Three Perspectives on Trauma and Healing

Sermon

One Sunday during fellowship time, two brothers tried to teach me about Star Wars: which movies to watch and in what order. What I got out of that was not an appreciation for the plotline but for the storyteller’s trick of non-chronological releases of prequels and sequels. We usually read Naaman’s story as if it’s about one man’s journey of healing, but the lesson from Star Wars is to check out the prequel and sequel. After trying that, I decided that our story is about collective (rather than individual) healing. And what these three traumas and three healings mean for the writer of 2 Kings is a critique of religious, racial, and national exclusivity.

The prequel covers what happens before the captive girl-child suggests a way for her master to be healed. She’s war booty, but from the very get-go we learn that God has given Naaman victory over The Chosen People. So maybe she’s God’s gift to this warrior. We learn that Naaman is successful but also a pariah because of his skin. Kind of like an African-American man winning a Nobel Peace Prize. After the slave girl makes her case for the prophet in Israel, Naaman asks his boss for time off and is sent to Israel’s king, whom he and Naaman have just defeated in war. Naaman brings the ancient world’s equivalent of his health insurance card—a king’s ransom in silver, gold, and new clothes. Not surprisingly, Israel’sking is terrified by Aram’s king’s request (demand?) that Naaman be healed, thinking it’s a trick to start another war or demand for increased tribute. Elisha, the erstwhile prophet, hears what’s up, and the scene shifts to Naaman parked in front of Elisha’s house, honking the horn for service. This is all a set up for the exclusionary disdain of Aram toward Israel, Israel’s loathing for the pagans who had defeated them. If you eavesdropped on the children’s time, you know Naaman’s sense of having been insulted by not being greeted by the prophet eventually relents. He dunks himself seven times and comes out with clear skin. End of story.

Except that more than Naaman’s skin is changed. No longer arrogant, his return to Elisha to express gratitude shows a humbled man. Here is their conversation, in 2 Kings, verses 15-19:

15 Then Naaman returned to the man of God, he and all his company; he came and stood before him and said, “Now I know that there is no God in all the earth except in Israel; please accept a present from your servant.” 

16 But Elisha said, “As the Lord lives, whom I serve, I will accept nothing!” Naaman urged him to accept, but he refused. 

17 Then Naaman said, “If not, please let two mule-loads of earth be given to your servant; for your servant will no longer offer burnt offering or sacrifice to any god except the Lord. 

18 But may the Lord Adonai pardon your servant on one count: when my master goes into the house of Rimmon Aram’s thunder god to worship there, leaning on my arm, and I bow down in the house of Rimmon, when I do bow down in the house of Rimmon, may the Lord pardon your servant on this one count.” 

19 Elisha said to him, “Go in peace.” An uneasy compromise.

But that’s the sequel to Naaman’s healing. There is also a post-quel. Gehazi, Elisha’s servant, thinks this despicable foreigner—who had just defeated Israel, who is unclean with a particularly reprehensible skin disease, who is of the wrong race and nation and who worships idols and thinks he can worship his true and pure God—this disgusting foreigner gets off way too easy in his book, and he’s gonna set things right. And make a nice little profit (with an “f” not a “ph”) for himself. Gehazi swears by God to do this, getting a little religious cache, then scores for himself a fortune in Naaman’s gratitude, which Naaman had wrapped like a birthday gift and paraded to his house. Of course Elisha hears and confronts Gehazi, who denies everything. Don’t lie to prophets, children, because Elisha gives Gehazi the leprosy that Naaman had just had.

Hearing Naaman’s story as a kid, I really focused on the bravery of that little girl. As an adult, I can see her courage was about more than offering a medical referral for her owner. These days, I’m reading racial reconciliation literature, so I’m struck that, even as a child, this girl has healed from her trauma enough that she does not hate the man who was the instrument of her losing home and family. But again, that’s another sermon. Because today I’m thinking about trauma’s scars. What got me thinking along this vein was remembering a pastoral conversation I’d once had about the resurrected Jesus. My questioner was puzzled about the scars he bore. Had his body just not healed in the three days in the grave, or did the wounds remain so that his disciples could recognize him? Did this mean she would have scars in heaven?

