The I Dont Wanna Syndrome

Naaman the Syrian was a sick man. He suffered from leprosy, a terrible disease in which the skin of a human being becomes white and flakey and falls off, eventually maiming whole limbs and killing a person. Highly contagious, leprosy was a form of social suicide. To contract the disease meant to be forced to live an isolated life. Whenever a leper entered the village, he or she had to call out ahead “LEPER! LEPER!” so that everyone who was in the vicinity could run away.


Naaman must have been some kind of a soldier, because the King of Syria demands that he stay and continue to lead the army in battle. Naaman tries to go about his daily life, but the pain of the skin disease plagues him daily, hourly. He begs God to be healed.

As in so many of our lives, God speaks to Naaman through people. In this case, God speaks to Naaman through the servant of his wife. And Naaman shows what an incredible man he is by listening. It was unheard of to speak to a servant and take their advice in those days, let alone a servant from another foreign land. And she was a woman to boot, less than human and considered stupid. But Naaman listens to her and his healing begins.

Often our healing, the righting of our life with God, begins when we finally give up on our way and begin to listen. God may be telling you something, but you have to be willing to listen to the voices all around you, including the ones that you may have written off.

The servant girl is from Israel. She tells Naaman to go to the King of Israel, that there is a prophet in that land who can heal him. So Naaman takes her advice. He sends a letter ahead telling the King of Israel that he is coming to be healed of his leprosy.

The King of Israel is distraught. Here was this four-star general from an enemy nation coming to his land to be healed. What would he do when they could not heal him? This seemed like a terrible idea. The king was scared stiff.

But the prophet Elisha was not scared. Send the General to me, he said. So Naaman travles a great distance with a huge entourage of servants and camels and donkeys, right up to the door of Elisha's humble abode. Naaman is seeking some difficult treatment or penance to bear so that he will be healed of this terrible sickness. But Elisha doesn't even come out of his house!  He sends a message to Naaman instructing him to go and bathe in the river Jordan.  In other words, all that Elisha says is Go and take a bath.

Naaman is mad. How dare Elisha be so condescending!  Why didn't he come out of his house and wave his hands around and perform a miracle, something that befit a great man. Naaman asks himself, "Why couldn’t I just bathe in my own rivers? Is my land not good enough?" And he refuses to do what Elisha asked.

Sometimes we fight God when God is trying to help us. Do you realize that? Do you fight God sometimes?  Sometimes we believe that we should have better treatment, like a direct word from God now and again or some impressive miracle.  Why should we just do as the Scriptures tell us?  That just seems so mundane, not special enough for you or me.  Sometimes we just don't want to let God help us.

Check out my hand. See how badly scratched up it is? On Monday of this past week, I was driving home when a neighbor stopped me. My cat, Ms. Meow, had her collar stuck in her throat. It was gradually choking her, the tags were lodged in her mouth. She was in pain and she would not let the neighbor near her.

I got out of the car and approached Ms Meow. She knows me and loves me. After all, I feed her and she understands what a gift that is. Ms. Meow was once a stray, living off a fish pond at a tiny church in Kansas. We found her and adopted her. She is an inside, outside cat, a fierce hunter but she can snuggle with the best of them.

Ms. Meow let me approach her. She stayed still as I came closer. The neighbor had scissors to cut off her collar, if I could just hold her still. But when I tried to pick her up, she scratched at me and bit me. She ran away, but just a short distance, her mouth forced open in agony.

Oh, honey, I am just trying to help you. I said. I reached for her again. She bit and scratched, but I didn’t let go. I held on to her and the neighbor cut off the collar quickly and skillfully. Ms. Meow was free but my hand was a bloody mess. I had to go on an antibiotic for ten days and get a tetnus shot.

Ms. Meow knew that I was trying to help her, but she couldn’t seem to help fighting me. That is what Naaman did and that is what many of us do with God. We say, Help me! And God says, Come to church. Give of your resources. Pray. And we say Well, I’ll come when I can. I will pray, but I can’t give money. I just don’t want to. Why do I have to? I don’t wanna!

What God asks of us is so simple. Practice the faith. Pray, Worship, Give. All three. But we want to do things our way, and then we wonder why life doesn’t seem to go as we wish that it would.

Go and bathe in the Jordan says Elisha. I don’t wanna! Responds Naaman. But luckily, his servants talk to him again. How hard can it be? They say. Why don’t you try it?

