NEW OPPORTUNITIES, NEW LIFE
Rev. Dr. Joyce Antila Phipps
Texts: 2 Kings 5: 1-15; Luke 3: 15-22
Like most of you I made some New Year’s Resolutions; and probably like many of your resolutions, mine have ended up by the wayside as the result of not paying attention to my time or being just too busy to keep on track. Last year I was going to keep a journal. Well, that lasted about two weeks. And then, this year, I was going to practice meditation and yoga every morning before I turn on my computer. Well, I haven’t kept it up every morning, but the overall track record is better. But then I realize there’s only one more day until the end of January yet. We’re all full of good intentions, but often we don’t have the discipline to maintain our intentions.
This is true even when we have what can be called earth-moving experiences. Our two readings this morning have something more in common than the Jordan River. Both of these stories concern such experiences. Naaman, a feared commander, has a feared and dreadful disease. I don’t know about you, but the image of leprosy that sticks in my mind is the one from Ben Hur when Judah Ben Hur goes to the valley of the lepers looking for his mother and sister. Its inhabitants were wrapped in what looked like Egyptian burial cloths.
A terrifying illness in the ancient world, its cause was not discovered until 1871 by Gerhard Hansen, a Norwegian physician. Its mode of transmission is still uncertain and leprosy is still endemic in parts of the world even today with more than 200,000 cases diagnosed globally. We even have about 150 cases reported annually in the United States.
The disease causes loss of sensation in parts of the body so that neither heat nor cold can be felt; disfigurement resulting from skin lesions sometimes resulting in small parts of the body, like fingers or nose muscle, actually falling off.
The Torah details how leprosy is to be diagnosed and how lepers are to be treated: “The person who has the leprous disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head be disheveled; and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, ‘Unclean, unclean.’” It takes a full two chapters in Leviticus, including how a leper is to be buried with the final detail that the clothing to be burned.
Naaman was not subject to Jewish law, but his condition was to be feared because he was understood to be infectious. He bathes in the Jordan and, as the text says, his flesh was restored. Naaman’s experience was physical. He literally regained his life, which gave him new opportunities.
Jesus baptism, on the other hand, is a different kind of experience. Baptized with others, he prays and has a spiritual experience – the heavens open and the Holy Spirit descends like a dove and the text tells us that a voice came down from heaven. It’s not really clear from the text whether others heard the voice or saw the heavens opened. Luke’s version is more ambiguous than Matthew or Mark, which state that only Jesus heard the voice and saw the heavens opened. His experience was a spiritual one.
The experiences that offer us new opportunities in life are usually not as dramatic, but they are no less important. Physical and spiritual experiences are often closely knit; one relying on the other. Although we cannot “make” the spiritual experience occur, we can help the spiritual along by being attentive to the relationship that God already has with us. In some way, that is what happened to Jesus when he was baptized. He became aware of his relationship with God and responded to it.
That is what we are challenged to do: to be open to God and to respond to what God is trying to say to us. That isn’t easy because we are bombarded with so many messages from so many different sources. We have unspoken expectations about God’s message to us or how it will be given. Look at Naaman’s response when told what he needs to do to be made clean. “I thought that for me he would surely come out and stand and call on the name of the Lord his God, and he would wave his hand over the spot…” The lesson here is that God doesn’t come in ways that we expect but in ways that are surprising and unexpected.
Jesus’ baptism is another case in point. It’s easy for us to picture it much as it was painted as it has been in the past. Jesus stands before John with a loincloth in a suppliant position with a look of transcendent holiness while the heavens above him open up as if he understands what is going on. I have a different image in my mind’s eye. John preached a baptism of repentance and of rededication of one’s life. Jesus goes to John to be baptized as did others for those reasons. He, too, sought new life. And then something transforming happens to him, something unexpected.
Jesus had an experience of some sort. All three Synoptic Gospels not only agree that Jesus was baptized by John but that something extraordinary did happen. Within those moments of his baptism, he experienced some sort of epiphany – in fact it is what probably what leads him out into the wilderness to struggle with his calling. It is the same with us. We all have those “a-ha!” moments, those times when all of a sudden, it just seems to make sense or come together. The question is what do we do with them and how do we discipline ourselves to use those moments as frameworks for living.
Most of us are not very well disciplined. I would wager that many of us even think of discipline as being something that stifles spontaneity – and we all hunger for some kind of spontaneity in our lives. Perhaps we can draw on the tradition of Christian prayer practices to help us through this dilemma.
Many of our Christian mystics, both ancient and modern, used the reflexive activity of prayer to bridge this gap. They took their epiphanies, which had resulted from some kind of experience, and reflected on them. Their spirituality resulted from their constant work at deepening their reflections upon spontaneous events.
Many of these ancient Christian thinkers have names we barely recognize: Climacus, Cuthbert, Elisabeth von Schonau, Meister Eckhart; others like Theresa of Avila, Hildegard von Bingen, and Catherine of Siena are more recognizable. Their writings are rooted in the tension between spontaneity and discipline. What they recognized above all was God’s continuing presence as a reality; they took their epiphanies and reflected upon them in a disciplined but not in what we would call a rational manner. Like Jesus, they opened themselves to God’s Holy Spirit and let it work in their lives.
Well, we say, that’s easy when you just sit off in some convent or monastery but we live in the 21st century where there are all kinds of competing demands for our time, where we have to work, et cetera, et cetera, and so forth. We have real lives while they just sat. In some ways, yes, the pace of life moved more slowly; there was no instant messaging, no 24 hour news on CNN, but war, tragedy, famine, and death struck them as it strikes us; they had to work with greater difficulty just to have the basics to live. And it took more time out of their days. They weren’t that different.
So, this is my thought: the days are now getting longer. After the Winter Solstice about a month ago, we now have about 1.5 minutes more of daylight each day; as we get closer to March, the amount of time increases because of the way the earth shifts on its axis. So by the beginning of Lent, in March, we are up to 2 additional minutes of daylight, more or less. In the morning, when the sun rises, be open to God’s epiphany for the day.
For the owls among you, when you bed down, reflect on your day and use that reflection to give you a new life the following day. The reflection on the day before will merge into the epiphany for the new day and so it will continue. This prayerful reflection will serve to guide you throughout the following day and you will be open to the spontaneity of God’s surprises for you. In that way, we have new life accompanied by new opportunities.
Let us pray: God of surprise, open us to your vision for our lives and bring us closer to that vision. May we live in prayerful reflection, always grateful for your love. In the name of the One who offers us new life, even Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen.