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Archie Bunker loved to look back to the good old days, back to when all was right with the world, when "girls were girls and men were men" and "everybody pulled his weight," unlike the messed up world of the present. The people of Israel were fond of looking back to the good old days as well. They often remembered the way things were before their sin and disobedience led them into the turmoil and exile of the present. "We remember, Lord. We remember the days when you chose Abram and brought him into the land of Canaan and named him Abraham, the days when you found his heart faithful and blessed him and all his descendants." "We remember when you saw our suffering in Egypt, those days when you heard our cry at the Red Sea and divided the Sea before us, and sent other miraculous signs and wonders. We remember when you led us with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, to give us light on our way, those days when you gave us bread from heaven to eat and water from the rock to drink, the days when we lacked nothing and our clothes did not wear out, nor did our feet become swollen. "We remember those days when you gave us a kingdom with frontiers far from home, the days when you made our sons and daughters as numerous as the stars in the sky. We remember when you brought us into the land where we took possession of houses filled with all kinds of good things, where wells were already dug, and there were vineyards and olive groves and fruit trees in abundance, the days when our forefathers ate to the full and were well-nourished and when they reveled in your great goodness." (Nehemiah 9, passim) Remembering Eden. Looking back to a Golden Age when all was right with the world is a habit of human beings. So is looking forward to a time when all will be well again, to a time when, once again, we'll "have it all together." Young people who are preparing to be married often tell me, "Oh, we plan to have children sometime, but not until we can afford to. We're going to work for several years, and then, when John is established in his practice and has paid off his student loans, and after we've gotten a second car and have paid off the mortgage and saved up enough money for everything we want, then we'll have children." There is a dream there, a dream of a time when they'll have all their stuff together. And then, then life will be the way it's meant to be. The Bible, too, has dreams of the future, visions of a day to come when all will be right with the world again. In that day, "the walls of Jerusalem will be rebuilt, and her gates will always stand open. They will never be shut, day or night." "For in that day," says the Lord, "I will pour out my Spirit upon all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, and your old men will dream dreams and your young men will see visions, for on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there will be deliverance." It will be a day, the Bible says, "when the faithful will stand before the throne of God, serving him day and night in his temple." And "he who sits on the throne will spread his tent over them, and never again will they hunger, never again will they thirst. The sun will not beat upon them, nor any scorching heat. For the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd. He will lead them to springs of living water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes." We are fascinated by time, by the past and the future. And also by the eternal. But where do we find the eternal? Is the eternal to be found within time, or outside time? Who, in this world of time and change, can speak or hear or be that which is changeless, that which is eternal, that which is of God? This morning, in the Bible, Elijah is leaving the world of time and change. The good old days are behind him, and the age to come is ahead of him. Elijah is about to be taken up to God and eternity. And Elisha, whose days of time and change in this world are ahead of him, but who longs for eternity, refuses to leave Elijah. Elisha dogs Elijah's steps as Elijah makes his way to the Jordan and to God, to the eternity Elisha desires. "What can I do for you before I am taken from you?" Elijah asks. "Let me inherit a double portion of your spirit," replies Elisha. Let me be, in other words, as if I were your own first-born son, your heir. "Your request is a difficult one," Elijah says. "This is not mine to grant, but God's. If God grants it, if you see me while I am being taken from you," he adds, "it shall be as you ask. If not, it will not be so." And Elijah is taken up into heaven in the whirlwind, and Elisha does see it. And Elisha picks up the fallen mantle of Elijah, and the spirit of Elijah comes to rest on Elisha. What was it that Elisha wanted so badly? It wasn't the mantle itself, the old hair coat Elijah wore that was filled with fleas and dirt. What Elisha wanted was some of Elijah's good old days in his own day. He wanted the life and vocation of Elijah, the life of speaking the changeless word of the eternal in the world of time and change, the life of speaking God's eternal word to his generation, just as Elijah had spoken God's eternal word to Elijah's generation. He wanted what we prayed for earlier this morning. He wanted "so to pass through things temporal, that he lose not the things eternal." What Elisha wanted was the power Elijah had, the power to speak of the eternal in the present, the power to tell kings and other people who live