Sermons Preached at Church of the Redeemer

Sermon by Ella D. Auchincloss, M.T.S. Candidate ’05, Harvard Divinity School, delivered to the Church of the Redeemer (Chestnut Hill, MA), June 27, 2004.

The Call of Elisha vs. the Call of Man in the New World Order—A Comparison of 1^st Kings 19:15-21 and Luke 9:51-62.

MAY THE WORDS OF MY MOUTH AND THE MEDITATION OF MY HEART BE ALWAYS ACCEPTABLE IN THY SIGHT, O LORD, MY STRENGTH AND MY REDEEMER.

Jesus said to him, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God.” 

Strange as it may seem, phrases like this one are what I love about the Bible.  There are so many difficult, often contradictory messages embedded in its pages that challenge our understanding.  Today’s readings are classic examples.  In the gospel passage, we find the Lukan Jesus telling someone that he is not fit for the Kingdom of God because he must tend to the sacred obligation of burying the dead.  This is an intentionally radical statement that would have shocked the reader in antiquity even more than shocks us today. 

Juxtapose this statement of Jesus against the call of Elisha from the Kings passage.  Picture the image: The great and venerable prophet Elijah is riding on horseback.  He passes Elisha whose hands are on the plow and drops his mantle on him.  This is Elijah’s way of calling Elisha to be the inheritor of his role as an uber-monotheist and prophet of God in an age that is as hostile to the God of Israel as any period before or after.  What is Elisha’ first response?  Well, it is essentially the same as the response that the man on the road gave to the Lukan Jesus.  He asks for time to leave his affairs in proper order before he embarks upon a new and very different life. The great prophet Elijah expresses indifference rather than indignation at Elisha’s response. Elisha, having obviously been moved by the call of Elijah, returns home, symbolically slays the oxen in a gesture that is intended to signify his acceptance of the call.  He celebrates his decision by preparing a great feast, presumably before his family and the people of his community.  He is allowed the privilege of saying good-bye.   The exchange between Elijah and Elisha is indeed a strange one.  But let’s focus on what was at stake when Elisha went home to “kiss” his father and mother.  Lets’ place ourselves at the scene of this event. 

As my mind’s eye conjures up the image of this scene, I picture Elisha’s eleven siblings and his father and mother, to whom he was obviously devoted.  I imagine their reaction at the news of his prophetic calling.  I wonder if he actually returned home wearing the mantle that Elijah so abruptly drops upon his shoulders.  The mantle is a symbol of sacred power, sort of like the staff of Moses.  In Mosaic fashion, Elisha later uses the mantle to part the waters of the Jordan River.  The significance of possessing this sacred object would certainly not have been lost on Elisha’s family.  While it is highly likely that Elisha’s family was strongly devoted to the cult of YHWH, perhaps Elisha, as the youngest, was never taken too seriously by his older siblings.  Maybe, as the last-born, he was his parent’s favorite. At any rate, the scripture passage is silent as to what the family says.  If they tried dissuade Elisha from answering the call of YHWH, we aren’t told.  But, here, God invites us to use our faculties of reasoning to imagine that the return home with the mantle and the news of this calling was, at the very least a bittersweet exchange.  The youngest of the Shaphat family is to be God’s anointed in the battle against a wicked dynasty of the notorious Baal worshippers, Ahab and Jezebel.  But here, as in other places we see the God of Israel placing great emphasis on the free acceptance of his invitation.  He allows his anointed choice of a prophet go back home to bid his family farewell, knowing that, in returning home, Elisha could have been convinced that this whole thing was a really bad idea.  What, after all, would you tell your child if he or she came home and told you that they had been called to religious “jihad” is such a fashion?  

Nonetheless, Elisha actions are quite deliberate.  By slaughtering his oxen, he is telling his family that his decision to answer the call is irrevocable.  The only choice is to accept and celebrate over a symbolic feast. He was allowed to go home, settle his affairs before assuming the mantle of prophetic power.  The story unfolds in a way that it should.  Going home to say goodbye seems like it was the right thing to do.  It is consistent with our sensibilities even today.

