July 3, 2022

Pentecost 4

“It was the middle of November when the strange man came to the village,” writes Dorothy Sayers in her short mystery, “The Incredible Elopement of Lord Peter Wimsey.” “Thin, pale, and silent, with his great black hood flapping about his face, he was surrounded with an atmosphere of mystery from the start.” A young woman named Martha decides to pay him a visit. She’s serving as a maid and a nurse to an aristocratic Englishwoman who’s been brought to live in this remote village in the Spanish Pyrenees by her husband. The woman seems to be bewitched, under the power of a spell, and Martha thinks that perhaps this strange man is a wizard or a magician who can break it. When she enters his house, Martha encounters a strange scene: “An aromatic steam began to rise from the cauldron… Then, a faint music, that seemed to roll in from leagues away. The flame flickered and dropped… Then, out of the darkness, a strange voice chanted in an unearthly tongue that sobbed and thundered… she saw his pale lips move and presently he spoke, in a deep, husky tone that vibrated solemnly in the dim room:

О̄ pepon ei men gar polemon peri tonde fugonte,aiei dē melloimen agērо̄ t’ athanatо̄ te…ὦ πέπον εἰ μὲν γὰρ πόλεμον περὶ τόνδε φυγόντεαἰεὶ δὴ μέλλοιμεν ἀγήρω τ᾽ ἀθανάτω τε…” (1)

And so on. Martha needs no further evidence. This man is a mighty wizard. This man can break the spell.

But this man is, the reader knows, no wizard, no magician. He’s the English amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey. The unearthly sights and sounds are simply artifacts of chemistry and lighting; his incantation is nothing but a fragment of the Homeric Iliad he had memorized in school, albeit rendered quite dramatically. The woman has not been bewitched. She’s being drugged by her terrible husband. Lord Peter needs access to the house to help her to escape, and the magic is all a front to convince the superstitious locals to let him help.

Peter Wimsey understands that human beings sometimes prefer a flashy cure to a simple one. The prophet Elisha could have told you the same thing. The story alternates between the grandiosity of the important kings and generals in the story, and the simplicity of the humble and lowly, the servants and the prophet. Naaman is the “commander of the army of the king of Aram,” a “great man” who’s “in high favor” with the king, a “mighty warrior” (2 Kings 5:1). But he doesn’t know the cure for his disease. Instead, it’s a “young girl” who points the way, an enslaved girl, kidnapped from the land of Israel on an Aramaean raid. There’s a prophet in my old hometown who could probably help! Why don’t you go see (5:2-3)? But this is too simple. Naaman needs something more grand. So he consults with the king of Aram, who sends him to the king of Israel with a diplomatic letter in hand, and ten talents of silver, and six thousand shekels of gold, and a few nice suits to boot (5:5). And the king of Israel is full of drama. “Am I God, to give life or death?” The king of Aram is mocking me—I’m sure! (5:7) But Elisha is calm: “Why have you torn your clothes? Let him come to me” (5:8). So Naaman comes. And Elisha’s answer is simple: “Go wash in the Jordan seven times” (5:10).

You can imagine Naaman’s face. …That’s it? “I thought for me,” Naaman says, “he would surely come out, and stand and call on the name of the Lord his God, and would wave his hand over the spot, and cure the leprosy!” (5:11) Naaman wants the Lord Peter Wimsey treatment. He wants the bubbling cauldron and the flickering lights and the incantation in a strange and foreign tongue. He does not want a bath. It’s insultingly simple. But again, his servants carefully approach: If he gave you something hard to do, wouldn’t you do it with gusto? So why not do it all the more when all he said was, ‘Wash, and be clean?’” (5:13) And, finally wising up, he does what they say. And it works. 

The truth is so much simpler than he expects. That doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

I sometimes worry that we approach the Christian faith like Naaman, not Elisha: as a tangle of inscrutable mysteries, not a simple truth. And there’s some virtue in this. It’s good to be thoughtful and careful. It’s good to approach God with humility about our own understanding of the depths of God’s nature, to appreciate nuance rather than oversimplification. But I sometimes worry that our yearning for complexity and subtlety and depth can distract us, like Naaman, from the simple truths.

