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United Church of Paducah
4600 Buckner Lane
Paducah, KY 42001
(270) 442-3722
Worship Times
Sunday Service: 10:00a
Refreshments &
Fellowship: 11:15a
Christian Education
For All Ages:
11:20a - Noon
Nursery Services Provided Handicap Accessible
All Are Welcome!
A Congregation Of The
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From July 8, 2007
Great Expectations
2 Kings 5: 1-14
Are you, right now, where you thought you
would be fifteen years ago? Are you living the life you
imagined then? I don't know about you but standing in a
pulpit in Paducah, Kentucky, on a summer morning qualifies
as something I never envisioned for myself!
It's in our nature to look ahead, to catch glimpses of the
future. As our Basement Youth Group prepared to leave this
week-end, I have to think that teens and chaperones alike
were making movies in their heads about their trip and their
time together.
As far as we know, we're the only creatures on earth with
the ability to envision the future and strive to make that
vision a reality. It's a powerful asset, one that has
enabled us to leave our caves behind and reap the many
benefits of progress.
Being able to look ahead is an amazing gift, but it's not
without its downside. Sometimes our vision and the real
thing don't quite sync up.
Now sometimes reality's better than we imagined--and when it
is we turn to God and say "Awesome! Thank you." But when our
notion of the future exceeds what we find when we get there,
we can feel disappointed, angry, scared. When that happens,
what are we to do?
One of the things we can do is turn to scripture for help.
Practical help. Some how-to advice that can guide us across
the bridge of failed expectations to the life God intends
for us.
Here's where our friend Namaan comes in. He walked that walk
and his experience is both instructive and timely.
He was a rare man, Namaan was. He was the king's go-to guy
for military leadership. He was a superb strategist, a
commander extraordinaire, the sort of man who exuded
confidence, intelligence, and ferocity. Everyone knew and
respected him.
Namaan's was the perfect life. Except for one not-so-small
issue. He had this affliction, see, this icky thing going on
with his skin.
It started out as a few whitish patches, spots Namaan
managed to keep hidden. But that only worked for a while.
His unsightly disease had gone on the march and conquered
broad expanses of flesh. It had gotten so bad, in fact, that
Namaan begun catching people averting their eyes.
It's a horrible thing when a military genius finds himself
stumped. Although he had tried many things to combat it, his
disease would not surrender. Unacquainted with defeat, it
was all he could talk about at home.
It was then that a quiet, confident word passed from his
wife's slave girl, through his wife, and on to him, an
unanticipated word that struck Namaan as a trustworthy ally.
In Israel, the servant girl
reported, there was help to be had for her master's
affliction. Believing this to be true, Namaan hurried off to
enlist that help.
But Namaan's powerful military mind, his greatest strength,
very nearly did him in. For with that powerful mind of his,
Namaan pictured his healing in detail. He imagined the King
of Israel asking him to kneel as he decreed Namaan's
restoration.
It did not occur to Namaan to imagine it any other way. His
life had centered around courts of power, after all; it had
been founded on political relationships. So even though the
slave girl had clearly made mention of an able prophet,
Namaan thought in other terms. Which is why he went to his
king and why it was, when Namaan asked, that his king was
only too happy to comply with Namaan's solicitation of
support.
The ink on the king's letter still wet, Namaan rounded up
his servants and raced off to the slave girl's homeland,
chariots laboring under the weight of silver and gold and
ten sets of clothes. When Israel's freshly overthrown king
read Namaan's royal request and spied his chariots heavy
with wealth, the whole thing smelled to him like a political
maneuver, a ploy to bring even more shame and dishonor upon
his people.
Had Elisha the prophet not intuited the misunderstanding
from afar, there's no telling what disaster might have
ensued. "Send him to me," cried Elisha through his
messenger, "and Namaan will learn that there is a prophet in
Israel."
Throughout his military career Namaan had traveled to many
exotic places. He knew that religious cures were possible.
He had seen the sick put into healing trances. He had
visited foreign marketplaces spilling over with sacred
potions and mystical lotions. He had even sought out an
oracle once but kept her message to himself.
So when the prophet called for him, Namaan quickly climbed
aboard his chariot and summoned his memories. He imagined an
elaborate course of treatment, one that would likely take
days, days that would certainly strain Elisha's
concentration and require every ounce of spiritual expertise
he possessed.
As he jumped down off his chariot, Namaan knew what to
expect. But what he found was not what he imagined. And this
displeased him to no end. What, no invitation inside? No
face time with the prophet himself? Immerse himself in the
Jordan? Seven times? Namaan flew into a rage.
"I thought he'd personally come out and meet me, call on the
name of God, wave his hand over the diseased spot, and get
rid of it."
