Today's reading is from 2 Kings, chapters 6 and 7. You can find it on page 282 in the Pew Bible. Now, it came about after this that Ben-Hadad, king of Aram, gathered all his army and went up and besieged Samaria. There was a great famine in Samaria, and behold, they besieged it until a donkey's head was sold for 80 shekels of silver. and a fourth of a cab of dove's dung for five shekels of silver. Then Elisha said, listen to the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord, tomorrow about this time a measure of fine flour will be sold for a shekel and two measures of barley for a shekel in the gate of Samaria. The royal officer on whose hand the king was leaning answered the man of God and said, Behold, if the Lord should make windows in heaven, could this thing be? Then he said, behold, you will see it with your own eyes, but you will not eat of it. Now, there were four leprous men at the entrance of the gate, and they said to one another, why do we sit here until we die? If we say we will enter the city, Then the famine is in the city, and we will die there. And if we sit here, we die also. Now, therefore, come and let us go over to the camp of the Arameans. If they spare us, we will live. And if they kill us, we will but die." They arose at twilight to go to the camp of the Arameans. When they came to the outskirts of the camp of the Arameans, behold, there was no one there, for the Lord had caused the army of the Arameans to hear a sound of chariots and a sound of horses, even the sound of a great army, so that they said to one another, behold, the king of Israel has hired against us the kings of the Hittites and the kings of the Egyptians to come upon us. Therefore, they arose and fled in the twilight and left their tents and their horses and their donkeys, even the camp, just as it was, and fled for their life. When these lepers came to the outskirts of the camp, they entered one tent and ate and drank and carried from there silver and gold and clothes and went and hid them. And they returned and entered another tent and carried from there also and went and hid them. Then they said to one another, we are not doing right. This day is a day of good news, but we are keeping silent. If we wait until morning light, punishment will overtake us. Now, therefore, come, let us go and tell the king's household." So they came and called to the gatekeepers of the city, and they told them, saying, we came to the camp of the Arameans, and behold, there was no one there, nor the voice of man. Only the horses tied and the donkeys tied, and the tents just as they were. The gatekeepers called and told it within the king's household. Then the king arose in the night and said to his servants, I will now tell you what the Arameans have done to us. They know that we're hungry. Therefore, they have gone from the camp to hide themselves in the field saying, when they come out of the city, we will capture them alive and get into the city. One of his servants said, please let some men take five of the horses which remain, which are left in the city. Behold, They will be in any case like all the multitude of Israel who are left in it. Behold, they will be in any case like all the multitude of Israel who have already perished. So let us send and see. They took therefore two chariots with horses and the king sent after the army of the Arameans saying, go and see. They went after them to the Jordan and behold, all the way was full of clothes and equipment which the Arameans had thrown away in their haste. Then the messengers returned and told the king. So the people went out and plundered the camp of the Arameans. Then a measure of fine flour was sold for a shekel and two measures of barley for a shekel, according to the word of the Lord. Now the king appointed the royal officer on whose hand he leaned to have charge of the gate. But the people trampled on him at the gate, and he died just as the man of God had said, who spoke when the king came down to him. The word of the Lord. I'm filling in for John Stevenson, who was filling in for me. So that's weird. And this is a weird sermon. It's a weird passage of scripture. It's a weakness sermon, and it's a good news sermon, and it's always appropriate to have a good news sermon. This is the time of Elisha, the 8th century BC. It's a time when the Israelites were divided into two nations. The northern kingdom was called Samaria, and the southern kingdom was called Judea. And this is taking place in the northern kingdom and the capital city of Samaria, which goes by the name of Samaria. It's quite a ride, actually, to look at some of these lesser-known stories of the Old Testament and try to derive spiritual benefit from them. Lucas has been helping us in that process, taking us through the book of Judges, and I think he has one more sermon left in that series, which is a real doozy when you wait to hear the last passage or read it on your own. It's full of what I have called in the past dark grace, and we really see it epitomized here in today's passage. This story is a long one that Carol read to us, and I'm not sure that you got all the details on that one reading. And so what I'd like to do is give us this picture of weakness. It's really what we find in the passage. It's a kind of seed theology. It's like one link in a chain, which is gonna stretch right through very end of the Bible, the Bible's unique understanding of human weakness. And the Old Testament is demonstrating here and in a variety of different ways how God thinks about and how God responds to human weakness. And what will eventually emerge when all these links are chained together is an understanding of weakness that is the opposite of what characterizes the understanding of