And so he bathes, and he is made clean. He is changed.  The Scripture says that his skin is like the skin of a young boy.

Oh God, he says, Thank you. What can I give you?

Do you want to be made well? The recipe is clear and simple. Practice your faith. You are Christians. Do what Jesus instructed. Pray every day. Worship with your community here at the Cathedral. And, the hardest part, give some of your money. Give it away. Give to the church and Greenpeace and Universities and whatever is of God. Just give it away.

The Vestry has made a statement that hangs in Talliaferro hall. It is a Rule of life. Together with me, they vowed to worship every Sunday, pray daily and give of their resources. It is a simple statement. If you agree with it and want to join us, sign it. We left rooms for lots of people to sign with us.

In the gospel, Jesus heals seven lepers but only one comes back to say Thank you. Giving is our way of saying Thank you. Thank you for healing me. Thank you for creating me. Thank you for enabling me to walk and talk and see and speak. Thank you.

Do you realize that you won the lottery? There were over a million possible people who could have been born in your body. The possibilities of chromosomes were so vast as to be mind boggling, but, out of all those possibilities, God chose to make YOU. God wove you together in your mothers womb and the fact that you exist at all is such a miracle that you cannot even begin to wrap your mind around it.

When will you stop charging forward, doing things in your own way, and turn around? When will it be time to stop and look at the face of Christ and say, Thank you. Thank you for making me, for sustaining me. Thank you for the eyes that I have that work so that I can see light and color. Thank you for the friends that you have given me. Thank you that I can hear music. Thank you for life, God, thank you for life.

Why does it take illness for us to appreciate health? Why does it take poverty for us to appreciate wealth? Don’t wait until the end of your life to say thank you to God. Listen to the voices of those around you, listen to God’s call to you, and give of yourself endlessly in an act of thanksgiving.

Thr Better Question

My friend had a little boy who was absolutely adorable. He was clearly smart as a whip and at six months old, he would smile and laugh out loud. By the time he was well over a year old, he still had not uttered a word, and his mom began to worry. “Maybe his has some learning disability, maybe he is socially unable to speak or has anxiety…” She, like lots of young moms, was a worry wart. So she went to the pediatrician.


“Well,” the doctor said. “This boy seems happy and healthy to me. Let me ask you this…Do you give him everything that he needs?”

“Oh, well, I try. I feed him when he seems hungry. I know when he is tired. I try to take care of his every need…”

“Try something for me,” the doctor said. “Try not giving him everything he needs. Start with food. Give him a bit but then wait and let him begin to express his own wants and needs. Do not fulfill his needs before he asks. Otherwise, you give him no incentive to speak…”

That afternoon, my friend sat her son down in his highchair and put a few cheerios on it for him to munch on while she did the dishes. He ate them quickly and then gestured for more, but she didn’t put more on his plate. She just stood there staring at him. She told me later that it just about killed her, not just getting him exactly what she knew and he knew that he wanted. But she stood her ground.

Her son’s first word was “MORE.”

I used to bring my sons Luke and Jacob to the nursing home with me when Luke was two and Jake was just a baby. The residents loved my children! If I forgot communion, well, that was not such a big deal, but if I forgot to bring the babies, well, they would be furious. They loved to hold Jake and rock him. And Luke would wander around the room as we did the eucharist together, singing Amazing Grace every week and the Old Rugged Cross.

As a young, frazzled mother, I would often arrive full of diaper bags but missing one thing or another. One week, I forgot the wafers. I called over one of the nurses assistants who brought saltines. So we proceeded with the service. Luke had a bad day and was mad and was hungry. He wanted the service to be over. As I began the holy words, he started yelling, “I don’t want to do a service! AMEN! AMEN!” Then, once we got to the communion, and he saw the saltines, he yelled “MORE CRACKER MORE!!!”

The disciples want more. They have experienced Jesus and the love that he has for God and they want to be more like him. They want more faith, more devotion, more intimacy with God. “Increase our faith!” they demand. Give us more of the good stuff. We want it now.

I am so often struck by how much we are like the disciples. Human nature has not changed one iota since Jesus’ time. They might as well have said, Jesus, Supersize me! I want bigger everything, bigger faith, more devotion. The disciples were able to take the best thing that they had going, namely their relationship with Jesus, and cheapen it. Instead of giving thanks for what they had, they said,” I want more. What you have given me is not enough.”

