Last Sunday we heard the tale of Jesus' first sermon back in his home town of Nazareth. About the Sabbath day when he read from the scroll of Isaiah and proclaimed "the year of the Lord's favour". It is a sermon that first elicits enthusiastic praise from the congregation as they shake his hand and slap his back after worship.

But there is the other part of the story, when Jesus begins to expounds upon the text. He mentions how Elijah didn't help Jewish widows during a famine but instead went to the aid of a Lebanese widow. He reminds them of the prophet Elisha who bypassed many Israelite lepers when he healed Naaman the Syrian. But "When they heard this," reports Luke, "all in the synagogue were filled with rage." (Luke 4:28). Jesus mentions Naaman the Syrian and the congregation is enraged.

To be honest, it is not a story that we have paid all that much attention to over the years. Surely it could not do us any harm to stand under it - to ‘understand' it - this once. Then again we can never be sure what kind of trouble we may find ourselves immersed in when we play host to the God who is met in stories like this one.

And is this ever a story ... let's see ... {read 2 Kings 5:1-14)

Who is this Naaman? Naaman - the successful, accomplished commander from Syria who does not realize that his success is the result of Yahweh's handiwork. Yahweh - the God of Israel - is (of course) the unseen character who this drama revolves around. And Naaman's illness is to be the means by which he will discover this unseen One's power. Naaman's illness is key. He has leprosy. But not the kind of leprosy that we imagine. Naaman does not have Hansen's Disease - the debilitating, flesh-eating leprosy which slowly eats away at those who suffer its effects. ‘Leprosy' is instead biblical speech for any one of several skin afflictions which, according to Leviticus chapter thirteen, can be very difficult to diagnose. ‘Leprosy' in the Bible is an uncertain state. One that calls for the expert diagnosis not of a doctor but of a priest. The term ‘leper' is then - and now - as much a social and cultural designation as it is a medical one. It identifies one who is ritually and socially ‘unclean'. One who shows evidence of being infectious; impure. A leper is one whose presence may put the whole community at risk.

On top of all of this, of course, Naaman is rich and powerful, arrogant and rude, and let's not forget, he is an enemy of Israel. Not exactly the kind of role that members of the congregation are likely to be eager to portray. Naaman is, in many respects, the Other. He is not ‘one of us'. He is the successful outsider; the powerful competitor; the sibling who has made it and who has no room for the kind of ‘weak-kneed' faith of a community like this one.

Except that he has a nagging problem; an incurable defect; a noticeable limp, an obvious flaw, a sick compulsion, an inexplicable syndrome that puts him beyond the pale; that marks him as one who is impure. And this is a story about what happens when a little servant girl from the people of God - a secretary in the office of the Prime minister, perhaps, or a daughter-in-law newly married into the family - uses her low estate to speak truth from the margins to the powerful but needy one . This is a tale about how she starts in motion a chain of events which results in the amazing conversion of one who never imagined that he would bow down before the God of Israel. Namaan is, you see, a proselyte; a convert. And his is a story of conversion; of proselytism. Maybe this is why Jesus gets in trouble for reminding his own people of Namaan. It certainly lands him in plenty of hot water these days in these parts!

Naaman is lead by God to the simplest of places for healing. God leads him into the River Jordan seven times. Seven times? Yes ... seven. Seven, it seems, is the recommended dose for a cure from leprosy (or so say the prescriptions in the fourteenth chapter of Leviticus). Just as the doctor requires that a patient take the complete course of antibiotics, so Naaman is required to bathe seven times in the healing river. To be washed with ordinary water.

Given the amount of water I like to use in Baptisms, it will come as no surprize that I sometimes wish that we had one of those full immersion baptismal tanks. Then we'd make the baptismal connection between the font and the Jordan River.That's it, isn't it. The font does double as the Jordan River where Jesus was baptised. And we have one right here; and many Sundays it appears in front where friend and foe; neighbour and stranger; oldtimer and newcomer cannot worship God without seeing it.

Do you see? We have been performing the story of Naaman on all of these Sundays for all of these years without even knowing it. In fact, Naaman is no stranger to us. How many here already know what it is to be a ‘leper'; in their family; among their peers; at their work; even in the church?

How many of us have come here at one time or another because we had nowhere else to turn for our healing. Because we were responding to some small seemingly insignificant voice that said: "There is One in Samaria, near the Galilee who can heal you"? Who among us has come to this font of life not just once but seven times over, to be made clean and whole? How many Naamans make up a congregation like this? How many who succeed on all of the world's terms and yet are not whole, not acceptable, not well?

To be honest, I am convinced that each one here is Naaman. There are those among us who already know the healing of the cleansing waters of the Jordan. And then there are those others here who long to know what it means to be healed. To know that they are accepted and acceptable to God and to others. Who long to belong and not to be passed by or forgotten or cast out.

And yet, make no mistake about this mornings text, there are also those Naaman's whom we think are beyond the grace of God. Those aweful Naaman's for whom Jesus welcomes into the cleansing waters of the Jordon. People some consider unworthy of God's kindness and mercy. Our enemies, be they political, ethnic, personal, or even in our own families. People whom we might be enraged at learning of God's grace being given to them aswell, unless of course we remember that God is God. And, in the end, it is not our choice whom God shall or shall not bestow God's gift of salvation upon. It is the choice of Jesus Christ, the one who died for a world that rejected and betrayed him. And those who truly understand humanities perdicament, thank God with all their hearts that the judgement of the world is left in Jesus nail marked hands.