The Thirteen Sunday in Ordinary Time

SECOND KINGS 2:1-12: This is a strange and awesome story. It tells of the end of the life of the prophet Elijah, and it relates the beginning of the prophetic ministry of Elisha, Elijah's chosen successor.

Elijah had been a prophet in the line of Moses. He had confronted King Ahab when Ahab had married a foreign princess, Jezebel, and she had brought her gods with her to the land of Israel. Elijah had challenged these gods on Mount Carmel and had defeated them. But the ecstacy of victory had turned to darkness and gloom in Elijah's soul when he learned that Jezebel had demanded that he die for what he had done to her prophets, and Elijah fled to the Mountain of God where Moses had stood before. He asked to see God, but like Moses, he could not. Instead, wind, fire, and earthquake poured upon him, but God was not in these. God came to Elijah only in the "sound of a gentle stillness," as the agitation in his soul was silenced, and he was able to return to Israel to continue his ministry. There he confronted Ahab once again when, at Jezebel's suggestion, Ahab tried to expropriate the land of a fellow Israelite and use royal prerogative to make it his own.

Elijah was the prototype prophet. All true prophets after him drew their inspiration from the covenant made between God and Israel, through Moses, and all true prophets confronted Israel when the justice and mercy of God was being compromised by king and people.

Now Elijah is about to depart this life, and he knows it. When the certainty of his departure came to him, Elijah and his disciple Elisha were on their way from Gilgal. Elijah wanted to proceed on his journey alone. This act was in harmony with the rest of Elijah's severe and lonely life. At the end of it, he desired to meet his God alone. Elijah said to Elisha, "You stay here. For myself I am going to Bethel to meet the Lord." Elisha would have none of it. "As the Lord lives, and as I live," he said, "I will not leave you." He accompanied Elijah to Bethel.

When they arrived at Bethel, Elijah said to Elisha, "You stay here. For myself I am going to Jericho to meet the Lord." Again Elisha would have none of it. He accompanied Elijah to Jericho, an ancient city deep in the Jordan River Valley, the lowest city in elevation on all the earth. Once more Elijah said to Elisha, "You stay here. For myself I am going to the Jordan River to meet the Lord." Once more Elisha persisted. "I will accompany you to the Jordan," he said. Elijah took his mantle, rolled it up, and with it struck the waters of the river. As these waters had parted for the people of Israel when they came from Egypt through the Sinai to Canaan, the waters parted again, and the two men walked on dry land from the Promised Land back into the wilderness from which Israel had come. It was also the area in which Moses died. Elijah, like Moses, will die on the very spot where his own master had died.

As they walked, Elijah asked Elisha what he could do for him. "Give me a double measure of your spirit," said disciple to master. This was no small request. The spirit that had come to Elijah, the wind and breath of God upon him, had led Elijah to bring life from death (1 Kings 17:17-24), to engage rival gods in order to enact the truth of the God of Israel (1 Kings 18-19), to confront the power of kings with the justice of God (1 Kings 21:1-24). Elijah was not able to transmit this power to Elisha. The ministry of Elisha pales when compared with the ministry of Elijah. Instead of a "double measure" of Elijah's spirit, Elisha was able to receive "a half measure" only.

Here is the conclusion of the story: As they continued walking and talking, a chariot of fire and horses of fire separated the two of them, and Elijah ascended in a whirlwind to heaven. This prophet, whose life was marked with fire and storm, ended it in the same way: in a whirlwind, with horses and chariots of fire bearing him to heaven. Elisha cried out in bereavement and abandonment, yet in devotion and adoration: "Father, father! The chariots of Israel and its horsemen." As Clovis Chappell interpreted this verse in one of his sermons (Faces in the Crowd, 189), "There goes the real defender of our nation," he said. "He wears not the crown of a king but the mantle of a prophet."

So Elijah does not die but is taken up into heaven in this miraculous moment. A prophet like Elijah can never be said to be dead. His spirit remains with his people and returns when it is needed the most. There was a story abroad in Israel ever after that before Messiah came, Elijah would return. He did return before Messiah was revealed to all the world, in the moment of transfiguration on the holy mount, when three disciples saw for the first time who their master truly was.

PSALM 77:1-2, 11-20: Verses 11 through 20 represent the poet's answer to the questions and doubts that he raised in the first part of the psalm. These doubts and misgivings are prefaced in verses 1 through 3: "I cry aloud to God, aloud to God, that he may hear me. 2: In the day of my trouble I seek the Lord; in the night my hand is stretched out without wearying; my soul refuses to be comforted. 3: I think of God, and I moan; I meditate, and my spirit faints." Here is a man, or woman, who prays day and night to God but receives no answer to the prayer. He even entertains the dreadful thought that the character of God has changed as the years have passed: "Has his steadfast love for ever ceased? Are his promises at an end for all time? Has God forgotten to be gracious? Has he in anger shut up his compassion?" (77:8-9) In verse 10 he says it aloud: "And I say, 'It is my grief that the right hand of the Most High has changed.'"

But that is not the end of the matter for this psalmist. He or she begins to remember what God has done in the past. "I will call to mind the deeds of the LORD; yea, I will remember thy wonders of old. 12: I will meditate on all thy work, and muse on thy mighty deeds." His meditation produces one of the great hymns of the Book of Psalms (77:13-19):

13: Thy way, O God, is holy.
What god is great like our God?

14: Thou art the God who workest wonders,
who hast manifested thy might among the peoples.

15: Thou didst with thy arm redeem thy people,
the sons of Jacob and Joseph.

16: When the waters saw thee, O God,
when the waters saw thee, they were afraid,
yea, the deep trembled.

17: The clouds poured out water;
the skies gave forth thunder;
thy arrows flashed on every side.

18: The crash of thy thunder was in the whirlwind;
thy lightnings lighted up the world;
the earth trembled and shook.

19: Thy way was through the sea,
thy path through the great waters;
yet thy footprints were unseen.

The mighty deeds, of course, are those that took place during the exodus of God's people from Israel. When God acted to bring the people out of their land of enslavement, even the waters trembled at the power of God. Thunder crashed, lightnings lighted up the world. God acted, and the people were saved. Will not God act again with like power to deliver us?

I need to draw attention to two special verses in this hymn.

Mention is made in verse 15 of "Jacob and Joseph." Jacob was a doubter and a fugitive, as we find him in the Old Testament, a man who had lost his favorite son and did not know where to find him.. Yet the power of God restored his lands and his son to him. Joseph was sold into slavery by his own brothers and had his years of doubt in the prisons of Egypt, yet God raised him up to be the greatest in all the land. If God does this for Jacob and Joseph, will God not do like things for the children of these two men?

Verse 19 conveys this powerful phrase: "Thy path (was) through the great waters; yet thy footprints were unseen." Is it that the waters obliterated the footprints? I think the meaning of the line is stronger still. God walks with us in our valleys of the shadow of death, yet when we look around, we do not see God's footprints. They are "seen" only through the eyes of faith. Only when with faith in the delivering power of God we look at our present and our past can we make out, however dimly, the footprints of God in our lives. We look to the past to see God working there. We transfer this working of God into our own present lives. To do this is what we call "faith."

GALATIANS 5:1, 13-25: The remainder of Paul's Letter to the Galatians is a plea for responsible use of freedom. Christ took the yoke of the law off our shoulders, but in its place he put the cross. This freedom is harder to bear than is the law itself, and it is for this reason that we are tempted to go back into slavery.

Paul may be referring to a practice known as manumission. A slave who desired to purchase his freedom could deposit the money in the temple of his god. He then became the slave of the god, but he or she was free from his human master. Many of Paul's hearers were slaves or former slaves. They knew what it was to belong to god. The difference is that in Roman custom the slave paid the price of his freedom; in the Christian Church, Christ paid it for him.

In verse 13 Paul once more issues his call to freedom. He points out how easy it is to use freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, and he states his Christian principle: "Through love become slaves to one another." (Martin Luther was later to use this verse in his book A Treatise on Christian Liberty. He wrote: "A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.") After stating his own position, Paul quoted that of Jesus Christ: "The whole law is summed up in a single commandment, You shall love your neighbor as yourself." Paul had never met Jesus in the flesh, but through the church and its teachings Paul was acquainted with some of the important things Jesus said.

Paul then articulated the tension under which all Christians live. "Live by the spirit, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh." To support this, Paul incorporated into his letter two catalogues for living (5:19-26). One list is labelled "works of flesh"; the second is called "fruit of the spirit."

There is widespread agreement that catalogues similar to these existed in Hellenistic society before the time of the Christian movement. Stoics had such catalogues of virtues and vices, as did Cynics. They used them in their proclamations and their teaching as a means of portraying the differences between the kind of life lived in society in general and the kind of behavior expected of adherents to their philosophy. In incorporating such a catalogue into his letter, Paul was drawing upon a form of argument familiar to persons to whom he was writing. What Paul, and those other Christians who helped to formulate these lists, had done to adapt the catalogue to fit his own purposes is significant.

The first catalogue, listed as "works of flesh," has no recognizable order to its subjects: immorality, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party-spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing. Alternating between personal faults and public sins, the catalogue drew a picture of a society sick to death. Nor is it overdrawn. Estimates of thoughtful contemporaries in that society supported the picture. It was a society about to collapse under the weight of its own evil: beyond the power to police itself; beyond the reach of law to control it; subject to chaos and destruction.

