Rivetti's Blog

The congregation at All Saints’, Columbia Falls, Montana, is a blending of two congregations at Whitefish and Columbia Falls, that were united in a single building exactly halfway between the two parishes. The really long-term interim there, the Rev. Bradley Wirth, agreed to let me supply there one Sunday while he was away on vacation. Which was fortunate for me since I was still staying in his family’s guest cottage on the Fourth of July. This is the sermon I offered there on July 4:

The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost – July 4, 2010

2 Kings 5

Let me begin today by thanking you all for the hospitality you have shown me these past few weeks as I have sojourned in your land – actually as I have holed up in the Wirth guest cottage on the tail end of my sabbatical. The last time I was here, around five years ago, I was traveling with my husband George, who died last summer after a long illness. Bradley and Jeannine were at our wedding nearly 19 years ago. But before George and I ever met, Bradley and Jeannine first introduced me to the beauties of this part of the world, encouraging me to take a couple of camping trips to the Grand Tetons, and up into Glacier park. When George and I did meet some 20 years ago, it was our mutual love of the Tetons and the Continental Divide that drew us to one another in the first place. The Wirths have been a part of our love story for a very long time, and it is my honor to stand with you today so that they can continue their well-deserved time together.

If Bradley were preaching today, of course there would be some good quote from a book about United States’ history or politics. There is no-one quite as eloquent that I know who is capable of taking the deliberative procedures of governance, whether of nation or of church, and transforming them into pure poetry. I will not be able to do that. Instead I’m going to talk about the Old Testament. He warned you, didn’t he? I want to talk about the Old Testament for two reasons. The first is that Our Lord was formed by the Law and the Prophets, he was bathed in that world, and it was that world that provided the context for his story, and for the commentary on his story that so richly infuses Paul’s letters to Gentile believers. But the second reason is that this story about the prophet Elisha is just dazzling, and perfect for talking about politics.

First – let’s tell the story again. We get most of the story in today’s reading, but I commend the entire chapter to you for some light reading this afternoon when you’re home. Naaman is the commander of the armies of Aram. We never hear the names of either the king of Aram or the king of Israel in this story. Just the Naaman. Schwartzkopf; Eisenhower; MacArthur, Washington. That big. He has defeated the king of Israel in battle, but big and important as he is, he has a humiliating skin condition that under normal conditions would make him an outcast. If he lived in Israel, he would be forced to stand apart from the community, ring a bell to warn people away. He would beg for his living. He has leprosy. A girl whom he has taken as a prize of warfare and given to serve his wife tells the wife that there’s a holy man in Israel who can help the master. So Naaman tells the king that he needs to obtain this cure, and the king writes a letter to the wrong person. He writes to the king of Israel. Because that’s what kings do. They don’t write to holy men. They write to their equals. The king of Israel immediately suspects a trap. He tears out his hair, rends his garment, swears and stamps his feet. If you’re hearing this story being read, which is how Jesus would have heard it when he was a child, you’re rolling on the floor laughing at this point. But Elisha comes to the rescue – and says, “There, there. I’ll take care of the situation. Send him to me.” Naaman shows up and offers the rich and generous treasure of Aram. But Elisha leaves him outside, cooling his jets, and sends word that he doesn’t need the ten talents of silver, six thousand shekels of gold, and ten sets of designer clothes. The leprosy will leave him if he just washes seven times in the Jordan. Now it’s Naaman’s turn to become apoplectic. More comic relief as he struts and storms and refuses to be consoled and almost blows his chance at being healed. Who does this guy think he is? Doesn’t he know how important a man he is? And he won’t come out and see me? He won’t perform an incantation or ritual or sacrifice or prayer service on my behalf? He just tells me to get into that trivial little muddy river Jordan? It takes another servant to calm Naaman down enough to convince him that maybe, just maybe, this will work. And it does. Even though Elisha won’t accept the gifts, Naaman does pledge to take a little of Israel home with him, some holy ground, that he can carry around with him in his pocket so that when he has to do his duty back home, which does include escorting the king into the temple of Baal, and, can’t be helped, bowing down with the king when he does obeisance to Baal, we’ll all know that he is truly a servant of the one true lord, the most high, the God of Israel. There’s a little coda we don’t read but it’s important just so you can get the symmetry of the story. Elisha has a servant named Gehazi who is pretty chagrined that Elisha has turned down the rich offerings for the healing. So he runs after Naaman and says, “Funny thing, we forgot to mention the fee….” When Elisha confronts him and he tries to pretend nothing happened, Gehazi himself ends up with the leprosy. So we move in a nice symmetrical pattern from the outsider – the girl/slave/captive to the outsider/insider – powerful general with leprosy to the insiders – king of Aram / king of Israel – to the outsider who is truly inside, namely Elisha – and then the comic ending with the leprosy landing on the servant, like the yukky mess in the Cat in the Hat.

