Chris Taylor’s Sermon –3/1/09
Passing the Mantle
2 Kings 2:1-12
Mark 9:2-9
When Bonnie and I got married, our first dog was a mongrel named Rugby. He came to us as a puppy about two months after our marriage, and he was a large part of those early years. He was with us when we made the move from Connecticut to Ohio. He was there when each of our three children were born, and was there as they made the transition from infancy to childhood. Look at almost any of our early pictures, and you will Rugby as a kind of constant presence.
It was pretty traumatic for us, then, when Rugby developed a tumor and we were told that we would need to put him down. We took the kids over to the vet’s to say goodbye, and we hugged old Rugby and petted him and cried until the vet finally came in and kicked us out. She told us she couldn’t take the sound of the kids’ wailing any more. I stayed behind so that I could be there with Rugby as the vet gave him that final shot. I can honestly say I hated every moment of that day.
We know when we get a pet that their life-spans are much shorter than ours. That doesn’t make it any easier. Their presence reminds us how much in this life constantly changes. Some of those changes are for the better; when dogs get beyond the chewing and digging, for example, that’s always a good and happy thing. Other changes, however, can be pretty wrenching. They remind us of how much we don’t control.
When something changes, there is always going to be something we lose. In the transition from the horse and buggy to the automobile, for example, we lost something of the romance of horses, and their personalities, and the slower pace to life that horses offered. In the shift from childhood to adolescence we lose the shared sled-rides, the times of cuddling on the couch in front of a movie, and the intimacy of a bed-time story. There is a reason for the popularity of books such as Spencer Johnson’s Who Moved My Cheese, or Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline. We know change is part of life. We know we’ve got to embrace it and adapt if we are going to be healthy and successful. But the truth is, we still resist it. There is something in us that just doesn’t like change.
Our Scripture lesson this morning offers us some insight about change. Israel is in crisis: she is about to lose Elijah, one of the greatest prophets all time. That’s no small thing. For a Kingdom grounded in its relationship to God, that kind of loss can be catastrophic. So what are they going to do? Where are they going to turn?
Notice here that like us so many times the people had no choice. They weren’t given the option of holding onto Elijah or letting him go. In fact, Elijah himself had no choice. Some people see his telling Elisha to stay behind three different times as evidence of how much he didn’t want to move on. But move on he did. And that’s the way it is with change. Sometimes we simply have no choice. It isn’t that we’ve done something wrong or that we need some kind of course correction. That’s not what was going on here in the text. No, this is just life moving on. Change happens.
And where was God in this midst of all this? God, we find, was right in the middle of it; not standing outside of the change, and not standing against it. God, rather, is right there at the center.
Our text makes it clear that it is the Lord who is driving the action. Verse 1; “the Lord” is about to take Elijah up by a whirlwind. In verses 3 and 5 we find the company of prophets asking, “Do you know that today the Lord will take your master away from you?”
And in the end it wasn’t a chariot that carried Elijah up, but a whirlwind. “Whirlwind” here is the same word that Scripture uses to describe the storm out of which God spoke to Job. It is a swirling chaos of cloud and dust, ever-flowing, ever-changing as it moves across the horizon. The unchanging God, in other words, is present and at work not in stasis but in change itself.
Who picked Elijah’s successor? This is the only detailed account we have in the whole Old Testament of prophetic succession, and note: it wasn’t Elijah who did the choosing. You would expect his successor to come from the company of prophets. That was the only logical choice: it was the company of prophets, after all, who had committed themselves to the ways of God and the study of God’s word. If Elijah had been doing the choosing, that’s probably where he would have turned. But God didn’t lead him to the company of prophets. God led him, rather, out to a field, and to a guy named Elisha who was working behind a plow.
This same dynamic is confirmed here in our text. When Elisha asks for a double portion of Elijah’s spirit, he isn’t asking for twice as much but rather for that double portion of the inheritance which would ordinarily go to the rightful heir. Wouldn’t you think that Elijah would get to choose his own heir? But his response makes it clear that he doesn’t get to make that call. It is up to God. If God allows Elisha to see his departure, then he will, indeed, be the heir.
The point here is that God is right there: there in the whirlwind that raised Elijah to heaven; and there in the choice of who would follow. God is in control. God is in the midst of this enormous change that has come to Israel.
What this means for us is that we aren’t going to meet God in trying to run from change. Just the opposite. As painful as it might be for us and as much as we might want to avoid it, we are going to meet God (rather) as we move into that change; as we move towards the emptiness and towards the loss.
How does John put it? “All thing came into being through him, and without him not on thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life; and the life was the light of people.” God is life, and since change is so much a part of life, then turning into the change and into life is precisely where we are going to find Him.
Now let’s be clear: I’m not suggesting that every change is good, or that God is behind every change we encounter. That’s not true at all. We know we live in a world that has fallen away from God. We know that evil exists and that people make bad choices. There are, in other words, going to be things that happen in this life that absolutely contradict God’s nature and God’s intent.
What I am saying, rather, is that there is nothing that we are ever going to face in this life where God isn’t present or where God isn’t at work. We don’t have to run. We don’t have to turn away, no matter how great the evil. We can turn towards it, rather, because God is standing right there with us. We can move into it and through it because we know that God is at work there as we place our trust in Him.
That’s the message of this Scripture lesson: God moving in the whirlwind; God providing for Israel even as she lost Elijah. That’s the message of the cross: the greatest evil of this world utterly transformed into humanity’s greatest good.
Year after year, decade after decade, through all the changes this world has seen over the last two thousand years, this Sacrament has reinforced that central message: no matter what might come our way, no matter how great the evil that might confront us, we aren’t going to be facing it alone. God is right there with us – offering a strength and comfort that go far beyond our own. And God is at work through us – accomplishing far more than we could hope or imagine as we turn towards him.
Don’t be afraid of change. It is part of life; part of living in this world. Know, rather, that as we move towards those changes that inevitably come our way, it is right there that you and I are going to encounter the living God.