Bald Dudes and Bears
Eastern Parkway United Methodist Church
A warm welcome to each worshiper today. We celebrate you and offer you our friendship and love. We are a congregation of people who seek to grow spiritually, to become more like Christ in His compassion and acceptance of everyone while growing more aware of what it really means to be Christians today.
As a Reconciling Congregation, EPUMC affirms the sacred worth of persons of all sexual orientations and gender identities and welcomes them into full participation in the fellowship, membership, ministries, and leadership of the congregation.
943 Palmer Avenue, Schenectady, NY 12309 / 518-374-4306 epumc943@gmail.com / www.easternparkway.org
Order of Worship
September 3, 2023
10:00 a.m.
*You are invited to rise in body or spirit.
Prelude
Greeting and Announcements
Mission Statement:
We are a faith community striving to be, to nurture, and to send forth disciples of Jesus Christ.
Call to Worship:
We are standing on holy ground.
All those who have gone before us have witnessed to the love of God.
We are challenged to be people of loving service
Lord, open our hearts and spirits to accept the call to serve you by helping others.
*Hymn Come, Ye Faithful, Raise the Strain #315, v 1, 3, 4, 5
Prayer of Confession:
God of love and mercy, be with us this day. We have faltered in our service to you. We create divisions between various people; we judge before we listen; we condemn before we make any attempt to understand. Our lives are in turmoil and we confess that we have turned away from you. It is fear and anger that too often surrounds us and our actions become based on those fears and anger. Slow us down, Lord. Give us hearts overflowing with grace and compassion. Help us to mirror Jesus who loved and healed others who were rejected by “polite” society. Remind us that we are called to be strong voices of hope for those who feel alienated and lost; we are called to be a home to strangers; to quench thirst and to give nourishment; to welcome and bring words of hope. Forgive us when we have forgotten these things. In Jesus’ Name, we pray. AMEN.
Assurance:
Christ calls each of us into lives of service and hope. He equips us for these ministries and places us on the pathways of peace. Rejoice! You are called by God’s Son and blessed by him. AMEN.
Scripture Reading 2 Kings 2: 23-25
23 He went up from there to Bethel, and while he was going up on the way, some small boys came out of the city and jeered at him, saying, “Go away, baldhead! Go away, baldhead!” 24 When he turned around and saw them, he cursed them in the name of the Lord. Then two she-bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys. 25 From there he went on to Mount Carmel and then returned to Samaria.
Sermon Bald Dudes and Bears
Friends, we’re now in the seventh week of Stump the Preacher 2023, sermons requested by you and then researched by me. Today’s sermon topic came from a friend of the cloth who follows me on Tik Tok, and was interested in bizarre Bible stories, and this one in particular.
To be clear, I don’t mean anything negative when I say that this story is “bizarre”. Faith, in general, can be a really bizarre thing, and if you’re going to belong to any religion in this life at some point you’ll have to face how your faith beliefs don’t always completely square with the laws of nature, the priorities of society, and even our expectations of morality and how we treat one another in public. If our most beloved story is about a man coming back from the dead, then there’s no reason for us to fear bizarre Bible stories. That said though…oh boy does the Good Book get crazy sometimes.
The central character in this story is Elisha. A prophet, he devoted himself to following, serving, and learning from his beloved mentor Elijah. Tightly as Elisha clung to his mentor, though, in the chapter proceeding this one Elijah ascended into heaven, and Elisha had no choice but to cross the river they were standing in front of together and move on with his life, becoming the prophet Elijah trained him to be. Immediately after stepping into those very big shoes, Elisha, well-received by the people of Jericho, blesses their water supply with salt, promising life to the folx who drink it. But then Elisha faces two major contests of his authority. The first comes from a company of fifty young prophets who claim to not be able to find Elisha even though he’s been in Jericho, which is not exactly a remote location. Clearly this predates the invention of the GPS.
Next, Elisha moves on toward Bethel, and while out in the wilderness he meets a group of people described only as “boys” who mock him for his baldness. He sics two female bears on 42 of these “boys” and moves on.
Huh. So…that happened.
This story is not only very strange in its details, but also difficult to read and try to pull wisdom from because of its violence, and the implications we’re tempted to pull from it. Did Elisha really set up a bunch of little kids to be mauled by bears just because they were making fun of him? Is Elisha really that petty and vain? And if he is, how could he make a good prophet?
As with most of these super weird Bible stories, the key to cracking this one is hiding in the Hebrew from which it was translated.
First question to look into: was Elisha an old bald dude? Off the bat, he definitely wasn’t old, he just effectively graduated from being an apprentice to Elijah, which would make him around 30 at the oldest. So as much as he might sound like an old fogey shaking his cane at a bunch of whippersnappers in this story, that simply isn’t the case.
But lots of us have known young men with no hair on their heads, for a variety of reasons. Was that the case for Elisha?
