READING:
2 Kings 5.1-14 

Healing in Community

the Compassion of Strangers

The story we’ve heard today from 2 Kings 5 is not simply a tale of miraculous healing. It’s a story about how healing happens through people who are often overlooked, through actions that seem too small to matter, and through relationships rooted in trust, humility, and presence.

Naaman, the powerful commander of the Syrian army, is brought low by illness. Though he holds honour in the eyes of the world, he cannot fix this problem by rank or reward. His healing begins, astonishingly, not with a prophet or king, but with an unnamed, captive servant girl, a person without social status, power, or even freedom. She speaks a word of hope, quietly but clearly: “There is a prophet in Samaria. There is healing.” Her voice, fragile, marginalised, yet full of faith, sets the whole journey in motion.

What follows is not a straightforward path. Naaman arrives with gold, letters, and expectation, but the healing comes not through spectacle, but simplicity: “Go and wash.” The prophet Elisha doesn’t even come out to meet him. There is no drama, only a message. And Naaman, initially insulted by the ordinariness of the act, is ready to turn away, until yet again, his servants encourage him to trust, to let go, to try. And so it is that Naaman’s healing is not only physical, but relational, communal, and spiritual. He is changed not just in skin, but in heart and mind.

This is not a story of heroic intervention, but of shared transformation. It’s what Sam Wells and HeartEdge churches would describe as “being with” rather than doing to. The unnamed girl, the prophet who steps back, the messengers and servants… all act not out of power, but from presence. It is in these small, faithful, human gestures that God’s healing flows.

Being With

And it is this same spirit of “being with” that shone so clearly in the days following the Grenfell Tower fire in June 2017. When systems failed and structures faltered, the community became the healer. Local mosques, churches, community centres, and schools opened their doors without question. People formed human chains to sort donations, patrolled streets for safety, and offered what they had: time, hands, prayers, presence. Survivors were not pitied. Rather they were accompanied. Not fixed, they were honoured and people walked alongside them.

Compassion from afar

But the story didn’t end on Ladbroke Grove. Nearly 300 miles away, a mother in Cornwall, Esmé Page, asked: What can we do? Within days, a Facebook post turned into a movement: Cornwall Hugs Grenfell was born. Over the following months, more than 500 survivors, neighbours, and first responders were welcomed into homes, B&Bs, and cottages across Cornwall. Not for counselling, not for programmes. But simply for a breathing space for the soul and friendship .

There were surf lessons, cream teas, handwritten notes, and quiet evenings watching the tide go out. Children who had fallen silent after trauma found words again after afternoons rock-pooling. Adults who had not slept in peace found rest in the embrace of open skies and strangers who had become companions. One host said, “We offered a bed, but we received a story. And that story has enlarged our hearts.”

A different sort of healing

This is the kind of healing Naaman discovered. Healing that happens through others, through humility, through community. Healing that does not come in a straight line, or through grand gestures, but in slow, surprising, sometimes uncomfortable ways. Healing that asks us to receive from those we did not expect. And to give not from abundance, but from presence.

In both Naaman’s story and the Grenfell response, we see what Sam Wells, vicar of St Martin’s in London , calls the heart of Christian mission: not problem-solving, but relationship. Not answers, but accompaniment. Not control, but compassion.

And so, today, we are invited to hear these stories together. Theses stories are not just as historical or inspiring events, but as a call. A call to trust the voice from the margins. To offer hospitality without needing to fix. To believe that God’s healing presence often moves through the small and the ordinary. And to recognise that our own healing- – whether of soul, body, memory or society, will also come through community, through presence, through shared journey.

Listening with our heart

Let us listen afresh for the quiet voices of faith in our world. The unnamed, the overlooked, the ones who carry wisdom not in degrees, but in scars. Let us trust the ordinary gestures of washing, welcoming, waiting. Let us build communities not around fixing, but around being with. Remember, God is already present, already at work in ways we do not always see.

I wonder…

• Where are we looking for grand solutions when God is offering simple, faithful presence?
• Who are the unlikely prophets and witnesses in our community—those whose voices we overlook?
• What would it mean to take healing seriously—not as a project, but as a shared journey of being with God and with one another?