2 Kings 5Abandon Ideology
(Slide 1 Namaan washing in river) Naaman had an important job and he knew how to do it well. If you break his job down, it went something like this: Spot an approaching enemy. Report it to the King. Follow the kings’ instructions to defeat the enemy. Fight. Win. Repeat: Look out for the next enemy. It was doing these things repeatedly, and well, that gained him a reputation as a valiant soldier, the King’s ally, and a feared opponent on the battlefield. He was so focused on this huge responsibility that he probably did not need to know much about anything else. What more could a man want?
One day he saw a different kind of enemy approaching. Not big and not clear in sight, in view. A small spot hidden underneath his armour. His own body was the battleground this time. Leprosy was the enemy now.
So Naaman did what he thought, and what he knew was best. He spotted this enemy in a timely manner; like a good oncologist would spot cancer early. He reported the situation to the king. His informant this time was a young slave girl, but she must have been similar enough to his subordinates who always reported back from the battlefield. So, he listened and went to his king as he always does. The king gave his blessing as he always did. The strategy differed but he looked all set for victory. He had now not just one king but two to back his efforts (the King of Aram, and the King of Israel). In a way just another day at the office. The king and himself together with a bunch of good guys against the bad guy, in this case leprosy. “I’ve got this “…or so he thought. What we read about next is something that makes average stories, good stories.
Shallow stories go like this: There are good guys and bad guys. The good guys fight and defeat the bad guys. Shallow stories’ characters don’t change. The good guys stay good and the bad guys remain as bad as ever. Such stories may entertain and even soothe us but they do not transform us. For stories to be transformative, you need good guys to discover that they have bad things in them. You need bad guys that show you that they also have a good side. If the good guy loses or nearly loses and it seems to you almost good that he does… now that is when you have a deep story that can speak to your heart and change… even you. And that is what you have in this story.
The script Naaman lived for most of his life was a simple “good guys-/ bad guys” one. And it worked well. It gave him honor and glory, the two most precious things sought among men in his time. When he is struck with this unexpected bout of leprosy, a disease known to strip you of honor and glory (as any enemy that defeats you would), he approached it as he usually did. But then things simply did not work out as smooth and easy as they usually had in his life. He didn’t win like he usually did. And here was Naaman’s problem: He looked for the bad, the enemy only outside of himself. But to defeat this leprosy, he needed to go further. He needed to face the enemy inside himself. He had to acknowledge that there was something inside himself that stood between him and defeating his illness. It was pride. The fact is, that he thinks he knew best and that he knows better than anyone else. He thought it was insulting to get off his high horse and follow Elisha’s instruction to go wash him in the lesser river of the Israelites. His healing did not start when he got in that river. It started when he got off his high horse and humbled himself enough to follow Elisha’s instructions. He changed inside before he changed outside and got the smooth skin of a baby once more. (slide 2 – hammer and nail) Why this message is especially important in our day and age
There is something in our day and age that makes the message of Naaman’s story an especially important one to heed right now. It has to do with ideology. What is ideology? It is to see everything as a nail because you only have a hammer in your toolbox. You only see things one way, you love to jammer so much so that you feel unmotivated to walk to the hardware store and spend money to add other tools to your toolkit. But it always catches up with you. Because you cannot do a proper job with only a hammer in your toolkit. Sometimes the damage you do is immediate and evident. Often it is subtle and only becomes evident when everything implodes and is left in tatters. Maybe you are not crazy about metaphors – like a hammer only seeing everything as a nail. So let me explain ideology more concretely. Jordan Peterson says that one of the most dangerous people you can find is a lazy intellectual. An intellectual, is usually a clever person. One who has an ability to see cause and effect better than the average man or woman. But a lazy intellectual will take one topic he or she is interested in – whether it be economics, race, gender, sex or power and use this to justify all issues. The person will rightfully see how, say “income disparities” causes many problems then draw in issues that one would think is unrelated to it. But the lazy intellectual points out to people how this pet subject of his leads to many seemingly unrelated problems. It leads people to think, with relief, that they need only to attack this one issue and it will solve anything else in their lives. Whenever this happens, and it has happened often, an ideology is born. Ideologies grow fast. They do not die easily. (Slide 3 – Sigmund Freud)
Let me give you a few examples, Freud studied sexual desire and made interesting discoveries. He linked mental illness to sexual desire and came up with things like “penis envy” and the “Oedipus complex” to describe the mental development in girls and boys. Freud rightfully made us aware of the fact that our sexuality is part of our humanity, but he took it too far (or perhaps not far enough). The psychiatrists that came after him had to correct and expand on his one-sided understanding of human beings, sexuality and mental health. Today his contribution is acknowledged but his conclusions not followed without exception. They have been modified and expanded.
(Slide 4 – Karl Marx)Karl Marx made us aware of economics and the role it plays in class and power struggles. He made us aware of things that flew under the radar before his insights. But his one-sided overemphasis on economics, valuable as they might have been, led to undervaluing things like education and religion. It gave birth to a totalitarian regime of Marxism that had no room for the individual in its approach to society and politics. It was blind to the fact that the disenfranchised and oppressed workers class has just as much potential for abusive power grabbing, as the owner’s of the means of production have. Failed Soviet States are a case in point.