in time the way things are with God. Just as Elijah had in the good old days. You remember how it was with Elijah - how a man named Naboth had a vineyard right next door to King Ahab's property, and how Ahab wanted Naboth's vineyard, and how he asked Naboth to sell it to him. But Naboth said, "Oh, I couldn't do that. That vineyard has been in my family for generations." Ahab, the king, tried again and again, but always with the same result, and when the king came home after his most recent failure, his wife Jezebel nagged him and said, "What kind of king are you anyway, that you can't get what you want? Let me take care of it for you. I'll get the vineyard for you." So Jezebel arranged to have the town elders bring a false accusation against the lowly vinedresser Naboth, and then to have Naboth stoned to death on the basis of the false charges. Jezebel contrived to have Naboth murdered, so that her husband, the king of the temporal, would then be able to grab Naboth's vineyard in the world of time, in violation of at least three of God's eternal commandments. But God then sent Elijah to speak a word from the eternal to the king of the temporal, to speak truth to power in a very particular place, at a very particular time, to confront the king with God's justice, the truth about how God would bring punishment upon Ahab for his sin. And you'll remember how sometimes Elijah spoke an eternal word of mercy. You'll remember how, at another time, Elijah had spoken God's eternal truth with a word of love, how he asked God to restore life to a widow's son who had died during the great drought, and how God had heard Elijah's prayer and breathed life into the boy again. This power - the power to speak a word from eternity to the world of time - is what Elisha wanted when he asked for the mantle of Elijah. He sought the life of the prophet. He wanted the power to speak truth to power and to speak a word of love in these days, to his own generation, just as Elijah had spoken them in the good old days. Elisha, like Elijah before him, wanted "so to pass through things temporal, that he lose not the things eternal." Like most stories in the Bible, this is not a story only about Elijah and Elisha. It's a story about us, about you and me, a story about the changing of the guard, about the succession of generations, about teachers and disciples, about the passing on of the eternal Word of God from one time to another, in real life. Not just a word about the distant biblical past, but a word about the present. It's about what we think about time and place, about what we believe about history and eternity. It's about how we, too, might "so pass through things temporal, that we lose not the things eternal." The story of Elijah and Elisha, the Bible, is not like the transfer of information in a lecture, which someone once defined as a "transfer of information from the lecturer's notes to the student's notes without its passing through the mind of either." It is similar with preaching. Preaching is not a transfer of information. Preaching, someone once said, is "earthing" God's word. It's the business of bringing the Word of God to earth, of concretizing it, of incarnating it in the world of the earth at a particular time, in a particular place, for a particular people. Preaching is about living. If one is to live as if eternity is in the present and the present is eternal, as God lives, and as Elijah and Elisha wished to live, then one seeks to "earth" God's Word in his own life now, here, at Fourth Street and Polo Drive in the Year of Our Lord 2006, not back in the good old days of the Bible or sometime later in an age to come. "Earthing" God's word. That's what Elijah did for King Ahab and Jezebel and for the widow and her son. And the vocation of "earthing" God's word is what Elisha sought as his inheritance from Elijah. And that's what it means when the Scriptures say that Elisha picked up the mantle of Elijah, and the spirit of Elijah came to rest on Elisha. But Elisha is not the only one to inherit Elijah's mantle. The mantle of those who would "earth" a word of truth and a word of love in the world was also worn by Jesus, and he has passed his "double portion" on to all who desire that mantle, to all the baptized, to all who seek it and who would wear it in their own day. That's what happens when we are baptized. "You are, all of you, sons of God through faith in Jesus Christ," St. Paul reminds us. "All baptized in Christ, you have all clothed yourselves in Christ," wrapped yourselves in Christ's mantle And the proof, Paul says, is that "God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit that cries, 'Abba, Father.' And it is this that makes you a son. And if God has made you a son, then he has made you an heir," the inheritor of the "double portion" of Christ, the heir of the One who is God's truth and word of love "earthed" in the world. And I can just hear some of you asking, "Well, OK, but what in the world does all this have to do with Jesus walking on water?" Well, like any one "earthed" in the world of time and space, Jesus needed a place to stand. And the Word of Truth and Love can stand anywhere, any time, even on water. The question is: Would you like to stand with him? Would you pick up the mantle of Elijah and Elisha and Jesus? Would you, too, inherit and claim as your own the "double portion" of the Son of God who has redeemed you, and called you his own? If so, it means getting it all. Not only the resurrection and the ascension into