Sermon: Elishas’s lepers (2Kgs 7)

Looking back over the years I think the Leprosy Mission was an important part of my Christian formation. In my teens, a very long time ago now, it taught me to identify with people on the other side of the world, who were suffering from things from which I, fortunately, was free; and it encouraged me to understand that for God’s people the suffering of all these folk in distant lands is connected with my life. I cannot walk by on the other side of the world; because the God to whom I pray about my little troubles is at the same time present to the great sufferings of his children across the whole of creation. When I am jogging his arm he is grieving over the cry of a mother carrying two of her children to the refugee camp, one just alive and one already dead. Being God, that’s how he lives, and he can cope with it, and he doesn’t love me any the less because I am rich and my concerns are trivial, but he does expect me to see who else is jogging his arm, and to know that we are brothers and sisters, and their lives are connected to mine, in him.

So the Leprosy Mission is one of a whole range of charities and missions which struggle to bring relief to people across the world, but it is an old friend, and it has introduced me to a whole gang of friends, from Christian Aid and Oxfam to the UN. For many years now we have given 10% of our household income to God, 5% to the Church but another 5% to various agencies which carry out God’s loving work in the neediest parts of the world. If I were a better disciple I would have faith to give more, as Jesus did, but it is a start, and it is a joy to be able to do something. Indeed the Leprosy Mission is one of those charities to which this Cathedral gives as part of our 10% charity giving to support the work of God. Over 130 years the Leprosy Mission has been providing a cure, and trying to address the underlying causes, preventing disability and restoring dignity to people and communities affected by leprosy around the world. Along with other agencies working in this area they have made heart-warming progress. According to the World Health Organisation there was a reduction over the ten years from 1985 to 1995 from 5.2 million cases to 0.8 million cases, now down to just over 200k cases, though there are new infections all the time.

The second Book of Kings, chapters 5-7, is full of leprosy. We all know and love the exquisite story of Naaman the Commander in Chief, who was cured of his leprosy through Elisha the prophet, but not without the patient and loving help of his wife’s maid and his own servants. And as a tailpiece to that story, Elisha’s servant thought he would secretly accept for himself the thank-you gifts which Elisha had turned down, but he was punished, in Elisha’s words thus: “the leprosy of Naaman shall cling to you, and to your descendants”. And one chapter later we come to today’s reading, about the four lepers at the city gate. Some traditional teaching suggests that these four may be Elisha’s servant and the servant’s three sons, but there is nothing in the text to support that. I prefer to think of them as ordinary, anonymous lepers who suddenly found themselves in a starring role. It should give hope to all of us.

Today’s story is part of a whole string of wonderful legends about Elisha the prophet and the exercise of divine power, and there is a lot we could say about the context, but this morning I want to use this story to reflect a bit on the nature of belonging to a community. Biblical lepers are pushed to the edges of the community. Our four lepers are sitting outside the city gates. (They clearly belong to their community but as outsiders.) The city has been under siege and famine has taken hold both in the city and on these lepers. They are outcasts but still share the city’s fate. Listen to the hopelessness of their case: “Why should we sit here until we die? If we say ‘let us enter the city’ the famine is in the city, and we shall die there; but if we sit here we shall also die. Let us desert to the Aramean camp; if they spare our lives we shall live; if they kill us, we shall but die.” The bonds that tie them to their own community have been loosened through exclusion and now self-preservation snaps them. But it does not remove the bond that keeps them together as a group of lepers. They remain a gang.

When they come to the enemy camp, no doubt preparing their pleas for mercy, they find the camp abandoned, and they take hold of the opportunity with both hands on several occasions. The text says, “they ate and drank, carried off silver, gold and clothing, and went and hid them. Then they came back, entered another tent, carried off things from it, and went and hid them.” We can smile. It is easy to understand their actions. But reading this passage one remembers those scenes of rioting in English cities. No doubt there was a lot of very bad, criminal behaviour in the riots from people intent on theft and disorder, but there is evidence that there were also others caught up in the temptation to take what was on offer when it looked as if there was nothing to stop them, and everyone else was doing it. But trashing the neighbourhood, we were told, showed that those concerned had become alienated from it, and felt no sense of belonging, inclusion or ownership. Gang against community.

It is very interesting to note how our four lepers came to their senses. They start to register three things; a bad conscience, a memory of their own community and the knowledge that they will be found out. The text says, “They said to one another, ‘What we are doing is wrong. This is a day of good news; if we are silent and wait until the morning light, we will be found guilty; therefore, let us go and tell the King’s household.’” We could spend a long time unpacking the philosophical ethics here but it is clear that their sense of belonging to their community re-surfaces in a big way. Having decided that their city held no hope for them and having gone over to the enemy camp, it would have been possible for them to have built a business for themselves out of this opportunity according to the very best traditions of capitalism (if I may read back into history). But their reflex shows that though they had walked away from their city out of hunger, they had never left it as their home. Outcasts or not, this is where they belonged and these were their people. They recognised this as a day of good news not just for themselves but for their community, and the morality and the guilt here are connected with that sense of behaving properly towards their own people.

Our country, like much of the developed world just now, is anxious about prosperity, about how to reduce our debts and live sustainably, and yet to stimulate the growth which yields better living standards and the prospect of good healthcare and support for those in need. The debate is becoming more acute in America as an election looms, and one would-be candidate is the governor of Texas, Rick Perry. He has built a minor Thatcherite miracle in Texas, most obviously (not in a town called Alice but) in a town called Alliance. In recent times half the jobs created in America have been in Texas, through having a low tax, low regulation, low service economy. Business people can invest knowing that government will not interfere or tax their profits. It is good for the rich and for those who get the jobs, but it is not a good place to be poor, because the state supplies only limited services. There is a genuine economic dilemma here about wealth creation, but what connected this American story, in my mind, with the second book of Kings, is the morality of personal prosperity versus the well-being of the whole community. For the Chief Exec of the Dallas Federal Reserve said, without a shred of guilt, “those services that are doled out in modern societies to a greater or lesser degree don’t exist much here. We also have an education system that is severely challenged. The nice thing about the US is that you don’t have to be here – you can vote with your feet, you can go somewhere else.”

Prosperity has its blessings, but when it is exclusive the price may be too high. Our four lepers were richer men than the Governor of Texas, because they understood deep in their outcast bones that they belonged with their community and that good news for the four of them was good news for the whole community.

And so we end where we began, with the Leprosy Mission, and with all those charities and agencies through which the lives of the poor and needy around the world are tied to our lives. The God whose attention we gain in our prayers is already attending to the need and the joys and the experience of our brothers and sisters around the globe. As we meet him we meet them: we can’t meet him without them. And for all of us, for his whole human family, he has good news.