(Slide 5 – Adolf Hitler)Hitler blamed Jews for all of Germany’s woes and in doing that, elevated the white “Aryan race” to a kind of superhuman status. The blinding power of ideology is seen in the fact that ordinary teachers and bakers turned into mass murderers of Jews thinking they did what was best. Nazism has shown us the worst of what human nature can stoop to because of this. Today we have our own versions of this. All of them represent something like an unpaid bill. They are causes and injustices that have been ignored for way too long. But many of them now also run the risk of transforming from legitimate causes to damaging ideologies. Hammers that treat everything and everyone that fits a certain demographic as a nail. Let me dare to give you a few examples of that.
(Slide 6 – Gay and Gender Rights)Gay and gender rights. Throughout history there have been people with a gay sexuality. They were often ignored, excluded, often abused and even murdered. You could be a great engineer regardless of your sexual orientation, yet many gay people were excluded from what they could have done really well because of their sexual orientation. Then there were, and are, also people who did not feel like they belonged to the gender assigned to them. Some because they were abused emotionally and made to believe they are not a real man or woman and some because something hormonally and biologically is at play. Now in Fort McMurray there was a father of two beautiful girls. I (Gabriel) happened to know his wife. One day, he announced that he will be transitioning to be a woman. The gay community embraced and supported him immediately. But his wife and two daughters ages 5 and 7, even though they tried to be understanding and supportive had great difficulty coming to terms with this and there was no support group for them. Some members of the gay group made their resistance and struggles as “anti gay”. Yet, this man shoved all his responsibilities as a parent aside and basically abandoned his children blaming their opposition to his sex-change as the reason. How legitimate his motivation for this sex-change was, I cannot say. But this person’s responsibilities and issues exceeded those of just a gender issue and the wife and innocent children suffered greatly because it was treated purely as an issue of gender. They were screws being hit by a hammer and were deeply scarred because of it
.(Slide 7 – Black Lives Matter)The BLM movement seek to make us aware of a very legitimate cause. It is mind-blowing for how long and to what extent people of colour have been enslaved and abused and are still discriminated against in various ways to this day. No Christian should be passive in the face of all these revelations. But when some protestors turn legitimate protest and constructive transformation of institutions into blanket statements such as that all white people are evil and everything every white person has and achieved is solely because of racism, the cause is damaged. Especially when complemented by statements that portray black people as always 100% innocent and just in all matters. This ideology isn’t helpful to black people or white people. It goes south – taken to extremes, it sketches black people as helpless victims that can only get things if taken from others, not by their own virtues and hard work. We know and most people know – this isn’t true at all. But when a few push a legitimate cause to these extremes – a virtuous protest can easily turn into a harmful ideology if not kept in check by those that participate in it.
(Slide 9 – Conservatism)Conservatism. It is very legitimate to say we should be careful not to throw out tried and tested values and rituals delivered to us through generation upon generation. But to make a blanket statement that all that is old is good and nothing needs reform or replacement is to make people blind to the fact that many things can change for the better.
What all of these ideological distortions of these worthy causes does is one thing: They make us blind to the goodness in others – even perpetrators (the bad guys) – and it makes us blind to our own mistakes and sins (we are always just the good guys). And so, we don’t feel responsible for whatever we do to the perpetrators in whatever way. And we don’t feel like taking responsibility to really improve ourselves because by being ideologically one sided, we can be seen as either the victim or the savior without facing our own brokenness. Like Naaman could only see good in his own country’s rivers and only bad in Israel’s rivers and advice, we become people that can only see bad in the other and good in ourselves. We begin to live a good guy-bad guy story where there is no transformation in anybody. And ultimately one wherein there are only losers. If you break all this down even more, you see that what we have to do here with is idolatry. To have godly expectations about things we see as the solution for everything because it was the solution for one thing in our life once when we were in a tight spot. At the root of this idolatry lies pride. Pride is what makes you think you are better than others, not true? That what works best for you must work best for everybody. In the final analysis ideology…is idolatry… is pride…is thinking you are better…is leprosy that will blind and kill you if you do not keep it in check.
Close: The Remedy In “The Brothers Karamazov” of the Russian author Dostoevsky, one of the characters makes this statement: It is easier to love all the people in the world than it is to love a single individual. It is so true. It is relatively easy to appear sympathetic to masses of faceless individuals. We all have some causes we feel sympathetic towards. And when we support the groups advocating for them, we show solidarity. That is good and necessary. But that is not what will bring about the change. The biggest difference you can make is not waving a gay or a BLM flag. It is engagement on the individual level. To befriend a person of a different race and listen to that person, does more to combat racism than marching in a protests does. To befriend a gay person regardless of if you approve of that person’s life choices, that heals more pain and causes more goodwill to the cause of homophobia than any pride parade does. That is why Mother Teresa said if you want to change the world, go home and love your neighbour. That is why Naaman was after all a wise man. Because he listened to a slave girl, not just to his group of war generals. And when he came upon a different kind of battle, he allowed for different kinds of input and instructions.There is a sacred balance between the communal and the individual personal level. There is an easy way to test yourself on this or to prevent yourself getting off balance. If you are drawn to a cause, ask yourself if you compliment the big cause by small acts of helping kindness to individuals. If you don’t, you might be busy with imagine management and virtue signalling, not with the real thing. Shortly after the crowds shouted: “Crucify him!” Jesus turned to one person beside Him and said: “Today you will be with me in paradise”. Whatever cause you feel strongly about, go to at least one person and in some way assure they person that Jesus is with us in our hell, and we will be with Him in his Kingdom.
Amen
Gabriel J Snyman
May 16th