It’s possible that he was literally bald. He could have shaved his head after the ascension of Elijah, a very common sign of grief, in which case his antagonists in this story are mocking him for being sad his best friend died, which would be awfully cruel of them, helping to explain Elisha’s hostile reaction.
Baldness in this world was also commonly associated with disease, and Elisha’s antagonists could have been jeering at him in the belief that he was sick, which would also have been very mean of them.
But, as much as the sparsely haired men in this room may feel like they’ve found their new hero, I gotta rain on your parade and tell you that I don’t think Elisha was actually bald, but rather that the baldness is a figure of speech for Elijah’s absence in his life.
A chapter ago, just before Elijah’s ascension, he was characterized in the Hebrew as “ish ba’al sa’ar”, literally a “lord of hair”, sometimes more loosely translated as “a hairy man”. At the beginning of this chapter, the author re-establishes that Elijah leads Elisha, just in case we forgot the stakes of this relationship, and the Hebrew word used there for leader is “rosh”, literally meaning “head”. When Elijah ascended, Elisha lost his hairy head. That’s one odd way to think of the most important person in your life, but I’ve heard weirder terms of endearment.
Now for these “boys”. More than likely Elisha’s taunters are pagan townies. The word that our English Bibles translate as “boys”, “yeladim”, can be used to describe children, but also describes someone under the authority of someone else. Critically, it’s the same word used in 1 Kings 12: 10-14 to describe unwise young men providing counsel to the newly crowned King Rehoboam.
Rehoboam was the son of Solomon, and the grandson of David. Solomon was notoriously wise, but also obsessed with amassing wealth, and tyrannical to his people. After his death, Rehoboam had a big decision to make: lighten up on the people and earn back the public trust his father lost, at the expense of personal gain, or rule with an even harder iron fist than Solomon in pursuit of selfish interests. Rehoboam gets his young friends in his ear, who go Machiavelli on him and make him believe he’d be better off feared than loved. Thus, Rehoboam rules with such a heavy hand that he makes Putin look like a teddy bear. Shortly after he takes the throne, the Northern Kingdom secedes, and Israel becomes a divided country.
In other words, the last time we saw yeladim, the main character listened to them and the world as he knew it fell to pieces. This time, the yeladim are challenging Elisha’s ability to carry on without his mentor, his ability to prophesy. Instead of repeating Rehoboam’s mistake of listening to the yeladim, Elisha tells them to take a long walk off a short plank, two mother bears show up and significantly decrease the yeladim population, and Elisha heads to the capital of the Northern Kingdom, to start working toward reconciliation.
Ok, so, that’s nice, but…how the heck does any of that apply to us?
Some topics are evergreen, and most of them are represented in the Bible. Think of where we are as a country now. We have democrats and republicans, red hat hardcore MAGA supporters, as well as folx throwing their weight behind a man like DeSantis and his trail of transphobia, as well as folx in favor of a far left revolution involving universal healthcare, gun reform, student loan forgiveness, racial justice, and action to stop climate change. The last time our country split clean in half, like Israel under King Rehoboam, happened right before the Civil War, under a flag that has started popping up a little too often recently, held up by folx who claim to be fighting for what America should be. The soul of America is splitting. And in the midst of this, the UMC is divided, with waves of our churches disaffiliating and many joining the GMC. We are divided, and barreling toward deeper divisions by the day. We are torn. And the yeladim are all around us, and really loud, and they’re calling people names and making threats and undermining justice. Will we take their advice, and hold contempt for our neighbor, and take rights away from the oppressed, or will we call out that bad behavior as contrary to the tenets of our faith, and let the mama bears clean house?
Like Elisha, let’s learn from those who have gone before us, both the Elijahs we admire and the Rehoboams who messed up, and make Christlike choices moving forward.
Amen.
*Hymn Freely, Freely #389
Offering
Offertory
*Doxology #94
*Prayer of dedication
Pastoral Prayer and Lord’s Prayer
All-powerful God, you are present in the whole universe
and in the smallest of your creatures.
You embrace with your tenderness all that exists.
Pour out upon us the power of your love,
that we may protect life and beauty.
Fill us with peace, that we may live
as brothers and sisters, harming no one.
O God of the poor,
help us to rescue the abandoned and forgotten of this earth,
so precious in your eyes.
Bring healing to our lives,
that we may protect the world and not prey on it,
that we may sow beauty, not pollution and destruction.
Touch the hearts
of those who look only for gain
at the expense of the poor and the earth.
Teach us to discover the worth of each thing,
to be filled with awe and contemplation,
to recognize that we are profoundly united
with every creature
as we journey towards your infinite light.
We thank you for being with us each day.
Encourage us, we pray, in our struggle
for justice, love and peace.
— Pope Francis
Our Father, Mother, Creator God, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us. Lead us, not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory forever. Amen.
The Lord’s Supper
*Hymn It Is Well with My Soul #377
Benediction
Postlude
Staff
Natalie Bowerman Pastor
Betsy Lehmann Music Director
Joe White Custodian
Cassandra Brown Nursery Attendant
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