your workplace. It's an understanding of human weakness that is the opposite of what our secular society says about human weakness. And it is an understanding of weakness that is actually antithetical to what most religions say and what most religious communities say. So secular people have the opposite understanding of weakness. so do spiritual, moral, and religious people, it's a different view altogether. So let's look at it today. Just tell the story again and then look at the doctrine that emerges out of the story. So two points, retelling the story and then taking out of the story this link in a chain that eventually will build this whole understanding of the Bible's perspective on human weakness. There were these marauding bands that would come down and plunder the capital city of Samaria and they came from the Syrians and that was bad news of course but it was good news that the marauding bands had decided to stop their shenanigans and I'm sure that people of Samaria breathed a great sigh of relief to know that they were not going to be terrorized anymore by these people. But what had actually happened is the terrorist bands went back to Syria and they decided to make a proper war against the Samarians. So it's kind of like we're putting away our pocket knives and we're going home to get our tanks. And now this whole army comes against the capital city of Samaria And they make war in that ancient way, which is to surround the city and to impose famine on the city. So they don't allow any commerce to come in or out of the city gates until they basically starve the people into surrendering. And in this flash famine situation, Samaria, the city, has become very quickly desperate. I mean, you can imagine how it would be here I mean, how much food is in your house right now? Imagine if I-95 closed, no trucks were able to come down. Imagine if the railways were closed. Imagine if all the ports were closed and we just had to eat what was in our homes, what was in Publix and the other supermarkets, what was in the warehouses here or what we could grow in our gardens. We'd be pretty desperate pretty quickly. And in this particular situation, one of the measures of their desperation was that one of the least desirable body parts of an unclean animal, the head of a jackass, sold for two months salary. So if you made $500 a week, $2,000 a month, $4,000 for the head of a donkey, and who wants to eat the head of a donkey? And the king of Samaria, this Israelite, gets news that the people are so desperate that they are cannibalizing their own children. And when a baby dies, rather than waste the baby, they have been eating or consuming the flesh of humans. And when the king hears that, he is so wracked with grief that he weeps out loud and he rages looking for someone to blame and he blames that prophet and he says out loud, this is because the prophet Elisha has brought judgment on us, that's why the people are cannibalizing. And the king from the palace, that's where the story starts, the king from the palace sends his deputy out into the field his lieutenant to find this rogue prophet and execute Elisha. And when the lieutenant finds where Elisha is holed up, Elisha gets word that the lieutenant and his platoon of troops are coming to get Elisha. So he bars the doors and the lieutenant's messenger has to speak through the doors and he tells Elisha, come out! We have now concluded that God is not the solution, that God is the problem. And since you represent him, you are the problem. But the man of God, as he's called Elisha, does not call judgment down on the man, instead he meets these threats with good news, and he says, no, no, no, don't stop trusting God now. We're right on the verge of a kind of breakthrough, and God is about to answer our prayers, and by this time tomorrow, you're gonna have more food than you possibly know what to do with, more than you could ever dream. Good news, bring back good news. But the lieutenant won't believe the good news, refuses to believe that God has anything good in store for the capital city Samaria and basically says bah humbug. I don't believe God means us well. I don't believe in the generosity of God. I've never seen the generosity of God. Even if heaven would literally open up we could never have the amount of food that you're even describing. I don't believe God can do it and I don't believe God wants to do it. I'll tell you we won't see it. And now Elisha Seeing that this man will not believe in the goodness and generosity of God, he will not receive the good news by faith, Elisha says, you won't see it, huh? I'll tell you, you will see it, but you will not eat it. And it's at this point in the story that we are introduced to the four stooges, what I've called lepers, fat and happy but when we first meet them they're not fat and happy they're just lepers desperate and starving and they find themselves outside of the city between a rock and a hard place and they consult with one another if we go back into the city well they don't have any food back in there so that's not going to help us if we go to the Aramaeans the Aramaeans will kill us because we're Israelites and because we're lepers So we're not gonna get any help there, but they're the only ones that have food. And since we have nothing to lose, what could happen? They could kill us, but we're gonna die anyway. And so they go to the camp of the Arameans and driven by desperation, the weakest of the weak. I mean, this is a starving city and these are the outcasts of a starving city. These are the weakest of the weak, the famished dying lepers leave the city gate and they walk to the, camp of the Arameans stumble in at twilight into the enemy camp and there is no one to greet them at