Fortunately, Christian Century magazine recently featured essays on the theme of scar. One of the essays is by a youngish man who’d had a tumor removed from his brain, resulting in a question mark-shaped scar over most of the side of his face—from behind his ear, over his forehead and swooping downward. It’s more prominent than Harry Potter’s lightning bolt scar from Voldemort’s fury. His facial scar, he says, mirrors the one on his skull, a scar, which like all scars, is stronger than the tissue around it. His scar reminds him not of another’s fury but of his own anger (why me?) and his fear (will the tumor come back?) and his worry (what does it mean, what did I do to deserve this?). The scar also reminds him of wonder—of surgeons and medical interventions and skill. But like Naaman’s transformation from arrogant warrior to man of faith, this man’s scar reminds him to wonder over the possibility that his “violent worry” might be transformed into “an enduring faith.”

Another scar essay was by a pastor who had been invited to visit the home of a family new to her church. An undersized 11-year-old boy answered the door and brought the pastor in to see his mother. The boy politely hung around, listening to the adult chatter until the mother released him to “go get your magazine.” The boy came back with a Life magazine. Pointing to the cover he said, “That’s me!” and took the pastor on a guided tour of the story about himself as a tiny child in a wheelchair, surrounded by medical paraphernalia—the first infant to successfully receive a heart. The picture his narration painted was something like a gentle ICU Eden where, he claimed, “Everyone loved me so much.” He tenderly caressed his chest, showing the pastor the long, pale scars left by his multiple surgeries, as his mother explained, “He likes to touch his scars. It comforts him.”

Scars. They serve a couple of purposes. They can strengthen the spot weakened by injury (like that question-mark scar), but they also reveal what we still treasure from the experience (like the small boy’s). I think the uneasy compromise between Elisha and Naaman reveals a scar. Like that facial scar strengthening where the injury occurred, it also raises questions. This is a conversion story, unusual for the Hebrew scriptures. It raises questions when Naaman requests a pass for when he has to accompany his master during worship of Aram’s thunder god. What sort of a conversion is that? And what’s with that superstition about the dirt? Maybe that scar is a question mark, but there is also stronger tissue there—God revealing the divine lack of need to be exclusively just the God of the Jews, as if more than one nationality or race is The Chosen People.

And this is where Gehazi’s actions reveal the wound of Israel is still healing. With Gehazi’s need for retribution, his desire to exact some payment from that outsider, he reveals the dangers of treasuring unhealthy scars. For that little boy, the comfort he gained from touching where he had been wounded was a good thing. For him, those scars revealed community and love and healing. Gehazi was treasuring exclusivity and payment for grace, “God is on our side.” And he was mourning the evidence that this was now lost. “Make Israel great again!” He personifies the wound of exclusivity—limit immigration, keep people out of our churches who don’t look like us, imprison them if we can’t keep them in their place. This is the wound that has not yet been healed in Israel and Gehazi.

The transformation hoped for by the man with the question mark scar—that takes time. When I was in seminary I discovered that my deepest, ugliest faith-wrestlings had been dignified by the Church with a title. They called it “theodicy,” the question of “Where is God in evil?” How could a benevolent God allow the Holocaust and the political mess we’re in and unemployment and institutional racism, not to mention every other kind of suffering in the world. Theodicy frames suffering as a problem to be solved, and I’m all about problem-solving.

But trauma theology is different. Trauma happens when suffering is not integrated into our lives; it is biological, psychological, spiritual, a response to overwhelming life events. The events of the last year, for instance. Trauma theologians (as opposed to theodicy theologians) call for us to witness suffering, not try to diminish it by explaining or prescribing ways to fix it. Instead, they speak in terms of resilience rather than recovery, of acknowledging the challenge of suffering, rather than urging the sufferer to just move on. Resilience is that slave girl suggesting to Naaman that he go visit the prophet in her home country, it is Naaman choosing to worship the God of Elisha, it is Elisha conceding that maybe God Adonai can be worshiped by people not born to his tribe.

Julian of Norwich said that suffering is not a result of the Fall, not something that we did to deserve punishment. That would be Gehazi’s response—pay a fair price for grace, limit it to those who deserve it. Dame Julian says that suffering is part of life, it is inherent to being human. For her, the real “problem” of suffering is that we cannot see the loving gaze of God on us. The question-mark shaped scars leave us stronger; they invite us to allow our wounds to be transformed into enduring faith. Faith to open the eyes of our souls to see the loving gaze of God on us. May it be so.