The Humility of the Small Instruction: For the Week You Did Not Choose

The cloak is still folded on the chair in the counseling room. Last month this church printed a line about a great thing they would do if God asked. This week the instruction already sitting on the table is smaller than that line, and the hallway has already explained why the river they brought from home is cleaner than the Jordan they already named.

A volunteer two seats over has a story about what healing should look like. He also left the named next wash unused because it did not come with a hand waved over the place. He has a sentence about faith. He has not asked who is still standing at the door with horses and chariots, waiting for a production.

This is a sermon for a church that will do a great thing and still treats the small instruction as optional furniture in a week it did not choose. If you preach 2 Kings 5 as a map of anyone's private pride, you will lie. If you preach it as Naaman after Damascus, a real leprosy, a real little girl, a real letter, a real door, a real Jordan, and a God who meets a raging captain with an ordinary word, you give this church a God who resists pride and gives grace to the humble. You also take away the cheap road that hides behind a great thing you would have done.

Text

Hear the door as Holy Scripture tells it, from the World English Bible: "Now Naaman, captain of the army of the king of Syria, was a great man with his master, and honorable, because by him Yahweh had given victory to Syria; he was also a mighty man of valor, but he was a leper.