Last Sunday After Epiphany
Year B, RCL
February 14, 2021
North Fork Ministries
Old Testament Reading:
2 Kings 2:1-12
Now when the LORD was about to take Elijah up to heaven by a whirlwind, Elijah and Elisha were on their way from Gilgal. Elijah said to Elisha, "Stay here; for the LORD has sent me as far as Bethel." But Elisha said, "As the LORD lives, and as you yourself live, I will not leave you." So they went down to Bethel. The company of prophets who were in Bethel came out to Elisha, and said to him, "Do you know that today the LORD will take your master away from you?" And he said, "Yes, I know; keep silent."
Elijah said to him, "Elisha, stay here; for the LORD has sent me to Jericho." But he said, "As the LORD lives, and as you yourself live, I will not leave you." So they came to Jericho. The company of prophets who were at Jericho drew near to Elisha, and said to him, "Do you know that today the LORD will take your master away from you?" And he answered, "Yes, I know; be silent."
Then Elijah said to him, "Stay here; for the LORD has sent me to the Jordan." But he said, "As the LORD lives, and as you yourself live, I will not leave you." So the two of them went on. Fifty men of the company of prophets also went, and stood at some distance from them, as they both were standing by the Jordan. Then Elijah took his mantle and rolled it up, and struck the water; the water was parted to the one side and to the other, until the two of them crossed on dry ground.
When they had crossed, Elijah said to Elisha, "Tell me what I may do for you, before I am taken from you." Elisha said, "Please let me inherit a double share of your spirit." He responded, "You have asked a hard thing; yet, if you see me as I am being taken from you, it will be granted you; if not, it will not." As they continued walking and talking, a chariot of fire and horses of fire separated the two of them, and Elijah ascended in a whirlwind into heaven. Elisha kept watching and crying out, "Father, father! The chariots of Israel and its horsemen!" But when he could no longer see him, he grasped his own clothes and tore them in two pieces.
Welcome to Transfiguration Sunday. In the gospel reading today we learned of Peter, James and John who had traveled with Jesus to the summit of a high mountain, where Jesus was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white.
This morning, however, I would like to bring your attention to the transfiguration of Elisha that took place in the Old Testament lesson. Elijah, whose name means “Yahweh is my God” was a great prophet, not simply in the usual contemporary sense of the word as a foreteller of the future, but a prophet in the sense it is usually used in the Old Testament, to refer to Godly men and women with the will to speak truth to power. Elijah demonstrated the courage to take the Kings and Queens of Israel to task and to defiantly oppose the worship of false gods. In response, King Ahab and his wife Jezebel, called him a “troubler of Israel”
Elisha, Elijah’s fellow prophet and protégé, accompanied Elijah on the journey from Gilgal, in the hill country of Samaria, to Bethel, where Jacob once saw an angel-laden ladder leading to heaven, and on to Jericho where Israel had centuries earlier launched its foray into the land of Canaan, and eventually to the River Jordan, where Elijah parted the waters and ascended into heaven in a whirlwind. At each stop Elijah urged Elisha to stay behind, but repeatedly Elisha proclaimed his faithfulness to the prophet and their work among the people - saying, “As the LORD lives, and as you yourself live, I will not leave you."
And so they traveled together, and Elisha, witness to Elijah’s prophetic vision, was, himself, transfigured by the journey.
As part of my continuing education as a member of the clergy, for several years I was engaged in a course dealing with family systems theory. Family systems theory is an approach to understanding human behavior developed by Dr. Murray Bowen, suggesting that individuals cannot be understood in isolation from one another, but rather as a part of an emotional unit – the family. Families are systems of interconnected and interdependent individuals, and no single individual can be understood in isolation from the system of which he or she is a member. We are who we are, largely because of the family from which we emerge. And the members of each generation carry within them the psychological and behavioral characteristics of the generations that have preceded them – for good or for ill. The degree of closeness or distance from others that we require, our particular neuroses or our mental health, the ways in which we deal with stress – all these patterns of behavior we get it from our ancestors and pass it on to our descendents.
Family systems theory isn’t just concerned with the biological family. Organizations, like churches, are systems of interrelated individuals as well. And our attitudes and how we behave as individual members of a church family, is a reflection of the larger dynamic at work in the congregation as a whole. We are a family, with patterns of behavior common to this particular family.
We, the members of Holy Trinity and Redeemer, those of us who hear my voice today, are responsible for the health and well being of congregations that will follow us far into the future. The founding members of our congregation, over a century ago, laid the groundwork for who we are as a people of God. Those founding fathers and mothers, were instrumental in shaping our personality as a church. And their influence on the church, for good or for ill, isn’t easy to modify. But at this point, the future is up to us. Future generations of parishioners will be as welcoming, as generous, as receptive to change, as protective of tradition, as optimistic or as gloomy as we are today.
The spirit of a people can be remarkably resilient, and our spirit will imbue the people that come after us, as surely as the prayers of the people before us can, even today, be felt within this sacred space.
Imagine the character traits we will pass on: a spirit of radical hospitality, the value we place on reverent worship and beautiful music, our respect for the land and the seas that surround us, a desire to experience the presence of God first-hand.
But might we also pass on to future generations a deep underlying sense of anxiety, our personal fears, or a lack of faith that the ultimate outcome is in God’s hands?
In asking Elijah for a double share of spirit, Elisha is making reference to a law that gives to the firstborn son a double portion of an inheritance. Elisha was asking that he inherit more of the spirit than other prophets, and that he be regarded as a son.
May we always have the prophetic spirit passed on from Elijah to Elisha. May we be willing to speak truth to power. We live in a state where the powerful and the powerless, live in close proximity. We live in a world where more than a third of the people live in extreme poverty. And at the same time, there are now five members of the exclusive centibillionaire club – individuals worth more than 100 billion dollars. Will we pass on a tradition of listening to God’s voice and not being afraid to echo it? Maybe we need the courage of prophets like Elijah and Elisha to call attention to the inequity that surrounds us.
My prayer is that this congregation. You, the inheritors of a sacred tradition, be so vibrant, be so healthy, so filled with the presence of God, that future generations of parishioners, when they are told of our work here in revitalizing this church, and will lift their voices to the heavens and cry out, “Please, let me inherit a double share of your spirit.”
Whatever we have to offer as a people of God - hospitality, graciousness, inclusivity, reverence, serenity, willingness to speak truth to power, love for society’s unloved – whatever characterizes us as a congregation, will be passed on, will be magnified, doubled and tripled and live on far beyond the days in which we have walked the earth…. It is, I grant you, a weighty responsibility.
But as I’ve learned more about systems theory, I’ve learned that the responsibility doesn’t have to be onerous. As a congregation we will pass on who we are, but that doesn’t mean that you must take on the burden of fixing the bad behavior of the fellow parishioner who will soon be sitting on the pew beside you, fearing that his or her wretched attitude will show up in the character of congregations to come. We really can’t do much to fix other people anyway. The only person you have any real hope of changing, is yourself. If you want your husband, to “just lighten up” then you have to practice being a non-anxious presence yourself. If you want your children to have giving hearts, you have to let go of your own clinging nature and desire to control or possess. If we want to pass on a legacy of health and well-being to future generations, then we must make a movement toward wholeness ourselves. And as we make the pilgrimage from Gilgal, to Bethel, to Jericho and ultimately cross the River Jordan, it will be with the assurance that the double measure of spirit that is our children’s inheritance will lead them to the promised land.