Segontium and Expectations - Sermon 15th February 2009

2 Kings 5:1 , Mark 1:40

When I was in P6 – not that we called it that back then, in North Wales; we called it “Mr. Pritchard’s class” – we had a big visit arranged. Like all primary children since the Romans left, we had had all sorts of lessons on “the Romans.”  We had even done a project on “The Romans”.  That’s how modern we were! And now we were off to Caernarfon, fifty miles away, on the bus, not to see the castle – which most of us had already seen a few times – but to inspect that other, hidden glory of the old walled town. We were off to Segontium.

Segontium is the old Roman auxiliary fort at the top of the town. It’s nothing like as well-known as Caernarfon castle, but it is of huge archaeological importance in its own right. It was an outstation of Deva Victix, the huge Roman site which is now the city of Chester, at the other end of the North Wales coast.

And I, alone of all of our class, had already seen it.

Well, I’d seen it through the fence as I walked by...

The late sixties was, you might say, the Golden Age of Plastic; I had already had a contented summer running around the Isle of Bute in a plastic Viking helmet.  And now you could get plastic Roman helmets, and square shields, in Woolworth’s. (Remember Woolworth’s?) My friends Keith and Jonathan and Caradog had plans to dress up as Roman legionaries, and – and I quote – “run around the battlements...” In fact, the prospect of standing in plastic Roman attire and waving a sword “from the battlements” was already the biggest component in what they were looking forward to, that great day.

You would have thought that my having seen the place would have put me in pole position in all the excited playground chat that this visit generated; but oddly, it didn’t. I couldn’t share their enthusiasm, for one good reason. Yes, I, alone, had seen the site. And I alone knew that there was nothing on it more than two feet high. 

And I worried myself sick about this. What should I do? Should I tell them? And then I found myself reasoning in an odd way. Maybe I’d only seen a bit of the site.  Maybe there was another bit. Maybe, on that bit there were high buildings. Maybe they did have battlements... And then, something else kicked in. What was that that I was sure I’d glimpsed, through the railings? Wasn’t there something at the far end of the Segontium site? Something different from all these low rows of stones marking the outlines of Roman buildings?

I so didn’t want my friends to be disappointed...

Well, the first good thing that happened – though it didn’t seem so at the time – was that Mr. Pritchard banned plastic Roman armour from the bus. He was a very liberal and progressive teacher. I’d half-expected him to turn up in a toga. But Roman armour was, very sensibly, verboten.

And then we got there.

And there were a few grumbles of “Is this it?” – but not that many.  We’d been an hour and a bit on the bus, singing bus songs, and playing bus games, and – without the helmets and square shields – this had already come to feel like any other school trip, which wasn’t at all a bad thing.

And Selwyn Pritchard was a superb guide to the site. We had no historical yardstick to measure it by, and such comparisons would have been right over our heads, but  when the foundations of Segontium were laid, in the 70s, AD, only one of the New Testament Gospels – Mark’s - would have been written. The stone buildings all dated from barely after Luke. And these stones were here, in their neat arrangements.  And somehow – I wish I could remember how – Selwyn Pritchard managed to convey to us, his class, just how old,a nd just how important, this place was. And then, after the profound silence, one of the boys came to the end of his attention span, and let out a whoop. There, in one corner, was a complete-ish building.  And it even looked a bit like a military structure, even though it was only the size of a very small bungalow, or a very large shed. It must be the Praetorium, or some integral part of the defences. Here, for a few minutes, we could pretend to be Roman legionaries.

I looked the building up on the guide to the site we had been given.

 It was the dog kennels.

I didn’t tell them...

Looking back, I am actually quite proud of what we were able to do as a group of children. Because it was something that Naaman, the King of Aram’s General, had a lot more trouble doing, and nearly didn’t manage at all. We overcame our unreasonable expectations, and managed to see the value of what was there.

So Naaman came with his horses and chariots, and halted at the entrance of Elisha's house. Elisha sent a messenger to him, saying, "Go, wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh shall be restored and you shall be clean." But Naaman became angry and went away, saying, "I thought that for me he would surely come out, and stand and call on the name of the LORD his God, and would wave his hand over the spot, and cure the leprosy! Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? Could I not wash in them, and be clean?" He turned and went away in a rage. 

Now, in our wee situation, there was nothing of the huge significance of Naaman’s disease, with all that it meant for him, and for the way in which, even for such a powerful man, it would distort and curtail and vitiate his life. Our wee happy bus was full of unreasonable hope, and expectation; but fear and dread, and the question “What will happen if nothing happens?” was no part of it. And yet we all know that it is when things are especially worrying, especially dark, especially bad, that the least glimmer of hope seems to light up the world. And that this is a good and fair comparison – a busload of children going to see something they think will be Roman in a Cecil B. DeMille kind of way, a totally spectacular way, and the Syrian general, full of hope after months of fear – is demonstrated, for me at least, by Naaman’s reaction to what happens. “But I thought it was going to be like this – and it wasn’t…”

"I thought that for me he would surely come out, and stand and call on the name of the LORD his God, and would wave his hand over the spot, and cure the leprosy!”

“I expected a big spectacular! I expected some sort of magical rite, some sort of exotic performance, something different, that marked this out as the miraculous, the powerful, the divine!” 

