SunJun272010
II KINGS 2:1-2, 6-14
“A number of years ago,” wrote the late theologian Robert McAfee Brown, “I preached in Buffalo, New York. It was a double-service situation: run through the liturgy at 9:30, have a quick cup of coffee, go to the bathroom, and then do the same thing again at 11. Before my 9:30 sermon I was prayed over by the local parson: ‘. . . O Lord, grant unto thy servant with us this morning a portion of thy grace, that he may rightly divide the word of truth.’ Fair enough, I decided, despite my nervousness; I need all the help I can get.
“Then the local parson heard my sermon.
“At the 11 o’clock service, he repeated everything he had said in the earlier service, word for word, phrase for phrase, pause for pause, save that when he came to the portion of his prayer quoted above, he escalated the petition: ‘. . . O Lord, grant unto thy servant with us this morning a double portion of thy grace . . .’” (Creative Dislocation—The Movement of Grace, pp. 134-5).
Not what any preacher wants to hear between services! When someone else says it, it’s just a slam. But, that is something we’d ask for ourselves. Elisha isn’t dissing Elijah here, after all. He’s asking for help. He’s asking for guidance, something any of us—not just preachers—might crave. Just as Elisha asks for a double portion of Elijah’s spirit, so we all wish to inherit something of value from the preceding generation. It’s the hope that we’ll live up to the best of what they’ve offered—that we, too, will receive a double portion.
In my family, we’re full of ministers. Several summers ago, when I asked my mother about it, she counted twenty four of them that she knew. And many of them were illustrious. My maternal grandfather was a distinguished pastor of a church in Oak Park, IL, and later the Conference Minister in Massachusetts; a great uncle was one of the lead advocates for the Scottsboro Boys, nine black Alabama boys falsely accused, in a famous case, of raping two white girls in 1931. My father published a book that’s on every minister’s bookshelf. And my mother was likely the first woman senior minister in the country, in the 1970s, as well as a seminary president and the recipient of three honorary doctorates. So it won’t surprise you if I tell you that, in my family, Elijahs have proliferated, and there is a heritage to live up to.
My guess is that, in your own way, that’s true for a number of you, as well. Your father was perhaps president of a successful company, your mother the one who bound the neighborhood together. Your grandfather was a gifted carpenter, your grandmother a radiant soprano. Or maybe it was an aunt or uncle, a mentor on a first job, a teacher whose passion and care led you to your present field. For most of us, there’s an Elijah—someone who has been larger-than-life, someone who has set an example we think we can’t possibly equal.
And maybe we really can’t equal them—some people really are larger-than-life, with few, if any, peers. But it’s also true that many of our forebears had struggles we didn’t know about—the rakish uncle whose alcoholism felled him, the distinguished mentor whose extra-marital affairs proved self-destructive, the Martha-Stewart mother whose depression was viselike—the struggles and failures that are the hidden part of every life. So often the lives of those to whom we look up are not what they seem on the surface—not as smooth and effortless and booming as they look.
I remember, in seminary, hearing my father preach a sermon in which he said that when he himself graduated from seminary, he felt as though he knew less than when he had started—that the older he got, in other words, the more mystery there was to life. And, as mysteries deepened for me, I remember being incredibly relieved, and surprised, to hear there were things he didn’t know.
Still, even as compromised and complex as their legacies may be, many of us yearn for some of what those forebears had. Like Elisha, we want to say to them, “Please give me a double portion of what you have. Let me have your business acumen, your musical ear, your teaching ability, your faithful trust in God.” Today’s story of Elijah and Elisha suggests something about the presence of God in the passing of the torch from one generation to the next.
Let’s explore some of the dynamics of this passing of the torch from Elijah to Elisha. First: though Elijah chooses Elisha to be his successor, he then lets go. He doesn’t try to tell the younger man what to do or how to behave. He doesn’t insist that Elisha be just like him. Elijah knows that his time is through, and that Elisha will be his own person. We could stand to be the same way. So often, as we get older, we’re eager to tell the next generation how they should carry on—how the company should be run, for example, or how the church should be shaped. We can’t. They’re going to carry on in their way. They’re going to be their own people. It’s up to us to let them be. Elijah shows us how.
Then there’s Elisha, who insistently gets everything he can before Elijah leaves. There’s great persistence in his refusal to be left alone. “Stay here,” says the old man to the younger one three times (II Kings 2:2, 4, 6). And each time, Elisha won’t let the mentor go. Like Jacob wrestling with the angel (Gen. 32:22-31), it’s as though Elisha refuses to be left without a blessing. It’s probably terribly irritating to Elijah. But it’s something the younger man has to do. And his persistence finally pays off—he gets what he needs. Is there a woodworker you admire, a parent you respect, a banker you wish to learn from? Don’t let them go, Elisha seems to say. Stay after them to learn what you can.
Elisha, in fact, is incredibly specific about what he wants from Elijah: he wants a “double share” of Elijah’s spirit. A somewhat presumptuous request, isn’t it, to be asking apparently for twice Elijah’s gifts. As it happens, though, what Elisha wants is the portion of the inheritance that would go to the older child when the father dies. So what Elisha is really asking for is two thirds of Elijah’s “property”—his spirit—not double it. He’s asking for the older son’s two thirds, rather than the younger son’s one third. It’s still a pretty bold request, but it’s not as pretentious as asking for twice the master’s gift. Maybe that would be a healthy way for us to approach our parents and mentors, too: ‘Give me a sizable chunk of your charisma, your gifts as a lawyer, your gentleness. I don’t need more than what you have. I just want the lion’s share of what you have to carry on.’ That would be both modest and suitably demanding.