heaven, but also the Cross, the vocation of being a word of truth and love "earthed" in your own day, for your people, here in this time, the present. Perhaps, as with Elijah, this means speaking a word of truth to power, a word of truth to a world that can make war at the drop of a hat, but that cannot seem to make peace. Not in Iraq, not in Israel and Lebanon, not even here at home. Perhaps it starts with just hearing a word of truth. Hearing a word of truth is often just as hard as speaking one, such as hearing the truth from our own President, who reminded us that every bomb and warplane that we build is a theft, a bite of food or a decent home stolen from the hungry and the poor. The President was Dwight David Eisenhower. Perhaps picking up Elijah's mantle means receiving a word of truth such as that truth that is often reported but little acted upon - the truth that the 24,000 people who die every day in God's world from hunger or hunger-related causes die in a world of plenty, where our "scarcity" consists mainly in worrying that someone else will have more than we do. Perhaps wearing the mantle of Elijah and Elisha and Jesus means hearing and speaking a word of truth in a nation or a state or a city where a drive to raise or lower taxes, or a law to impede or facilitate development, may be a contemporary way of stealing one's neighbor's vineyard. Do we want to "earth" God's word? Do we want to speak, are we prepared to hear, a word of truth regarding the things eternal - a word of justice or mercy - in the midst of the things temporal in our day? If not, what on earth are we doing that's more important? Being the heir of Christ, being the first-born of God, also means speaking a word of love. It means speaking a word of love to those who are alone, or without friends, so that you might, through God's word spoken by you, give them life. As Elijah did. And Jesus. Not all that long ago I heard about a teenaged boy who died without anyone's speaking a word that might have restored life to him like the boy in Elijah's day. The boy I heard about just stepped off the school bus one morning, and collapsed and fell into a snow bank in front of all his classmates, and died. The principal of the school asked a teacher to write an obituary for the boy for the school newspaper. And the teacher later wrote an article about her experience in writing the obituary. She had had a hard time doing it, because she had not known the boy very well. In fact, no one at school had known him. "I could see him in my mind's eye all right," she wrote. "I could see him sitting back there in the last seat in my room by himself, and left by himself. 'Cliff Evans,' I muttered to myself, a boy who never talked, a boy who never smiled. I never saw him smile once. "Cliff Evans had silently come in the school door in the mornings and [had] gone out the school door in the evenings, and that was all. He had never played on a team, he had never held an office.... And I could guess how many times he had not been chosen to play on one side or the other in a class game, and how many whispered conversations had excluded him, and how many times he hadn't been asked to participate. And I could hear the voices of classmates saying, 'You're a nothing, Cliff Evans.' "A child is a believing creature," the teacher went on to say. "Cliff Evans believed them. And suddenly it seemed clear to me: when finally there was nothing left at all for Cliff Evans, he collapsed in a snow bank, and simply went away. The doctor might list 'heart failure' as the cause of death," the teacher concluded, "but that wouldn't change my mind about why he died." Does this sound like the real world to you? Do you know any worlds like this where a word of love, a word of love from the eternal spoken by you in a particular time and place, might bring life? Do you know some who walk in and out of your school, or in and out of your parish church, in and out of your life, without a word of welcome and love being spoken to them? Do we desire to share God's word of love? Do we desire to speak that word, and to be that word, to people who hunger for it in our particular world and our particular time? If not, what on earth - on this earth, at this time - what on earth are we doing that's more important? Rembert Weakland, the former Roman Catholic Archbishop of Milwaukee, once said that that religion that is real religion - that old-time religion, God's religion, the religion of Elijah and Elisha and Jesus - is not rule-obeying religion, but religion that influences lives. And that old-time religion - real religion, the religion of influencing lives - is very threatening to those who just want to obey the rules and keep order, and then go to brunch. "But if religion doesn't influence lives," Bishop Weakland asks, "why bother with it?" You and I are heirs of the mantle and "double portion" of Christ. And Christ offers no religion except that old-time religion, the religion of the God of eternity "earthed" in the present, the religion that influences lives, the religion that influences lives n real time, in the real world. God offers no life except the life of the eternal "earthed" in the particular, which is a life in the present offered for the sake of those God loves. It is a mantle Elijah left by the Jordan River when he ascended into heaven. Jesus left it at the foot of the Cross when he ascended into heaven, where it waits for an heir to pick it up and wear it. In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. |