Now Naaman was commander of the army of the king of Aram. He was a great man in the sight of his master and highly regarded, because through him the Lord had given victory to Aram. He was a valiant soldier, but he had leprosy.2 Now bands of raiders from Aram had gone out and had taken captive a young girl from Israel, and she served Naaman’s wife. 3 She said to her mistress, “If only my master would see the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy.”4 Naaman went to his master and told him what the girl from Israel had said. 5 “By all means, go,” the king of Aram replied. “I will send a letter to the king of Israel.” So Naaman left, taking with him ten talents[b] of silver, six thousand shekels[c] of gold and ten sets of clothing. 6 The letter that he took to the king of Israel read: “With this letter I am sending my servant Naaman to you so that you may cure him of his leprosy.”7 As soon as the king of Israel read the letter, he tore his robes and said, “Am I God? Can I kill and bring back to life? Why does this fellow send someone to me to be cured of his leprosy? See how he is trying to pick a quarrel with me!”8 When Elisha the man of God heard that the king of Israel had torn his robes, he sent him this message: “Why have you torn your robes? Have the man come to me and he will know that there is a prophet in Israel.”9 So Naaman went with his horses and chariots and stopped at the door of Elisha’s house. 10 Elisha sent a messenger to say to him, “Go, washyourself seven times in the Jordan, and your flesh will be restored and you will be cleansed.”11 But Naaman went away angry and said, “I thought that he would surely come out to me and stand and call on the name of the Lord his God, wave his hand over the spot and cure me of my leprosy. 12 Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? Couldn’t I wash in them and be cleansed?” So he turned and went off in a rage.13 Naaman’s servants went to him and said, “My father, if the prophet had told you to do some great thing, would you not have done it? How much more, then, when he tells you, ‘Wash and be cleansed’!” 14 So he went down and dipped himself in the Jordan seven times, as the man of God had told him, and his flesh was restored and became clean like that of a young boy. (2 Kings 5: 1-14)
Anyone can be a prophet, if by “prophet,” we mean someone who can predict the future. Isn’t that what we usually think prophecy is? Predicting the future? If so, an internet search of “fortune tellers,” “soothsayers,” “diviners,” “psychics,” palm readers and more will fill the computer screen with the names of hundreds or thousands of prophets, so-called. Not that I would recommend them and their services: it’s occult. I just googled them for research sake and got to wondering, If these folks are so good at predicting the future, then why do we have to call and make appointments? Wouldn’t they just know if we’re coming?
But we don’t have to claim any supernatural talents to have some success predicting the future. Time and experience will give us some sense for impending events and the laws of consequences. Parents of toddlers see a glass of milk toward the edge of a table, or a sharp-cornered coffee table at just the right height, and you know how that story ends.
Nor did you need a supernatural sense for the future when certain elements of the sexual revolution, and the Playboy philosophy of the 1960’s and 70’s combined with the internet today to make pornography one of the largest global businesses in the world. Nor did it take a prophet to predict that that toxic brew would lead to a hook-up culture, a growing danger of rape, sexual abuse and addictions, and tons of marital distress and divorces in their wake.
Nor did anyone need a special sixth sense 13 years ago to predict that the invasion of Iraq would be a cakewalk, but that the aftermath would be a nightmare of unintended consequences from which we have yet to awaken. All you needed to prophesy such things was time to live, observe, remember and reflect.
But predicting the future, naturally or supernaturally, is not the way in which Elisha acted like a prophet when Naaman’s chariot rolled into town.
Anyone can also be a prophet by what we call, “speaking truth to power.” Anyone can stand before a president, a monarch, or a mayor, wag their finger at them, tell them to clean up their act and add, “thus saith the Lord.” Then you’ll look and sound like a prophet. Like when the prophet Nathan stood before King David and said, “You are the man,” the man who took Uriah the Hittite’s wife to bed, got her pregnant, murdered her husband by sending him to his death in battle, and covered the whole thing up with a sham marriage. “Speaking truth to power” like Nathan did we call, “prophetic.”
But if we’re pointing out other people and their faults and failures just to feel better about ourselves by comparison, that’s more “pathetic” that “prophetic.” In that case, we’re not prophets, we’re just critics, cranks and curmudgeons.
If anyone had a right to “speak truth to power” you’d think it was the prophet Elisha when Naaman the Syrian came to town. Naaman was the warlord of the Aramean military forces that had long threatened, troubled and tortured Israel. When Naaman showed up in Elisha’s neighborhood, I suspect it was quite tempting to lay it on with the critical, accusing truth about his wicked warmongering. But the truth that Elisha spoke was not about the sins Naaman had committed, but about the healing that he needed. And with healing we come around to what it meant for Elisha to be a prophet in Samaria some 800 years before Christ. It’s what we also need to be prophets and a prophetic people today, in our very divided, angry, angsty time in post-Christian America. For God is still gifting the church and the world with prophets. Not with prophets with new words that go beyond the Word that we have already. How can we claim to have done justice by that already? Rather, God is still gifting the church with prophets who, like Elisha, can apply an ancient word to new people in new settings, but with the same ancient illnesses and the same ancient needs for healing from things like sin, shame, fear, grief and despair. These things are ever with us. They may take new forms as things change, but at heart, they remain the same maladies, we remain the same patients, our Great Physician is still the same God. The whole church itself is called to be a prophetic people, pointing the way to the waters of healing, like Elisha did.
So, first of all to be prophets and a prophetic people, do we know where and how true healing from the hand of God is to be found? Or as the hymn puts it, do we know “whence the healing stream doth flow?” That presumes that we understand everyone’s need for healing, beginning with our own. So that when a scary, sinful adversary like Naaman shows up in our neighborhood, we don’t act like the problem between us is just that we’re good and he’s bad, because he’s ignorant or ornery. Nor do we see sin just as wrongly ordered structures and arrangements in society, politics and the economy, though sin is all that, of course. Knowing “whence the healing stream doth flow” means that we understand that a terrible, contagious, disfiguring disease, the moral and spiritual equivalent of leprosy, has infected and afflicted every soul, all society, every relationship, indeed, all Creation. That doesn’t mean that we despise Creation and the human condition like some sad, sour-faced Puritanical prudes. No; it’s precisely because we are so fearfully and wonderfully made, so beautiful in God’s eyes, that anything which mars God’s image in us is so hideous.
Elisha knew “whence the healing stream doth flow,” which Naaman needed. Jesus used the same figure of flowing, healing water, in much the same way, when he said, “Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.” By that, John’s Gospel says, he meant the Holy Spirit. Knowing “whence the healing streams doth flow” also presupposes that we ourselves go regularly to wash and drink of that healing, Holy Spirit stream of grace. For our ministry and witness in this world are not about us as experts telling the ignorant and the ornery how to shape up, succeed and achieve the way we have. Rather, we are but thirsty stragglers in the desert telling other stumbling, straggling sufferers where we go to slake our thirst; we are life’s walking wounded telling other suffering sojourners where we get our wounds cleaned and bandaged. Knowing “whence the healing stream doth flow” as Elisha did is the first thing that separates the prophet from the mere critic, crank and curmudgeon.
But to know “whence the healing stream doth flow” requires, secondly, that we can recognize it when we see it. The second thing then that makes a prophet of God, rather than a mere crank, a critic or a curmudgeon, is that we can recognize the healing waters for washing sin’s defilement and disfigurement in the most immediate, accessible places of life. More often than not, these are also the least remarkable, the most ordinary and eminently overlookable places.
Naaman perceived “whence the healing stream doth flow” in the warm, weedy, murky, muddy Jordan River, a working man’s ribbon of water in which washerwomen did their laundry, and where livestock drank and cooled themselves off from the heat of high summer. Something more like the Pudding River than the Willamette or the Columbia, certainly not the place you’d step into expecting to come out cleaner than when you went in.
So of course a high-ranking general with friends in high places would prefer to bathe in his hometown waters of the Pharpar and Abana rivers. Not only were they familiar, they were upper class waters, crystal clear from their source in the mountains, full of enough water to fill the pools and baths and hand-dug canals in the city of Damascus, lined with colorful tile and rock wall gardens. That’s where I’d go to get cleaner than when I went in.
A rabbi was once asked, “Why is it that so few people find God?” And he answered, “Because we’re not looking low enough.” To paraphrase Garth Brooks, “God makes friends in low places.” Any old God can do the magnificent and majestic, the stupendous and the superlative. But ours is a God so powerful that he does almost everything with almost nothing. So often God confounds the wise by choosing and using the foolish; he bypasses the proud and the powerful by using what is humble and weak, and in reach of all, so that we know that the power of healing is his, not ours.