Next, Elijah is whisked off to heaven in a whirlwind, and Elisha does two things. First, he grieves. He tears his clothes in sorrow. Such open expression has much to teach this culture which so underplays its grief. When someone you look up to dies, it’s sad. So write the widowed partner, go to the funeral, take a personal day from work. Elisha grieves: it’s good to take time to weep.
Then Elisha gets to work. As we grieve the passing of our parents and mentors and teachers, then, like Elisha, it’s our turn to test our gifts. Elisha has seen the older man make like Moses and part the Jordan River. And there is absolutely no other way of seeing what he is made of than to step to the river himself. Will he, too, be able to part the Jordan? Has that gift, that “double share,” come to him? There’s no way to find out but for him to take the mantle himself and strike the water.
‘You want to be the banker your father was?’ the text seems to ask. Then do the best banking job you can possibly do. ‘You want to be the connecting force your grandmother was?’ Then host the family get-togethers and send the cards and go to the ballgames she went to. ‘You want to be the teacher Miss Burke was?’ Then love your students and engage your subject the way she did.
Sometimes, it’s as though we hold back, as if we’re waiting to feel some change inside us before we think we can launch our ships. And it may not so much be the internal change that enables the step, but the step that shapes the change. Years ago, I heard a UCC minister named Tony Robinson quote the poet Dante as saying something to the effect that ‘Providence follows where we take the first step.’ It’s often as we act that the new reality takes shape in our lives.
There was a time—and I’m sure it was an important time—when I thought I had to get all the pieces of the puzzle straight before I could enter the ministry. I had to deal with all the demons, face all the expectations, make peace with all my insecurities before I could become a pastor. I do think no one would have been well-served if I hadn’t done a good deal of self-reflection. But it’s also true that there was no way for me to claim my own power until I finally took the step and acted my way into the pastorate. I couldn’t rely simply on planning and preparing and speculating. I had to do it. I had to preach the sermons and visit the people who were sick and lead a church in order to find out if this was for me. Like Elisha, I had to take the mantle and strike the water—myself.
There comes a point, for all of us, for our workplaces and churches and families, when we realize that it’s now our moment to lead, and to live in the way God has given us to live. And that, in fact, we’ll do it in our own unique way. Elisha, after all, is not Elijah. Douglas John Hall, who teaches theology, was, as a younger man, a kind of disciple of the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth. He had been shaped in profound ways by his mentor. But as he was writing his first major book, he paid a visit to Barth’s city of Basel, and, he says, “I wandered in the rain around the magnificent old cathedral of Basel, where Barth had lived and taught, and I made in my mind a heartfelt speech to the great man: ‘Dear Karl Barth,’ I said, ‘I am terribly grateful to you—and to your sometime-student Bonhoeffer, and to my teachers Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and the others—for all that you have handed over to me. Without this, I could never have achieved the boldness to write such a book as I am now writing. But I must advise you, all the same, that I shall no longer rely as much on you and your generation of great theologians—no longer seek your approval; no longer feel the need, even, constantly to quote you. No doubt I shall make many mistakes as I venture forth on this new path—oh, how utterly presumptuous of me it is! Yet it is you, yourself, and the others, who have pushed me toward this moment; and I would certainly have failed to learn from you had this moment never arrived. . . . Thank you most sincerely . . . and for the present, Auf Wiedersehen. Perhaps we shall meet in heaven, and then you can tell me what you think of my ideas’” (Theology Today, October, 2002, p. 422). Hall had to begin doing his work without, as he says, always looking over his shoulder to see whether “the authorities” approved (p. 421).
Others have the same experience. The UCC website has many video testimonies about the work of God in people’s lives. As it happens, one of the featured videos this week is of the Rev. Will VerDuin, a long-time Federated member recently ordained here. In Will’s video, he says that as a teenager he resented his older brother’s gifts and wondered why he didn’t have those same gifts. Because of his resentment, he drifted away from the church. Then one day he found himself on his knees in our chapel, and he suddenly heard the voice of the Spirit say clearly to him, “Will, I love you for you. Be a leader and not a follower.” Be a leader and not a follower: Elisha steps up.
This is true for all of us. Yes, the generations ahead of us did great things. But they went through the same insecurities and had the same sense of inadequacy we have. And they nevertheless became our mothers and fathers and teachers and mentors and prophets. God graced them. And God graces us. There comes the time for us to take up that mantle ourselves. And, in a sense, that time is always now.
Now is the time for us to solve the terrible energy crisis that faces us, as earlier generations fought a great war and put a person on the moon—time for us to find energy sources that don’t rely on fossil fuels, time for us to change our habits so we preserve rain forests and stop acidifying the oceans, time for us, as a country and as the world, to engage all our resources to solve this blight.
Now is the time to engage fully in this short life we have—to work hard and play hard, to creatively solve our problems, to commit to our family life, to care for each other “in sickness and in health, in life and in death.”
Now is the time. It’s the time to deepen our commitment to this great church. It’s the time to pray with joy and gratitude and trust and conviction. It’s the time to embrace our children and forgive our parents and make a difference for someone who is poor. It’s the time to live in the grace God has given us, to receive the double portion, trusting that all shall be well, and giving ourselves for the healing of the nations. Elisha took up his mantle and struck the water. By grace, this day, so will we.