It’s a funny story. And memorable. In its day — perhaps when it was being told to the exiles living in Babylon — it subverted the structures of absolute power with the faith of the outsider, as so many of the stories of the Hebrew scriptures do. God’s saving acts in history are effected throughout scripture by the folks who have no authority to do so. Younger brothers; Canaanite women; Ruth of Moab; Elisha the bald, understudy acolyte of the great Elijah, Daniel the vegetarian prophet, Jesus the working class kid from Nazareth. Those last, least, lost, little and dead that we hear about so often from Fathers Capon and Wirth.

When Americans tell the story of the Revolutionary War, they, too, like to tell the story of the unlikely success of the war. Of citizen patriots, the ragtag army, fired by a dream of liberty, overwhelming the superior armies of the king. We in the Episcopal Church also have another story of what was going on in our own history. For many Christians in the colonies who were members of the Church of England – the church established in Virginia, in Connecticut, in New York, in Maryland, in Pennsylvania – it had been a solemn aspect of daily prayer to offer prayers for the king. Clergy when they were ordained swore an oath of conformity to the king as God’s chosen ruler on earth. When independence was declared in July of 1776, those same prayers for the king became an act of treason. One priest wisely offered “Prayers, O Lord, for those whom we have been asked to pray for.” Other priests went into hiding, struggling with their fellow Anglican Christians throughout those uncertain years to grasp what their new role might be. After the war, as the church began to reform itself the bishop elected in Connecticut, Samuel Seabury, could not be consecrated by bishops in England because he would have had to swear anew his allegiance to the king. The solution, as we know, was that Seabury would have to go to Scotland, where the non-juror bishops had moved after the Glorious Revolution. These men, too, had taken a sacred oath to another king, James II, as God’s chosen representative on earth. And then there had been a revolution that imported a new regime, and the bishops were required to swear a holy oath in support of the new monarchs, William and Mary. Some of them could not so lightly give up that first oath, no matter how glorious the new political situation. Like the American clergy, they were caught in the midst of the development of nations, in the wrenching divorce between nation and religion. It was these non-jurors –the non-oath-takers– who consecrated Seabury, assuring continuity with the uninterrupted line of bishops of Canterbury, and thus of the apostolic laying on of hands. In exchange for this act, the bishops asked Seabury to include a little something special in the new prayer book that would have to be written if Americans were to begin anew. Not just prayers for Independence Day and the Nation – though that was an important piece of the new prayer book. But an expanded form of the Eucharistic prayer, something they’d found in their exposure to the Orthodox Church in the East, something they’d been trying unsuccessfully to get the Anglican Church and the Parliament to adopt, something we now take for granted every Sunday, but something that distinguishes us to this day from the Church of England, which has never received permission from Parliament to replace the 1662 version of the Book of Common Prayer. A key part of that expanded prayer of consecration is something called the “epiclesis.” The what? Listen today as I speak the words on behalf of the assembled people of God, as I call on God to send the Holy Spirit – that’s “epikleo” in Greek – on these gifts – to sanctify this bread and wine – and then I ask God to send that same Spirit on us, to sanctify us. Or as the old Prayer Book used to say, “fill us with thy grace and heavenly benediction,”so that the blessing on the gifts of God and the blessing on us carries us from this table, to a mystical place where the substance of bread and wine, and the substance of you and me, meet and become one communion of faith and one fellowship beyond time and space. In our communion here each week we have a glimpse of that new creation Paul talks about in Galatians, new creation that wipes out ethnic differences, that takes us beyond the borders and dividing lines that separate us from one another. All that. From those outsiders up there in Scotland, consecrating that outsider American bishop so he could bring that back to us as the special gift, that little piece of Scotland perhaps tucked into Seabury’s pocket and reminding us of the marvelous ways we are interconnected.

Fear of that lordly power of English bishops urged the newly formed government to create a constitution that drew a bright line between church and state. The Episcopal Church that was formed here on the other side of the struggle for independence embraced that separation, and created governing instruments that reflect a revolutionary, radical, and even holy concept, that the “outsiders,” the unordained, the laity share authority in the church as baptized members of the Body of Christ. One of the ongoing gifts of our Anglican heritage has been the realization that people who gather in worship in the one, holy, church universal, are humans who order our lives in communities through negotiation and government and local understanding – that is, through politics. In our weekly gathering of faith, our holy meal of bread and wine, we members of the Body of Christ are lifted up beyond time and space into that heavenly banquet offered from before time. But here in Columbia Falls, Montana, on this Fourth of July, we come as citizens of a nation that fought hard to be freed from the tyranny of monarchy, a nation that has struggled with its own story of hardship and success, its dire history of genocide and slavery, its unprecedented might and vast if finite resources, its great capability and challenge and promise. On this day we come with special prayers that God will bless our nation’s constant project of renewal and reformation as once more we dedicate ourselves to the founding principles of justice and liberty to which our forebears once pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor.