Crossing Over

 

Service of Worship

Eastern Parkway United Methodist Church

February 14, 2021

Rev. Natalie Bowerman, Pastor

 

Let us pray:

Dear God, Help me today to understand what love really means.

I need a love that’s big enough to include all of us. Big enough for the dating and engaged couples, of course, with their giddy daydreams of a future together. But also big enough for the married folks, whether their passion for each other is still blazing brightly or barely more than a smoldering wick. Big enough for the singles toasting their independence, and for the singles wishing someone would come along and make that independence disappear. For the lonely and widowed and brokenhearted, I need a love that understands, a love that welcomes in hurt and sorrow instead of excluding them.

The love I need more than anything is Your love. Without Your love, no other love will ever be sufficient. And with it, every other love becomes richer and truer and more life-giving than it could have been otherwise. We have learned all our best loves from You: the love of faithful friends, of spouses and significant others, of parents and siblings and children. Love that commits. Love that sacrifices. Love that lays down its life. You authored each of these loves, taught us how to recognize them and long for them and give them away. Our best efforts at Valentine’s Day are just a fraction of the wholeness of love.

Today, let everything I see remind me of Your love. Let today be a day for love. Real love. Big love. Your love. - Gregory Cole 

2 Kings 2: 1-12

Elijah Taken Up to Heaven

2 When the Lord was about to take Elijah up to heaven in a whirlwind, Elijah and Elisha were on their way from Gilgal. ² Elijah said to Elisha, “Stay here; the Lord has sent me to Bethel.”

But Elisha said, “As surely as the Lord lives and as you live, I will not leave you.” So they went down to Bethel.

³ The company of the prophets at Bethel came out to Elisha and asked, “Do you know that the Lord is going to take your master from you today?”

“Yes, I know,” Elisha replied, “so be quiet.”

⁴ Then Elijah said to him, “Stay here, Elisha; the Lord has sent me to Jericho.”

And he replied, “As surely as the Lord lives and as you live, I will not leave you.” So they went to Jericho.

⁵ The company of the prophets at Jericho went up to Elisha and asked him, “Do you know that the Lord is going to take your master from you today?”

“Yes, I know,” he replied, “so be quiet.”

⁶ Then Elijah said to him, “Stay here; the Lord has sent me to the Jordan.”

And he replied, “As surely as the Lord lives and as you live, I will not leave you.” So the two of them walked on.

⁷ Fifty men from the company of the prophets went and stood at a distance, facing the place where Elijah and Elisha had stopped at the Jordan. ⁸ Elijah took his cloak, rolled it up and struck the water with it. The water divided to the right and to the left, and the two of them crossed over on dry ground.

⁹ When they had crossed, Elijah said to Elisha, “Tell me, what can I do for you before I am taken from you?”

“Let me inherit a double portion of your spirit,” Elisha replied.

¹⁰ “You have asked a difficult thing,” Elijah said, “yet if you see me when I am taken from you, it will be yours—otherwise, it will not.”

¹¹ As they were walking along and talking together, suddenly a chariot of fire and horses of fire appeared and separated the two of them, and Elijah went up to heaven in a whirlwind. ¹² Elisha saw this and cried out, “My father! My father! The chariots and horsemen of Israel!” And Elisha saw him no more. Then he took hold of his garment and tore it in two.

Mark 9: 2-9

The Transfiguration

2After six days Jesus took Peter, James and John with him and led them up a high mountain, where they were all alone. There he was transfigured before them. 3His clothes became dazzling white, whiter than anyone in the world could bleach them. 4And there appeared before them Elijah and Moses, who were talking with Jesus.

5Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here. Let us put up three shelters—one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.” 6(He did not know what to say, they were so frightened.)

7Then a cloud appeared and covered them, and a voice came from the cloud: “This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!”

8Suddenly, when they looked around, they no longer saw anyone with them except Jesus.

9As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus gave them orders not to tell anyone what they had seen until the Son of Man had risen from the dead.

