Kingdom of the Caregivers (Part Two) - Reading the Heart of Need

Preached on Sunday, January 20, 2019

Scripture readings: 2 Kings 5:1-19; Matthew 9:1-13

Usually, when people ask me how I’m doing, I just say: “Fine! How are you?” Sometimes they’re already gone by then, because “how are you” can be just like saying “Howdy, catch you later!”.

Looking around near Bridgeport Bridge
Near Malakoff Diggins and North Bloomfield
California, May 2015

This winter, this past month, when people ask how I’m doing I tell them how long I’ve had my cold; and I explain how this is not because I’m getting old. It’s because I’ve always had disgustingly long colds. I go on to tell them how my roommates in college would complain about how long my cold had been going on, and how annoying I was, and why didn’t I go to the doctor?

Maybe that’s why it might be more polite, sometimes to just say “fine”?

No, when I ask you how you are, I really want to know. I Want to know how you are!

I wanted to be an astronomer, off and on, when I was a kid. I still have a small telescope that my parents bought for me when I was about ten years old. It’s been a couple of years since I’ve taken it out but I have used it, now and then. I’ve used it since I’ve lived here.

In the summer, I like to put a cot out in my back yard, with a sleeping bag, and just lie there looking up. I like looking at the stars and the planets and guessing which ones they are.

All of you are just like that!

To me, at least.

I mean, I really could just stare, and stare at you and wonder what you are and where you really are, way up there in the heavens above me.

Last Sunday I started a short series of messages in which I want to think and share what it might mean to care for the spiritual needs of others. How can we do that when we are like distant but wonderful stars and planets moving in the circles of the heavens? We’re all so mysterious.

That could be a good way of playing it safe with each other. One of the scary things my mom said to me when I was a child and I had done something wrong was this: “I can read you like a book.” That sure scared me. And school teachers claimed to have eyes in the back of their heads. Grown-ups were strange creatures who could know everything about you without your even saying a word. They know exactly what you will do next, and you can never know what they have in mind about you.

Now that I’ve more or less grown up, I don’t quite buy into that scary part anymore. I know that I can’t read you like a book. Although, I have been held responsible, before, for things that I should have known without having been told.

That’s just not in my grasp. If you tell me something important and expect me to read between the lines in order to “get it”, that will never, never happen. I am incapable of reading between the lines.

It can be a lonely thing, being a star out in the Milky Way, so far from the other stars. How can we help others in their need if we can’t read them? How can we ever hope to have our own inner needs understood and cared for if we are such mysterious creatures to each other?

We could share more. We could talk more, and be more personal.

That would help.

But that can be hard, too. And, then, what if our own hearts seem as far away from us as the stars and the planets of everyone else? What if you are too separated from your own star to know what’s really going on way out there, or way in there?

Today’s readings from the scriptures tell us about how the spiritual needs of people, including our own, can be hidden and disguised, or else How these needs can become visible, and clear, and accessible to our care, and the caring of others. Naaman the Syrian General with his leprousy; the paralyzed guy who was carried by his friends to Jesus; and the tax officer named Matthew, who because the source of our first gospel, all showed their spiritual needs that differed greatly from their apparent needs, or lack of needs.

I mean they all showed their innermost, genuine needs to Jesus. The people in the crowd hardly had a clue.

In the gospel, Jesus gave the young paralytic exactly what he came for, which was healing, but healing was not the first this he needed. The first Jesus gave him something completely different from physical healing. Jesus gave him forgiveness first.

Jesus gave Matthew something that no one else of his own people would ever dream of giving him. Most of his own people wouldn’t have given Matthew the time of day, if he asked for it. (Of course, no one had watches back then, to tell the time by.) Matthew’s real need was for forgiveness, like the paralyzed guy. Or, was it acceptance? Was it a purpose that mattered?

The young paralyzed man and his friends came to Jesus because he clearly needed more help than any human being could possibly give him. No human being could take away his paralysis. His best friends gave him the only thing they had to give by bringing him to Jesus; whatever Jesus might be.