Jesus has plenty to say that’s enigmatic, to be sure. But at the heart of the gospel, there is a simple truth: “The kingdom of God has come near” (Luke 10:9, 11).

Jesus sends his followers out to thirty-five towns in pairs, and gives them their instructions: Go where I am sending you. Greet no one on the road. Whatever house you enter, first say, “Peace to this house!” (10:3-4) If they welcome you, stay with them. Eat what they give you. Cure the sick. And say to them: “The kingdom of God has come near” (10:8-9). If they don’t welcome you, get out of town. Wipe off even the dust of their roads from your feet, and ritually announce that that’s what you’re doing. But nevertheless proclaim the same, simple message: “The kingdom of God has come near” (10:11).

It’s a truth that’s almost too simple for us to bear. We want to be the Naamans of our lives: we want to be the mighty commanders, competent and in control and held in high regard. At the very least, we want there to be something we can do: some ritual we can enact, some prayer we can say, some good work we can perform that will heal us or save us, improve our lives or change our world. 

But the kingdom of God is not conjured with a magic spell. We don’t wave our hands or invoke the mighty name of our God. In Jesus, the kingdom of God has come near, and the apostles’ words are not an offer to us to seize the throne. They are an invitation to turn aside and enter into that kingdom as Naaman steps into the river: not as mighty and powerful people in control of our own destinies, but as people who recognize that we need to be healed, that our nation needs to be healed, that our world needs to be healed.

There are moments, throughout life, when you can feel how near the kingdom of God really is. I don't know if you've ever had an experience like this. I did just this week. 

I live and serve in a neighborhood that is profoundly divided. Occupying a single square mile, geographically isolated from the rest of the city of Boston, Charlestown sometimes feels like a small-town community packed together at an urban density. But within our one, small, neighborhood, there are distinct communities that rarely intersect: the Irish-American working-class “Townie” population who’ve lived in the neighborhood for generations, the mostly-white gentrifying “Toonies” who have moved in in waves, and the residents of the largest public-housing development in New England, a diverse community made up mostly of people of color. Charlestown has a sadly well-earned reputation for racial segregation and violence; while the neighborhood overall has changed over time, on a block-by-block level it remains so sharply segregated you can see it on a map. 

So I was moved, as I sat in a room at the Museum of Science this week to celebrate the 10th anniversary of a local youth group, to see the community that they’ve built. This youth group originated as a public-health effort—a social-marketing campaign about the dangers of prescription drug misuse. It’s developed over time into a broader effort to build a safer and healthier community, and it’s one of the few communities I’ve encountered that really does unite our neighborhood: a group of young people of color, who mostly live in the Bunker Hill development, supported by Townies who've been part of the recovery community for years, supported by a network of yuppie social workers and doctors. To hear their testimonies of the power those relationships had had in their lives and to hear their dreams for our community’s future felt like someone had walked across the neighborhood to knock on my door with the simple message: “Peace to this house.”

For me, it was a glimpse of the kingdom of God, a vision of what the world would be if we accepted God’s reign, if we turned and entered that kingdom, a place in which—as our collect this morning said—"O God, you have taught us to keep all your commandments by loving you and our neighbor.”

And in this neighborhood, of all places, loving our “neighbors” is not a metaphorical thing. It is what it means to be a community. It is what is to be Christian.

It’s not complicated. It’s not impressive. It’s not that hard. Or rather: It’s very, very hard. But it’s simple nevertheless. So I wonder what it means for the kingdom of God to be near to your neighborhood. I wonder what it means for your community to be healed. I wonder what it would take to turn aside and step into that river, to enter into that kingdom love.

1. “The Incredible Elopement of Lord Peter Wimsey,” in Dorothy L. Sayers, Lord Peter (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 337–339.