A Message

“Crossing Over”

This morning the Revised Common Lectionary offers us two very powerful, yet very mysterious stories upon which it is a Holy Wonder to preach. Our Hebrew Bible reading from the book of 2 Kings presents us with the very last chapter of a saga between a hero and his sidekick: Elijah, the veteran prophet and his best friend and apprentice, Elisha. And yes, 2 Kings really presents us with a very important story about two dudes who almost have the same name. You kind of have to roll with it.

Elijah knows that his days on this mortal coil are numbered. He's just about to go on to heaven and he's trying to prepare Elisha for it so that Elisha can go on and become the next great prophet that the people of Israel need. But at every turn, when Elijah tries to warn Elisha that he can’t go where his mentor is going, Elisha clings to his friend and refuses to leave his side. This brings us all the way to the river, where Elijah knows he will ascend to heaven within minutes. In order for Elisha to be willing to let go, Elijah must promise him a double share of his power. And even with that promise made, once Elijah ascends Elisha falls on the ground in abject grief.

Then we head on over to Mark and read the story of Jesus’ transfiguration. It starts out simple, with Jesus climbing a mountain with Peter, James, and John. But then the Sacred breaks through the ordinary, and Jesus suddenly becomes much more Divine in appearance than he had been in the proceeding nine chapters. At least to those who hadn’t been looking very closely—aka his disciples. Not only that, but now two important men from Hebrew history are standing beside Jesus: Elijah, from our last story, and Moses.

None of the three disciples present have any idea what to do, but Peter steps forward first and suggests something that sounds like a great idea to his naïve heart. Peter suggests, Oh, look, we've got two new friends with us. Let's have a party. Peter wants to build three tents so that he can sit and soak in the presence of Jesus, Moses, and Elijah for as long as he possibly can. His heart is truly in the right place, but, like Elisha in the other story, Peter wants to cling to something that won’t last. Jesus just as suddenly is back into his old self. Elijah and Moses are gone. And the last parting words that the disciples get come from the Divine and scare the pants off of them: This is my son, the Beloved--words that they had heard at Jesus's baptism, and then perhaps the most important thing that they needed to hear from the Divine this morning--Listen to him.

What are we supposed to do with these words of wisdom?

While I was thinking about these two old familiar stories, I had an interesting conversation this week with several United Methodist clergy women from a group that I'm part of. I had seen a joke go around on Facebook about “most hated office jargon”. And once I read that, I thought, Oh, man, we need a church version of this.

So I lifted it up to these clergy women. And I won't use their names for this because this is confidential, but I'll use their thoughts with their permission. And I invited them to suggest their “most hated church jargon”. And boy was this cathartic.

So I present to you: Church Jargon Your Pastor Doesn’t Want to Hear Anymore. You don’t have to agree with any of these, but I think you’ll see a common thread.

1)     “Narthex” that was one we wanted to get rid of first. Everyone wants to dispose of the pomp and circumstance and just call it the lobby.

2)     “People are saying”—y’all, “people” aren’t saying anything, it’s what you think. Put your name on it and own it.

3)     The official slogan of the United Methodist Church—“But we’ve never done it THAT WAY before!”

4)     “Why can’t we just go back to normal?” Oh how I hear your grief in such a time as this, but, dear Church, normal is gone.

5)     “Pastor so and so ALWAYS did___”. I’m sure they did. But in the words of God as expressed through the prophet Isaiah: “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing!”

6)     “Until you got political, Pastor.” Jesus got political all the time.

7)     “Well, even if God IS calling, there’s no money for that in our budget.” We understand your anxiety about money, but pinching pennies doesn’t build the Kingdom.

8)     Next come the phrases that can feel gross, intrusive, or just plan odd—“love on”, “pour into”, “bathed in prayer”, and “who have you touched with your ministry?” Our words can trigger, and we need to remember that.

