Sermons
November 1, 2026 (Proper 26)
Quackery
2 Kings 5:1-15a
One episode of the long-running British archaeology show Time Team was focused on locating the site of a medieval leper hospital. They had some written sources, maps and such, that showed the hospital’s cemetery at one particular spot; but there were others indicating it was in a different place.
When they started digging, they brought up several skeletons, and they took one of the skulls for facial reconstruction. They didn’t always do this with skulls they found, but in this case it would be very helpful. Leprosy damages not just soft tissue but bone, so by rebuilding the face that would have been on that skull they would be able to tell if this person had been a leper or not.
So over the course of the weekend when the episode was filmed, in addition to the archaeologists digging to find the foundations of the hospital’s buildings, they had an expert working on that face. It did turn out at the end that the woman had in fact suffered from leprosy, or as we call it in modern times, Hansen’s Disease.
Nowadays it’s quite rare, at least in the developed world, for someone to turn up with Hansen’s Disease; and there are effective treatments available. But up until the 20th century, people feared leprosy, possibly more than any other disease. And there were rules about where people with leprosy could go, what they could do, what contact they could have with other people.
Many of those rules found their way into the Bible.
There are a couple things to know about leprosy and what the Bible says regarding it. First, I have heard that something like 95% of humanity is immune to Hansen’s Disease, or leprosy.
And second, not everything the Bible calls “leprosy” is actually leprosy. Any discoloration of not just skin but also fabric and even the walls of your home, could be called “leprous.”
Vitiligo—a condition in which the skin gradually loses its pigment—was leprosy, in the eyes of the Bible. It isn’t dangerous and isn’t contagious, but the rules about leprosy in the Bible applied to people with vitiligo as well.
Many people, as we age, find ourselves with dark spots developing on our skin, mainly due to sun exposure. Again, not dangerous, not contagious, but possibly lumped in with leprosy in the eyes of Torah.
Psoriasis or eczema, which are uncomfortable and not especially attractive, but not catching, might also have been considered leprosy.
And if your wall or your fabric or your shower stall had mildew, that was considered to be leprosy. If you cleaned it and it went away, the priest could come and declare it clean, just as with a person who had had one of the conditions called leprosy that had cleared up could go to the priest and be declared clean.
The main reason leprosy was so feared in the ancient world is that nobody knew what caused it, its effects were rather frightening,[1] and people therefore wanted to keep their distance from lepers.
It wasn’t just the Israelites who had to deal with lepers, either; and I imagine most cultures had some rules about how to handle them, whether and how they needed to be isolated, how to integrate them back into society if their conditions cleared up, and so on. We know this because in today’s reading, we have an Aramean military leader who had leprosy. He might have just come down with it, but it threatened his career and his entire lifestyle.
How could someone who had to be isolated from others lead an army into battle? And he had a wife and presumably a family; maybe he would have had to be separated from them, too, and if his condition put an end to his career, it might have sent them into poverty.
But it just so happened that, in one raid against Israel, Naaman’s army had captured a girl who was now servant to Naaman’s wife. This girl sort of indirectly makes it known that there is a prophet in Samaria who could cure him.
Hearing this, Naaman goes to his king and asks permission to travel to Samaria to take the cure. He takes along an abundance of money and fancy clothing as gifts for the prophet—Elisha—to grease the wheels of his healing.
He also takes a letter from his king to the king of Israel, who seems to have been a bit of a coward, and who also appears to misunderstand what Naaman wants. He seems to think Naaman wants him—the king—to cure his leprosy! And he is quite terrified, because he of course has no idea how to do that, and assumes that it’s some kind of trick whereupon when he cannot do the impossible, the king of Aram will send his army (led by someone other than Naaman, I suppose) to fight him.
Elisha the prophet, on the other hand, is not a coward; he sends a message to his king and says, “Relax; just send the man to me.” So off go Naaman and his entourage, along with the wagonload of gifts, to Elisha’s house. Naaman, who is an important man back home, is offended when Elisha doesn’t even come outside, just sends a boy out with a note that says, “Go wash in the Jordan River seven times and you’ll be fine.”
And he stomps off. Insults the local waterway, and the prophet, and anyone or anything else within easy reach. “Doesn’t he know who I am? Surely that lazy prophet could get up out of his easy chair to come and meet me! And why did I come all this way just for him to tell me to go swimming in his muddy little river! If all I had to do was that, I could have stayed home and swum in one of our local rivers, which are much deeper and cleaner than the Jordan.”
He was prepared to pack everything up and just go back to Aram, uncured.
Like many great and important people, Naaman thought rather too highly of himself; but unlike a lot of them, he was willing to listen to his servants, who got him down out of his snit. “If the prophet had told you to stand on your head and recite the Ten Commandments backwards, you’d have done it, right? If he had told you to travel to the very edge of the world and bring back a gemstone that could only be found there and was under the guard of a very cranky dragon, you’d have done that, wouldn’t you have?”
Well, of course he would! Something like that would certainly cure him.
“Well, then, why not try this simple thing?”
And to his credit, Naaman did—and indeed his condition was cured.
You know, sometimes we make the simplest things into the greatest ordeals. We aren’t feeling well, so off we go to the doctor, who draws blood and listens to our heart, maybe orders some tests, and then says, “You’ve just plain worn yourself out; go home and rest, and call me in a week or so.”[2]
And we just might get bent out of shape at that! “I’m sick! Surely she needs to prescribe some pills, right?” No, you’ve just worn yourself to a nub, poured everything out until there’s nothing left.
Or maybe we’re overweight, and so we go out there and find an app that will tell us exactly what to eat and how to move, or we find the weirdest and most restrictive diet anybody has ever invented that promises to make that excess weight just melt away—when for many of us the best course of action is simply to eat less and move around more.
Or perhaps we’ve decided we want to get right with God. We’ve not always behaved like we should, and while we’ve put that behind us now, we still feel sort of guilty and wonder if God wants anything to do with us anymore. And maybe we figure we need to do something in order to earn our way back into God’s favor.
Some ways people have tried to do that over the years have included dangerous pilgrimages to far-off holy sites, extreme fasting, mortification of the flesh, locking themselves inside hollow logs, sitting atop poles for months at a time,[3] finding the one thing they really enjoyed and depriving themselves of it. And even after all that, we wonder if we’re truly forgiven, or if there’s more we should do—but we can’t think of anything else we could do, really, to appease a holy God.
We make it so difficult on ourselves, when it turns out that God has already forgiven us, has already offered his grace as a free gift, and all we really have to do is accept it.
[1] I just watched a video a couple nights ago when in the throes of insomnia, in which there was an explanation of the “uncanny valley,” a situation in which a person might look human, but not quite—as in the case of the earliest people, where there were actually several different species of humans that all had slightly different appearances and ways of communicating. I suspect that lepers might fall into the “uncanny valley” as their extremities and face became disfigured, and that might account for why it was so frightening—that plus the fact that they had no understanding of how germs made people sick, and certainly no modern medical treatments for illnesses caused by germs.
[2] Now I do know that there are quite a lot of horror stories out there about how doctors dismiss people, especially women, with “You’re just tired,” and miss something much more serious. But I also know that a great many of us just plan burn the candle at both ends until there’s nothing left, and the best thing for us truly is to go home and rest.
[3] Yes, really! Go look up the stylites.