En el nombre del unico Dios, santo y vivo. In the name of the one, holy, and living God. Amen.
Our readings today highlight how essential humility is for us as followers of Jesus. We begin with one of my favorite OT stories, the healing of Naaman.
Naaman is a privileged and powerful military commander who has leprosy, a disease that slowly eats away at a person. When the leprosy progresses, he’ll lose his position of power because in those days, a person with leprosy was exiled in order to keep the disease from spreading. Leprosy was thought to be punishment for sin, so not only were they exiled, they were also shamed and blamed.
Hearing about Naaman’s condition, a young Israelite slave girl (notice the vulnerability in each of those descriptors: young, Jewish, slave, female) who served Naaman’s wife offers some advice: Why doesn’t Naaman go see the prophet of God in Samaria? He could cure him.
Naaman is highly insulted and angry. ‘That’s it? I thought the prophet and his God would put on a great show of healing magic because – well, it’s me! And why would I go to the Jordan River when we have all the best rivers in Aram.
It isn’t until Naaman humbles himself that he’s healed. In that moment, power is redefined for all who read this story and have ears to hear it.
The unnamed slave girl in this story exemplifies what Jesus is teaching his followers about being laborers for God’s harvest. She notices Naaman’s weakness and tends to him. His physical weakness is the skin condition, but his real weakness is spiritual: his attachment to having and wielding earthly, coercive power.
There are plenty of Naamans among us today. There always have been and probably always will be.
It’s important to note that the unnamed slave girl didn’t need to tend to Naaman. She could have let his disease progress. It’s likely that his downfall would have led to her freedom. But she was a laborer in God’s harvest, one in which every fruit, every person is worth serving.
In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus is sending 70 followers into the harvest, but first he tells them to pray for themselves: “…ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” The reason is, prayer is where we learn and practice humility. It’s where we surrender ourselves and our wills to the will of God.
Praying before they went would help the 70 remember that it’s God’s harvest, not theirs. God has done the work: planting the seeds, growing them in the womb of the earth in secret, nourishing them, and bringing them to ripeness, ready for harvesting.
They are sent two by two - because we don’t do the work of God alone. We also don’t carry expensive gifts as Naaman did. We carry only the peace of Christ, which unleashes God’s powerful, redeeming love into the world.
Jesus sent the 70 to share his peace with everyone they meet – everyone, that is, who will receive it - because some won’t. When that happens, Jesus tells them to shake it off, as Taylor Swift would say, and walk away, allowing God to work that reconciliation another way at another time. What happens to those who refuse Christ’s peace is God’s business, not theirs, but do tell them, Jesus says, that the kingdom of God has come near to them.
Followers of Jesus must never be tempted to violence, coercion, or contempt. We must, instead, always remain open to the grace of the Holy Spirit, because by that grace we will not only remain devoted to God, but our unity and tenderness for one another, even those who challenge us, will be complete, and in that completeness God’s love restores them.
When they returned, the 70 were excited to tell Jesus about what happened: “In your name even the demons submit to us!” When we hear that, we often think of otherworldly beings who tempt, damage, or possess humans. But demons are also humans who are fierce and skilled in making their evil, selfish, destructive plans succeed – usually by coercive means.
Even these demons submitted to the peace of Christ brought by the 70 followers. In response, Jesus cautions them to remember that it is the unity of their spirits with God’s Spirit and their wills with the will of God, they should celebrate, not a newfound power over anyone or anything. That power belongs to God alone.
Jesus calls them wolves and instructs the 70 to go out like lambs among those wolves. We don’t need to be powerful. We need to be humble, remembering that any power we carry into the world belongs to the Lord of the harvest, and God’s power doesn’t destroy – it transforms, reconciles, and re-creates. Therefore, we don’t grow weary in doing what is right, and whenever we have the opportunity, we work for the good of all. “All, all, all, all, all” as Archbishop Desmond Tutu said.
Being lambs among wolves feels rather appropriate right now, doesn’t it? When modern day demons are working to destroy the vulnerable among us, we want to fight back, by pushing against their power with our own, but that will get us nowhere. We need to be like the 70 Jesus sent out carrying nothing but his peace. The demons submitted then, and they will submit now.
Do we trust that?
Do we trust that?
Our task right now is to learn and practice humility together. In order to do that, we need to consider how we understand humility. Humility comes from the Latin word humus which means grounded… from the earth. When we are humble, we are grounded in our faith and self-aware.
Humility is not self-deprecating - quite the opposite. Humility is an appreciation of our gifts and talents in relationship to God by whose grace we have them. In humility, we remember that we are from the earth, created and sent by God with a divine purpose to complete during our time on earth.
And what is that purpose? To be devoted to God with our whole heart, and united to one another with pure affection, bearing one another’s burdens with gentleness, and tirelessly co-creating a world where all of God’s beloveds know they are valued and will be cared for. A world where everyone’s sackcloth is turned into joy.
Then we, the ones God is sending in our time, will praise God without ceasing, giving thanks forever for God’s grace, mercy, love, and faith in us to serve. Amen.
