The Masked Work of God's Healing Hound

From the Covalence Archives

Texts for the 20th Sunday after Pentecost:
2nd Kings 5:1-3, 7-15
Psalm 111
Luke 17: 11-19

If the universe is just right for life, as Paul Davies argues[1], we humans tend to see this from our own point of view. How we see the universe may vary. Some see how the world is through the lenses of our own immediate interests or our own religious traditions. We tend to see ourselves as the point of it all, as the reason why God created the world, the solar system, or the cosmos. A few find thinking of the universe in such anthropocentric terms absurd and go to the opposite extreme of seeing ourselves as irrelevant accidents in the cosmic scheme of things. In the Bible, however, we find examples of people seeing through the cosmos with the eyes of faith, wonder, imagination, and gratitude to the One who creates, sustains the cosmos.

Two Healings

And in some of these examples, people are able to see through their own experience not merely that things sometimes happen for their own benefit when they sorely need it, but more importantly that God works their good as part of God’s work for the whole creation. Consider Namaan the Commander and Ten lepers who encounter Jesus of Nazareth.

When his Israelite servant girl directs the leper Namaan, the commander of the army of Aram, to the Israelite prophet, Elisha, for healing, Namaan imagined how his healing would go. Elisha the prophet would call on God, wave his hand, and bring God’s power to bear on his leprosy. That’s what prophets do. Instead, Elisha directs Namaan to wash in the River Jordan. He protests that the rivers of his home city of Damascus were better than the Jordan. But when Namaan heeded the pleas of his servants to wash in the Jordan and was cleansed of his leprosy, he saw the God of the Israelites differently, and he was deeply moved with gratitude to the Israelites’ God. A national god who could heal him with simple washings of water was now for Namaan the only God who lives.

Ten lepers of mixed ethnicity in a boarder area near Galilee encounter Jesus of Nazareth who, they had heard, healed the sick. Unlike Namaan, their healing goes as they had imagined it would. Keeping the required distance as they made their request, Jesus tells them to show their healings to the priest as law required so they may be certified as “clean.” A Samaritan, seeing he had already been healed, returns to Jesus in intimate physical contact, giving God praise and thanks. In Jesus and his word, the Samaritan sees the action of the life-healing power of God and is full of thanks and praise.

Me and All that Exists

“I believe that God has created me and all that exists,” wrote Martin Luther as he began to explain God’s relation to the world in the Apostles Creed. Luther’s Small and Large catechisms are the confessional lenses through which Lutherans tend to see the connection between God, the cosmos, and themselves.

“I believe that God has created me and all that exists.” Luther continues, “He has given and still preserves my body and soul, my reason and all my senses. He provides me with food and clothing, home and family, daily work, and all I need from day to day. God protects me from danger and guards me from every evil. All this he does out of fatherly and divine goodness and mercy, though I do not deserve it. Therefore, surely I ought to thank, praise, serve, and obey him.”

The God who created the cosmos, continues to create and sustain in it. Luther understood that this often happens partly through natural processes which mask God’s creating and sustaining work. It also includes human processes and the service we give to others in our own places of responsibility. For example, Elisha the prophet used the prophet’s gift to heal for Namaan. The Jewish community that prayed Psalm 111 in worship sees God’s creating and sustaining work particularly for them through the lens of God’s covenant relationship with them and their own religious tradition. God provides food for the faithful, being mindful of his covenant. God gives them the heritage of the nations. God sends redemption to them when they are captive to foreign powers. This means that human history is also a context for God’s creating, sustaining, and redeeming powers.

A Cosmic, Intimate God

The God who created the cosmos sometimes brings that creating and sustaining power to bear on the particular and the specific: Namaan, the commander of the armies Aram; Ten lepers in a Galilean village near Samaria, the people of Israel.

The God who creates and sustains the cosmos through physical and biological processes we imperfectly understand is not aloof and alien from this creation but shows himself to be passionately involved with it, interacts with and enters it, suffers in it. The lepers who call out to and obey Jesus’s command encounter in him as well the creator of the cosmos. That much the Samaritan leper who returns understands, though he does not understand how this is so. The one who created and creates the cosmos brings that creating will to make whole these outcast lepers. Those who encounter God the creator encounter as well Jesus the healer and redeemer; to meet the one person is to meet also the other.

Ronald W. Duty is a member of the ELCA Staff Team on Faith, Science, and Technology and staff liaison to the ELCA Alliance for Faith, Science, and Technology. This sermon was preached at "Christ, Cosmology, and Creation--Sunday Scientist Symposium IV at Spirit in the Desert Retreat Center, Carefree, Arizona on October 14, 2007.

Endnote

[1] Paul Davies, Cosmic Jackpot: Why the Universe is just Right for Life, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007). Davies gave a presentation on this theme at the Sunday Scientist Symposium, "Christ, Cosmology, and Creation."