Dr. Mark Owen Fenstermacher Where Is the Lord? June 30, Kings 2:1-2, 6-14

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1 Dr. Mark Owen Fenstermacher Where Is the Lord? June 30, Kings 2:1-2, 6-14 First United Methodist Church 219 E. 4 th Street Bloomington, IN Something is about to happen in this friendship, this partnership, in this relationship, between the prophets Elijah and Elisha. The opening words of the 2 nd chapter of 2 nd Kings tells us that: Now when the LORD was about to take Elijah up to heaven by a whirlwind, Elijah and Elisha were on their way from Gilgal. These two, the older man and mentor named Elijah, and the younger prophet, the junior partner in this team, Elisha, are about to be separated. One-the older man-is going away. The younger man is going to be left behind. Those are interesting moments in life, aren t they? If you are the veteran, if you are the experienced one, if you are the older one, you realize you are winding up. Finishing up. Packing your boxes. Having that last meeting. Recording the grades of your students at the end of your last semester of teaching. Loading your tools in the back of truck as you leave the last construction job you ll ever be on. Something big-a job, a relationship, or maybe your own life-is coming to a close. Everyone else around you seems to be living normal but you are winding up, boxing up, moving on. When life-or death-is about to take you away from where you are and what you re doing and the people you love, it is a season full of all sorts of feelings thoughts If you are the younger person in this relationship you realize the person you have looked to for answers, for guidance, for encouragement, is about to leave. You ve been able to go down the hallway, poke your head in their office, explain how stuck you are and then usually they had a way through. They saw something you were missing. Or they remembered a similar situation from eighteen years earlier, and they made the same mistake you are about to make! They caution you they slow you down This week the Herald-Times had an article about machinist, I think it was, in a local car repair shop. He s in his 70 s. Still doing great work. Years ago he started watching other good people who knew how to tear cars apart and put them back together. He never really went to school to learn how to machine car parts or repair them, but he learned from other older guys who knew the trade. He picked up how to do things. A younger man in the shop, today, was asked about the older man and the younger man said the veteran just knows how to get things done. The younger man said there are times when he is stuck, or he starts to do something, and the veteran says, Let me show you a trick let me show another, easier way to do that. 2 nd Kings is telling us we are being told about a time of transition. A time of change. William Bridges, a few years ago, wrote a wonderful book on transitions. If you are going through a time of change in your life, in your family, in your work, you might find Bridges book amazingly helpful. 1

2 Elijah and Elisha, these two prophets, these two voices for God in an uncertain and evil age, are about to go through a time of transition. Elijah is going to be taken away into heaven. Elisha, the younger man, is going to be left behind. That s what is about to happen as the 2 nd chapter of 2 nd Kings begins. How did these two get started? How did they begin? Go back to the 19 th chapter of 1 st Kings. Elijah, the older prophet, has just faced down the 850 prophets of the fertility cults favored by Queen Jezebel up on Mount Carmel. We talked about that story a few weeks ago. Fire comes down and burns up the sacrifice and the wood and the stone. The whole spectacular story is about how the people are staggering from god to god, and it is a moment when the LORD God YHWH calls them back to himself. The moment on top of the mountain is a stunning triumph for God and for the prophet. Everything works. Everything comes together. The claims Elijah makes about the trustworthiness and power of God are proven true! We have noted, before, that sometimes we are most vulnerable when we have just had a moment of success recognition. After this great moment up on top of the mountain, Elijah hears that Queen Jezebel has promised to hunt him down and kill him. Elijah, who has faced down 850 prophets of the fertility cults, suddenly crumbles. He runs for his life. Heads out into the wilderness. He even leaves his servant behind as he flees. Then, Elijah sits down beneath a broom tree and he asks God to take his life. He can t take it anymore. The pressure of standing up to kings and queens, the work of swimming against the currents of popular opinion, is eating him up. He feels all alone. Out there in the wilderness Elijah does a lot of sleeping. Bible scholars point that out. Elijah lies down and sleeps which may be a sign that he is depressed. Twice a messenger of God wakes Elijah up and tells him to eat and drink what God has provided in the wilderness. The prophet ends up in a cave. Hiding from Jezebel. Maybe, he is hiding from God. I don t know. Perhaps he is hiding from himself. God shows up and asks him, What are you doing here? God tells Elijah to go to the entrance of the cave. Leave his hiding place behind. There is a great wind, an earthquake, and a fire. These are all traditional ways that God announces God s presence in the Hebrew Bible. But God, the Bible says, is not in the wind or the earthquake or the fire. God is in the silence. And out of the silence God tells Elijah that he has another mission for the veteran prophet. God is not done with Elijah! A part of this new mission is to anoint a 2