We do that here in America without even blinking. When is there ever enough? We are constantly saying to ourselves, I want more food, more clothes, more money, more time. We ALWAYS need more of something. We have so convinced ourselves of our need that we can no longer distinguish between needs and wants. Our obeisity rates are the highest in the world because we don’t seem to know when we have had enough food. People who already have weight issues will go to buffets and eat and eat and eat.

Many of our corporations are designed to create new needs. Last year, I heard of an energy bar for dogs! It is designed so that the dog will get more out of his walk. So does your dog NEED it?

In response to the disciples, Jesus a parable about a slave and his master. After the slave has worked all day in the fields, the master will not call him in and say to him, come and join me at the table, instead he will tell the slave to put on his apron and serve his master and, only after he has served, then he can sit down and eat. So we are not to assume that God will invite us to sit down and eat at the banquet. We have work to do first. We are to approach God with humility, as his slaves, grateful for whatever God gives to us.

It is a painful parable that rubs us the wrong way today. We now understand that slavery is a horrible institution that degrades the human being, but Jesus was simply using a daily, familiar reality of his time to make a point about God. He wanted to use an image that would be familiar to the disciples, something that they would see often. So he talks about a slave and his master.

This is the truth, harsh though it sounds. When it comes to our relationship with God, we are not free agents. We are not consumers or independent contractors. We cannot decide when to place our order or just how long we will live. We are slaves. We are servants. We belong to God. For us to ask for more faith is preposterous. It is simply not our place and it will get us nowhere, not because God would be offended, but because we really have no idea what we truly need. Only God knows who we truly are and what we really need.

The best question to ask God is “What can I do to serve?” Asking for more stuff does not ultimately help us in any way. Asking for happiness or peace of mind is all well and good, but what if there is something that we need to learn or experience. The truth is that we really have no idea what we need.

Jesus calls us his little children a lot. Children of God. Like little ones, we don’t always know what is best for us. We would buy stuff like crazy when it does nothing more than increase our attachment to material things. We want better lives, more peaceful or easier. We want this and we want that. But God knows that instead of wanting more, we just need to give and serve. Jesus tells us that serving others is best for us and would make us happier, more fulfilled. God knows that the secret to our spiritual lives lies in our ability to give of ourselves.

If you are feeling as if God has not given you enough: not a good enough life, not enough money, not enough friends, not enough health, or success or time with your loved ones, try giving it away.

We are spending this year listening to Jacksonville and to the roles of Cathedrals through the centuries. And I am hearing God’s call to us. It is coming through loud and clear. And it is so simple. Oh, so simple.

We as a Cathedral are being called to be servants of this city. The masters of this church, the ones who we serve, are not the clergy or the Vestry, it is the children, the disabled and the very old. We are called to serve those that are the most helpless. We are called to give the child a safe place to be nurtured and the best education that we can, for the future of this city depends upon it.

Forty percent of the children in this neighborhood live on or below the poverty line. We have taken the first step in ministering to children by starting the Cathedral School here just five years ago. And today we celebrate this school. Today is Cathedral School Sunday.

This beautiful early-learning center teaches and nurtures children from babies to age 5. The children of this school are happy and loved. I have the blessing of leading them in chapel. A few weeks ago, they decided to ask God if he might reconsider creating cockroaches. They wondered if he might want to come up with another model.

The Board of the Cathedral School is committed to growing the school, offering more scholarships to inner-city children and even growing into elementary school. We are called to serve these children. They are the masters and we are the slaves, for they hold the keys to the future of this city. If our children are loved, we will be OK.

What do you need? What do I need? We don’t need to ask for anything more. We need to give. We need to serve people like these children, the elderly, those who are in pain or need.

Friday night, Jo Hedgepeth died. Jo was one of our most faithful parishioners. She was so pivotal to this place that many of us feel rocked without her presence. The night that she died, Jo’s daughter and son were able to say goodbye and to thank her. They told her that it was OK to go. They gave her something that many people do not give their loved ones who are dying, they gave her permission.

After she died, the nurse told us that her mother had died when she was 25 and that she had begged her mother not to go. She wanted more of her mother, more time. So she begged for her to stay and as a result, her mother had a painful prolonged death. “Don’t ask for more time,” she said, “Give them the gift of letting them go.”

Who are we to ask for more? We are children, servants, slaves. We belong to God. All we can say is Thank you, God, What can I do for YOU?