Sermon for the Sixth Sunday after Epiphany
By Donyelle McCray,
Associate Professor of Homiletics
Yale Divinity School
(The following is a transcript of the service audio, Feb. 11, 2024)
At some point in our lives, we all face turning points. Some line up with happy rites of passage like graduation, marriage, finding a first job, others come out of the blue, bringing a reality we couldn't imagine. And revealing the essence of who we are.
Our lesson from 2 Kings is a story about a turning point. Once there was a student who had a great teacher, not just a smart teacher or an unusually kind teacher, but a great teacher, a legend, Elijah. He was a fixture in the pantheon of prophets, among the greatest of all time. And he was moving on. Things would not be the same without him.
Elijah was larger than life. He was an expander of imaginations. He was the relentless justice-seeker Israel needed. One who spoke with authority because he didn't bow to the idols of comfort or convenience. His words sizzled with truth. When he wasn't confronting the likes of Ahab and Jezebel, he had a folksy way of saying two things at once. "Stay here, the Lord has sent me to Bethel." Which meant something like stay if you want to stay, but come if you really want to come. He had way more humility than charisma. Was better at loving people than making speeches. And he was a lover of the land, of crags and caverns, and the many secrets God hides in the wilderness.
While sweet-smelling monarchs draped themselves in velvet, Elijah was cologned in the sweat of his own hairy body and always cloaked in his beloved mantle. I wouldn't be surprised if it had a name as B.B. King had Lucille, Elijah had his mantle, only it was even more precious. It was a sign of an enveloping grace.
Elijah was addressed with the typical salutations people used to express respect, father teacher, but chief among his titles was the chariot. Now, he was not the driver of the chariot, he was the chariot. He was feared by the spiritual needs of the people, and borne up by the mercy of God. Elijah embodied the idea that Israel's true power did not rest in military might but in divine intimacy, or as one source puts it by his prayer. He was better for Israel than chariots and horsemen.
And did he pray? Not many people can call down fire from heaven, but God responded to Elijah's call in a flaming rush. He prayed that it would not rain, and it did not rain for three years and six months. He prayed that it would rain and the heavens opened. Parched land turned green with vegetation. Elijah had been so porous to the divine will, now he was moving on.
Guided by divine illogic, he took his student along a winding rugged route to say goodbye. When the time drew near, Elijah turned to his mentee and offered a parting gift. "What may I do for you, before I am taken from you?" And the student said, "Please, let me inherit a double portion of your spirit." Now the double portion was what a father usually gave his firstborn son. But lest we think this episode is just one more patriarchal power shift, I should note that in the ancient Near East prophecy was a highly feminized category. Whatever their gender, prophets were understood to be receivers of divine wisdom. And this meant holding a posture of listening and waiting, not dominating. This isn't about power wielding, it's about connection, about whether and how their bond would continue.
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They'd spent nearly every day together, mumbling to one another from the stupor of daybreak until nightfall, and then dozing off to the familiar rhythm of one another's snoring. They had the fidelity that the Mishnah imagines between a teacher and a student. A fidelity as deep as that between a parent and child. As the saying goes, a father brings a son into the world, but a teacher must equip him to enter the future. Elijah and his student were that pair. Even their names seemed to flow in twinship. And now Elijah was moving on.
Like my own African ancestors, he stewarded the frameworks and coping strategies, the symbols, stories and melodies that a people need to survive under constant duress. Sister Thea Bowman said, "Enslaved singers planted healing and solutions to problems in the spirituals, so that we might keep our humanity intact." Elijah was that guardian for his people, and now he was moving on. In the face of that kind of loss, it's understandable why his student would say, "Please, give me a double portion of your spirit."
Of course, as the protege, he must have also known how hard things had been on Elijah. Every idealist has a date with disillusionment. Murderous threats and pressure chafed at Elijah's spirit until he was a man on the run, curled up in a cave, numb with depression. And if it had been that hard on Elijah, the chariot, then the student would need even more help. "Please give me a double portion of your spirit. Your spirit that has been wounded but persisted. Your spirit that is familiar with loneliness and abandonment. That doesn't have all the answers, but leans on the Almighty. Give me a double portion of yourself. What are your capacities for giving and mine for receiving? What is constituent to you and what parts of your identity can you shed? Live on in me. Be more available to me after you part."
His request builds on all their prior lessons about what it means to be human, about what it means to walk the shoreline between this life and the next. Elijah cannot make any guarantees, but he knows there's power in vision. He says, "If you see me when I'm taken from you, it'll be yours."
It reminds me of a moment in Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, the preacher Baby Suggs Holy tells her listeners, the only grace they could have, was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it. Well, in a flash of fire, Elijah's taken up in a whirlwind, the student is left to forge a path of his own. Elijah moved on.
It was not the last time the two saw one another. The Bible says that sometime later when the student was under attack, his teacher nestled in the hills of Dothan to protect him. Peeking to him through a fiery flank of horses and chariots, only visible to those with eyes to see. And some would swear they saw glimpses of Elijah in John the Baptist and Jesus. And for good reason. Jesus wants to be associated with him. Elijah's wisdom is so crucial for our Lord that he wants the prophet beside him at the transfiguration.
In Judaism, Elijah is the awaited one. The one whose presence announces the coming Messiah. It's Jewish custom to pour a cup of wine for him at the Passover Seder, the cup of Elijah.
On other occasions, he's welcomed with an open chair. Elijah is coming. And according to Jewish folklore and rabbinic literature, Elijah reappears in disguise, assuming fluid identities, old man, slave, wealthy statesman, prostitute. No longer breathing fire and brimstone, now he comes with food or a tender word of comfort. Whatever it takes to spark a grace-filled turning point in the lives of others. Many see him as a great harmonizer and bearer of universal love. Elijah even reaches through the veils of other faiths, and though he doesn't manifest in the same way, he comes in vivid and potent ways. He's a beloved figure in Islam, among Baha'is and the Druze. Elijah is the lone prophet in the Hebrew Bible who is celebrated as a Christian saint.
We have him to thank for inspiring Carmelites like Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross. And though people like to put words in her mouth, Sojourner Truth was believed to echo him too, when she said, "I'm not going to die. I'm going to heaven like a shooting star." As one rabbi puts it, "Elijah's mystery is really the mystery of divinity spreading." If we are willing, the love God pours into the world through Elijah can pour through us. If we are willing, that messy all-compassionate love, that barrier-breaking, truth-telling, wounded but still outstretched love. That generous, turning point-inducing, irrational, nothing-to-prove love can flow through us, through us. May it be so.