3 new prophet to take up the work Elijah has been doing. God tells Elijah to go to a man named Elisha and anoint him as God s prophet. Elijah, in 1 st Kings 19:19, finds Elisha out plowing the ground with a team of oxen. God has chosen a farmer to be God s prophet God s spokesperson. Elijah walks up and throws his cloak, his mantle, over the younger man. The cloak or mantle worn by a prophet was considered to hold the personality and power of that prophet, according to Bible scholars. The experiences and truth and style of the prophet were held in that cloak that mantle. It was like a memory stick that holds the content of a computer full of files that might tell your successor how to do the job how to solve the problems how to overcome the challenges. It s all in there all in those files. The Hebrews believed that the cloak or mantle of a prophet held his power, his personality, and his faith. So Elijah throws that over Elisha. The younger man wants to go home, first, and say goodbye to his family before going off wherever God calls him to go off to. Elijah says, Do what you need to do, but do you know what I have done for you do you see how radical and complete and immediate this call is? The younger man then slaughters the team of oxen, cooks the meat, and gives it to the people to feed them. It is a decisive act. Soon enough he will be feeding the people of God with God s good and hard truth. And then the two men set off together. The Bible says, Then he set out and followed Elijah, and became his servant. So that s how they ended up together. That s how they started. Now, they re about to be separated from one another. As Elijah is about to be taken up into heaven, the two prophets take a last walk around the high, holy sites of Israel. If you ve ever said goodbye to a place or a job or a chapter or a relationship you know how you can slow down savor every moment spend a lot of time remembering noticing. Elisha and Elijah start that tour at a place called Gilgal. That name may not mean anything to you, but it is not only a place where the people worshipped God, where they came together, but it was a place of transitions. Where one leader would pass from the scene and another would step up. If you look at the 4 th chapter of the Book of Joshua, you discover something interesting about Gilgal. That s where the people crossed from the wilderness into the Promised Land. That s where they started a new life. When the people of Israel crossed the Jordan River the priests went ahead, marched down into the river with the Ark of the Covenant, and the water parted. The people walked on dry ground until they had all crossed over. Then, on the Canaan side, at Gilgal, three things happen in Joshua 4. First, the priests stack up twelve stones to form an altar and that represents the Twelve Tribes of Israel. 3

