Sermon — July 3, 2022
The Rev. Greg Johnston
“It was the middle of November when the strange man came to the village,” writes Dorothy Sayers in her short mystery, “The Incredible Elopement of Lord Peter Wimsey.” “Thin, pale, and silent, with his great black hood flapping about his face, he was surrounded with an atmosphere of mystery from the start.” A wizard! A magic man! Martha decides to pay him a visit. She’s a young woman in a remote Spanish village in the 1920s, and she’s serving as the maid to an aristocratic Englishwoman who’s been brought to live in the village by her husband, seemingly bewitched. Perhaps this mighty man can break the spell. When she enters his house, Martha encounters a remarkable scene: “An aromatic steam began to rise from the cauldron… Then, a faint music, that seemed to roll in from leagues away. The flame flickered and dropped… Then, out of the darkness, a strange voice chanted in an unearthly tongue that sobbed and thundered… she saw his pale lips move and presently he spoke, in a deep, husky tone that vibrated solemnly in the dim room:
ὦ πέπον εἰ μὲν γὰρ πόλεμον περὶ τόνδε φυγόντε|
αἰεὶ δὴ μέλλοιμεν ἀγήρω τ᾽ ἀθανάτω τε…
O pepon ei men gar polemon peri tonde fugonte,
aiei dē melloimen agērо̄ t’ athanatо̄ te…”[1]
(And so on.)
Martha needs no further evidence. This man is a mighty wizard. This man can break the spell.
But this man is, the reader knows, no wizard, no magician. He’s the English amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey. The unearthly sights and sounds are simply artifacts of chemistry and lighting; his incantation is nothing but a fragment of the Homeric Iliad he had memorized in school, albeit rendered quite dramatically. The woman has not been bewitched. She’s simply being drugged by her terrible husband. And all Lord Peter needs is access to the house to help her to escape. The magic is all a front to convince the superstitious locals to help him out.
But Peter Wimsey understands that human beings sometimes prefer a flashy cure to a simple one. The prophet Elisha could have told you the same thing. It’s part of the comedy of this reading from the Second Book of Kings. There’s a constant contrast between the pompous grandiosity of the important kings and generals in the story, and the simplicity of the humble and lowly, the servants and the prophet. Naaman is the “commander of the army of the king of Aram,” a “great man” who’s “in high favor” with the king, a “mighty warrior.” (2 Kings 5:1) But he doesn’t know the cure for his disease. Instead, it’s a “young girl” who points the way, an enslaved girl, kidnapped from the land of Israel on an Aramaean raid. “There’s a prophet in my old hometown who could probably help!” (5:2-3) Why don’t you go see? But this is too simple. Naaman needs something more grand. So he consults with the king of Aram, who sends him to the king of Israel with a diplomatic letter in hand, and ten talents of silver, and six thousand shekels of gold, and a few nice suits to boot. (5:5) And the king of Israel is full of dramaL “Am I God, to give life or death?” The king of Aram is mocking me—I’m sure! (5:7) But Elisha is calm: “Why have you torn your clothes? Let him come to me.” (5:8) So Naaman comes. And Elisha’s answer is simple: “Go wash in the Jordan seven times.” (5:10)
You can imagine the pause. “…That’s it?” “I thought for me,” Naaman says, “he would surely come out, and stand and call on the name of the Lord his God, and would wave his hand over the spot, and cure the leprosy!” (5:11) Naaman wants the Lord Peter Wimsey treatment. He wants the bubbling cauldron and the flickering lights and the incantation in a strange and foreign tongue. He does not want a bath. It’s insultingly simple. But again, his servants carefully approach: If he gave you something hard to do, wouldn’t you do it with gusto? So why not do it all the more when all he said was, ‘Wash, and be clean?’” (5:13) And, finally wising up, he does what they say. And it works.
The truth is so much simpler than he expects. That doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
I sometimes worry that we approach the Christian faith like Naaman, not Elisha; as a tangle of inscrutable mysteries, not a simple truth. And there’s some virtue to this. It’s good to be thoughtful, and careful. It’s good to approach God with humility about our own understanding of the depths of God’s nature, to appreciate nuance rather than dumbing things down to a bumper sticker. But I sometimes worry that our yearning for complexity and subtlety and depth can distract us, like Naaman, from the simple truths.
Jesus has plenty to say that’s enigmatic, for sure. But at the heart of the gospel, there is a simple truth: “The kingdom of God has come near.” (Luke 10:9, 11) He sends his followers out to thirty-five towns in pairs, and gives them their instructions: Go where I am sending you. Greet no one on the road. Whatever house you enter, first say, “Peace to this house!” (10:3-4)
If they welcome you, stay with them. Eat what they give you. Cure the sick. And say to them: “The kingdom of God has come near.” (10:8-9) If they don’t welcome you, get out of town. Wipe off even the dust of their roads from your feet, and tell them that’s what you’re doing. But nevertheless proclaim the same, simple message: “The kingdom of God has come near.” (10:11) And that’s it.
It’s a truth that’s almost too simple for us to bear. We want to be the Naamans of our lives: we want to be the mighty commanders, competent and in control and held in high regard. At the very least, we want there to be something we can do: some ritual we can enact, some prayer we can say, some good work we can perform that will heal us or save us, improve our lives or change our world.
But the kingdom of God is not conjured with a magic spell. We don’t wave our hands or invoke the mighty name of our God. In Jesus, the kingdom of God is near at hand. And all we have to do is to turn aside and enter into that kingdom, just as Naaman steps into the river: not as mighty and powerful people in control of our own destinies, but as people who recognize that we need to be healed, that our nation needs to be healed, that our world needs to be healed.
Because that’s simply what we need: to turn aside and be healed.
There are moments, throughout life, where you can see that kingdom of God and feel how near it is. I don’t know if you’ve ever had an experience like this. I did, actually, just this week. On Thursday night, I went to the 10th anniversary celebration of Turn It Around, the Charlestown Coalition’s youth group. Some of you may remember that some folks from the Charlestown Coalition came and spoke with us here after a service during Lent. Turn It Around started as a kind of social marketing campaign about the dangers of drug overdoses, and it’s involved into a group of young leaders who work with the staff of the Charlestown Coalition to try to spread their message of peace and of love and of health throughout our community.
The very fact that many of us have not heard of their work has a lot to do with the divisions within our community. But as I sat in that room on Thursday night, looking around, I saw, for once, a Charlestown community that bridged our divides: a group of young people of color, who mostly live in the Bunker Hill development, supported by Townies who’ve been part of the recovery community for years, supported by a network of yuppie social workers and doctors, being together as a community, trying to heal and comfort our community in this neighborhood. For me, it was a glimpse of the kingdom of God, a vision of what the world could be if we turned and stepped into that kingdom that is so near at hand, a place in which—as our collect this morning said—we have learned to follow all God’s commands by loving God and loving our neighbor.
And in this neighborhood, of all places, loving our “neighbors” is not a metaphorical thing. It is what it means to be a community. It is what is to be Christian.
It’s not complicated. It’s not impressive. Christianity is not that hard.
Correction: Christianity is very, very hard. It’s just not complicated. So I wonder what it means to see the kingdom of God near you. I wonder what it means to turn aside and step into that river. I wonder what it would mean for us to become part of that beloved kingdom of God together.
[1] “The Incredible Elopement of Lord Peter Wimsey,” in Dorothy L. Sayers, Lord Peter (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 337–339.