Rebecca Sheridan
Sunday, November 4, 2018
2 Kings 5:1-19

This morning our scripture texts are about healing, and really, this All Saints’ Sunday is a good Sunday to talk about seeking God’s healing in our lives as we deal with loss and grief. What might be hard when we hear these scripture readings about people who received physical healing from God, is when we think about those times in the past year when we heard the words no one ever wants to hear: “there is no cure. There is no more treatment. We’ve done all we can do. It’s time to get your arrangements in order.” The question “why?” is an easy one to ask God during these times – why was Naaman healed and yet my mom not? Where was Jesus’ healing touch for my dad, or my grandma? Those are fair questions to ask God in times of grief and loss.
In some ways, we can understand Naaman’s angry response to Elisha, because he healing doesn’t come in the way that Naaman expects or wants. Elisha sends a messenger to ask Namaan to wash in the Jordan river seven times, and Namaan is angry, because he expected this famous prophet to come to him personally and touch him and be healed. He’s a bit indignant, and besides that, the Jordan water is kind of dirty. His servants wisely calm him down, reminding him that it’s really not a big thing that Elisha is asking him to do. I don’t necessarily have the answers to why God doesn’t always heal us in the way we hope for or want. But I think these scripture passages remind us that it is God’s mission to heal the world, in a much deeper sense of the meaning of healing beyond physically curing people. And even in times of death, God reassures us that through Jesus Christ, who himself died for our sake, healing is possible. Healing IS God’s mission, for the world.
Both in Hebrew and in Greek, the word for healing has a more holistic sense than a physical cure. Specifically, the word “sozo” in Greek can also be translated as “salvation.” And even our English word, “salvation,” is related to the word “salve” – a healing ointment. Healing and salvation are closely tied for God. Naaman seeks healing for his skin disease, but at the end of the story, after washing seven times in the Jordan river, Naaman not only has skin as smooth as a baby, he is spiritually healed. He tells Elisha, “I now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is no God anywhere on earth other than the God of Israel.” In that physical healing, Naaman has a powerful experience of God that changes him forever. Not only is he healed, he is saved, by the living God of Israel. Similarly, the man with leprosy that Jesus heals in the gospel for today not only experiences relief from a physical ailment, but restoration back to the community, as lepers were outcasts isolated from social interaction because they were thought to be not only contagious but spiritually unclean. God must be punishing them for something wrong they had done, was the common thought. The leper’s healing includes physical, emotional, and social wellbeing that God in Jesus Christ brings.
We were at my grandparents’ farm to celebrate Thanksgiving one year when I was in high school. I went with my family very reluctantly to my grandparents’ church for their Thanksgiving Eve worship service. I was reluctant to go because we had been out searching for my dog all afternoon. She had never run away from the farm before, but on this day she had followed my grandparents’ golden retriever off the farm and headed east, towards Brookings. That was all we knew – my grandparents’ dog had come back without her. There was snow on the ground and it was cold in South Dakota and too dark to continue our search that night. So my mom dragged me to church. It just so happened that my grandparents’ pastor had just returned from his mother-in-law’s funeral and preached about that. I don’t remember a word he said, but I was sobbing. My dog was lost, his mother-in-law was gone. And even though I could hardly hear the words I remember feeling a great comfort that someone in that room, especially the fact that it was the pastor, was grieving something, too. I was not alone. Fortunately for us, on Thanksgiving morning the Brookings pound called to say that a kind passerby had picked up my dog that night and taken her to the pound. She happily greeted us like nothing had been wrong, excited to “tell” us all about her adventures. It was a powerful moment for me to realize we all feel loss and grief sometimes, even over a lost dog, and church can be a place for us to share our grief so we know we are not alone, and that God is with us even and especially in those difficult times.
Martin Luther referred to the church not as a museum for saints, but as a hospital for sinners. On All Saints Day, we remember that we are people created by God to do great things for God, but often, as sinners, we fail. Often, we are in need of God’s healing beyond what physically ails us. Many of us suffer from chronic conditions for which there is no cure, and that does not mean that our faith is somehow weak, that God is punishing us, or that God is silent and uncaring. Many of us are wrestling with things we’d rather not talk about, whether it’s ongoing arthritic pain, a battle with cancer, family divisions that aren’t getting better, a mental health diagnosis that requires daily medication, a changed financial situation, and so on. All of these hurts, while not all physical, come with additional mental, emotional, social and spiritual wounds. They come with loss – we can’t do things the way we used to because of limited physical mobility. We can’t celebrate Thanksgiving or Christmas the way we used to because our family member isn’t with us, or so and so isn’t speaking to us. This is where God’s healing in the salvation (sozo) sense of the word gives us hope. Christ is here. Christ is here now, extending a healing touch beyond what may be physically possible to send friends and family to support us mentally and emotionally, a church community to pray for us, to feed us spiritually and sometimes literally with nourishing food. As we remember loved ones who are no longer with us here on Earth, together we grieve their passing today, whether it’s been twenty years or two weeks. We are not alone in our grief. Today, we also celebrate the promise that God’s healing in Jesus Christ includes our salvation and theirs, life abundant, life eternal, now and always. Amen.

