Succession

Semicontinuous Reading: 2 Kings 2:1-14

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Two prophets journey to the Jordan River. Only one of them returns. This is a story of death and continuity. The old gives way for the new to arise, even as the old is reborn in the new.

The Prophet Elijah lived in the ninth century B.C.—so some 3000 years ago—while the Second Book of Kings, from which we read his story tonight, was first put to parchment sometime in the sixth century, during the Babylonian Exile. That means this text is well over two-and-a-half millennia old, which is really quite remarkable. Very few books continue in living memory, living continuity, over the course of thousands of years. And these tend to be religious.

Just imagine how many empires have risen and fallen since first we told Elijah’s tale in the synagogue. And now here we are, regularly reading it in community, in our churches and our homes, in languages that didn’t even exist back then. Check out best-seller lists from a hundred years ago and see if you recognize any of those titles. Yet the Bible is still alive, still the most sold, most read, most translated, and most stolen work in all of human history. Both for better and for worse, it still plays a prominent role in our public discourse.

This story was read by Ezra, by Judah Maccabee, by Jesus Christ. Mozart and Napoleon and Washington read it; Shakespeare and Melville and Dante and Hulagu Khan. It’s a testament to our thirst for the sacred, our desire for God—two testaments, really. Here in the Bible has one people’s record of their struggle with the divine become truly a universal saga, relevant to all peoples who wrestle with God and prevail.

Ah, but I’m getting rather far afield: back to Elijah and Elisha. What you need to know about Elijah is that he’s a second Moses. That’s how he’s always presented in the text. Everything Moses does, Elijah does as well. His presence gives the people faith that God is still with them, as surely as He was atop Sinai, as surely as He was when He spoke face-to-face with Moses. Like Moses, Elijah works wonders. Like Moses, he raises the dead. Like Moses, he despairs.

It seems no matter how many miracles God might deign to perform through his weary and calloused hands, there is always more work to be done. The people are forever turning from wisdom to folly. Evil is ever rearing its ugly head. For as heavy a hitter as he is, Elijah’s now worn out. He’s come to the end of his long and illustrious prophetic career. And again like Moses, he must now pass the torch, pass the mantle of leadership, on to the next generation, on to his successor.

And the man whom he ordains—whom God in fact ordains—to take the reins of this wild and woolly mission, this sacred succession of thankless tasks, is the Prophet Elisha, whose time is now at hand. The two of them embark on a bit of a whirlwind tour of important biblical locations. They start off at Gilgal, where God’s people Israel, fresh off their liberation from bondage in Egypt, passed into the Promised Land of their ancestors; Gilgal, where the Israelite monarchy was first established, the kings and queens of old.

Then it’s on to Bethel, the holy city and sanctuary which preceded Jerusalem; and Jericho, where a united Israel witnessed the power of God’s faithfulness, toppling the walls of an impregnable fortress. (Jericho, mind you, was cursed by Moses’ successor Joshua, yet poignantly rebuilt by Elijah’s nemesis King Ahab.) And finally our two prophets reach the Jordan, the borderland, the river parted by God for Joshua, as He parted the Red Sea for Moses. Elijah slaps it with his mantle just to prove that he can claim the same.

At every stage of the journey, Elijah encourages Elisha to turn back. This is no easy path for a man with his whole life ahead of him. Elijah tells him to go home, much as Christ would also tell hangers-on to do during His own journey to Jerusalem. But Elisha is determined, until at last he witnesses his master Elijah taken bodily up into heaven, amidst a whirlwind and chariots of fire. Keep in mind that in the Hebrew Bible the dead don’t typically go to heaven; they go to Sheol, the underworld. Only Enoch and Moses were said to have been taken up body and soul to live with God.

And when all is said and done, when the lightshow is over and Elijah is gone, Elisha takes his master’s mantle to do as he had done. “Where is the Lord, the God of Elijah?” Elisha asks. Where is God in times like these, of chaos, loss, and change? Then he smacks the water just as Elijah had—and, lo and behold, it parts. The God who was with Moses, Joshua, and Elijah, in power and in spirit, is now with Elisha too. Thus he goes forth to continue his master’s work, the struggle and glory of God.

I confess I rather take comfort in this, both as a pastor and as a Christian in our age of upheavals. God is still with us, as He was with our fathers, our grandfathers, and our forebears in the faith stretching back to the dawn of humankind. No matter the wonders we might have accomplished, or that God through us has wrought, there will always be more work to do, more work to the end of the world! But it isn’t all on us. When we fail, when we fall, we are never alone.

God is still with us, as is the great and mighty host of sainted sinners from every time and place, the motley cloud of witnesses whom God has drawn from the unlikeliest of sources. I have nothing not passed on to me by greater women and men than I. And when I die, or perhaps just collapse from exhaustion, others will pick up my slack. The mantle passes on. The Spirit abides with us, within this strange community. I am part of a greater Body, a greater story, than I could possibly comprehend.

We stand in continuity, yet are also ever new, ever falling and rising, dying and resurrecting. The secret to keeping things the same is change. That’s what God does to us. He is always with us, always loving, always forgiving, and always making us new. We are like silver refined seven times in the furnace, ever transforming into ourselves from glory unto glory.

Everything changes. Everything is always changing. Indeed, I often think that we find ourselves so obsessed with the end of the world because our world is always ending, the world we knew always dying, to make way for a new world, a new generation, somehow both completely different and also just like us. Just like us, God is with them. Just like us, God calls them home and sends them out and makes them ever new. Moses gives way to Joshua, Elijah to Elisha, and even John the Baptist to Jesus Christ our Lord, all of them together reminding us that “I must decrease, but He must increase.”

The spirit of Elijah we see again in John. And John uses it to full effect—or is it that the spirit uses John?—to proclaim, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” That’s our mission in life: to point to Jesus, point to Christ. Many have done so before us. Many shall do so after. And if that is all that we might accomplish in this span of our life, then truly we will have been amongst the greatest of prophets indeed.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.