the front door and as they prance right in there is no one at all in the enemy camp and it turns out that the Arameans had heard a rumor as some scholars interpret verse 6 which says the Lord had caused the army of the Arameans to hear a sound of chariots, a sound of horses, even a sound of a great army. Either it was a rumor or God had caused a kind of audio illusion so that the people actually thought they were hearing the approach of a giant army, maybe from Egypt, maybe this was a huge mercenary army that Israel employed to come against the Syrians. from another country, and that that army was now on the move, on the approach, and the Arameans panicked and in complete mayhem. They just drop everything they have in the camp, and they run for their lives, and they run, and they keep on running, dropping articles of clothing and armor as they go. They had massive supplies of food. They had enough food in that camp so that they could maintain this famine siege indefinitely. And now they leave everything behind. All of their food stores, all of their riches, everything is just left in the camp. And these four stooges, lepers, just march into the camp. And when they look around, everywhere is food, armor, treasure. I know we just had Christmas morning and maybe you've seen this kind of look on the face of a child, but that's the face that characterized them. They walk in and this is crazy. Everywhere we look, clothing, treasure. They're plundering. They're stuffing their faces. You can just imagine it. Carrying as much as they could hold. They're packing things in their clothing and packing bags over their shoulders. They're stashing. They're stuffing their mouths. They're giddy, they're laughing, they're crying, they're scared, they're amazed, they're eating. And then, one of the lepers, fat and happy, says, time out guys, wait a minute, guys, we need to think this through. This ain't right. I feel guilty. Not because we're plundering our enemies but because we left all the people in the city and they have no idea that all this food is right here outside the gate. I feel guilty for not sharing the good news. Carol punched the words when she read it and you know the truth is in Hebrew the Hebrew Bible was translated into the Greek and when it came to this particular passage we're not sharing the good news. The Greek word for that is Evangelion. We're not sharing the gospel. That's really what he's saying. We're not sharing the gospel with the people in the city. The gospel of God's victory on behalf of his people. We have to share this good news with the king or we're going to get in trouble. So it's back to the gate again. To the city. And there, by the messenger, they send word to the palace. And the writer takes us back to the palace where the story started. It goes full circle. where we first met the king weeping, but now the king gets news. No need to weep, we have all the food that this city could possibly use. And now the king wonders, is this a trick? Are these lepers sent by the Syrians to trick us? Could we possibly find scouts who would risk their lives and go and see if this camp is really as chock full of food as they say it is? And it's not difficult to find scouts because it's dangerous mission, but they got nothing to lose. And so the scouts go desperate and weak, but they come back confirming the good news. The people of the city are informed and they make this mad dash, the stampede out of the city of Samaria into the camp of the Arameans to take as much food as anyone can carry, a super abundance of food rags to riches. Fine flour, it says, sells for the price of common barley. It's like filet mignon is on sale for the price of spam. And the king says, we have to have crowd control. I mean, it's like looting. It's crazy. It's chaos in the streets. So he says to his lieutenant, you get out and direct traffic at the city gate, but it's too late. The crowd is just so out of control and the lieutenant literally gets trampled and dies. He sees the food but he never gets to eat the food just like the man of God said. Now, suppose you read that in your daily Bible reading because you're all making resolutions to read the Bible from cover to cover this year. And suppose you read that and close your Bible, what are you supposed to do with that? What is the budding idea that we are supposed to take away? What does this particular story say about the Bible's unique understanding of human weakness? Well, let's trace the bud all the way to the flower in the New Testament, three perspectives on weakness, and then a final question. Number one, You only see the Bible's unique teaching on weakness fully when you face that moment that God himself became weak in the death of Jesus Christ. God becomes a man. He unites himself to a human body and human nature, and God loses, as it were. He gives away his power, and God becomes totally weak. He's born a baby who has to be changed and fed. He then becomes a minor child under the authority of parents then becomes a servant he humbled himself taking the form of a servant and finally he becomes cursed the lowest outcast member of society condemned with no power no legal rights no status a criminal an outcast like the lepers one from whom men hide their faces it says in Isaiah and yet as the Apostle Paul said in first Corinthians chapter one the weakness of God is stronger than men. That is, when God became weak in the person of Jesus Christ, in that weakness, God is undermining, disarming all of our human objections and our defiance and our opposition. And in that moment, when God becomes weakest of all on the cross, He is exposing our strength for what it really is, which is an illusion. And it was in this place of weakness on the cross