Sunday, October 28, 2018
Rebecca Sheridan
1 Kings 3:4-28

Can you think of a time in your life when you got something right? Maybe it was deciding to marry your spouse, or taking a job that was a good fit, or making it through raising your children to be proud of who they’ve become as adults? Or maybe it was a smaller thing – being a comforting presence to a friend who was going through a rough time, sending a card or saying something that you didn’t think much of, but it really meant something to the person and they told you that later.
Solomon is one of my favorite Bible characters, partly, because he gets some things right! I would love to say that if God asked me for whatever I wanted, I would respond like Solomon wisely and not selfishly. But guess what? He wasn’t perfect either, just like all of the Old Testament people we’ve been learning about this fall. It’s subtle, but our reading starts out by reminding us that Solomon went to Gibeon to make sacrifices at the local shrine there, which was not an altar to God but to the local gods. He married many foreign wives, one thousand, to be exact, so we could say loyalty to God or to one wife was not his strong suit. Despite all this, however, he was a good king. He led the charge to build the first temple in Jerusalem to God. Solomon did love God – like many of us, he was tempted and drawn away from God, but God always drew him back to worshipping the true God of his father, David. On this Reformation Sunday, I want to remind us all that like Solomon, like Martin Luther, sometimes, we get things right! We are both sinners AND saints. God created us to serve him and sometimes we actually do. Solomon’s story is a good reminder of this.
So here’s a recap: as Solomon is worshipping the local gods of Gibeon, God appears to Solomon in a dream and says he’ll give Solomon anything he wants. That’s a pretty gracious offer to someone who has been spending his time worshipping someone else! And Solomon gets the question right – he doesn’t ask for riches or a long life or power, he asks for God’s wisdom to be able to serve God’s people well as king of Israel. He says to God, “Give me a God-listening heart so I can lead your people well, discerning the difference between good and evil. For who on their own is capable of leading your glorious people?” Solomon doesn’t put himself first, but thinks about what would be best for him AND for his people. He seeks God’s will to be done before his own. He asks for a God-listening heart. Then immediately after this dream, he returns to Jerusalem and arbitrates a conflict between two women fighting over the same baby and wisely identifies who is the true mother. The writer of 1 Kings reminds us that the Israelites “were all in awe of the king, realizing that it was God’s wisdom that enabled [Solomon] to judge truly.” Solomon strives to live by God’s wisdom instead of his own, putting God and God’s will first in his life. He isn’t perfect, he doesn’t do it all of the time, but he knows that when he relies on God for help, God will do it. And when he does make decisions by relying on God’s wisdom, others notice!
Solomon’s story isn’t unlike Martin Luther’s own story of struggle to rely on God. As a young man who entered the priesthood and the monastery, he was over-the-top in his feelings of guilt. He was so aware that he was imperfect before God and sinful that he was paralyzed by his inability to do good. It was unhealthy. Martin Luther’s Priest Confessor Staupitz told him to stop confessing every little sin and rest in God’s grace and forgiveness, but he couldn’t do it…until one night, reading the book of Romans, he came across chapter three, “Since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” It was a lightbulb, lifesaving moment for Martin Luther that would change history. He got something right. It wasn’t until he realized that life wasn’t about keeping score of how good and bad he was, what good and bad things he did, but about relying on God for forgiveness, grace, and salvation, that Martin Luther could live freely knowing he would still mess up as a sinner, but that sometimes, by the grace of God, he would get it right. And that changed the world – it brought the Christian church back to an understanding that Jesus taught us in the Lord’s prayer, to be about God’s will to be done in our lives instead of our own, to rest in God’s grace rather than on our ability to save ourselves.
When we get up and start our day by relying on God’s wisdom, by praying to have a God-listening heart, by seeing that God has given us everything we have including grace abundant through Jesus Christ, we get it right! God gives us the strength and wisdom we need to do what God calls us to do, at work, at home, with friends and family, here at church. We don’t always listen – we aren’t perfect. We still sin. But because of our faith in Jesus Christ, we can sometimes get it right. And like Solomon, we can strive to serve God and our neighbors with a God-listening heart, enabled by God’s wisdom, not our own. This morning in particular, we are surrounded by visible reminders of God’s grace working through us – these beautiful quilts, the music offered throughout worship, our monetary offerings that go to ministry to touch lives right here and across the globe. It is good for us sometimes for God to keep us in check, reminding us of our sin, helping us discern evil from good like Solomon. But instead of being hampered or held back by our mistakes, God empowers us through Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit to serve God and all people, with God-listening hearts. Amen.