08/14/2026
Dear friends,
A number of you have asked me for a copy of my sermon notes from last Sunday — I am flattered you all thought so highly of what I had to say! For your convenience, here is a transcript of my sermon.
See you in church!
Jonah
In 1970, Walter Mischel, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, conducted a famous series of experiments which became known as “the marshmallow test.” Mischel began each test by seating a young child alone at a table with a single marshmallow. The child was then presented with a choice: either to ring a bell which would summon the researcher back, and on his return to eat the marshmallow, or to wait for the researcher to come back of his own accord, at which point the child would be rewarded with an additional marshmallow. Some of the children involved proved unable to wait for even a full minute (Mischel called these children “low delayers”), while others (called “high
delayers”) were able to wait for up to twenty minutes, developing techniques to distract themselves from the presence of the marshmallow.
The marshmallow experiment and its results are, I think, extremely indicative of where we are at as a society. Our whole way of life is built around the promise of maximum gratification in the minimum amount of time possible. Are you bored? You can find any movie or TV show you want on streaming services like Netflix. Looking for a change of scenery? Online booking agencies like Travelocity have you covered — it took me all of five minutes to book flights from my home in Boston to Saskatoon this spring. Are you hoping to enact political or social change in your community? There are dozens of groups to join and causes to get involved with in Prince Albert alone. We are told that we
have infinite choice and infinite potential, but somehow it seems like nothing ever gets fixed and no one is completely satisfied.
Of course, these are all very modern examples, but as we learn in our first reading this morning, people have been chasing this illusion of total satisfaction for a very long time. Our “main character,” as it were, is a man called Naaman, the commander of the army of the king of Syria, who “was a mighty man of valour, but he was a leper” — that is, a person suffering from a highly contagious bacterial infection of the skin, for which there was no known cure at the time. Naaman’s wife’s maidservant, an Israelite girl kidnapped by the Syrians in a raid on their southern neighbours, sends him to the prophet Elisha in the hopes that he might be able to effect a cure for him.
However, when Naaman arrives at Elisha’s house, the prophet refuses to interact with him
directly (perhaps due to the contagious nature of Naaman’s condition), communicating only through an intermediary. Worse still, from Naaman’s point of view, is the underwhelming nature of the cure which Elisha prescribes him. Naaman is directed to bathe in the River Jordan seven times; could he not have bathed in one of the rivers in his hometown of Damascus, which are apparently cleaner than the Jordan? Was it really necessary to come all the way to Elisha to receive such basic advice? Moreover,
Naaman is a very important person who has plenty of friends in high places — should Elisha, man of God though he is, not be treating him with a bit more deference?
These questions which are going through Naaman’s head might seem to us like the natural ones; goodness knows I might have asked some of them if I were in his place. It is tempting, is it not, to imagine that since God knows our desires, our likes and dislikes, and our expectations of him, he will behave exactly as we imagine he will. And while God might choose to reveal himself to us in exactly the way we think he will, we certainly should not count on him doing so, for the sake of our own spiritual
well-being. I know this is going to sound awfully cliché, but I really do want to emphasize the value of learning to expect God to show up in our everyday lives where we least expect him. Sure, the River Jordan may have seemed dirty and unappealing to Naaman. But remember that it was in the same River Jordan that Our Lord was baptized centuries later. The Church Father Origen, writing in the third century, teaches that Naaman “becomes angry because he does not perceive that it is our Jordan and not the prophet, which removes the uncleanness of those who are unclean because of leprosy and
heals them. For the work of a prophet is to send one to that which heals.”
In other words, the things which are most useful to God are often those things which we
might overlook or dismiss as uninteresting. What is more, we ourselves are called to be the agents — the very hands and feet — of God in the world. In the words of the Psalmist, “every man living is altogether vanity”; nevertheless, God offers us the opportunity to be his co-workers in the process of salvation. We are given a particularly clear example of a person living into this vocation in our second reading today, in which we hear about Saint Paul’s arrival at Rome and how he preached the Word to
the people there. Now, our reading this morning is from the very end of the Book of Acts, and you may have noticed that its conclusion was pretty anticlimactic: “And he lived there two whole years at his own expense, and welcomed all who came to him, preaching the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ quite openly and unhindered.” Nothing more is said about Saint Paul’s encounters and relationships with the other Jewish leaders at Rome, and even more surprisingly, nothing more is said about his dealings with the imperial authorities; remember, he came there specifically in order to plead his case to the Emperor. This anticlimax is so disjointed and out of place, in fact, that some scholars have suggested that Saint Luke was planning to write a follow-up volume telling the rest of Saint Paul’s story.
As creative as this suggestion is, I think it obscures the theological brilliance of this seemingly boring ending. The work in which Saint Paul was engaged during those two years in Rome — preaching the Word, making disciples, celebrating the sacraments — did not end with him, nor was it his alone. Rather, he and the other apostles mentored the next generation of Christians: people like Saint Clement, Saint Ignatius of Antioch, and Saint Polycarp. They, in turn, passed the work on to the next generation after them, and so on in an unbroken chain which continues down to the present day.
Thus, the ending of Acts is the perfect antidote to the desire for instant gratification which has gripped people from Naaman’s time until today. Each of us, as Christians, are indeed players in a cosmic drama far, far bigger than ourselves. But in order to do what we are meant to do and be who we are meant to be, we must learn to see Our Lord in the ordinary, the everyday, and the uninspiring, instead of waiting for the grand moment which we cannot be sure will come. “He must increase, but I must decrease,” Saint John the Baptist tells his followers in response to their questions about Jesus.
And so it is with us: in a culture which teaches us to assert ourselves as aggressively as possible, in which everything is permissible but nothing is forgiven, one of the best ways in which we can bear witness to Christ is by just slowing down and making some time in our everyday lives for him. We cannot fix all the world’s problems, no matter how hard we try; the best we can do, as Origen reminds us, is to point the world to the only Person who can.