It’s so easy to approach God with preconceived ideas of what it will be like, and what will happen. It’s so easy to approach God with a wish list, even a wish list we don’t realize we have. And it’s terribly easy to let these things blind us to what God is actually doing – because it isn’t what we expected, or what we thought we wanted.

We’ve just had our Quinquennial Visitation. The new, user-friendly terminology is “Five-Yearly Visit” but it will be generations before it’s anything other than a Quinquennial to most people. Because of circumstances, not least the demise of the old Paisley Presbytery, it’s eleven years since we last had one, and five years is enough to half-forget what they are all about – and to start to worry when another is on the horizon!

Ken Gray last Sunday very gently, powerfully and constructively reminded us of what it’s all about. From our point, it’s about us being listened to, even more than being looked at. It’s certainly about a mirror being held up to our life and work, so that we can look at ourselves responsibly, and take stock; it’s also about us being able to tell people who come as friends where we find ourselves, and what our joys, frustrations, hopes and fears all are.  And thanks to the sensitivity of the visiting committee, we were able to do all of these things. Sometimes, just telling friends, who haven’t heard it all before,  what we’ve been thinking, and what we are worried about, puts things into a new perspective. For me, the Quinquennial visit offered – and continues to offer – a chance to take a deep breath, and to take stock.

One of the things we’ve been trying to do in Kilbarchan East for the last two and a half years and more – really for the past six years – is to think about the future. We know that the way things are, the present arrangements, will change, and that the future will in some way be different.  We all have our thoughts about how this might be.  But none of us knows. We all have our preferred options for the future shape of Christianity in Kilbarchan; and we know that we aren’t the only people involved in this discussion; there’s Kilbarchan West, and there’s Howwood, too – and people there have their own takes on what a good, sensible constructive arrangement for the future might be.

But we are stuck. The future’s coming, but at the moment we have no way of dealing with its challenges. We have no framework that will let us tackle the future, or even think seriously about it. And that’s not our fault, it’s just the way things are. The whole situation at the moment is just seized up.  These things happen.

Think of Naaman, discovering his leprosy. There’s a very distant, but useful parallel here. Suddenly, everything is up in the air. Suddenly, he can plan nothing, take nothing for granted. Suddenly, the hopes he’d been nurturing for the future are gone, the expectations that seemed so natural, so fair, so much his possession, are taken away from him. Things are not going to be the way he thought they were. 

Yet God is in this situation. And the presence of God here is marked by hope.  A little slave-girl says to his wife “I know of somebody…” 

The trouble is that Naaman starts to script this hope, to write a screenplay for it. “This is how it will go!” “This is what it will be like!” “This is the kind of thing he will do!” “It’ll be wonderful – because it will be just like this…”

And it’s not. What he’s offered is God at work in the mundane, in the everyday. In the world where life is lived, day after day.  “Go and wash in that little burn…”  Not even a big river, like the rivers of Syria. Certainly not a rite presided over by a charismatic, mystical figure. More like a prescription from a grumpy GP. “I told him I had a cold, and he wouldn’t even give me antibiotics…” As though antibiotics could help a cold! “Yes, but that’s not the point! I expected him to…”

So Naaman very nearly misses what is there.

And the danger for us is that if we have too clear a picture of what the future holds, too detailed a wish-list for what we want – we might miss what God is offering. 

At the very beginning of Mark’s Gospel, a leper comes to Jesus, and says to him “If you choose, you can make me clean.”  And that’s a terribly complicated thing to say in a few words.

“If you choose, you can make me clean…”

On the one hand the man is saying “What I want is irrelevant. You can heal me if you want to…”

“If you want to…” And that’s all we usually hear. And we react with surprise and horror. Is there any chance that Jesus might not want to?

But that’s not the point. That’s not what the man is saying. What he’s saying, with the greatest possible emphasis, is you can do this. And for a leper to say that, under these circumstances, means only one thing. You can set me free.

How can we imagine what dreams of being healed a first-century leper, isolated from his family and friends, hounded out of community life, stoned away from villages and towns, having to shout his presence on the roads to warn passers-by, must have had.  But the point is that, at this moment, the actuality of what is on offer from God in Christ is so huge that it’s bigger than any of these dreams. Because it is real. And the man acknowledges the reality of this, by saying to Jesus “I know that you can set me free. I know that you can do this.”

“If you choose, you can make me clean…”

What he says at that moment is this. The future doesn’t belong to his dreams, however much he’s been sustained and kept going by them. The future belongs to God.  And in Jesus Christ, this future has become real. Whatever else it contains, it contains God. 

That’s what Naaman nearly missed. It’s what we need to make absolutely sure we don’t miss, as a congregation, over the next few years. God in the possibilities before us. God in what’s actually there.  God in real life, giving new life, in ways we couldn’t have imagined.

We’ve spent so much time thinking and agonizing and worrying about the future. It’s time to draw a line under all of that. It’s time to do what Naaman ultimately and grudgingly had to do, and what the leper in Mark did with a sense of complete liberation. It’s time to put ourselves completely in God’s hands, and to open ourselves up to what he has in store for us. And to trust that it will be better than anything we could possibly imagine.