2 Kings 2:1-12; Mark 9:2-9; 2 Corinthians 4:3-6
There are some passages of scripture that become indelibly etched in one’s memory. I can’t remember the when, but I do remember the how of my first encounter with Elijah and Elisha and the chariots of fire. It was back in the time when religious programs were easily found on popular radios stations. I can’t remember the name of the program but it came on every Sunday afternoon and was a kind of radio theater of Bible stories. If I recall there was an adult character or two and a couple of children who interacted with them around the details of the story as it was told. It was a kind of mini church school class. I don’t remember all the stories which were told, but this one has stuck with me all these years.
There are a variety of levels in this story. There is the near-heart-wrenching break up of the teacher-student relationship of Elijah and Elisha. And if you think about the whole of the Elijah saga, you realize that at this point Elijah has his spunk back. He was pretty demoralized after the contest on Mt. Carmel when he caused the thrice-drenched sacrifice and stone altar to be incinerated which made a mockery of the 450 prophets of Baal attached to Queen Jezebel’s court. Elijah had the failed prophets put to death. The queen then put a bounty on Elijah. He fled to the desert, was nourished by an angel from God for forty days until he encountered God in the stillness of silence. God told him to stop feeling sorry for himself because he wasn’t the last of God’s prophets or followers. God told Elijah to get up, go anoint kings over Aram and Israel, and train Elisha as his successor.
In this reading, this transfer of prophetic authority from Elijah to Elisha is seen to be more than just the transfer of power, as we do every quadrennial Inauguration Day when one elected President hands over the government to the next elected President. To be Elijah’s heir entails a great deal more than simply doing miracles similar to those of the master. To go in the footsteps of Elijah, Elisha must go wherever Elijah went – Bethel, Jericho, Jordan – bear the same burdens, risk the same dangers, experience the same hardships, and venture into times of both solitariness and solidarity in order to receive and ultimately bear the word of the Lord.
Prophetic work is not something that is taken up lightly. It is not fair weather work. It is not an “easy A” course at the rabbinical university. In fact the exchange of the prophet’s mantle between Elijah and Elisha manages to crumple up all the romantic notions we have of prophet’s peering into the mists of the future and announcing what will one day come to pass, or calling down God’s wrath on divine enemies and miscreants.
To be a prophet is not to be the solitary future-gazer or the herald of God’s impending judgment. To be a prophet is to enter deeply into the realities and relationships of the people to whom the prophet is sent. To be a prophet is not to be anonymous or dispassionate. Nor does a prophet stand impersonally outside of or apart from the community. The prophetic word is potent because it comes from the community to which it is addressed. The word is driven by the anguish of witnessing the disparity between the grand desire of God for God’s people and the extreme poverty of the reality God’s people have been forced to accept. To be a prophet is, in the words of David Lose, to love God’s people enough to tell them the truth about their condition.
This potent God-blessed, God-sparked love is the basis for the Confession of Belhar which the Sunday morning class finished studying last week. South African people of color like Allan Boesak, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and countless others dared to say to the Dutch Reformed Mission Church, once spawned for blacks and coloreds by the white Dutch Reformed Church, and say to the world at-large, that the reality of apartheid was not the reality that God desired for South Africans or for anyone else.
To be a prophet in this tradition is to step out into the open, to refuse the institutional armor as David refused Saul’s armor for the combat with Goliath. To be a prophet like Elijah and Elisha is to take up vulnerability, to lay aside all the human-made physical, ideological, and theological armaments and to live totally dependent on God’s word and God’s mercy. This is what Jesus spoke to when he swept aside the idea of Peter to build shrines for Moses, Elijah, and Jesus on the mountain of transfiguration. Nothing must stand between the prophet and God or between the prophet and God’s people to whom the prophet is sent and with whom the prophet stands against the anti-divine reality the people have been forced to accept.
That is why the need for two helpings of Elijah’s spirit which Elisha requests as the elder prophet’s parting gift to his successor. Only Elijah doesn’t have the power to make that gift. Elisha’s prophetic ministry will depend ultimately on God and on Elisha’s willingness to commit the totality of his life to God, to make himself without obstruction vulnerable to God’s will for his life and to the antagonism and antipathy of the world in desperate need of God’s saving grace.
Even though the parting of Elijah and Elisha and the transfiguration of Jesus are epic moments of God’s presence breaking into human existence, this attitude of vulnerability is the key link between fiery chariot and horses and the mist-enshrouded mountaintop voice reiterating the divinely spoken message from Jesus’ baptism: “This is my Son, whom I dearly love.” The message at the baptism was addressed to Jesus, “With you I find happiness.” On the mountain the message was addressed to the two disciples and eventually the entire community: “Listen to him!”
