same way. You were one of them. Like Naaman, you had something like a disease clinging to and afflicting you, a disease for which you had no cure. It was worse than leprosy; it was sin.
People try all sorts of remedies for this: trying to do enough good to cancel out their bad, pointing to the worse failures of others to make themselves look better, even arguing that what used to be considered sinful isn’t really sinful anymore. But we can’t escape it. The sin of Adam has been passed along to us, and this sin has captured our hearts. Ignoring this infection doesn’t make it go away; it only makes our condition worse. So what can we do to make our condition better?
Jesus says, “There is nothing that you can do. But there is something that I can do.” The Son of God took on our weak human flesh, so that He could reverse the fortunes of Adam’s line. He came to bring salvation to us who were sick, and life to us who were dying. For the official beginning of His public work, Jesus stepped down into that same dirty river as Naaman had some eight hundred years before, and He was baptized by John “to fulfill all righteousness” (Mat. 3:15).
At His Baptism, your sin was poured over Him, and He carried that sin all the way to His death on the cross. His death on the cross was the cure for your sinful condition. It was the remedy for the Fall of all mankind. The perfect Son of God made full satisfaction for all your sins against the holy God. By His death and resurrection, He declares you righteous and pure in God’s sight.
To make sure that you know this righteousness is for you, He has sent messengers to tell you. Your parents brought you to the baptismal font, where you received “the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit” (Ti. 3:5), so that like Naaman, you were made new, “like the flesh of a little child”—born again by water and the Word. It was a perfect cleansing, removing all your sin from you, and placing Jesus’ righteousness over you. At your Baptism, God gave you a tremendous gift. And since that time, your parents and sponsors and fellow believers and pastors have reminded you about this gift.
The humble appearance of Baptism makes some think it is powerless. It’s like Naaman stating that there must be better options for bathing than the Jordan River. But where Jesus’ Word is spoken according to His promise, there is power—life-giving, heart-changing power, the power to heal and save. Today’s Holy Gospel presents an excellent example of the power of His Word (Mar. 7:31-37). Jesus said, “Ephphatha—Be opened,” and the deaf and mute man was healed.
The Word attached to the water of Baptism is what brought you healing and salvation from the LORD. You return to these waters every time you repent of your sins and cast off the things that hinder your faith in Him. Like mighty Naaman humbly obeying the Word and dipping his leprous skin in the water, you and I bring our sins to God, but not only our sins. We bring our weaknesses and strengths, our past and our present, our worries, struggles, and pain, our abilities, our dreams, and our plans, our imperfect hearts and minds. We bring them all to the cleansing waters of Christ and drown them all in faith.
We want everything we do to be washed in Him, to flow from Him, to be sanctified through Him. We need Him to guide our thoughts, words, and actions. We need Him to carry us and keep us true to Him, so that we are not misled by other gods that cannot save. His method for keeping us faithful is not what we expect—the proclamation of His Word and the administration of water, bread, and wine with His promise. These are the powerful means that bring us His forgiveness and salvation, that conquer and cleanse our sinful hearts.
Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost; as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, forevermore. Amen.
+ + +
(picture from Saude Lutheran Church stained glass)
The Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity – Pr. Faugstad sermon
Text: St. Luke 17:11-19
In Christ Jesus, who heals the sick and rescues the dying, so they might be His own and live under Him in His kingdom, dear fellow redeemed:
It started with little sores that stuck around, reddish spots, and some skin numbness. He wished it would go away, he wanted to ignore it, but he couldn’t. He went to the priest to have it examined, and the priest confirmed his greatest fear—it was leprosy. He had to leave his job, leave his home, leave his family. The Book of Leviticus describes the protocol for lepers: “The leprous person who has the disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head hang loose, and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, ‘Unclean, unclean.’ He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease. He is unclean. He shall live alone. His dwelling shall be outside the camp” (13:45-46).
It was a hard reality, but there was no known cure. A person with leprosy had to stay away for the good of others. But he wasn’t completely alone. Lepers often formed their own communities. We see that in today’s reading, when ten lepers called to Jesus outside a village between Samaria and Galilee. We learn something else about this group of men. It was a mixture of both Jews and Samaritans. That probably wouldn’t have happened if this terrible disease hadn’t drawn them together.
In general, the Jews and the Samaritans interacted with each other as little as possible. They had long lists of reasons why the other group was inferior and not worth their time and attention. But “misery loves company,” and these men were miserable. They set aside the animosity they may have felt toward one another and stuck together. But they were still of course on the outside. They were not where they wanted to be. They were part of a community of death, a community of the dying.
