Blue Cord

As I mentioned in the previous post, I preached today on 2 Kings 5.  Because I had not decided on which element I would focus for the sermon when I made the original post, I thought I would follow up here.

I choose to focus on the fact that in this passage God continually speaks through people far down the social ladder.  Elisha’s message is not delivered by Elisha, but by his servant.  When Naaman balks at following Elisha’s instructions, it is Naaman’s servant who points out that Naaman would have done something difficult if Elisha had asked, so he shouldn’t hesitate to do something easy.  And the most powerless figure, the Israelite slave girl, is the one who has the solution to Naaman’s problem in the first place.

This last figure is particularly interesting.  She has three strikes against her as far as people in the ancient Near East were concerned.  She is a woman, she iss a foreigner, and she iss a slave.  Yet she is the one through whom God speaks to Naaman initially.  Without her, we would have had no story to put in 2 Kings 5.

One additional element caught my eye in the passage.  This is the notice in v.1 that Yahweh had given Syria military victories.  I found that to me a remarkable comment for two reasons.  From the historical side, it represents a break from the standard Iron Age understanding that Yahweh was limited to Israel.  And from the theological side, this had to be a bit of a jab at Israel, since a large number of Syria’s victories had come against Israel.  The idea that Yahweh is fighting against Israel is very muted here, but it is certainly present.  It will come out later in full force, especially in the prophetic ministry of Jeremiah.

Revised Common Lectionary, Year C, Proper 9 (series reading)

I am scheduled to preach this Sunday at my home parish, All Saints’ Episcopal church in Stoneham, MA. Like many Episcopal churches, we are now using the Revised Common Lectionary. The RCL provides two Old Testament readings each week. One is a thematic reading that fits in with the epistle and gospel readings. The other is a reading that provides sequential readings in a particular book.

I am going to using the sequential reading for my preaching this week. It is taken from 2 Kings 5:1-14 (thanks to Duane for pointing out the typo). Having begun the exegesis for writing the sermon, I thought I would share some of my thoughts here. The passage in 2 Kings 5 is the story of Naaman, the commander of the Syrian army who comes to Elisha to be cured of his leprosy.

This passage contains some rather interesting features. First, it focuses on a foreigner and his act of faith in Yahweh. It is set in the middle of a number of stories focusing on Elisha, but Elisha is a secondary character in this story. Other than two short conversations with Naaman, he is a background character, though essential to the story.

Second, the story turns questions of power on their heads. The mighty leader of the army is striken with leprosy. The king of Israel is portrayed as fearing the king of Syria, who he thinks will attack if Naaman’s leprosy is not cured. He appears to forget that he has a prophet in his kingdom who can perform such wonders. The weak, on the other hand, are shown to be wise. The captive Israelite girl — a slave in a foreign land — is the one who has knowledge that can help Naaman. And when Naaman balks at washing in the Jordan, one of his servants has to point out his error.

There are several elements that I think provide rich possibilities for preaching:

• The faith of the foreigner contrasted with the lack of faith of those on the inside.
• The faith of the powerless contrasted with the lack of faith of the powerful.
• The simplicity of the act Naaman must do to be cured.
• The hospitality of Elisha, who cures the foreigner. In doing so, he provides comfort to the enemy.

Although it is not a part of the reading for this Sunday, the continuation of the story also has some interesting details. After being cured, Naaman says he will worship only Yahweh. In order to do so, he asks to be allowed to take two donkey-loads of Israelite soil back to Syria. Yahweh is the God of the land of Israel, so if you are going to worship Yahweh, you have to take some of that land with you.

I found it interesting that pered in v.17 is translated as ‘mule’ in every translation I could check. While it is clear that there were mules in the ancient world, it is not entirely certain that pered indicates a mule. A mule is the offspring of a male donkey and female horse, but interbreeding of animals was forbidden in Israel (Leviticus 19:19), although this does not mean it was not practiced. I wish I had my Koehler-Baumgartner lexicon out of storage right now to see what they have to say about pered.

On the other hand, it is clear why translators would want to avoid talking about Naaman taking an ass-load of dirt back to Syria. A mule-load definitely sounds better.

Although today was the first day of the SBL conference, I don’t have much to report from sessions. Most of the morning was spent at the Employment Information Services, the people that provide interview space for all the universities that are hiring. I had a good interview this morning and was very pleased with my perception of the school. I can only hope they felt the same about me.

I did get to two sessions in the afternoon, but was only able to stay for thirty minutes of the second one. The first one was on teaching the Bible in a liberal arts setting, something that has been discussed on this blog lately. The papers certainly brought up a lot of good questions. One of them was a survey of students and how they respond to biblical studies courses. The most important thing I got out of this paper was that students who expect to learn new material in a biblical studies class usually learn more new things. Now, this may sound obvious, but there are some students who come to class expecting a Bible class just to be review of things they already know. In such cases, the students do not learn as much, even when confronted with new material. This suggests that we need to spend some time in the first few days of class trying to get student expectations to match our hope that they will be learning new things. In theory, this should help them learn more.

The highlight of this session was a paper by Christian Brady at Targuman, which he had made available on his blog. Chris referenced the recent discussions of his topic in the biblioblogosphere and his paper points out several issues that are involved in teaching a text that is inherently theological. We — as well as Steve Cook — were able to chat about teaching for a few minutes afterwards, and I look forward to getting together tomorrow with the two of them and other bibliobloggers.

I also was able to attend thirty minutes of the biblical exegesis for homiletics session. Although none of the two presentations I heard were ground breaking, they did point to the fact (often overlooked) that when we interpret a text we need to be aware of the audience for whom we are interpreting it.

Dinner tonight was with my good friend and hotel roommate Ramon Luzarraga who treated me to a dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steak House. We had a good discussion on issues of faith in the classroom, much of which built on questions raised by the session on teaching the Bible in liberal arts. Although Ramon is a theologian instead of a biblical scholar, the question of how to approach issues of faith in an academic setting overlap to a certain extent.