Preached on the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 9C), July 6, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.
2 Kings 5:1-14
Psalm 30
Galatians 6:1-16
Luke 10:1-11, 16-20
Reap What You Sow, by Ernesto Ybarra
Every person contains multitudes. This is something of an axiom in current psychological circles. If you have a therapist, I imagine they’ve said to you at least once, “Which part of you thinks that?”. Your therapist is likely to ask this when you say something self-deprecating, or discouraging, or anxious.
Our vernacular language carries this belief about human nature — that we contain multitudes: “Part of me wants to get married,” you might say to yourself; “but another part of me wants to wait and see.” Each of us is an individual, yet there are smaller selves within each of us.
Some of our psychological “parts” are quite young, even pre-verbal. When something upsetting happens, one of our inner selves is triggered, urging us to fight, flee, freeze, or fawn. (“Fawn” is the impulse to charm or flatter someone you perceive to be dangerous.) When one of our internal parts is triggered, it’s usually because we experienced a similar trauma when we were much younger, and the current stressor reminds us of that old wound. The body remembers. A body part remembers.
But the modern idea of psychological parts has ancient parallels. Often when we encounter a troubled person in holy scripture, we’re told that they have “demons,” often plural. What is a “demon,” really, if not a part or a dimension of the self that is upset, or triggered? The healing in these stories is not a medical procedure as much as a form of psychotherapeutic relief: the triggered psychological part is soothed, and gently brought back into a relaxed state.
Centuries ago or just this morning, that process can be quite simple and straightforward, even though many of us experience persistent and recurring emotional distress. Sometimes, when I am under great stress, it helps to simply find a quiet room, sit in a chair, and say to myself — out loud — “Sweetheart, what is it? What’s wrong?”. I encourage the distressed part of myself to let me know what is upsetting them. I normalize, and validate, their subjective experience. I begin to breathe more easily. I begin to regulate my feelings, and integrate them once again with my thoughts.
But it’s always much easier to do this when we have help. One of the great atrocities of this past week is the provision in the omnibus budget bill, now signed into law, that deprives seventeen million people of Medicaid — bare-bones, shoe-string health insurance for those who are disabled, sick, or low-income — foreclosing their chance to receive even basic mental health care. Physical illnesses will go untreated, but mental and emotional distress will also proliferate across our troubled land, particularly in this time of massive, roiling, global distress. Fewer and fewer people will receive the help we all need simply to make it through the day.
Every person contains multitudes, but in these basic existential matters we are all quite simple, and quite similar. When we are in distress, we often just need a helping hand. We need someone to recognize our humanity, and reach out to us with compassion. That’s really it. None of us needs a miracle cure, or a so-called “Cadillac” insurance plan that meets our every conceivable need. But we all need help, to soothe the anxious and sad parts within us; to apply balm to our chapped skin; to turn the pillow just so and remain with us through the long night.
With all of this in mind, I now return your attention to the story of Naaman, an army commander, a man of war, a fearsome warrior. Naaman is in distress, in more than one way. Outwardly and most obviously, he suffers a skin disease, which in his time and place means that he is ritually unclean: he will not be allowed to enter the Temple. Skin ailments are a source of profound social shame.
But, just like you and me, Naaman contains multitudes. He harbors a skin disease, but he is also afflicted with pride, with stuffy and pompous self-confidence: maybe this pride, this inflated sense of self, was just one of his psychological parts, coping with a nagging sense of inferiority by whispering in Naaman’s ear that he is too good for common treatments, too good for medicines pedalled by some lower-class prophet or healer. In our day, Naaman would go to Swedish Hospital and demand a hospital room of his own, and the best specialists to review his case and administer state-of-the-art treatments.
And so Naaman balks after a common servant girl suggests he consult the prophet Elisha, and Elisha prescribes seven dips in the little, unremarkable River Jordan. There would be no theatrics, no dramatic invocation of the power of a fearsome god, no waving of the hands and complicated chants above the leprous wounds. Just a series of dips in a river at the edge of the map.
But the good news for Naaman is that one or more of his internal parts manages to listen to the good counsel of his servants, who suggest that he submit to the humble — even humiliating — treatment, since he most likely would have endured a much more difficult treatment, had it been prescribed. “Fine,” Naaman seems to say, and he goes ahead and gets it over with. And he is healed.
But this is where things get interesting, and to fully understand the scene, we need to dip into the Hebrew language of the passage. Let’s go back a bit in the story, to the part where a young girl – a slave girl – steps in to suggest the treatment. In Hebrew, the term for “young girl” in the text is “Na’arah qetannah.” Na’arah qetannah. Nothing to see here, just yet. But then, later on, when the storyteller announces that Naaman has been healed, the text says that his skin was healed “like the flesh of a little child.” In Hebrew, the phrase “like the flesh of a little child” is “Kibsar na’ar qaton.” Na’ar qaton. That is, the same words that we heard for “young girl,” just in their masculine form.
What does this mean? It means that Naaman’s healing goes much deeper than the curing of his skin disease. The Hebrew Bible scholar Stephen Cook explains it this way. Dr. Cook says, “Naaman hasn’t just been healed. He [has] become humble, open. He’s been made like [the young slave girl]. The man of war becomes like a child. That’s not just about skin; it’s about the heart.” Naaman’s skin is restored, and the Hebrew word for ‘restored’ here is shoob – a verb that means not only restoration, but also turning, or returning – as Dr. Cook says, “a turning of the heart, not just the body.”
In our contemporary psychological terms, Naaman becomes emotionally regulated. His inner multitudes come back into balance. Some part of him was in distress, which expressed itself not only in a skin ailment but (even more powerfully) in his sour, self-righteous attitude. As the story opens, Naaman is on the extreme opposite end of the story from the young slave girl: he has all the privileges, she has none, or none but one: she can still speak, and shape events with her voice. But when Naaman goes through his healing experience, the two characters trade places. He submits humbly to a treatment – a common treatment, a humble ritual that the poorest, dustiest nomad in the land is entitled to perform – and he gets back in touch with his humbler self, his younger self, his more vulnerable self.
And we, you and I, all of us gathered here, we in turn are called to this same humility, this same vulnerability. We follow one who sends his followers into ministry with “no purse, no bag, no sandals.” They are utterly vulnerable to the hospitality – or lack thereof – of the hosts they encounter on their journey. This person at the center of our faith, Jesus of Nazareth, dies the humiliating death of a common criminal. And yet he rises, and his followers rise, and we rise, full of life and health and strength, like Naaman who emerges from the River Jordan with skin kibsar na’ar qeton, skin “like the flesh of a little child.”
So much is dreadful right now. And so many of the awful atrocities in this country are being committed by self-proclaimed Christians, if you can believe it, people who somehow have gleaned lessons from holy scripture that are entirely at odds with the Good News we actually find there. If we want to respond like mighty warriors, that would be understandable. If we want to rise up like battle-tested soldiers with an inflated view of ourselves, that would make sense.
But our Savior calls us to bathe in baptismal waters, waters that soothe our anxious inner selves, steady our angry hearts, and send us in mission like lambs in the midst of wolves. In this hard and humbling work, our vulnerability is our sword; our love for one another, and for the stranger, is our shield. Armed not with weapons of war but wearing tender armor kibsar na’ar qeton, we go forth from here as healers, helpers, allies, and friends of those in deepest need, those in dreadful peril.