All five young men were people of faith. They had no theologically and Biblically correct idea of who in the world Jesus was. But I think they could have said something like: “This Jesus comes from God. He comes right here to our town and he can take care of absolutely any need that anyone brings to him. Maybe he’s the king Daniel writes about, who goes to heaven on the clouds to sit on the throne with God. Who can know?”

It would be nice if the five of them knew this. But they may not have been that clear. It was only clear that Jesus was wonderful, and that he helped everyone who came to him.

Matthew had no faith. Maybe he once had a faith he had said “no” to. In any case, he had left his faith behind to work for the Roman dogs who had invaded and occupied the land that God had promised to Israel.

There’s no sign that Matthew was aware of any spiritual need at all. He as doing quite well, thank you. Matthew didn’t come to Jesus at all, let alone ask Jesus for anything.

Jesus came to him. Only Jesus saw Matthew’s real need.

Jesus came as a care giver for those in spiritual need. The healings, the miracles, the turning around of people lives, and calling them away from their old way of life (whether fisherman or taxman) was only part of the caregiving purpose of Jesus.

In the twentieth chapter of Matthew, Jesus tells us that he has a caregiving job to restore the world to God. The job of caregiver, no matter how big and great, is still always the job of a servant. “Whoever is great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave; even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Matthew 20:26-28)

Jesus came to save an enslaved world. We are born with a need to be ransomed from the slavery of the sin of the world.

The Old and New Testaments, from that point of view, both give us servants (except for Elisha’s servant) who know how to help, and (more importantly) servants who know the root of the need.

The servant girl knew where the general could be healed. The general’s servants knew that their “father” (as they call him) needed to stop playing the hero and the great man, if he wanted to be healed. The general, after his tantrum, thoughtfully listened to the wisdom of his daily caregivers.

Because their identity as servants taught them their master’s greatest need, he became a changed man. He became a servant of the God of Israel.

The prophet Elisha had, from the very first, given the general a little task for his deeper healing. Elisha knew how to do this because he was, at heart, a servant. Elisha knowingly gave, for the general’s physical healing, a silly, repetitive, boring task, that could easily humiliate him, and enrage him.

The prophet was a caregiver, too, and was wise, like any servant of Jesus, to read between the lines and see the real need, not the obvious need. Serious caregivers learn how to look deeper, and go deeper, than others can see or do.

Jesus, from the first, gave the young, paralyzed man the forgiveness of his sins.

Two things make us forget that there is a simple purpose in forgiveness and so (if that is true) then Jesus intended to give forgiveness, plain and simple. The Pharisees turn forgiveness into a distraction and a complication.

In his effort to reach out to them, Jesus asks them to use this forgiveness to learn from him more willingly. Jesus tells them that now they know what his authority is, but that’s not why he started with forgiveness in the first place.

First, I want to explain something about authority in the Bible. There are a couple words for authority and power in the New Testament language. This one is “exousia” which cannot be passed on to anyone, although it may be shared. Exousia, in this way means “substance”. It has to be part of what you’re made of. There is a substance to being a spouse or a parent that really can’t be given to you. It must be ingrained in you, in these cases, over time, and they are never finished forming.

Ok, when it’s not part of who you are by birth, it must be learned, and you never stop needing to learn learning.

The authority of forgiveness in Jesus is a very part of him. In the animal kingdom, some animals (like wolves and dogs, maybe with the exception of poodles) are essentially, substantially predators. It’s their inborn authority to be predators.

Jesus is a forgiver. It’s as essential to the nature of Jesus as the authority of love. Because God is love. Jesus shares the nature and authority of God.

It may sound as though Jesus gives us the authority to go out into the world, but it is actually, always his authority, and not our own. Jesus’ authority is not a matter like saying that “the buck stops here”. It means that when we do what we are authorized to do, we are not doing it on our own.

Jesus is doing our task with us, and through us. Every act of our authority is a partnership, and a communion with Jesus. Jesus is being the caregiver through us.