4 Second, Joshua tells the people that in future years when their children ask why the pile of stones was put there, the parents are to say, This is where Israel crossed over on dry ground. The LORD dried up the waters of the Jordan for us to cross over just as he dried up the waters of the Red Sea. Finally, it is at Gilgal where the people of Israel decide to trust the leadership of Joshua. Joshua, you remember, had followed Moses. No one, in the minds of many, would ever replace Moses. No one could ever lead like Moses. Joshua didn t speak like Moses or walk like Moses. They are different personality types, I suspect. They had taken a spiritual gift inventory and I wouldn t be surprised if Moses and Joshua had different strengths and weaknesses. It can be very difficult to get used to a new voice when you are so used to-and love-the voice you have known so long. Ask basketball coaches at UCLA and Indiana what it is like to follow a legend. Ask coaches up in Green Bay what it was like to try and follow Vince Lombardi or what it was like down in Alabama to follow Bear Bryant. I wonder what it was like for leaders at IU to try and follow Herman Wells. Gilgal was the place where the people of Israel finally seemed ready to accept, to trust, to follow, the leadership of Joshua. Joshua 4:14 says, On that day the LORD exalted Joshua in the sight of all Israel; and they stood in awe of him, as they had stood in awe of Moses, all the days of his life. As they leave Gilgal, Elijah says to the younger man, Stay here; for the LORD has sent me as far as Bethel. The older man is saying to the younger prophet, It s time for you to go on your own. It s time for you to speak up. It s time for you to take on the forces of injustice and violence and hatred and greed loose in the world! You stay here it s time for you to live out God s call. Elisha says, As the LORD lives, and as you yourself live, I will not leave you. Maybe he wants to have every moment with Elijah that he can have. You know how it feels to hold onto every moment of a closing chapter.a place someone you love and are about to lose. They go on. They go on to Bethel. That is another place where the people of Israel worship. It was also a place where a new chapter had begun. In Genesis 12, long before the days of Elijah and Elisha, Abram and Sarai followed the call of God and traveled hundreds of miles west to Canaan. When they arrived in Canaan, Abram built an altar of rocks to celebrate that God had been with them through the journey had never abandoned them had made a way had been at work all the way along. Later, there was a school for prophets at Bethel. That may have even been where Elisha learned to be a prophet. So maybe, as they walked around Bethel, Elijah said to Elisha, Remember what you learned here. Remember the fire in your soul for God. Remember how confident you were of the love and truth and unsettling power of the living God! Elijah tells the younger man, Stay here; for the LORD has sent me to the Jordan. The younger man is being told, It s time for you to do this on your own. It s time for you stand on your own two feet. It s time for you to live out God s call and stop standing in my shadows waiting for me to do the next thing or say the next word. Elisha insists on going with Elijah to the Jordan River. When they get there, Elijah takes off his cloak and hits the water, and the waters of the Jordan River part. They walk over on dry ground. Which is a reminder that God was with the people even when 4

5 they doubted God. When they had their backs against the Sea, and the soldiers of Pharaoh were rushing their way, God made a way. When they got to the Jordan River, under Joshua s leadership, God made a way. So Elijah and Elisha walk on the dry land and they cross over to the east side of the Jordan River. That s what the book says. When they get to the east side of the Jordan River, Elijah says to the younger man, Tell me what I may do for you, before I am taken from you. Young Elisha doesn t hesitate. Please let me inherit a double share of your spirit. What he is asking for is the double-inheritance that would come to a first born son in Israel. But it is more than that, it seems to me. The young prophet feels completely, totally inadequate. There is no way he is going to be able to do the kinds of things Elijah has done. There is no way he has what it takes to meet the needs he sees around him. There is no way he has the faith that is going to endure the kinds of challenges he hunches are ahead for him. Do you remember when you were a child? Do you remember how every adult looked like a giant? We always, I think, look at the generation before us and see them as giants but view ourselves as a smaller version of the people ahead of us. And even when you are a young adult, or you are middle aged, or you are more mature, you think about people who have lived out their faith or shown uncommon compassion or spoken a difficult truth few people wanted to hear in the past, and you want to step back and say, That s not me. I can t do that. Even as adults we can feel like powerless children. Unable to see where the power and resources are going to come from to help bring this broken world one step closer to the way God wants it to be. I wonder if people ever think that when they face challenges? I wonder if families are ever in the middle of such a crisis that they are convinced they don t have the resources to heal, to move on, and they suspect that God has gone off. I wonder if churches ever look around, see all the challenges and the opportunities, and think, We can t do this. We would need a double portion of the Spirit that moved an earlier generation. For the last year, off and on, I have been speaking with our leaders about my conviction that we need to work together, pray together, to develop a clearer sense of who we are, why God has put us here, and what God s preferred future looks like for us. For the last year, off and on, I have thought out loud about how essential it is for us to prayerfully develop -identify-our priorities for the next chapter. What is essential what will receive our best effort, our best resources and what good things will we need to say No to as we pursue the essentials? Because if we don t know what is most important, it is easy to drift from thing to thing, project to project. 5