Now let’s turn our attention to the Lukan passage.  Before we conjure up the image of Jesus on the road to Jerusalem, lets first picture the author of the Luke-Acts.  What was he trying to accomplish in this epic story of the Jesus and the founding of the Church? It is important to establish Luke’s deliberate attempt to place Jesus in the same prophetic archetype as the great prophet, Elijah.  For example, Luke depicts Jesus on the road to Jerusalem preparing to face his enemies just as the story is told of Elijah on the road, bracing to face the enemies of YHWH.  When the Samaritans reject Jesus, his apostles make a reference to the same miracle that Elijah performed before prophets of Baal.  Through the words of these apostles, Luke encourages his readers to remember the vivid scene in 1^st Kings where Elijah calls forth fire from heaven to show the superior power of the YHWH, the Lord God of Israel.  All through the Lukan gospel we find these prophetic associations.  Luke presents Jesus as the heir of a sacred tradition.  He typologically links Jesus with the great Elijah, the prophet of Israel who did not die, but who was taken up to heaven in a chariot of fire.  The Lukan Jesus is forging a new way of devotion to the God of Israel as a progression from the old.  He is heralding the next phase in the storied history of a people who have already once witnessed to the irruption of God into human history by their miraculous redemption from slavery in Egypt.  Jesus is telling these people to wake up and take notice that God is in the process of intervening in history again to redeem them from the slavery of sin.  The Lukan Jesus is proclaiming a New World order.  A radical vision that is different from what has past—a break with tradition ushered by a peasant Jew, whom Luke emphasizes as solidly rooted within the sacred lineage and royal bloodlines of Israel.  The Kingdom of God in Luke reflects an otherworldly wisdom.  The values of this kingdom need to be taught to humanity by the long awaited Messiah, the Christ, the anointed one of God.  He is to model the new path of devotion to those who are solidly grounded in the wisdom of the law and tradition.  In the model of Elijah and Elisha, Luke casts Jesus as one who has been anointed to perform a most sacred and crucial task.

So it is with this sense of Luke’s intention that we settle back into exercise of placing ourselves in the scene of scripture.  For my reflection, I choose to place myself in the sandals of the man who desires to say goodbye to his family before following Jesus.  Taken at face value, this man’s request is so reasonable.  After all, didn’t the great Elisha have this chance?  On the other hand, Jesus’ response is so unreasonable—“no one who put his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God”.  Is Jesus telling the man he is unworthy or is he saying something different?  Can we infer that the man Jesus calls to “go and proclaim the Kingdom of God” may in some sense want to follow Jesus like Elisha wanted to answer the call of Elijah? Are we to expect that the man might change his mind upon seeing his family? Perhaps Jesus is telling him that he is not ready rather than unworthy to follow Jesus.  Why isn’t this man ready?  How does Jesus know this?

Luke places great intentionality on the man’s request to go home and bid his family farewell. I think this symbolizes two things.  First, it is intended to stand in stark contrast to the call of Elisha.  It is symbolic of the man’s prevailing attachments to the past and to the old way of devotion.  It also demonstrates to Jesus that this man is not ready to allow God into his life in the new way that is necessary for service in this kingdom of otherworldly values. Readiness to serve is to be willing let go and to entrust those you are leaving behind to God.  This radical vision that is being preached by Jesus involves a willingness to separate from home, from whom or whatever you hold sacred apart from God, from what you place before God.  It involves the voluntary enforcement of a poverty of spirit, an emptying of self.   It is an invitation to a more personal form of devotion.  Jesus deemed this man unfit to proclaim the Kingdom’s values because he wasn’t ready to let go—to empty of self in order to be filled with God.  He did not embody the poverty of spirit that is necessary to serve in the Kingdom of God.   Jesus looks to his own, the people of Israel, Jacob’s children, to find this new form of devotee.  He knows precisely what he is looking for because he has spent his earthly life in the presence of at least two people who embodied this new form of devotion.  They are still revered as models for such devotion to this day.  Mary, the mother of Jesus, epitomized the poverty of spirit required to serve God in his earthly kingdom.  Her soul doth magnified the Lord in her answer to the angel Gabriel’s request to follow where God would lead her.  She said yes despite an enormity of reasons that should have caused her to say no.   Joseph was also a model for this form of devotion for the way he placed God in the center of his motivations and served Him despite the great consequence to his honor and standing in this community. I mention these two individuals from the infancy chapters in Luke’s gospel to illustrate that Jesus knew what to look for even before his ministry began.  By the time he was on the road to Jerusalem, he understood what it means to put one’s hand to the plow and not look back.  The new way forged by Jesus involved risk, a thrust into the unknown, a leap of faith into a new form of devotion that was informed by the old way of observance but lacked any sort of nostalgia.  It was about leading a fully transformed life by bringing forth everything that has had formed you into the person you are and offering yourself to God’s will, God’s purpose and His transformation.

