Pentecost 5/Proper 8
The Rev. Nigel Taber-Hamilton, Rector
1 Kings 19:15-16, 19-21; Psalm 16; Galatians 5:1, 13-25; Luke 9: 51-62
All three readings today have a combined theme: that of “journey” – the journey home to God, and of what we as people of faith have to let go of to make it.
In the Kings passage Elijah is commanded to call his successor, Elisha – and there’s an echo in today’s gospel of Elisha’s response - “I want to go and say ‘goodbye’. Elijah’s response is, basically, ‘do that and you can’t follow me’. So Elisha lets go of everything, even to slaughtering his oxen and giving the cooked meat away, so that he can follow. This is the first part of that great departure story – you’ll remember the second part, where Elijah and Elisha journey together, and Elijah strikes the water with his cloak, his mantle, and they walk together through the water to that place where, after giving over his mantle to Elisha, Elijah is taken up to heaven in a whirlwind.
Here we see Elijah presented as having come to a new insight, a God-inspired vision that the time had come for him to let go of some of the things he’d been metaphorically been carrying around for a long time, and in particular the weight of responsibility and authority he had as a prophet, symbolized by his cloak, his mantle. To be free to move into the unbounded future, Elijah realized he had to give away that authority by passing it’s symbol: the cloak – which is, of course, where we get the metaphor of “passing on the mantle” from
For Elijah there was no looking back – he had to shed the past the way one would shed a cloak. He had to let go. In fact there’s another metaphor that’s equally appropriate for this moment: burning one’s bridges. The hand-off was not a reversible event, the bell, as they say, can never be un-rung. Once he let go he was beyond going back.
That’s a difficult thing to do for most of us, especially when we’ve retired! All of us have seen folk who had some significant authority when they were, as they say, ‘gainfully employed’ but now, having retired, no longer have that authority. Some folk struggle without knowing it to seize authority away from others so that they can regain that feeling of control they used to have. This happens a lot in churches and it’s destructive for both the individual doing it and the congregation suffering from the consequences of the struggle.
What Elijah’s story tells us is that the fruit of giving up, of giving away, of letting go of authority is a saving experience – and not just any ‘saving experience” but an echo of The Saving Experience of the crossing of the Red/Reed sea.
What Jew could miss the allusion?! Here was a bold-faced gilt-edged invitation to remember those events that marked the core moment of their sacred history, and to remember, too, it’s meaning: freedom involved a sacred journey through water.
A sacred journey through water. Sound familiar?! It’s easy to see why this language is later adopted to describe baptism, isn’t it? – freedom from slavery, freedom to breathe free is necessarily tied to a sacred journey through the water of baptism.
The choice of Paul’s writings to the Galatian community is not, therefore, accidental: freedom in Christ only comes by engaging in a journey into death and out the other side in to the new community of faith. That’s a pretty profound letting go. The way the early church symbolized it was that every adult who came for baptism shed their clothes as they went down in to the water to be baptized – men by men, women by women – and were then re-clothed in the white garments of the baptized (which I’m wearing today) as a sign that they had begun a completely new existence.
That, for us, is a pretty profound message, it seems to me: we as followers of Jesus are invited through our baptisms to let go of the everything - let go of the things we think we own, let go of the authority we think we have, let go even of the people we think we possess – let them go in the way Elijah shed his cloak, and to embrace the new identity of Christ as we journey home to God. That’s really what Paul is saying - he’s got that long list of things that really, in the end, are time-wasters, and then he talks about what really matters in our lives, beginning with love.
All of this is underscored by today’s Gospel. Here, again, is a journey – Jesus has “set his face toward Jerusalem” – the beginning of a journey that will lead to freedom, to the saving of us all.
To share in that journey, that pilgrimage, Jesus says, we have to let some things go. For his disciples it was the letting go, the giving up of cherished notions about the appropriate way to respond to rejection, especially by those we expect to reject us. Our contemporary response would be no different than that of the first century – we get easily offended; we want to argue the point. What’s wrong with us, we reason, that anyone in their right mind would reject us?.
When confronted with the Samaritan Jews’ rejection the disciples get angry – they want to punish these hated enemies of Judean Judaism – “We want to call down fire from Heaven”, they say. And sometimes that’s how we respond, too, when rejected by others – with anger. But Jesus didn’t let that happen to him, he just walked away – and he told his disciples to do the same thing – just walk away.
When you’re on a journey you’re not going to get anywhere you can’t get side-tracked, you can’t carry around anything that might distract you from your central purpose, including anger. You’ll just spend your time focusing on unimportant things. My mother seemed to spend about 20 years of her life being angry about her divorce from my father. Then she had a realization that she’d wasted 20 years of her life. So she spent the last 5 years being angry that she’d spent 20 years being angry! What would it be like, at the end of your life, if someone asked you how you spent it, and you thought and said “well, I was angry a lot”? Jesus’ message is this – in the greater scheme of things it doesn’t matter – you’ll just be holding yourself prisoner to something that’s not that important. Let it go. Constantly looking back. Let it go. Learn from the experiences of life but let go of the recrimination, the second-guessing, the desire to change the past, and focus on where the journey is taking you and how you can make it better.
That’s always the Christian invitation as we journey: to let go of the heavy past that can so easily confine us and turn to face the future squarely; to let go of the anger that can confine and limit us in our response to God’s saving act for us. That’s the only way we can be free to move into God’s unbounded future with hands freed to work as the community of Christ’s body,
May we move into that unbounded future together. Amen.
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