The command often has an exclamation point. It is not likely a “pretty please” kind of request. It is the kind of command that a parent gives a child. Yet there is still some possible variation there. Does it mean, “Do as I say! Now! Or Else!” or does it mean, “Pay attention! Watch what I am doing so you can do it too.” I think it is more of the latter. While Jesus did preach from time to time, he was much more of an educator. He once said to a group of listeners, “Put on my yoke, and learn from me” (Matthew 11:29).
Jesus led his companions down the mountain and back to the reality of the people to whom and for whom he was called. He told the two to keep the details of what they had experienced to themselves until the time after the Human One – the Son of Man – Jesus – had risen from the dead. He knew that only then would they be able to process what had happened and what the message was for them and for all God’s people.
Jesus went down the mountain to be vulnerable: to love God and love the people, to be betrayed, and to be made to suffer and die on the cross. He anticipated and accepted this reality only by trusting completely in God’s mercy.
Jesus calls us to be vulnerable. This is not the “Keep calm and have stiff upper lip” mentality that is so often doled out. We have received it, and we have given it. “Buck up.” “Stop being a cry baby.” “Get a grip.” Jesus was not impassive. Jesus was not a stoic. In taking on human life – your and my life – he allowed himself to be open to and to experience to the fullest every human emotion, every human pain and elation, every human reality.
If a person believes that life is against them, that everyone is out to get them, life will be bleak. But if a person believes the overwhelming mercy of God, then no matter what life throws at us, we will not be overcome. The prophet’s tears pour out of his vulnerability. Jesus wept for Jerusalem. Jesus invites us to weep for the world.
Our strength does not come through stiff upper lips but through broken hearts and helping hands. Our strength does not come from hate but from love. Our strength does not come from ourselves but from God. To be prophetic in our community is to be immersed in the challenges confronting God’s people and, amid those difficulties, to throw ourselves to the mercy of the God of Elijah and Elisha, the God we know most fully in the dearly loved Son, and to give voice to God’s vision for wholeness and life, both for us and through us for the world.
May it be so. Amen.
General Resource: David J. Lose, “Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), Year B, vol. 1, pp. 435-439.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
Sunday, February 15, 2015
Sunday, February 1, 2015
Awe, Not Terror
Psalm 111; Deuteronomy 18:15-20; Mark 1:21-28
Our calendar year has seasons. Can you believe it? We are already halfway through the season of winter. It’s less than three weeks until baseball spring training starts, and six weeks to the first day of spring.
The church year has seasons, too. We have come through the season of Advent, which started the fourth Sunday before Christmas. It is a season of expectation, of watchfulness, of waiting. Then Christmas came and lasted twelve days until the day of Epiphany, which traditionally celebrates the arrival of the magi to worship the Christ child. Epiphany means manifestation or revelation. God’s activity in Christ is revealed to the world, represented by the worldly magi who were not of Jesus’ own people. Jesus is revealed, in the words of Simeon, as “a light for revelation to the Gentiles and a glory for [God’s] people Israel” (Luke 2:32).
Epiphany is a season of the church year which bridges the time between Christmas and Lent. The gospel readings almost always point to the character and mission of Jesus as displayed early on in his ministry, whether or not people recognized him or not.
The reading three weeks ago was about his baptism, when Jesus was baptized by John, anointed with the descending dove/Spirit and confirmed by God’s affirmation, “my beloved.” Last week the reading was the beginning of his ministry following John’s arrest and Jesus’ first call of disciples.
So with the beginning core of his leadership team, Jesus began to circulate. When the next Sabbath arrived, they were in Capernaum and they went to the local synagogue, just as people today may drop in to a church in a town they are visiting on vacation.
I don’t know if the local rabbi embarrassed Jesus by asking who he was. Perhaps he was known as the carpenter Joseph’s son. Instead of being given a loaf of guest bread, he was invited to join the adult class and he jumped into the discussion. He apparently didn’t do a word by word, verse by verse discussion of the text. He brought an in depth understanding of the reading and amazed everyone. It was evident that he knew what he was talking about and wasn’t just beating his gums with the same passe explanations which had been repeated for the last fifty or one hundred years.
Jesus was not just revealing something about himself, he was revealing something about his father, something about the God for whom he was the flesh and bone representative living in the midst of God’s creation. Jesus may have been coming into his own as a teacher and healer, but more importantly his revelation was of God. He wasn’t just a representation of God, he was a window through which people could see God, a portal through which people could experience the depth and breadth of God’s never-failing love and grace.
