Next [Proper 8C - I Kings 19:15-16, 19-21]

 The Rt. Rev. Jeremiah Williamson

I Kings 19:15-16, 19-21

 

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Christ Church, Walton

 

This was not exactly an appealing offer.  That is, if it was an offer at all.  It was more like a high-stakes game of tag.  And Elisha was now “it”.

 

Elisha was working the plow, sweating it out at the family farm.  Elijah, the prophet, the extremely controversial prophet, finds Elisha at work and, without a word, tosses his mantle, his vocational cloak, onto the younger man, who was probably sufficiently hot without an extra cloak.  Relieved of his mantle, the prophet just keeps walking.  No negotiation.  No sales pitch.  No carefully constructed succession plan. No explanation.  Just some thrown clothes.

 

But apparently the message was clear.  Elisha knew he was next.

 

Though I’m not quite sure Elisha fully understood what it meant to be next.  If he knew what he was really getting into, I wonder if he would have slaughtered the oxen, or if he would have continued to follow the oxen.

 

Perhaps ignorance was, in this case, bliss.  Elisha was most likely aware of Elijah, the prophet’s pot-stirring probably seeped into the rumor mill, but likely he was less aware of the true price Elijah paid to be a prophet.

 

The Elijah story is told in the books of the Kings – from introductory drought to farewell chariot of fire.  The reader immediately realizes that his prophetic road will be rocky because his first public act as a prophet is to boldly confront the king with a scathing word of divine judgment.  The king does not enjoy that encounter – neither does he enjoy it when Elijah declares a multi-year drought in the land.  It is just the first of many excruciating jobs God assigns to the prophet.

 

Elijah basically spends his 20-year public ministry on his nation’s most wanted list.  All he does is make people mad.  First it is the drought – directed at the corrupt king but affecting everyone in the nation.  For that he has to go into exile – because his own government wants to kill him.  In exile, he finds a kind, young widow willing to care for him.  But she and her child are starving to death – because of the drought Elijah called for.  He works a miracle of perpetual sustenance for them but the child still dies.  And the widow blames Elijah.  Nobody likes this guy.  Although he does win the widow back over by raising the boy from the dead – so maybe two people begrudgingly like him. 

 

Elijah is then sent by God back to the king who has been trying to kill him.  That meeting results in a contentious showdown with the king’s favorite prophets, the prophets of Baal, the Canaanite fertility god.  Elijah wins that showdown.  And he brings back the rain.  That should be a happy ending but the King is mad that Elijah wiped out the prophets of Baal and again threatens to kill Elijah. 

 

Again, Elijah has to make a run for it.  He runs and hides and begs God for the sweet release of death because no matter what he does he can never seem to catch a break; someone is always trying to kill him.  But God does not let him go.  Instead God lets him nap and makes him a nice meal.  And that helps. 

 

It is the refreshed, but still discouraged, prophet that finds God in the sheer silence.  God is present but God is not finished with him.  There will still be more difficult work to do.  The only relief Elijah finds on that mountain is the promise of a successor; he won’t have to carry the crippling weight of the mantle forever.  And neither will his work be in vain; the salvation story will continue, even when he cannot.  God has a plan.  Elisha is next.

 

Laden with the prophet’s mantle, Elisha releases the plow and abandons the oxen mid-row.  He just goes.  He goes after the silent wanderer who kept walking.  And he catches up.  He catches up to let Elijah know that he must go back – at least to say goodbye to his parents.

 

It is a reasonable, and deeply human, request.  Elisha is going to go with the older prophet.  He is not saying no to this new life.  He just needs to make sure his parents are not worried – or offended.  Elijah offers a strange response – one harder to interpret because we have no sense of the emotion behind the words: “Go back again; for what have I done to you?”

 

Admittedly, Elijah had not done too much to Elisha.  I guess, if we are keeping score, he afflicted the family farm with years of drought and gave him a cloak.  But I suspect the question wasn’t asking for a literal accounting. 

 

Another version, the Common English Bible, translates Elijah’s response as: “Go! I’m not holding you back!”  And that response makes more sense to me.  Elijah carried the mantle for a long time.  He cried the tears and wore the scars and felt the loneliness of the calling.  He couldn’t blame Elisha for going back to the farm, to a stable life, to a complete lack of death threats.  He wouldn’t hold the young man back.  Because he understood the weight of the ministry.

 

And Elisha did go back; he went back to the farm.  And he said goodbye to his agrarian life, to home, to friends, to everything that he knew.  And he followed the prophet.  He followed the calling.

 

And it wasn’t easy.  Like Elijah, Elisha faced some challenges – most especially, from my perspective, getting teased for being bald.  But his ministry was so powerful that even his dead bones raised the dead.  His ministry had a long half-life; he left a rich legacy.

 

The prophetic ministry to which God called Elijah and then Elisha was not an easy ministry.  They were not promised a life of luxury.  But they made the world better.  God wrote the salvation story through their lives.

 

God does not promise us that our work will be easy.  It won’t; justice always faces an uphill battle; radical love always finds someone to offend; the Gospel is always planted in a cynical world.  But God does promise to be with us and to work through us.  

 

The salvation story is an epic tale.  It started in Eden and will continue to unfold until God wipes away every last tear, until death and sorrow are no more.  It has been passed down through the generations, saint after saint tossing the mantle into the future, onto the next.  Now it is ours to wear.  One day we will pass it along.  Because the work of God in this world is not done.  God is still calling because there is still love to share, still evil to oppose, still goodness to expose.  That is our work.  And it is weighty, but it is worth it.