đź Proper 23
The Healing of Power
This weekâs lectionary takes us through 2 Kings 5, Psalm 111, 2 Timothy 2, and Luke 17.
At the center of these passages stands Naaman, a foreign military commander who carries both power and prideâand, as it happens, a skin disease he canât cure on his own.
On one of his raids into Israel, Naaman captures a young woman and brings her home as a prisoner of war. She becomes a servant in his household, attending to Naamanâs wife. Yet itâs this unnamed womanâsomeone stripped of power, identity, and homelandâwho points her captor toward healing.
The Prisoner and the Commander
The Greek word for this womanâs status, aichmalĆtos, literally means âcaptive of war.â
And yet she acts not from resentment, but from compassionâor perhaps realism. Either way, she chooses to speak up. She tells her mistress that a prophet in Israel might heal her husband.
Naaman listens. Thatâs his first miracle.
He listens to the powerless.
The Waters of Humility
When Naaman finally stands before Elisha, he expects ceremony and grandeur.
Instead, the prophet sends him to bathe seven times in the muddy Jordan River.
At first, Naaman balks. Heâs a general; heâs used to command, not to kneeling in a foreign river.
But his servants persuade him to try, and when he does, his skin is restored.
In the Greek Septuagint, this scene gives us the first biblical use of the verb baptizĆâto dip, to immerse.
Before John the Baptist or Jesus ever step into the Jordan, this Syrian soldier does.
The ritual cleansing once reserved for priests and womenâs monthly cycles becomes something new: a universal act of humility, not privilege.
Baptism and Power
John and Jesus inherit that symbolism. They transform purification into participation.
Baptism becomes the shared entry point into Godâs economyâone where authority is exercised not through domination, but through humility and belonging.
Naamanâs household gives us a model of power that shares rather than hoards.
He still commands; he still has resources.
But his healing depends on a network of servants and captives who speak truth to power and are heard.
The Scandal of Grace
When Jesus preaches this story in Luke 4, His hometown audience erupts in rage.
They want a messiah who delivers vengeance, not mercy to outsiders.
But Jesus reminds them that Godâs vindication is not national or tribalâit is moral and spiritual.
Grace crosses borders.
Later, in Luke 17, another foreignerâa Samaritan leperâis the only healed one who returns to give thanks.
Naamanâs story echoes forward: salvation may come through Israel, but it cannot be contained there.
The Work and the Word
The Hebrew and Greek traditions together preserve this tension between strength and surrender.
To study both is to see how Godâs revelation transcends our categoriesâJew and Greek, slave and free, soldier and civilian.
Discipline and formation are necessary, but they arenât everything.
We need laughter and lament, pride and repentance, to become whole.
If there were only one path to God, that would not be monotheismâit would be monopoly.
Naaman reminds us that healing is found not by clutching power, but by releasing it.
Faith begins when weâre willing to listen to the least likely voicesâthe servants, the strangers, the captives of war.
Transcriptâ
ââGood morning and welcome to Proper 23. This is Brother Logan Isaac, broadcasting from the chapter House in Albany, Oregon. This morning's readings come to us from two Kings, five, Psalm 1 11, 2, Timothy two, and Luke 17. The central reading in the New Testament, second Kings five, has to do with Naman, who is a.
Foreign military commander who on one of many raids apparently into Israel, captured a, a uh, slave, a victim, a prisoner of war. Ike Ottos is the Greek, and this prisoner of war is a, a young woman, and this young woman, the captive. From the land of Israel serves Naaman's wife, you know, 'cause there's gender distinction for a lot of ancient cultures.
And this whole passage is really important I think, to Joshua, the Christ's ministry when, when he gets up in Nazareth to preach in Luke four. Uh. He says, uh, quoting from Isaiah 60, I've come to proclaim the good news to the poor, to bind up the broken-hearted, to release the Ottos, the prisoners of war, to release them.