The God that Jesus enabled people to see was both personal, operating within a domain of reality, and distant, lying beyond the limits of ordinary experience. God is complex, so complex that we can only know a tiny fraction of God’s reality at any one time. God operates both within and beyond our reality. God is a close as the next breath we take and as distant as the farthest reaches of the universe, a distance which seems to grow in both time and distance the more we discover about the universe.
This paradox of closeness and distance, of cozy companionship and icy aloofness, of never-failing love and unremitting justice is the God whom Jesus brought close to anyone he encountered. Some welcomed this presence while others refused to welcome it. Some were awe-struck and other were angry. Some people who had no reason to know him knew who he was, and some who should have known him, never caught on to his identity or refused to know him.
The posthumous writings of the 17th century French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher Blaise Pascal included what has come to be known as “Pascal’s Wager.” Pascal posited that humans all bet with their lives either that God exists or does not exist. Given the possibility that God actually exists and assuming an infinite gain or loss associated with belief or unbelief in God (as represented by an eternity in heaven or hell), a rational person should live as though God exists and seek to believe in God. If God exists, the person gains everything, and if God does not actually exist, the person loses little or nothing.
Believers tend to respond to God in one of two ways: awe or terror. Today’s psalm captures some of this bipolar response to God. The psalmist tries to lay out a balanced view of God. The same God who is both above (distant) and within (near) is also named as a God whose presence and involvement within the faith community can be intimately felt.
God’s transcendent qualities, the ones that define God as very different from human beings are readily evident in the psalmist’s words:
Of course, many of us have some trouble with that. We are very rational. We were bottle-fed on cause and effect, and if God is cause, then we don’t like a lot of the effect that we see or experience. Too often we know just enough science to think that there is no connection between it and God. We doubt the power of God’s works or God’s involvement in things we think we can clearly and unabashedly define as solely human causation.
Being awe-struck by God is not something to be gotten over like recovering from an illness or a bad employment experience. If God is awesome, that awesomeness doesn’t diminish with time or experience. The psalmist says that “fear of the Lord is where wisdom begins.” That suggests that the awesomeness of God is something that actually grows over time, something that deepens as our relationship with God develops. The “fear of the Lord” is not terror. It is respect, it is wonderment, it is wide-eyed amazement. It is awe.
We see a shift in the middle of the psalm. “God gives food to those who honor him.” This links the faraway-ness God with God’s closeness. Not only does the believer have an experience of awe in the presence of God, that very experience is what leads us into the relationship that intimately nourishes us.
If we are terrified of God, afraid of God, fearful of God, we will work to keep God at arm’s length, pushing God away from us. We will deny God’s intimacy with us and echo what the person imprisoned by an evil spirit screamed at Jesus in the Capernaum synagogue, “What have you to do with us?” That approach wants nothing to do with God nor God’s doing anything with us. On the other hand, awe is an invitation for a more fulfilling relationship, a deeper intimacy from both sides, we with God and God with us.
Jesus – divine and human – Word made flesh – bridges the chasm between terror and awe, between fear and joy, between icy resentment and warm welcome.
“Fear of the Lord is where wisdom begins.” And wisdom is the knowledge that, in the words of Paul to believers in Rome,
May God’s praise last forever!
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
Our calendar year has seasons. Can you believe it? We are already halfway through the season of winter. It’s less than three weeks until baseball spring training starts, and six weeks to the first day of spring.
The church year has seasons, too. We have come through the season of Advent, which started the fourth Sunday before Christmas. It is a season of expectation, of watchfulness, of waiting. Then Christmas came and lasted twelve days until the day of Epiphany, which traditionally celebrates the arrival of the magi to worship the Christ child. Epiphany means manifestation or revelation. God’s activity in Christ is revealed to the world, represented by the worldly magi who were not of Jesus’ own people. Jesus is revealed, in the words of Simeon, as “a light for revelation to the Gentiles and a glory for [God’s] people Israel” (Luke 2:32).
Epiphany is a season of the church year which bridges the time between Christmas and Lent. The gospel readings almost always point to the character and mission of Jesus as displayed early on in his ministry, whether or not people recognized him or not.
The reading three weeks ago was about his baptism, when Jesus was baptized by John, anointed with the descending dove/Spirit and confirmed by God’s affirmation, “my beloved.” Last week the reading was the beginning of his ministry following John’s arrest and Jesus’ first call of disciples.
So with the beginning core of his leadership team, Jesus began to circulate. When the next Sabbath arrived, they were in Capernaum and they went to the local synagogue, just as people today may drop in to a church in a town they are visiting on vacation.
I don’t know if the local rabbi embarrassed Jesus by asking who he was. Perhaps he was known as the carpenter Joseph’s son. Instead of being given a loaf of guest bread, he was invited to join the adult class and he jumped into the discussion. He apparently didn’t do a word by word, verse by verse discussion of the text. He brought an in depth understanding of the reading and amazed everyone. It was evident that he knew what he was talking about and wasn’t just beating his gums with the same passe explanations which had been repeated for the last fifty or one hundred years.
