The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

"Spiritual discipline: Naaman the Syrian and The Daily Grind"

The Rev. David Frazelle

“Naaman became angry, and went away.”

I was a quitter. About five years ago, I hiked the Appalachian Trail from Maine to Georgia. I tried to quit four times – twice in Maine, once in Vermont, and once in Virginia. Four different times I became angry and decided to go away. I want to talk about my decisions to quit. I want to talk about the four times I became angry and wanted to go away from my journey, because what happened to me on the trail happened to Naaman the Syrian in our OT reading; and what happened to Naaman the Syrian happens to all of us when we are confronted with the realities of the “d” word. The “d” word I am referring to is “discipline,” a word whose very sound and connotations can make us angry incline us to walk in the opposite direction.

I wanted to quit the Appalachian Trail because the experience did not match my expectations. I thought that the journey would be about blissful, contemplative immersion in nature. I thought that I would do spiritual reading and write profound things in my journal during my free time. I prepared meticulously so that I could fully enjoy the freedom of this pleasant stroll with God. And I probably needed to believe and expect these things in order to convince myself and my wife that it was a good idea to go.
It was not long at all, though, before I was confronted with the realities of the trail – the simple, humbling, sometimes painful realities of the trail. I discovered the emotional pain of separation from family and friends. I found myself weeping and walking for hours in the afternoons because of the pain in my feet. But most importantly and frustratingly, I discovered that the Appalachian Trail was essentially about walking – the simple, humbling, repetitive discipline of putting one foot in front of the other 5 million times.

When confronted with these realities of the discipline of the trail, I resolved to quit on 4 different occasions. Each time, my wife, Emily, persuaded me to keep going. Although I was, literally, not a happy camper when she held me accountable to my original commitment, I have been so grateful for her gentle and not-so-gentle pressure to stay on that journey. The reason for my gratitude is that, in the end, it was through the monotonous and sometimes painful discipline of the trail that I received the grace that God had in store for me. When I finally let go of my pre-conceived notions of what the journey was supposed to feel like – when I finally accepted the discipline of the journey for what it was – then I was free to receive God’s gifts, which were far greater than anything I could have asked for, planned or imagined.

In our Old Testament reading from Second Kings, Naaman the Syrian undertakes a journey that he nearly quits. Naaman was seeking healing, and he had his own expectations of how that healing would take place. The text tells us that he planned to take his diplomatic letter and his meticulously-chosen gifts to his destination. Once there, Elisha, the prophet and healer, would come out to greet him with great fanfare and would stand before him and call aloud on the name of the Lord God. Then, with a dramatic wave of Elisha’s hand over the diseased place on his body, Naaman would be healed instantly. After leaving his magnanimous gifts with the prophet, who would thank him profusely for the honor of his visit, he would depart in joyful exultation.

The problem for Naaman was that these expectations clashed with the realities of his journey. When he arrives near the end of his long journey, Elisha does not even show him the dignity of coming out of his hovel to greet him in person. His carefully-chosen gifts are first ignored, then rejected. He is told, through a lowly messenger, to follow another religion’s simple rites of purification by washing himself in an unremarkable river, and he is told to repeat that discipline seven times.
When confronted with these simple, repetitive and humbling realities of the spiritual path to healing, he does what I did and what most of us do – he gets frustrated and he quits. By the grace of God, he is saved from himself by his servants, who persuade him to keep going and to pursue his journey to its end. When he listens to their counsel, he lets go of his pre-conceived notions of how healing happens and what it is supposed to look like and feel like. He accepts the spiritual discipline given to him for what it is, and by doing so he receives the healing he sought and much, much more. Not only is Naaman’s skin healed, but Naaman receives intimate, experiential knowledge of the one true God that converts him and changes his life forever.

This archetypal dynamic of the spiritual discipline is recapitulated in all the other readings this morning. For the psalmist, it is the spiritual discipline of continual prayer, even when God seems absent. For the Apostle Paul, it is the rigorous disciplines of the life of a persecuted, traveling evangelist. For the leper whom Jesus healed, it was supposed to be the discipline of observing the laws of the Bible. For all of these biblical characters, the spiritual disciplines given to them are pathways to the grace of new life in God’s kingdom.

This paradigm of God working through simple, monotonous, humbling disciplines was not a popular one in the biblical era, judging from the resistance of Naaman and hosts of other biblical characters who represent us. These sobering realities of the spiritual discipline remain a difficult pill to swallow today, but a pill that just might save our lives. I will limit myself to just one example and apply this archetypal story of the spiritual life to the discipline of Christian marriage.

As many of you know, after the first several months or years of marriage, depending on the couple, something changes. We learn that marriage is not what the movies taught us to expect. We learn that we are unable to re-make our partners to suit what we perceive to be our needs. The truth of who they are forces us to confront the truth of who we are and of all that has ever happened to us, and this is a very uncomfortable, even painful confrontation with the truth. This is the point at which many people decide, “Well, I just wasn’t cut out for marriage,” or, “this person is just not right for me,” or, “we have grown apart,” or, “he or she is not my soul mate.” They become angry, and they walk away, but they take themselves with them, carrying the same unresolved pain and woundedness to the next person.
Now, let me be clear: sometimes a marriage is truly dead and it needs to be declared so through divorce. And let me be even clearer: I never presume to judge any person’s marriage or the decisions that they make about their marriages. I am saying that in some cases, divorce is especially tragic, because it is precisely at this point of tension and confrontation with reality that the real work of marriage begins. This is when the sacrament of marriage really begins to function. This is when the Holy Spirit is calling people to exponential growth in the knowledge and love of God, if they stick with the discipline. It is through the spiritual discipline of marriage – the discipline of deciding I’m going to wake up next to you until we are parted by death regardless of how I feel about you or me or our marriage on any given day – it is through this kind of repetitive, monotonous, humbling discipline, that we become sacraments of God’s unconditional love to each other. Through commitment and perseverance in this discipline, we receive the grace that we sought in marriage, plus infinitely more than we could have imagined.
I could go on to describe this same dynamic in every single spiritual discipline I can think of, from contemplative prayer, to vocation, from hospitality to the stranger (including parenthood), to corporate acts of mercy. All of these are repetitive, humbling, sometimes painful Christian disciplines. In all of them, God asks us to relinquish our pre-canned notions of what they ought to be about and what they ought to feel like. Through all of them, God moves to raise us up into the full stature of Christ, to fill us with the knowledge of his love, and to bring us, ever-so-slowly, into union with him in his heavenly kingdom. Thanks be to God for the spiritual journey. Thanks be to God for those who help us persevere. Thanks be to God for the spiritual disciplines of the Christian Tradition, through which God imparts his grace to us.