Member-only story
Doing the easy/hard thing
Talking about power, who has it and how it is used, does not seem to be easy for us. For those who do not have power, it is hard to give voice to their experience. It feels dangerous to speak up, to “speak truth to power”.
And if you are someone who has power, oftentimes that is hard to acknowledge, hard to see. So many discussions of “privilege”, especially “white privilege” result in some strange defensive posture in the person who has power, as if someone is coming to take everything that they have, scaling the walls of their castle at this very moment!
So when I read again the story of Naaman this week, it was not just the story of this powerful commander, a military leader, but there was another voice there too: this servant girl.
If you are someone who thinks that scripture or the bible or however you want to refer to the text we have in front of us in Christian churches, that it is a story of domination and authoritarianism or triumphalism, you would be wrong. There is story after story of the defeat of the mighty, of a God who chooses the unlikely one, oftentimes the weakest, the outcast, to be the one who leads the people, the one who God favors.
So in this story of the mighty military commander and his struggle with his disease, it is the servant girl who is the savior.
