Season of Courage: Listening to the Prophets
1 Kings 5
Midweek, I learned I’d be preaching in Deacon Kari’s absence. She has gone to be a part of her young nephew’s care team after a very serious tractor accident. There is much good news this week for little Kaden after multiple successful surgeries. After being in very serious condition, he has had nearly all the tubes removed… and his family expects him to be transferred to a regular room. Although a long recovery is ahead, all looks very good. We give thanks to God for little bodies that can heal from very serious injury and for our devoted Deacon who is also a loving, devoted auntie.
So, when I looked at this week’s story from 1 Kings to see which prophet we would listen to for courage this Sunday, I was delighted to see that it was the story of Elisha and Naaman. There is so much to love in this story. First, there’s the fact that a very, very powerful man has such suffering that he is willing to try anything. Because he’s desperate, he listens to the most marginalized—first a slave, then his servants—and this listening to those he considers “least” leads to complete healing.
But along the way of this story, there are some more juicy details that are just so real-to-life. Leaders are in poor communication & nervous tension with each other, thinking that this request for healing is really a test of power—and this most awesome of comments from a leader who actually realized he wasn’t God, “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." Paranoid to the last…
You’ve also got to love Elisha who speaks up to his own king and then when this very, very important foreign military leader arrives at his door?—maybe he was just feeling a little overworked that day, but he doesn’t even go out to meet this very, very important man face-to-face. No, he just sends a servant out with the prescription for what ails him.
Naaman’s response is less-than-pleased. As a great man, he is used to people giving him far more respect than he deserves. So, his response is kind of like, “How dare you?!”How dare you not come out and perform your prophet thing? Call on your God, wave your hand over the spot, perform the cure! And then the cultural supremacy thoughts come out—aren’t our rivers much, much better than your little muddy Jordan? I’ve come from so far, “How dare you?!”
An important book came out this week—it’s called Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the U.S. and it’s written by Lenny Duncan, a Black Lutheran pastor in New York who is calling this church who has loved him and welcomed him in with such grace and promise to take it a step further and address together with him in a more powerful way arguably the greatest sin of our country—racism. Our national church body gathers this summer in a Churchwide Assembly—and in fact, our member Eric Miller will be one of the representatives of the Saint Paul Area Synod at that assembly—and at past assemblies of our national church, we have approved many, many well-written, challenging and powerful social statements but what Pastor Lenny is calling us to do now is start putting our words into action, start putting our money where our mouths are, start responding to our community in dire need, start living the values outside our walls that we as church say we believe inside them.
We are this very, very powerful nation and white supremacy/racism is like our leprosy. Our church has become sick with the disease of inaction. It hurts all the time but eventually, it’s going to kill us. In a meditation on the parable of the Good Samaritan, Lenny writes:
My death doesn’t seem to move you. My blood being liberally poured out on the streets of America hasn’t moved you to organize or advocate for systemic change. So I offer your own death to you as an alternative. Because the truth is, this church is dying, and I don’t want to see it die without the hope of resurrection.
The reason the ELCA is so white is theological, not sociological… Black people have been a part of the Lutheran tradition on this continent since the 1600s. Lefse and hot dishes aren’t the problem. Liturgical worship isn’t the problem…. But we have abandoned the inherent justice and equity that the gospel is rooted in. We need justice to be the heart of our work and life, not just something we do for “God’s Work Our Hands Sunday.” (To be clear, I’m not criticizing this important initiative. It just isn’t enough.) Our theology needs to change if we want our polity to change—if we want more people of color in our church… (Pastor Lenny Duncan writes that he has) started a new organization called Emmaus Collective to give definitive action steps for churches and to map those churches that are already deemed safer for persons of color… churches that are on the way to, or working on, dismantling white supremacy in their church culture.[1]
I think that we want to be on that map, and particularly, because if we do the work of dismantling racism, we will be so much more authentically living the gospel of Jesus Christ, showing up for one another not just at rallies or protests but “frontline direct actions that are responsive to the cries of the oppressed.”[2]Lenny writes that too many of our welcome words come with an asterisk—All are welcome*
*If you don’t challenge us
*if you don’t make me feel anything that isn’t positive for this hour and a half
*if you don’t make me question anything I have built my life around
Lenny describes how in worship, he leaves a moment of silence between the confession of sin and absolution, a moment that is just longer than is comfortable… and then he says, “Let’s sit in that moment for a bit longer, Church, and allow the discomfort to fuel our work toward reparation.”[3]
Naaman faced that long moment as he raged outside the door of the prophet who didn’t do ministry like he expected. But then (and the real mystery is why), his servants came to him and pleaded with him to step into the water, the muddy Jordan, seven times like the prophet said (because really, didn’t he want to be healed?). He listened and it made all the difference.
At just it’s fourth lunch served this summer, guess how many lunches Shobi’s Table served on the corner of Sherburne and Rice, just kitty-corner across the street from our back parking lot? Guess how many? 79 lunches… and I don’t think they’ve ever served less than 40, even in the rain, since under the leadership of Deacon Kari, our Synod has re-launched this ministry again together with a spirit of listening and partnership, with a spirit of openness to what our neighbors might have to teach us. In a way, it’s easy to bring people together around food… but the challenge is whether the discomforts we feel along the way in this life-changing project will lead us to give it up and move back into our silence, our offended “don’t you dare” spirit or if we, like Naaman, might be moved by God, working unexpectedly through the voices of faithful ones to show us the way to healing and new life. Deacon Kari tells me that with each meal, her excitement and passion for us to get this kitchen done—and do our part in this process of confession, reparations and reconciliation in our own neighborhood. Lenny says this, “It is a dangerous experiment but so is Christianity… he says, “The truth is that I’m willing to sacrifice my life so that you might know what freedom looks like by fighting for mine.” If we humble ourselves to listen to the prophets who give us the steps, give us the way forward, it will take courage and investment… but I suspect that God puts the voices in our midst at just the right time, when we are perched already to act, and God calls us toward freedom, healing, new life that we have been seeking anyway. God calls us… as we listen and respond, it makes all the difference.
God you have called your servants… give us faith to go out with good courage…
[1]Lenny Duncan, Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the U.S., 18
https://lennyduncan.com
[2]Lenny Duncan, Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the U.S., 20
[3]Lenny Duncan, Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the U.S., 45
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