Prophets have a spiritually binocular vision: with one eye of the spirit they see and are seized by the infinite majesty and might of Almighty God. With the other eye of the spirit they see and are seized by the humility and the availability of God in all places, to all people, whether it’s a high-ranking general leading a mighty army or a peasant woman beating laundry against streamside rocks. For they both end up standing as equals in the same river of divine healing waters. Prophets can see, first, “whence the healing waters flow” and secondly, they can see them in all the low places immediately at hand.
But prophets must do a third thing in order to be prophetic, rather than just perceptive: they must be able to call us to bring all of ourselves, totally, body, soul and spirit, to immerse ourselves in over our heads in these healing waters of Holy Spirit grace. It’s not enough for them to inform us about the presence of these healing waters of grace right under our noses. It’s not enough just to point them out. That would make them educators, but not prophets. Nor is it enough to interest us so that we’re satisfied just to come like spiritual tourists and take a look, maybe stick a toe in the water and try it out, to say we’ve been there, done that, but otherwise, still preserve our dignity and our dryness. No, prophets are they who call us and inspire us to immerse ourselves totally in God’s Holy Spirit waters of healing grace, and for keeps. For there’s no healing of our debilitating, disfiguring disease of sin by halves. We’re either all in, or we’re not.
That’s probably why God had Elisha tell Naaman to immerse himself seven times in the muddy, murky Jordan River. Seven is the biblical number for fullness, completeness and perfection. Seven is a way of saying, “Go all the way, come what may, just like God did for you, or go home; don’t bother.”
The first time into the river, for Naaman, would be a trial run (Nope, still leprous). The second time would be a matter of obedience (still no evidence of healing); the third time, an inconvenience (I’m all wet, and maybe the prophet is, too); the fourth time an embarrassment as the crowds gather to watch this crazy man marching in and out of the water (and still no healing); the fifth time, no healing yet, but the patient is turning red for all the effort, the sunburn, and the public humiliation as the witnesses grow more numerous and more humorous; the sixth time, (might as well finish the job; can’t say I didn’t do my part); the seventh time in (Well, that prophet made a monkey out of me!) and then back out…… Oh. My. Lord. I haven’t looked like this since I was ten…..I’m healed!
That’s the difference between a true prophet of God and someone who just wants to be popular and prosperous in the religion business: true prophets call us to be all in. The prophet calls us to respond to God’s call on God’s total terms, not our own tentative, hesitant, partial ones. God plays for very high stakes: all or nothing. That explains the popularity of the book by Cardinal Robert Sarah of Guinea, West Africa. The title says it all, “God Or Nothing.” He should know because of all that he and the church suffered during the years of Guinea’s single party Marxist dictatorship.
The fourth thing that distinguishes a true prophet of God from a fortune-teller, an educator, a critic, a crank or a curmudgeon, is courage. Can you tell the truth and take the heat, and speak the word of God without fear or favoritism, to an enemy general as well as to your favorite fans, friends and followers? Not only that, but can you face up to the leprosy-like defilement and disfiguration of sin in human souls and society and do so with compassion, rather than condemnation? To extend your arms to the unlovely and the unlovable for an embrace, rather than just pointing fingers at them? With love for the defiled and disfigured, rather than fear? Because you know you really, finally, aren’t any better off yourself? Even when a fearsome enemy like General Naaman rolls into town in his chariot, can you care more about his healing than about his come-uppance?
That takes not only a theoretical commitment to love and non-violence, it takes courage, because some sort of blowback from your family and friends, for helping the enemy, is a safe bet. You don’t have to be a prophet to see that coming. Nor does the prophet know for sure that, once healed, your enemy won’t take advantage of that healing to betray you. Read the next few chapters in 2 Kings and you’ll see that the Arameans were back, multiple times, and not to say thank you. But God is who and what the prophet seeks, and not just a better way to win friends, influence others and make your dreams and wishes come true in this world. That’s why true prophets need courage, the courage to be truthful and compassionate to all, friend and foe.