And that’s exactly what the world is apart from Christ. It is full of people afflicted by the disease of sin, surrounded by death and facing death themselves. Leprosy is a helpful picture for thinking about how sin works in us. In the Large Catechism, Martin Luther quotes Romans 7:18, “I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my flesh.” Then he says, “If St. Paul may speak this way about his flesh, we cannot assume to be better or more holy than him. But the fact that we do not feel our weakness just makes things worse. It is a sign that there is a leprous flesh in us that can’t feel anything. And yet, the leprosy rages and keeps spreading” (Part V, paras. 76-77).
Because of nerve damage, a leprous person does not always notice when he cuts himself or gets burned or injured. And we do not always notice when we are getting injured or burned by sin. The more we participate in what is unclean, the less we perceive the damage that is being done to us. We think that we can stay in control of the sin. We won’t let it overcome us. But when we can’t stop consuming what is destroying us, can’t stop doing what we should not do, we are not in control of sin; sin is in control of us.
If one of the lepers in today’s reading denied that he had leprosy, it wouldn’t have changed the fact. And “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1Jo. 1:8). It is important that we see ourselves among those lepers. By nature, we are sinful and unclean (ELH, pp. 41, 61). We are the outsiders. We are the ones standing at a distance, away from all that is good. We cannot change our situation; we cannot save ourselves.
But One has drawn near to our community of death, even coming to live among us, One who has the power to heal us of our sin and save us from death. This One is very different; His reputation precedes Him. He has not been overcome by sin, and when death tried to take Him down, He took down death! “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” we cry.
And why should He have mercy? He isn’t the reason for our troubles. He is not responsible for the state we are in, for the messes we have made in our sin. But He does have mercy. He had mercy upon Naaman, an Old Testament Gentile who was afflicted by leprosy, by having him wash seven times in the waters of the Jordan River until he was clean (2Ki. 5). And our Lord had mercy upon us by bringing us to the cleansing waters of Baptism, where He applied the healing medicine of His holy blood to each one of us.
St. Paul explains this beautifully in Ephesians 2. He writes, “Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh… remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world” (vv. 11,12). We were on the outside, and we couldn’t get in. We were stuck in our sin and death. Paul continues, “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ” (v. 13). We were far off from salvation, but Jesus has brought us close to Him.
He accomplished this by perfectly keeping the Law of God, not just for the Israelite people but for all people. And then He went to the cross carrying the whole world’s sin and shed His holy blood to wash it all away. He poured His perfect righteousness and His cleansing blood over you through the waters of Baptism. That is how He transferred you from the community of death in the world to His holy Christian Church, the Communion of Saints. That is how He healed and cleansed you from the disease of sin that was killing you.
But many of the people He has done this for, whom He has joined to Himself in the waters of Baptism, continue on their way and forget what He has done. Like the nine lepers who were healed, they get caught up in “the cares and riches and pleasures of life” (Luk. 8:14). They don’t continue to listen to His healing Word. They don’t remember to give Him thanks. So even though Jesus freed them from the community of death, they have returned to it again. They might feel like they are alive. They might think they are doing important things. But none of it can save them, and none of it will last apart from Christ.
This is what the devil tempts all of us to do. He wants us to walk away from the life we have in Jesus, to give all of that up so we can fit in with the world. We might even feel ashamed sometimes of our membership in the Christian Church. We don’t tell anyone about it. We carefully keep it hidden, so we can fit in with the people who seem to matter. We don’t want them to think we are strange. We don’t want to be left on the outside. We don’t want to be singled out and left all by ourselves.
These are natural thoughts to have. It is difficult to be a follower of Jesus in a hostile world. But even though you may feel like you have to face these difficulties alone, you are not alone. The Samaritan went against the majority and turned back to give thanks to Jesus. He didn’t have the company of his former friends anymore, but He wasn’t alone. Jesus was with him, and Jesus blessed him. “Rise and go your way,” He said; “your faith has made you well.” Or as the Greek word literally reads, “your faith has saved you.”
You are saved by faith in Jesus who conquered your sin and death, and shares with you His life. And you are not the only one who has received this life. Going back to Ephesians 2: “So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord” (vv. 19-21).
Look at how large your community is! You are a fellow citizen with all the saints, all the believers who have gone before you. You are a member of the household of God. You stand on the foundation built by the apostles and prophets. Christ Jesus Himself is the cornerstone. You are part of an immense structure, a beautiful building, a holy temple in the Lord. You are most certainly not alone.
You are a member of the body of Christ. It is with Him that you belong. You will always find friendship, acceptance, and purpose in Him. He will not leave you by yourself. He visits you with His mercy in good times and bad, whether you are happy or sad, restful or anxious. He comes right to you through His Word and His Sacraments to cleanse you again with His holy blood and bless you with His promises.
Each time you receive these blessings, you praise Him and give thanks to Him, bowing down at His feet. And He looks upon you with love, and He says, “Rise and go your way; your faith has saved you.”
Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost; as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, forevermore. Amen.
+ + +
(picture from “The Healing of Ten Lepers” by James Tissot, 1836-1902)