The healing of Naaman, commander of the army of the king of Aram, seems to me to provide a metaphor for our time. We live in a world in which we pay attention to power and the powerful. We look to the powerful for the solutions to our world's problems. Naaman was one of those powerful people. He was a prominent commander of the army of Aram, a neighboring nation to Israel.

Even powerful people have problems. We are told that despite all his success and honor, Naaman had a problem that he could not solve. All that power and praise could not provide Naaman that which he most needed in life. Naaman was a leper.

His leprosy, a physical malady, is an effective metaphor for those diseases of the soul that plague so much of our society today. There is something desperately sick in our society t…