The wisdom of the Caregiving God is working through us, helping us to see what others don’t see. The wisdom of the Caregiving God, in Jesus, is helping us to go and to do what others don’t know how to go and do.

The young, paralyzed guy needed forgiveness more than anything else. This much is the same with all of us. We all need forgiveness more than anything else.

But there was something that only Jesus could see. It wasn’t that sin or shame caused the paralysis. Forgiveness was simply the greatest need in this one person’s life. In some way his life was marked by failure that made him ashamed. It overshadowed him in a way that may not be common to most of us.

Without the wisdom of the Caregiving God, in Jesus, we might miss the need in others for simple, unconditional grace and forgiveness. We are called to be servants who serve with caregiving wisdom to forgive others with the love and grace of God.

Matthew’s greatest need was to be a servant of the Kingdom of God and not of the Empire of Caesar. Matthew needed to be the traitor and thief among the first disciples called by the grace of the Lord.

Matthew needed this, because we all need a traitor and thief to be loved, and close, and a chosen servant of Jesus. It’s by Jesus caring for the need that he saw in Matthew that we know that Jesus can call us away from being thieves and traitors; and not be like Judas.

Not everyone can come, and love, and serve Jesus as an honest man or woman. We, in order to be true servants of Jesus, need to know this. We, ourselves, need a life changing call. There are people around us who need a life changing call and purpose in life. There are people whose greatest needs may be acceptance and purpose.

We might only see those who don’t deserve such a call or invitation, but the wisdom of the Caregiver God, in Jesus, will tell us otherwise. Our own hearts will be changed by that wisdom to change the lives of the spiritually failed and loveless into the inspired and beloved of Jesus.

Naaman must have had a real spiritual need lodged underneath his outstanding competence and his ability to be recognized for always coming to save the day. The caregiver Elisha healed Naaman not only by having him wash in Israel’s river, but made him, from that time on, an undercover Israelite behind enemy lines. When Naaman led the king of Syria into the royal temples, he was really worshiping the God of Israel and the Father of Jesus Christ, to come.

There are people who have the spiritual need to live with family and friends as if he or she is an undercover agent behind enemy lines. They may live in a world empty of the people of Jesus to love and understand them. We see their real need. We are ready to be there for them, to help them.

What benefits came to those whose deeper needs were met? Did they go on to live happy, fulfilled, successful lives?

Naaman had to live the rest of his life knowing that so much of what he did was fulfilling his duty to the wrong side. He had his troops, his treasures won in war, his palace and his servants who called him “father”, but he lived the rest of his life knowing that the world should not be the way it is. He lived knowing that he was of very little use where he was, and he would watch everything go on to the breaking of his heart. Naaman went on to become sad, but wise.

The forgiven and healed young man may have gone on to live the rest of his life as a normal, ordinary, independent human being. What a great gift that would be, don’t you think?

Malakoff Diggins, old hydraulic mine
Looking across that big hole in the round

If he and his family went on in living faithful to Jesus after the Cross, and the Resurrection, and Pentecost, he would have been a perfectly normal human being who would have to keep his priorities clear and hold onto Jesus, no matter how the persecuting world was moving around him, and maybe against him. He would be persecuted, but useful to his brothers and sisters in Christ, and possibly happy in spite of the fear, or persecution.

In the rest of his life, following Jesus, Matthew traveled with the good news of Jesus to a whole lot of places (Persia/Iran, the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa and especially south of Egypt) South of Egypt is said to be where he was a very successful witness for Jesus. He was so successful that he was killed there (burned alive) for his success. We just don’t know much about Matthew and how he ended.

There are other spiritual needs hidden in the stars of the souls around us. Caregiver Jesus, calls us to be caregivers with him to these and many, many others.

We can’t merely say, “How are you,” and know what to do. We don’t know where our caregiving will take those we help or where the help we receive will take us, in life. But we can learn what servants learn when we start serving the Servant-Lord Jesus.