It is important for me in my meditations to uphold these hallmark individuals when I consider how I might have reacted if Jesus had met me along the road to Jerusalem even though, in the end, I cast my lot with the guy in the sandals.  Thankfully, Jesus never pronounced me “unfit” for service in His kingdom.  And when he deemed that the time was right, he has cleared the path for me to serve him.  It became apparent to me that I could no longer say no.  The desire welled up within me.   This was NOT a monumental moment for me.  It began one step at a time, with the gradual and on-going  re-calibration of what I call my spiritual compass, the replacement of self with God at the center of my soul.  It is a quiet walk with God, not a race.  This is not simple or easy or ever completely accomplished.  And while I have been deeply moved, I confess that, so far, it has only made me marginally more pleasant.  I am still the slightly crazy lady from Texas who loves loud music, bright colors and spicy food. I still lack patience. Like all Christians, I am called to be in the world but different.  I come to you today in that light—yoked yet freely serving: my precious entanglements include being the wife of a loving man, the mother of two beautiful sons and the daughter of two devoted parents who have always been my best friends. Like Elisha’s family, my loved ones haven’t always understood my choices.   My contradictions go further: At the age of 43, when my peers are beginning to retire or rule the world, I have hit the books as a divinity school student.  I have found God at the temple of human accomplishment, Harvard—He is resides in the hearts of my very well intentioned and erudite colleagues.  As a former Wall Street trading floor junkie who thought her money days were over, I am now serving as the Treasurer of your diocese.  This was not what I envisioned as a ministry for myself but I now understand why I was called.  I also have begun to understand that to be yoked with God, to serve God, is to bring forth all of me without looking back.  Yet I move forward yoked with my most important attachments and have asked God to honor, and bless me in the entanglements he means for me to keep and to help me understand those I am to lose.  In return I have pledged to trust in God’s will and plan for me—and for those with whom I am yoked. 

So in closing I return to my sandal-wearing friend on the dusty road to Jerusalem who stands on the side of the road, bewildered at Jesus’ unreasonable response.  He ponders the words of Jesus in his heart while he works the plow.  He reflects on his apparent unworthiness.  He is drawn to this Jesus and cannot say why.  He begins to read, to study and to pray in the way this Jesus has taught.  He reflects on what he has heard about the miracles. He remembers what the prophets of his tradition have said.  He watches those who call themselves his disciples.  He learns of the way God exalted this Jesus, the Christ, the anointed one, after his tortuous death.  He asks himself how the empty tomb could be possible.  The truth of this improbable story begins to seep into his soul.  Slowly, gradually, he changes.  This change becomes perceptible to those with whom he is yoked.  His life has been re-calibrated.  His family thrives by God’s grace.  He lives by faith.  He stumbles and likely suffers as the result of these changes yet he gets back up.  He knows that he is loved down to his bones and this love is what he must show to others.  He puts his hand to the plow and moves forward in the direction his God has set for him.  He looks back but only to see how far he has come and to make sure he is always bringing along those God means for him to care for.  He has become a devoted servant in the New World order and I, as a  freely yoked member of the body of Christ, am the product of his devotion.

AMEN