9)     Then we have woman-in-a-meeting language: “I’m just going to push back on that a bit, if I can.” Y’all, quit undermining your power. Own it. Use it. It’s a gift from God.

10)  “The Young People”. Y’all, we’re a lost generation in our churches, and we know how desperately you want us to find our way into your folds. Please stop talking about us like we’re one big monolithic group.

11)  “The Unchurched”. Our friends who don’t identify with any one particular faith tradition do not appreciate being called this.

12)  Now we get into some deeper theological territory—the blood phrases. Some find them comforting, but some of us hear “washed in the blood of Christ” not as the Good News, but as the plot of a Stephen King novel.

13)  “Love the sinner but hate the sin” and other terrible platitudes that are not in the Bible. This phrase nearly universally means that the speaker doesn’t like LGBTQIA people, and when we say these words we cause our neighbor deep pain.

14)  Along the same vain—“Everything happens for a reason.” No it doesn’t.

15)  “God needed another angel in heaven” when someone dies, and, more broadly, euphemistic language that seeks to avoid the pain of grief. God doesn’t take your loved ones to fill celestial vacancies. You don’t have to believe your friend who died is “in a better place”. Grief is a vast ocean that you have a lifetime to cross with the help of your church. You don’t have to soften it with your words, it’s love that transforms our pain.

16)  All prayers that begin with “Father God, we just…”. You don’t have to use that formula to talk to God.

17)  Similarly, “let’s bow our heads in prayer”. There’s no right or wrong way to pray!

18)  And lastly, all language that implies that white is right and dark in sinful. As White Christians we often fail to even notice this one. But when we say things like “Being washed white as snow” or “stepping away from the darkness and into the light of Christ”, we reinforce centuries of covert racism in our Church and harm our BIPOC friends. We need to be intentional about dismantling oppression.

 

The overarching theme I discovered while combing through those phrases is that we the Church fight change with every fiber of our beings. But if we keep going down that road, we’ll die. Like Elisha, we want to cling to our sepia-tinted memories of the past forever. Like Peter, we want to watch Jesus glow forever, and we never want to climb back down the mountain. But it’s only at the bottom of the mountain that we become the rock upon which Christ builds the Church.

We, the Church, insist on dragging around a whole lot of baggage in the name of “tradition” that may never have helped in the past, and absolutely doesn’t serve us now. We can’t keep clinging to the “good old days” when our pews were full of people while ignoring the patriarchy, homophobia, racism, and ableism that helped fuel the Church’s flame. We can’t keep dancing around pain, ignoring trauma, and fantasizing about an era that, even if it was so great, is gone forever. We will never cross the River Jordan and speak the truth to God’s people until we learn to let go.

In the last year our churches have had to let go of a lot—10am live worship, singing, holding hands, smiling without a mask, and partaking in communion elbow to elbow in the pews while sipping out of those tiny cups we buy from Cokesbury. Even our grieving processes have been deeply changed because of how much harder it has been to have a funeral. Maybe our churches are slipping away from us. Maybe they are sinking into the deep river water, and being washed away.

But, if our churches are being stripped down to their bones, and all the flaws of the design are plain for us to see, maybe we can rebuild, and do Church right this time. And maybe, like God told Ezekiel, these dry bones can live again.

Perhaps something dear to us is dying, Church. Maybe something dear to us died sometime around 1958 and we’ve been like Elisha, sobbing at the river banks ever since. Maybe it’s time to get up, and cross over. What does the world need from our Church today? If we can let go of our grief, we can let go of our love, too, and start sharing it. The world hasn’t needed our yellowing walls and stiff pews (and stiff thoughts) for a long time. The world needs us to go back to our baptismal promises, like Jesus briefly did on the mountain top: the world needs our resistance to evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves. Your move, Church. Time to cross over. Amen.

I invite you to receive the benediction: Our God, our Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, will guard our going out and our coming in, from this time on and forevermore. And as the people of God we all say together: Amen.