2 KINGS 2:1-12
Lection for Sunday, February 19, 2012
Theme: City of Refuge Ministries - www.cityofrefugefl.com
My Messenger: Rev. Naomi King
Scriptures:
2 Kings 2:1-12
Psalm 50:1-6
2 Corinthians 4:3-6
Mark 9:2-9
Attention:
2 Kings 2:1-12
Turn,
attend,
this is my commandment,
live humbly with the One,
love the stranger,
love your neighbor,
love those with you,
travel the way made in the wilderness,
look after the Holy,
come into the garden, my love.
Over and again, the Biblical texts present us with invitations and stories about attending, even when we feel lost and afraid, even when we are exile or enslaved, even when we grieve and when we are angry. Attention is not a test, though there are plenty of interpretations that it is so. Attention is a way of life, the way of steadfast love, the way of reverence.
Elisha follows Elijah in this last day. Elijah has taught Elisha about the need to live in constant attention, to not lost heart, to keep on in love. Three times Elisha is approached by followers of the prophet living in communities between Bethel and Jericho. Those other followers say, “You do know Elijah will be taken from you today?” Each time Elisha answers, “Shut up! Yes, I know!” And Elisha will not be turned away from attention.
So Elisha recrosses the Jordan with Elijah, evoking Moses’ crossing the Red Sea, and follows Elijah to near Mount Nebo, Moses’ resting place. (The chronicle of Kings is often making connections between Elijah and Moses.) Elisha bears witness through a terrifying event of awesome power, and never once does he turn away with fear, with grief, with anger. He grieves after Elijah is no longer present. Then Elisha picks up the mantle that Elijah wore and puts it on, attending to the legacy left him, teaching Israel and tending the Holy all his own days.
We have our own callings of steadfast love each and every day. Can we grow more and more like Elisha? When the people we know and love try to turn us aside from the practices of steadfast love with urging that it is not prudent, or that we are going to lose, or that death will come, or that misery continues even when we give it our all – will we be like Elisha and say, “hush, I know,” and turn our attention to what Love tells us needs doing?
While many of the psalms are songs from humanity to the Holy, Psalm 50 begins like an oracle, as though the Holy addresses us directly. Psalm 50:1-6 is a summons to all those steadfast lovers of the Holy (devotee – chasid) to prove how well we live our covenant with the Holy. Who does the Holy call as the witnesses and judges? The whole world from east to west sits in our judgment. How we live matters. Whether we are attentive to our covenant with the Holy, attentive in steadfast love, something the world can judge. Here you are today, summoned, and how have you been doing? How are you demonstrating your steadfast love of the Most Merciful and Most Compassionate?
Turn,
attend,
this is my commandment,
live humbly with the One,
love the stranger,
love your neighbor,
love those with you,
travel the way made in the wilderness,
look after the Holy,
come into the garden, my love.Let Your Love Shine:
2 Corinthians 4:3-6
The Corinthians are discouraged. They are, by the second of Paul’s letters, mightily discouraged. Who’s listening? Who’s attending? How can anyone understand how steadfast love prevails when troubles keep happening, when people keep dying, when the world isn’t brought right after we’ve done just about everything we can do. What we do doesn’t seem to matter. We live in the shadows, unseen and unappreciated.
Have you ever been there, so deep in your self-pity and exhaustion that ten life lines can be lying on the quagmire around you and you can’t even reach out in the smallest way to grab ahold? Paul has to say something sharp to draw our attention away from our own weariness and self-pity and back to the work of steadfast love, the work we belong to, the work we are part of, recipients of and bearers of into every day life.
The whole world may be able to attest and judge how well we live our covenant (Psalm 50), but that does not mean the world’s standards are the ones we always want to live by. Sometimes the world is judging not in the Holy’s courtroom, but by some pretty awful standards. That doesn’t mean we turn back or give up.
Someone recently urged me again to go and publicly beg the Holy for a miracle healing of my chronic genetic disease, because then people would know the Holy is good. Of course, if there was no elimination of my disease, then it was just that I am such an unworthy vessel. I used to have this internal argument with myself regularly, because the assumptions behind it are so much part of the shaming and separation of people who live with chronic diseases and disabilities.
Eventually, I reached a place in the quagmire, where I asked myself: how would I know that the way I am is not already a blessing? What if I live from that trust in the Holy? If this was a way of blessing that many people couldn’t appreciate, so be it. The ways of blessing are sometimes hidden from everyone’s understanding and appreciation. That is what Paul is telling the Corinthians: we put our trust in the Holy, our commitment to living in steadfast love, and that is enough.