Within this society, however, lived a community whose canons were completely different and whose lifestyle might yet be a redeeming force within the larger world. It was an ordered society of love, joy, peace; of patience, kindness, goodness; of faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Behavior like this is beyond the reach of law. No law -- Hebrew, Greek, Roman -- would prohibit this kind of conduct. In fact, it is for the production of this kind of deportment that all law, all custom, all religion exists. Such behavior is developed, however, said Paul, not by human means but by an act of God. God, in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, brought to an end the era of life in which immorality, impurity and idolatry reigned and opened up a new epoch in which these gentler virtues can flower. And when those in the Christian community have crucified the passions and desires of the flesh, they have been freed to partake of the fruits of the spirit.

These fruits of the spirit fulfill the age-long aspirations of the social groupings to whom the message of Jesus Christ has come.

"Love, joy, peace" are characteristics of Christian conduct common to all Christians and emphasized first in the Aramaic-speaking churches of Judea. Love is goodwill active among people bound in loyalty to each other through their common loyalty to Jesus Christ. Joy is recognition that in Jesus Christ there is forgiveness beyond sin, music beyond tears, life beyond death. Peace is the shalom, the well-being, so desired by the Hebrews -- right relations with God, self, neighbor, and the world around -- delivered by the Christ who said, "Peace be with you, my peace I give unto you." Christ fulfilled the way of life sought for centuries in Jewish religion, and he opened this way for all Christians to walk in.

"Patience, kindness, goodness" were words drawn from Hellenistic Judaism to indicate virtues sought in the Greek-speaking synagogues of the diaspora. Long-suffering -- keeping the temper under control -- was a concept prominent in contemporary Hellenistic and Roman ethics. Goodness, kindness, generosity, more specifically doing what is appropriate and right -- had a history reaching back to the dramatists Euripides and Aristophanes, and had more recently become a virtue in Jewish society. The Greek word agathosunai, built on the ancient and very honorable concept of agathos, the good, was a late development in the Hebrew language and was a construction of Hellenistic Judaism. So Christ fulfilled the life not only of the homeland Jew but also of the dispersed Jew living in an alien culture and seeking a lifestyle that would fit him for his new environment.

The last set of three comprised the most famous virtues of Hellenistic society itself and so represented the aspiration of the purely gentile portion of the church. Faithfulness, -- trust, trustworthiness, that which gives confidence, a guarantee, a pledge of good faith --was a commercial term related to the Latin fides, fiducia, and by a transfer of the concept from finance to human relations had become a virtue highly extolled in society. Meekness had been used in Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Ethics. Drawn from the metaphor for breaking a horse to the bit, it denoted the gentleness of someone whose internal life had been fully tamed by being brought under bit and bridle and hence under useful control. It was the very opposite of the worst of all sins in the eyes of the Greeks, hubris, that deliberate arrogant defiance of the gods which occurred when humans overstepped the divinelimits set for them. Self-control had been introduced into Greek society by Socrates, was also employed by Plato and Aristotle in The Republic and The Ethics, and by the time of Paul had become the central quest of Hellenistic life. This catalogue of characteristics of the Christian life pointed to the well-ordered behavior produced by a community that took its spirit from the spirit of the crucified Christ.

At the same time, this catalogue pointed to the nature of the congregations with which Paul was working. Based on the Christian community in Jerusalem, the Christian movement had reached out to include in it Jewish people of the diaspora who had sought to discover a life-style characterized by virtues cherished in the society around them. It had moved beyond that to incorporate into its own life the qualities sought in that part of Greek society which was not influenced by Jewish practice. This Christian message proclaimed that the spirit of Christ fulfilled the aspirations of Hellenism as well as of Judaism.

This was a bold claim. If Paul was the one who had drawn together this particular list of nine characteristics of the Christian lifestyle, he had produced a triumph of faith and

theology rarely equalled in Christians annals. If Paul had

merely adapted this list to his own purposes, as is more likely in that the catalogue begins with the basic Christian virtues as understood in the Jerusalem community, the list was an indication of the tremendous vitality of spirit at work in these small communities of Christians. Without hesitation or fear of contradiction, they were audaciously claiming that their Christ fulfilled not only the Judaism of their forebears but the aspirations and hopes of the gentile society that surrounded them at all times.

LUKE 9:51-62: At first glance, this passage seems merely to mark Jesus' transition from Galilee to Jerusalem. On further reflection, the nuances of the passage tell us a great deal about Jesus' purpose and ministry.