that God planted his kingdom on planet Earth. He plunders the strong man and takes everything he wants, like the lepers were plundering the enemy camp. And God in Christ plunders the strong man God's weakness is greater than our strength. And because this weakness is so central and so important to the way God does things, God becoming weak in Christ, it means that those who enter into the kingdom of God and those who live through faith in Jesus Christ, for them, weakness is very important. They enter the kingdom not by their qualifications, not by their connections, not by the strength of their willpower or their discipline. They don't make some qualifying gesture, here God, I give you this, now you return your blessings to me. Not by some display of their own goodness or power or commitment. Those who enter the kingdom of God enter through the door of need. It's through desperation, it's through hunger, through the recognition of their own disease and weakness. It's not by becoming good enough, it's not by becoming strong enough, it's by becoming weak. That's why the basic ethic of the kingdom, when Jesus Christ offers his inaugural address and says, this is what my kingdom is going to promise. His opening words of his most famous sermon, the Sermon on the Mount, lay out the ethics of the kingdom, and they are the ethics of weakness. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. And these lepers contribute to the Bible's whole teaching on weakness. A teaching that says, unlike the world and the constant longing for strength and to get over people, and to get influence, and to get control. And unlike in religion, where people use moral achievement to measure up and show their own worth in the midst of the religious community of which they are a part, unlike any of these, in the gospel, seeing our weakness puts a person in the position to be blessed. So that's the first perspective. The cross of Christ provides a new paradigm, new paradigm for understanding weakness. Second, seeing the world and life in this new way can almost make us want to become weaker. You know, the lepers were the weakest of all and they became fattest and happiest of all. And the apostles, particularly Apostle Paul, he taught that when people really get the gospel, they will inevitably draw the conclusion that if the more sinful people get more grace, then maybe I should sin more so that I can get more grace. You know, I've taught very elementary, simple step presentation of the gospel in our new members, our inquirers class here at St. Andrews for many years. And there have been many times when after laying out the gospel in its simplest form, I can see people with worried looks on their faces. And sometimes they have courage enough to inquire in the inquirers class. And sometimes they say, well, TJ, if it's true If the gospel is that good, and if God is so generous, and it doesn't depend on us at all, then where's the motivation to love, to be good, to get better? It seems like it motivates us in the opposite direction. People who sort of measure up, people like a lot of you, people who know not to end sentences with a preposition. People who dress up for church. People who know manners. People who meet the expectations of their religious community. Good looking people. Successful people. They often don't see their need for this bloody spectacle of this cross salvation. I could see my need for a little fine-tuning, but the cross thing seems way too messy and extreme. On the other hand, really big sensational sinners, morally diseased people, and outcasts, they see Jesus Christ as their only hope. And sometimes the fairly good people can ask, well, what's the use? Why am I trying so hard? Why not just be like one of the morally diseased people? Why not just sin big so I can get big grace? And the Apostle Paul always answers that objection in the same way, no way, don't do that. And the Apostle Paul's point is, you don't need to sin more because you are all already way more messed up than you know you are. And the key is not to sin more, but just to see more of the sin that is already there. Because whether you know it or not, you already have all the weakness that you'll ever need. The key is not to sin more. The key is to see your sin and weakness, seeing your flaws makes you humble, and it says repeatedly in the Bible, God gives grace to the humble. Grace is for the desperate and dissatisfied, people who really want to change and grow. So says Paul, so says this passage. Don't sin more, just see more of the sin that's already there. A great quote from C.S. Lewis, great book called The Four Loves. Listen to it, I'll try to read it slowly. The good man is sorry for the sins which have increased his need. He is not entirely sorry for the fresh need they have produced. So when you sin, you're sorry for the sin, but you're not always sorry that it exposes you for who you are, a sinner in need of grace. The penalty for refusing or reversing this gospel grace order is always great. You see it in Elijah. Elijah was the mentor of Elisha. And when Elijah tried to appeal to that new convert, Naaman, do you remember him? And Naaman said, that's great, what can I pay you for that? Elisha said, oh man, now you're gonna be worse than you were before you had the leprosy. We see it also in Simon the magician in the book of Acts. He saw people filled with the Holy Spirit and said, where can I get me some of that? How much will it cost me? And Peter offers the most profound kind of punishment for that. And here too, in this lieutenant is saying, there's no way, I cannot believe that God would be that generous. God is too good to be weak. I won't accept it, it can't happen. He ends up not only hungry, but trampled