Um, and then he goes on, he says, you know, your, the prophecies fulfilled in your hearing, and when everybody just sits there silently, Christ goes on to say, uh, you're gonna tell me that you know, all the healing is gonna come to here in Nazareth, and by extension. The lands of Zebulon and Naftali by extension, the Lands of Israel.
And instead, Christ kind of attacks his own hometown by saying, well, when Alicia's time, the only healing was brought to Naiman and a woman, uh, by the well. And that pisses off the people from Nazareth, the Nazarites, um, and they want to kill their. Uh, star pupil, their hometown hero. They want to ignore the.
The, the social history and the fairness that God operates with and thinks that the vindication of the Lord, which is where Isaiah 61 continues. But Luke conveniently cuts off is the year of the Lord's vengeance. And Luke and Saul all want to like tone down the language of spiritual battle. And combat metaphors.
Saul used them very carefully, but he takes the armor of God, which is from treat. Isaiah the third, uh, grouping of the books of Isaiah, the letters or anyway, the chapters, and you can see it right here because if Jesus is, or Joshua is quoting Isaiah 61. Why does Luke take off that last little bit the day of the Lord's vengeance?
Well, clearly that's what the people of Nazareth wanted. They wanted vengeance on the more powerful, more prestigious, more elite tribes to the South. Judah, Benjamin, and Levi. And Benjamin's, maybe not one of the targets. And this is all just kind of within the narrative of the Old Testament. Now, Naiman is the first and possibly only place in the Hebrew Bible, in Greek, the Tugen, where we get this word baptizo, the verb of baptize or the equivalent of baptize.
And one of the things that the Christ does. In following the example of the Baptizer John, the son of Zacharia and Elizabeth, that's something new. The ritual immersion and water was something that women did to clean themselves, um, and priests were told to do when they went in and did their deeds and the Holy of Holies.
It was not something that men did on a frequent occasion. Women did every month, right? And John and his disciple, Jesus decide or just begin using this ritual not to overpower or delete circumcision, but it's clearly got some gender, um, going on. And John and Jesus seemed to be pulling from two kings, five naman the.
Foreign military commander who is so proud but corrects himself with the help of his servants. Um, he is at least humble enough to put his ego aside. He has some ego. He thinks we are better than Israel, but he's corrected and he's stands corrected and he's healed because, willing to be humbled before the greater God.
Um, he believed in, um. Syrian Gods and I don't know what they were. Maybe it was day gone. You know, it makes an appearance in the Old Testament. Um, but he has reason to have some ego. But he puts it aside, not only because out of humility, but because he wants something. He wants something good, he wants to be healed, and he goes to Israel's God.
And in order to be granted healing, he must be. Humbled before their people, before his own servants. And the other thing to notice is a servant girl, she's either accepted it wholeheartedly and just like, uh, life's not gonna get any worse. But she doesn't seem to hold any resentment for this enslave. She does not seem to withhold this valuable information.
Maybe she thinks she's gonna get something for herself, I don't know. Um, but. There is something unique or new or challenging going on with Naaman's story. Yes, he has power, but he does not lord it over people. He has created a community, a family, an ocos, an economic system or an economic engine that doesn't assume power is a zero sum game.
That if I have. If I give any up, I've given it all up. No, he seems to have created a family or an economic system, which power is shared. Even if he holds the ultimate leverage, he has not created a domineering dous of the Roman, you know, elite imagination. And it's unfortunate that the gospel here comes from Luke 17 because it's very clear.
Clear that Naiman is kind of a prototype for Captain Marvel in Luke seven, which is a, which contains an important callback to Luke three, which is where John Baptizes Jesus besides soldiers. So when Jesus is baptized across the gospels, there are soldiers there who are there, not from the temple, but from Rome or under the powers of Rome.
Um, to protect the tax collector money was the way that people usurped power. When we take our labor and our authority and our power, and we put it in a little coin, say, that is my value. This is what I'm able to work in a day. If we're all equal, we can all work. There's intellectual labor, there's physical labor, but turning that into a universal currency allows people to hoard other people's work without having them, you know, forcing them to do work.