Namaan's words flew faster than arrows; there was fire in
his eyes. "My rivers are cleaner by far! Why not bathe in
them? If nothing else, at least I would've come out clean."
Namaan spun around and marched away, convinced he had been
thoroughly misled.
There are at least five things in life that we cannot change
and Namaan has just slammed into one of them: things do not
always go according to plan. Better said, things do not
always go according to our plan.
And so our anger, and so our suffering, our fury and
depression and immobilizing grief. For we each have own way
of responding to those times when the future we envisioned
does not come to pass.
It is part of our nature to fashion expectations. It is part
of our human make-up to peer into the days and years ahead
and imagine what we will encounter there. This is why the
death of a loved one is so hard to accept; even when we see
it coming, when it arrives it is not what we imagined.
But there are more subtle losses, more nuanced
disappointments, times when we discover that our
expectations have not been fulfilled.
When I worked with international students, I would often ask
them to tell me about their "American movie," the things
they thought they would see and feel and discover when they
got here. Some of these students had known since early
childhood that they would be studying in the States, so they
had had years and years to fashion their fantasies.
Why did I ask? Not simply because I curious but because
adjusting to American society meant acknowledging and coming
to terms with the gap between what they imagined and what
they found when they got here.
Anyone who has ever been in a relationship or started a new
job knows that gap, knows that what the mind dreams and what
life gives are rarely twins. In fact, sometimes they seem
not to be related at all.
It is not a bad thing to have expectations, to picture what
lies in store. In fact, it can be good and healthy and
energizing. But it can also be the source of tremendous
frustration, pain, chaos, confusion, and - for Namaan,
anyway - fury.
As with people, so with churches.
Patti Bell and I have heard two lectures recently that
endeavored to address this. Across the country,
congregations are finding themselves reckoning with hard
realities they did not foresee in the 1950s and 60s when
churches were growing by leaps and bounds.
Cultural shifts are taking us in directions we don't even
know how to think about. All we know is that this time and
place is not what we had envisioned for ourselves forty and
fifty years ago when our coffers were overflowing, our
Sunday school classrooms were crowded, and when everyone
knew the words to all the hymns in worship.
As with Namaan, as with churches everywhere, so with us as
well.
When our relationship began two and a half years ago, when
God brought your ministry and mine together, each one of
us - in some way or another - created expectations about what
this journey would be like.
You had ideas about me, I had ideas about you, and we all
had ideas about what it would mean to move forward into the
life we sensed God offering us.
Along the way, we've had our moments of feeling that God was
giving us a reality far better than we had pictured. And for
that, we praise God again and again. But sometimes, like
Namaan, what we have encountered has not matched up with
those great expectations we've been holding onto and have
been working so hard to achieve.
And here's where Namaan is helpful, where we can learn from
him. Because Namaan shows us that when there's a disconnect
between what we envisioned and where we find ourselves, we
always, always have choices.
You will remember that when he was offended by the prophet
and then confronted with a word of help that seemed both
idiotic and inadequate, Namaan got mad and walked off. He
said no go. That is a choice we humans always have. We can
head home without the gift we ached for, scratching our
heads and wondering what went wrong.
But that's not the only choice.
Recall how God worked in Namaan's life. God spoke through a
servant girl, and Namaan was willing to listen to that word.
God did the same thing a second time, speaking through
Namaan's servants who asked him to reconsider. "Father, if
the prophet had asked you to do something hard and heroic,
wouldn't you have done it? So why not this simple "wash and
be clean'?"
So Namaan made a choice in a new direction. Even though he
might have expected nothing but disappointment, Namaan took
the prophet's advice. It might have been the last thing he
ever thought he would do.
You know the rest of the story.
"He went down and immersed himself in the Jordan seven
times, following the orders of the Holy Man. His skin was
healed; it was like the skin of a little baby. He was as
good as new."
As we think together about our future, I want to leave you
with a question or two to ponder. How might God be offering
this congregation a choice we don't presently view as a
worthy one? How might God be asking us to surrender our
expectations so that we are open to something even greater?
As we prepare to gather as a congregation in several weeks,
as we consider together some of the challenges before us, I
invite you to reflect. What did Namaan come to know that may
be ours to learn? Or ours to learn yet again? What is God
asking of us so that we, like Namaan, might find ourselves
rising up out of the water with skin as new and soft as a
baby's behind, praising God for God's great and glorious
goodness?
In the coming weeks, I invite you to pray, reflect, and be
open. As always, the choice is yours. Amen.
© Rev. Karen Winkel
United Church of Paducah (UCC) These three
books name and offer help with some of the psychological and
spiritual yokes so common to the human experience:
The Five Things We Cannot Change...and the Happiness We
Find by Embracing Them, David Richo, 2005. |
"Never place a period where God has placed a comma." - Gracie
Allen
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