The fifth thing that distinguishes a true prophet of God from a fortune-teller, a teacher, a critic or a merchant of the latest religious tastes and sensibilities is that they know that their ministry is not about themselves; it’s about God. So they seek to proclaim the Word of the Lord without getting in the way of God’s Word. They know they must earn trust in order to be heard, but they’re not seeking popularity nor approval for themselves. That makes prophets so different from the flavor-of-the-month religious celebrities who are popular on religious broadcasting, daytime TV talk shows, in the New York Times list of best-selling authors and books, who get invited to speak at colleges or seminaries, or to pray or give a benediction at a presidential inauguration or the christening of a new submarine, and then are soon forgotten in favor of the next new Christian celebrity and media favorite, to be remembered only when you see their books at a flea market or in a garage sale.
A true prophet may get even less exposure and celebrity than that. Prophets go unrecognized and overlooked all the time. But that’s okay; celebrity is not what he or she is after. More like, “woe to me if I do not preach the gospel,” said the Apostle Paul. Jeremiah likened the Word of God to a fire pent up in his body and his bones, which, when locked up, consumed him, but which, when released, consoled him. But again, it wasn’t about him. The prophetic ministry is all about God.
Maybe that’s why Elisha did not come out to greet Naaman personally, and heal him by waving his hands over his afflicted body, as Naaman expected. Otherwise, Naaman might have thought that Elisha himself effected the healing. He may even have mistaken Elisha for the god who did the healing. That’s how pagan and polytheistic cultures tend to think of healers and healings: that they are different beings higher up than the rest of us on some ladder of divinity between us earthly mortals and heavenly deities, that they are gods or semi-gods in contrast to the rest of us mere mortals.
But Elisha wanted Naaman to know that the God who healed him is not to be measured on the scale of us mortals. This infinitely superior God on a scale of his own creates and recreates by means of his word. This God need only speak, and it is. That makes us all, washerwomen and generals, equal before and below this Supreme God. This God encounters us in his Word, and again as we seek to obey his word. So Elisha gave the Word of the Lord in the form of a command, and then he left Naaman to obey it. Or not. And there, in the warm, weedy, murky, muddy working class waters of the Jordan River, Naaman meet God. Then no one could confuse the spokesman of God’s Word for God himself. That care, and that zeal to see that all honor goes to God and to God alone is what distinguishes the true prophet from a religious publicity hound.
As I have described and distinguished prophets from cranks, critics, publicity hounds, fortune tellers and merchants of the latest religious fad and fashion, so have I described Jesus Christ, our teacher, Lord and Savior. So have I described the church of Jesus Christ, at least, as Jesus calls and conceives her to be, a prophetic people who are willing to give themselves away and even die so that a sin-disfigured world might find healing in the waters of God’s grace.
And so have I described David and Ericka Gingerich. They have been prophets in our midst by who and how they are, what they have said and done among us, with us and for us. Their example of work and word, as servants, teachers, preachers and parents among us I would call “prophetic.” So is their willingness to follow God’s call to more study at Eastern Mennonite Seminary, and to explore whatever call to ministry comes next. And now we at Zion Mennonite Church, their friends and families, who have been so blessed by their character, their conduct and their ministries, must rise to the occasion and be prophetic ourselves, by releasing them and sharing them with the wider world and God’s global church, and with our blessing. To be prophetic, a church must be willing to overcome that very human tendency that wants to get everything and everyone into their proper place, like the dishes in Grandma’s china hutch, and keep them there. Instead, a prophetic church is willing to give its leaders, servants and members away for causes greater than its own survival and stability: namely, God’s Reign, God’s honor, and the healing of a sin-sick world. Even if we have to do so with tears in our eyes and a catch in the throat. Even if the people we are sending, releasing and blessing are our precious prophets, who, again:1) know by experience “whence God’s healing stream doth flow;” 2) who recognize these waters in the most humble and accessible places within us and among us; 3) who can call us, graciously, winsomely, to immerse ourselves totally, without reservation, into the healing stream of God’s grace so that we’re all in, and on God’s terms; 4) who have the courage to do so even if it is at odds with the spirit of the age that they are in; and 5) who can do so in such ways that we see God, and not them, because they are most concerned about God’s reign, and God’s honor, and not their own, and with the healing of the world.
In such ways any saint can be a prophet, too. And we can be a prophetic people.