Kind of like a slavery. And so Luke 17, sure. It's about healing. You know, and it is about a foreigner. The foreigner is the one who comes back and says, wow, you know, I wasn't brought up in this way or in this faith, but I sure as heck can't, you know, help from confessing that whatever I think of the universe, whatever Gods I think are in charge.
Israel's God and Israel's healers seem to have a much powerful sway over my life. Um, and so it isn't to shame Israel, but it is to say though salvation has come through a particular community, salvation cannot be contained. The people of Nazareth, the, the problem that, that they hint at their, their mistake, their sin is thinking that only vindication only goes to Israel.
No, it goes to everyone who is poor. It goes to everyone who has been put underneath someone else, just like the Hebrews were in Egypt. They had done nothing wrong other than to have a lot of sex and to have procreated at a higher tick, which means babies are surviving at a higher rate than the Egyptians, and that scared the Egyptians instead of seeing them as a an asset.
Which is how Pharaoh saw Joseph, a new Pharaoh, rose up and saw the Hebrew people as a threat and made them slaves. He took their labor, he took their value, he took the fruit of their labor, he monetized it as a, an investment strategy against the weather, against something that Pharaoh couldn't control.
So there's this whole system of meaning around work and. Farming and fairness that if you don't, if you don't have both the Greek SEP and the Hebrew metic text at your disposal, you might get a lot of this stuff a little wrong. And even some of the people that I've studied under who know the Greek and or the Hebrew, like, I don't know, they know it better than me.
They've studied it. I've. I guess I've studied it, but not formally. I'm just kind of like some people are trained to type. I hunt and peck and that's, that's how I've come to learn the Greek and the Hebrew behind it. And because I wasn't told this is the way that it must be done, even though that's good, I'm all about discipline.
I spent six years in the Army. I think formation is integral. Formation is a necessity for human, good discipline is a necessity. Uh, we cannot hang our hat on obedience and instruction alone. We have to give room for serendipity, creativity, laughter, joy, sadness. Like you have to be spiritually nourished from all colors of the spectrum.
If you think that there's only one way to God. I'm sorry, that is not monotheism, that is just a new Roman or, or cosmopolitan, uh, instinct that the Hebrew Bible does not support. And when I say Hebrew Bible, I mean both the step two against and the metic text. Um, and I think we've. Forgotten about the SEP two again, and we've forgotten that literally that's what a lot of the provinces, especially not in Jerusalem, like up in Nazareth, they wouldn't have had the Hebrew text, they would've had the Greek text that some of the soldiers were passing around, or the auxiliary troops.
Like a lot of where I'm coming from is trying to take seriously both that God is one, and that God worked in the Greek translation of the Hebrew. Uh, literature. We don't have any Hebrew manuscripts any older than, or anything complete older than the 10th or 11th century. And the, the Dead Sea Scrolls that were coming that are Aramaic, Greek and Hebrew, they match the CEP two much closer than they do the ninth century metic text.
And so, if anything, we have to be listening to the, the more powerful, you know, the. Alexander the Great and Hellen influence, like we wouldn't have any of this if it weren't. For those with power collaborating with those who do not have power.
âThank you for falling into first formation where rank and file believers gather to pray for the humble, hearty folk caught in the crosshairs of God and country. If you like what you've heard, you can participate in one of the three following ways. First, you can support the podcast by donating on Venmo with username Pew pew hq.
Second, you can become a co-host by recording a Sunday lectionary reading for a future episode. Instructions will be provided, and you don't have to be a grunt to collaborate with Grunt works in this or any way. Finally, you can record and send prayer requests of a minute or less. Prayers can be included in an episode.
Read anonymously if you wish, or kept private for off air prayer. So there you have it. Three ways to participate in first formation. I hope you'll continue to listen even if I haven't convinced you to fall in. This has been Brother Logan. Always faithful. Always family. Semper familia.