Jesus was not just revealing something about himself, he was revealing something about his father, something about the God for whom he was the flesh and bone representative living in the midst of God’s creation. Jesus may have been coming into his own as a teacher and healer, but more importantly his revelation was of God. He wasn’t just a representation of God, he was a window through which people could see God, a portal through which people could experience the depth and breadth of God’s never-failing love and grace.
The God that Jesus enabled people to see was both personal, operating within a domain of reality, and distant, lying beyond the limits of ordinary experience. God is complex, so complex that we can only know a tiny fraction of God’s reality at any one time. God operates both within and beyond our reality. God is a close as the next breath we take and as distant as the farthest reaches of the universe, a distance which seems to grow in both time and distance the more we discover about the universe.
This paradox of closeness and distance, of cozy companionship and icy aloofness, of never-failing love and unremitting justice is the God whom Jesus brought close to anyone he encountered. Some welcomed this presence while others refused to welcome it. Some were awe-struck and other were angry. Some people who had no reason to know him knew who he was, and some who should have known him, never caught on to his identity or refused to know him.
The posthumous writings of the 17th century French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher Blaise Pascal included what has come to be known as “Pascal’s Wager.” Pascal posited that humans all bet with their lives either that God exists or does not exist. Given the possibility that God actually exists and assuming an infinite gain or loss associated with belief or unbelief in God (as represented by an eternity in heaven or hell), a rational person should live as though God exists and seek to believe in God. If God exists, the person gains everything, and if God does not actually exist, the person loses little or nothing.
Believers tend to respond to God in one of two ways: awe or terror. Today’s psalm captures some of this bipolar response to God. The psalmist tries to lay out a balanced view of God. The same God who is both above (distant) and within (near) is also named as a God whose presence and involvement within the faith community can be intimately felt.
God’s transcendent qualities, the ones that define God as very different from human beings are readily evident in the psalmist’s words:
The works of the Lord are magnificent. ...The God described here is so powerful and present that we are enticed to study, to meditate on, and celebrate God in a community of the faithful. The presence of the Divine is so plain that there really is no option but to give witness to it.
God’s deeds are majestic and glorious.
God’s righteousness stands forever.
God is famous for his wondrous works.
The Lord is full of mercy and compassion. ...
God sent redemption for his people;
God commanded that his covenant last forever.
Of course, many of us have some trouble with that. We are very rational. We were bottle-fed on cause and effect, and if God is cause, then we don’t like a lot of the effect that we see or experience. Too often we know just enough science to think that there is no connection between it and God. We doubt the power of God’s works or God’s involvement in things we think we can clearly and unabashedly define as solely human causation.
Being awe-struck by God is not something to be gotten over like recovering from an illness or a bad employment experience. If God is awesome, that awesomeness doesn’t diminish with time or experience. The psalmist says that “fear of the Lord is where wisdom begins.” That suggests that the awesomeness of God is something that actually grows over time, something that deepens as our relationship with God develops. The “fear of the Lord” is not terror. It is respect, it is wonderment, it is wide-eyed amazement. It is awe.
We see a shift in the middle of the psalm. “God gives food to those who honor him.” This links the faraway-ness God with God’s closeness. Not only does the believer have an experience of awe in the presence of God, that very experience is what leads us into the relationship that intimately nourishes us.
If we are terrified of God, afraid of God, fearful of God, we will work to keep God at arm’s length, pushing God away from us. We will deny God’s intimacy with us and echo what the person imprisoned by an evil spirit screamed at Jesus in the Capernaum synagogue, “What have you to do with us?” That approach wants nothing to do with God nor God’s doing anything with us. On the other hand, awe is an invitation for a more fulfilling relationship, a deeper intimacy from both sides, we with God and God with us.
Jesus – divine and human – Word made flesh – bridges the chasm between terror and awe, between fear and joy, between icy resentment and warm welcome.
“Fear of the Lord is where wisdom begins.” And wisdom is the knowledge that, in the words of Paul to believers in Rome,
“If God is for us, who is against us? He didn’t spare his own Son but gave him up for us all. ... Who will bring a charge against God’s elect people? It is God who acquits them. Who is going to convict them? It is Christ Jesus who died, even more, who was raised, and who also is at God’s right side. It is Christ Jesus who also pleads our case for us” (Romans 8:31-34).Friends, fear of the Lord is where wisdom begins. It is awe, not terror, it is joy, not fear, it is life, not death.
May God’s praise last forever!
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
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