Friday, July 29, 2016
Pentecost 6, Tear C, Proper 8, June 26, 2016
Sermon for The Sixth
Sunday After Pentecost
Year C, Proper 8 ~ June
26, 2016
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Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
Keep your hand on the plow: hold right on.
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided
Trinity
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Plows.
Prophets. Apostles. Elisha is plowing, and Jesus says whoever once sets hand to
plow, but then “looks back” Is not suited for the Kingdom of God.
Elijah
was the great Pro-phet of Israel after the time of David. And Elisha was his
successor. God commands Elijah to institutionalize
his prophetic office – just as prophets already anointed kings, they would
designate their own successors.
The
Church understands this as the duty of Apostles, too. The Apostles are
analogous to the prophets of Israel, and they are to ordain their own
successors. We make much of this in the Anglican Communion – Apostolic Succession, we say, and we
call ourselves Episcopal, which means
having to do with bishops, whom we
regard as the successors of the Apostles.
This
coming Wednesday is the Feast of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul. It is often
simply called the Feast of the Holy Apostles, and as such it may also be taken
as a celebration of the whole notion of Apostolic Succession – a significance much
grander, even, than the commemoration of the two foun-ders of the local church
at Rome. Both Peter and Paul were foreigners, born elsewhere, who died violently
in Rome – traditionally on the same day, June 29. Even though Paul was legally a
citizen, they were both outsiders, sent from abroad with a message. To fulfill
their commission, they had to give up everything, including their lives.
Just
like Elisha. He couldn’t even go back home to tell his father he was leaving.
That alone is kind of outrageous, given that filial duty is enshrined in the
Fifth Commandment, written in stone on Sinai, by the Finger of God! The twelve
yoke of oxen (twenty-four large animals) and the plow belonged to Elisha’s
father. Not only did Elisha disappear without informing his father, but he
destroyed a fair amount of his father’s wealth before he left! So also, Jesus
insists on complete renunciation of ordinary obligations.
What
are we to do with this?
· We can attribute it to the apocalyptic
consciousness of the Early Church – the ones who wrote the Gospel – and say
that everybody expected the world to end soon, so ordinary obligations are
meaningless.
· We can say (as I often do) that one size does
not fit all, and that people have different callings… that it doesn’t mean you
have to forsake all obligations in order to do Jesus’s will and to be approved
by God – just that not everyone is called to be an Apostle.
· We can allegorize and spiritualize and
individualize the meaning, noticing that sooner or later we all WILL give up
everything to follow Jesus, whether we want to or not, in the sense that we are
all going to follow Him in death. If we practice inner renunciation now,
constantly remembering that we are dust and to dust we shall return, we begin
to get ready for the Kingdom of God. Indeed, we call Baptism participation in His Death.
· We can remind ourselves that the Kingdom of
God does not mean a reward in heaven after we die, but the transformed society
and transfigured creation of perfect equality and harmony. Obviously, any kind
of obligatory preference for anyone is incompatible with such a régime.
Maybe
there is some truth to each of these interpretations. At the very least, the story
of Elisha and Jesus’ pronouncement about the plow would seem to caution against
attachment to aspect of our present arrangements. But it would be a mistake to
think it cautions us against love. If we
don’t love our parents, how can we love anyone else?
Somehow
the Elisha’s love for his father must be reconciled with the sacrifice of his
father’s treasure. A big order, but maybe there is one little clue in the
detail about giving the twenty-four boiled oxen to feed “the people”:
[Elisha] took the yoke of oxen, and slaughtered
them; using the equipment from the oxen, he boiled their flesh, and gave it to
the people, and they ate.
Leaving
aside the considerable resemblance of this story to that of David’s sacrifice
of the oxen on the holocaust of the cart they were pulling, carrying the Ark of
the Covenant, which the Philistines, in desperation, had sent back, we have to
ask “who were these people?”
Whom
did Elisha feed? Who knows? They must represent something like society as a
whole. The prophet or apostle must put everything at the disposal of everyone
else. Everyone is his family, not just his father. He owes that extended family
– all humanity – the same obligation he owes his own Father and Mother. If you
want to enter the Kingdom of God, you can’t be tied to the natural restriction
of obligations to immediate family. Or to clan, or to tribe, or to nation.
The
prophet/apostle recognizes the whole of humanity – indeed the whole of creation
– as “father and mother” of the
Commandment. To enter the Kingdom of God is to awaken the consciousness that
all people and all creation really are as closely related to one as one’s own
parents.
To live in this consciousness seems to me to
be a rare gift. How on earth can it be institutionalized? That is the dilemma
of the Church – just as it was the dilemma of Jesus and Elijah. Some
institutional successors are better than others. Those who really live up to
the prophetic and apostolic calling, who offer themselves as building-blocks in
the Temple of which Jesus Christ Himself
is the chief Cornerstone, sacrifice everything, like Elisha and Peter and
Paul, so that the People may eat.
Their
sacrifice is symbolized by a famous comment on the rite of consecration of a
bishop in the Orthodox Church. After the actual consecration, the new Bishop is
vested and presented with two torches – a triple candle and a double one,
symbolizing the Mysteries of the Trinity and Incarnation (dual nature of
Christ.) But the famous comment observes that these ceremonial torches also
represent those carried by the soldiers coming to arrest Jesus in Gethsemane. The
main calling of successors of the prophets and apostles is sacrifice.
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME, LORD JESUS!