6 One of the ways we can do this is by participating in something called Fruitful Congregations. A team of laity here would work through eight books that talk about what it means to be a Christ-centered community that is healthy and vital and effective. They would meet together monthly and be in conversation with laity from other churches. Then, in the second year of the experience we would enter into a time when we would look at data about our community and church. A weekend consultation, after much study and prayer, would make recommendations to us about key steps forward to new life. We re going to be talking about entering into this two year experience. Most days I am confident God will help us do just that, and then there are moments when I wonder and worry. I start to wonder if we have the power, if we have the Spirit, if we have the giants, to get done what God needs for us to do. I wonder. (Do you ever wonder?) And then Elijah is gone. He is taken up in a moment that is mysterious. Carried away by a chariot of fire drawn by horses of fire. (When you read the Bible, it can be helpful to understand the difference between prose and poetry.) When you hear this language remember that fire, in the Hebrew Bible, is always a sign of the presence and power of God. The Bible is telling us that God is right in the middle of that moment when Elijah is taken away and Elisha is left behind. We often think that when a leader moves down the road it is all loss but often God is in the middle of that moment. The younger prophet does what you and I do when someone we have counted on, someone we have loved, is taken away. He tears his clothes in two pieces, 2 nd Kings 2:12 reports. He laments. He mourns. Then, he picks up the mantle of Elijah. Elisha walks back to the edge of the Jordan River, he stands there, and as he strikes the water he cries out, Where is the LORD, the God of Elijah? And the water parts! He, the Bible says, went over. Before we end this morning, I want to talk with you about this mantle. I have found myself this week thinking about how we are called to be a community where those of us who are older, who have been on the journey for awhile, to wrap the cloak of faith around a new generation. We shouldn t keep our faith discoveries, our understanding of prayer, our confidence in the trustworthiness of God, our love for Jesus to ourselves but share them with a new generation. We are called by God to wrap the cloak of our faith and our love for God and our understanding of community and our passion for truth and our hunger for justice around a new generation just the way Elijah wrapped that coat around younger Elisha. What we know, what we have learned, our successes and even our failures, can bless this new generation. And if you are younger, if you are starting out, you need to understand how important it is that you let the people ahead of you on the journey wrap their cloak, their faith, their love, their trust, their passion for justice and their commitment to community around you. We live in a very individualistic culture. It s all about me for us in North America, it sometimes seems. Don t try doing life on our own. Don t try inventing your own answers about life and death and God and money and relationships. Don t let yourself end up standing at the edge of the river depending on your own resources, but let the community wrap you in the cloak of deep truth and profound faith and passionate justice and the grace 6

7 of Jesus. You re going to need the cloak the coat. So let the community, let the elders ahead of you, wrap the cloak around you so you ll be ready to cross over face the waters go on through. Does he hit the water out of sadness out of grief? Does he hit the water in anger that his friend is gone and this all seems so impossible and why is God asking him to do this? Sometimes when God taps us on the shoulder, sometimes when God calls us, it can feel like God is picking on us more that than any kind of honor. Does he hit the water in fear that God is gone and he ll never be able to do what God-and lifecall him to do? Does he look around at this broken, needy, violent, unjust world and hit the water in fear that God is gone and that he and the people don t have the power, the Spirit, to do anything about all of this? Or does he hit the water in faith? Confident that in the middle of the change, in the middle of the transition, in the middle of the loss of the one he has looked to and counted on, God is God and God s power is available to God s people and when we take what God has given us, when we take the faith and the passion and the courage of the generation before us, if we hit the water if we address the challenge God will do what needs to be done. I don t know exactly why Elisha hits the water; all I know is he hits the water! He tackles the challenge. He does the hard thing. And don t you think that could be what God is challenging us to do today? To face the personal challenge, to face the family challenge, to face the soul challenge, to face the challenges and opportunities we have as a congregation, and hit the water! To look out at this broken, beautiful, hungry, lonely, violent, world where people yearn for a truth they can trust and a grace that is sure and a community that is real, and do what needs to be done for God hit the water! We cry out, Where is the LORD? I know what it s like to shout that whisper that. What we find out is that God is here with us even in the transition, the change, the challenge, the letting go of the old thing or saying of goodbye God is here. We may feel overwhelmed but God has this way of giving us a double share of God s Spirit if that is what it will take to go through the water. 7