and dead. So the point is a pretty big warning here. God is turning the world's value system upside down and God is showing that grace is not for the strong, not for the good, not for the proud, but for the weak and for the humble. And this is why in this world sometimes the worst thing that can ever happen to you is that you become someone strong and wealthy and good-looking and independent and good. You know some people have had a lot of pain in their lives. And they may wrongly misinterpret the pain to say, if God would bring this much pain into my life, God must not be good. God must not be generous. And that was the case with the lieutenant. He just could not believe in the generosity of God who had brought so much pain on the people of the Israelites. Others are the opposite. They've had so little pain in life and they are so secure in their stuff that they fail to see it is all a gift from the God of grace. Either way though, nothing is more spiritually fatal than to reject or deny or neglect or misinterpret God's grace and goodness. Third, what are you to do with your weaknesses? In other words, suppose you become convinced, yeah, I see the Bible's emphasis on weakness, that God blesses not the strong, but the weak who recognize their weakness. Well, what are you supposed to do with your weakness and how are you supposed to use it for your good and also for the good of other people? Let me offer two responses. Number one, learn to share your weakness with other people. This was a little band of lepers It's a little weakness community, the four stooges, the four lepers. Learn to band together with people who are weak and who know their weaknesses. Learn not to hide whatever it is, your hurts from your past, your failings, your difficulties, your temptations, your sins. and learn to develop within the Christian community. Learn to develop what my one friend calls appropriate vulnerability. That is, on the one hand, avoid being secretive and non-vulnerable. Avoid being self-justifying and private. Avoid acting as if you yourself never sin. That's a misuse of weakness. On the other hand, Don't be fixated and defined by your weaknesses. Don't adopt the victim mentality, the self-punisher mentality, that kind of low self-image that is really a kind of self-fixation, a form of selfishness and really the flip side of pride. All these are ways to exploit personal weakness and make it an end rather than a means. One rule of thumb is when you go to share your weakness with another person in the church, ask yourself, is what I'm sharing going to help this other person? Or is it just gonna, whatever, exploit my weakness for no purpose at all? A second gospel use of personal weakness is that when I look at my own weakness, It enables me to identify with the weak and needy. What do I mean by that? Well, seeing myself as a radically messed up person, as a radically flawed person, weak in loving God, weak in loving you like I'm supposed to, seeing myself as weak I am then enabled to move toward other weak people and to come alongside them and help, not as Mr. Big Daddy, superior guy who has it all together, but I'm able to come alongside people who I see as my own fellow lepers. And I can say, like the ones said in this episode, hey, I'm not better than you, but this is just too good to keep to myself. And I have to share it with you I know a place where you can get fed. And this is why believing in the gospel way, being Stooges in Graceland, this is why believing in grace enables in the church a kinship with widows and orphans and immigrants and the poor, all those categories that we just celebrated upstairs and all those categories mandated by God again and again in the Bible that should be the concern of the church. A final question and then I'll be quiet. What do you have to lose? What I mean is today's story introduces us to so many people who had nothing to lose. The lepers had nothing to lose. The scouts had nothing to lose. The people had nothing to lose. But I want you to imagine, I want you to imagine someone in that starving city. And there's a knock at the door. Hey, come on out. There's so much food that we can't even eat it all. And the person opens up the door, but leaves the chain on the door and says, that's okay. I think we're fine here. And the reason he says that is because about a week ago they took the family savings and they bought the head of a donkey which they keep in the refrigerator. And he's thinking to himself, that's okay. My family and I are well taken care of. And they never leave the confines of their house because they have all the donkey head that they can possibly eat. I hope no one here will lose the kingdom because you're satisfied with the donkey head that this world can offer, whether it's reputation or accolades or rewards. Don't be satisfied with fake strength when infinite joy is being offered to you. Let's pray together. Father in heaven, may we now launch into this coming week not dependent on our strength, but dependent on your grace. And may we be quick to face our own weakness and again and again come out with our hands up. God gives grace to the humble. And may we find that your grace is sufficient, that your grace is enough. Lord, use our weaknesses in this coming seven days to bring us again to the cross of Christ where God became weak in order to make us strong. Father, help us to be quick to tell those fellow lepers in the workplace, in our families, in our neighborhoods, look, There is food as if the very windows of heaven have been opened, and it's free to anyone who will come, leaving the donkey head behind and receiving grace upon grace. Thank you, Lord, for your love for us. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.