Paul tells the Corinthians to stop worrying so much about not making their mark in a way that is assessable and evident to everyone, in every time and season. We love well; we love fully; we love steadfastly. But we don’t love only in ways that make common sense or put us ahead or play to some ideal of human perfection. We aren’t living in this covenant of steadfast love because it serves our purposes. We’re not following the Holy for fame, for fortune, or because all pain and sorrow will cease if we do so, or even to get a shiny trophy (and now, for the holiest and most awesome peeps of the year awards, we have our runners up…) We aren’t living faithfully so our neighbors will say “yeah, that neighbor of mine is awesome!” We’re pursuing the way of steadfast love because a light has been lit in our spirits, a light so generous we cannot help but show it and give it away, just as we are, cracked and imperfect vessels, blessed and blessing.
The Habit of Surprise:
Mark 9:2-9
This Sunday in the western Christian calendar is Transfiguration Sunday, the last Sunday in the season of Epiphany. If you live somewhere that celebrates Carnival, we’re in the countdown of the final three days of celebration, from here through Fat Tuesday, before the repentant season of Lent. The wise librarians of the lectionary set us up with another glorious moment and the appropriate response of the steadfast devotee, in the story of Elijah and Elisha. How human Peter is, in this moment of awe when Jesus is transfigured before him. Peter doesn’t cry out like Elisha, “the chariot of Israel” or even “the Light of Love”. No, Peter babbles about how to set up this most excellent of situations, with Moses, Elijah, and Jesus all together, creating a site for maximum pilgrimage with the three booths, one for each of these great prophets.
I love Peter. What a strong character he must have had to have served as the butt of so many jokes, beginning with his name, Blockhead, or Rocky (like the ground where the seed cannot take root), or the Stone (that the builders reject). Peter is not Elisha. Peter retreats from awe and passes around directly to “how do we get more of the world to pay attention to this?”
Peter’s response is a humbling thing for those of us concerned with working with the Most Merciful and the Most Compassionate to make love real. Are we doing this for love’s sake, in awe and wonderment, or are we slightly backed away from the awe and wonderment with Peter, figuring out how to get more people in the doors? Or out to serve in the community? Or attending to daily spiritual practices? In the process, we can distance ourselves from the real presence of wonder, the joy and delight of those moments of transformation and transfiguration.
If James or John had mentioned three booths, well, then, maybe that would be the way for us to go. But in Mark, Peter is the Stone, the one who even in the middle of the most wonderful of moments stops to bend down and check his sandal straps. Church leaders can be lost in administrative details so often that we lose out in the great transformative experiences of wonderment and awe. In that losing, we’ve turned away from the practices of steadfast love, even as we earnestly thought we were following them. That’s the really tricky bit about attention: it is a habit that works against being a habit. Every day every thing is created anew. The habit of attentive steadfast love is the habit of surprise, of thanksgiving, of appreciating the blessing that is in the now.
The habit of Carnival is indulgence and celebration and excess. By the seventh week of it, I don’t know about you, but a simple meal and an early night is starting to sound like a really refreshing thing. Celebrating the Transfiguration each year, we’re invited to a moment of remembering awe and wonder, and asking ourselves when we last truly met that, reveled in it, and weren’t busy thinking about taxes or laundry or car pools or grades or when the next party would be.
Awe and wonderment is a regular feature of the Bible. We can also trust that awe and wonder is a regular part of our lives. Let us cultivate the habit of surprise, the habit of being awake to the moment of awe, the habit of wonderment in which everything else drops away except amazing joy. That’s grace. That’s transforming love. That is the way before us.
Prayer:
Surprise us, Beloved, each and every day. Bring us down to wash in wonderment and find renewed and refreshed spirits. The light of Your love shines upon us. May we bear that light wherever we go, living in wonderment, living in mercy, living attentively to You and the way you set before us. When we meet those who would turn us back and turn us aside, help us reach out and invite those to carry on with us. When we struggle ourselves, grant us strength and courage to bear up and carry on, trusting in Your transforming love, Your wonderful deeds and awesome blessings, trusting in You all our nights and all our days. Lead us and surprise us, Beloved, and laugh with us in our delight and awe in You, now and evermore. Amen.