Rented Clothes
2 Kings 2:1-14

July 1, 2007


One reason why new translations of the Bible are necessary from time to time is that the English language really does change and in the 400 years since the King James Version some words are not what they used to be. Rending your garments does not happen as much as it used to, and if you have rent your clothes lately you are not making a profit. I am certain one of the Monty Python skits had a case of rending one’s garments to excess.

To rend or tear one’s garment was the cultural sign of grief and mourning in the ancient world. Occasionally we read of someone rending his clothes - this seemed to be a man thing - when he had heard an unbearable blasphemy. You were seriously grieved at such a word or phrase that threatened to kill your faith. How much you had to tear your garment was always a little unclear. I am sure there were the gung ho types who literally tore their clothes in two so that it could not be worn again unless sewn back together, and likely more than a few who would rip a few threads for the minimum required effect. I am stuck coming up with an equivalent action for our Western society.

Canada Day is always spectacular if for nothing than the usually great weather and for the inevitable fireworks. You always need fireworks if an event is really going to be worth it. Remember, the Rolling Stones ended with fireworks at Taylor Field last October - doesn’t that prove it? Believe it or not, fireworks had not been invented in the Middle East during Biblical times, but there is an awfully close one, witnessed by only one person - Elijah and the chariot of fire.

The Bible doesn’t tell many better stories, but often the really good stories become lost in their details, like many a modern movie’s story is supplanted by its cinematic special effects. This story begins with the fact that everybody knew that the Lord God was about to take Elijah up to heaven by a whirlwind. The notice of this event comes out of the blue, but it does take away any suspense. Elijah’s companion and disciple Elisha obviously knows and is a spiritually ambitious man, not wanting to let Elijah out of his sight. Elijah keeps on a relentless and lengthy journey, testing Elisha by trying to tire him out and lose him, but Elisha’s energy is the equal of his master’s. Along the way, everybody does seem to know this is The Day.

There is that playful repetitiousness found in the best of the old stories. Elijah keeps walking and trying to lose Elisha, first at Gilgal, then Bethel, Jericho, and on to the Jordan River. “As the Lord lives, and as you yourself live, I will not leave you” is Elisha’s refrain. Eugene Peterson captures the crafty and impertinent side of Elisha’s personal mission, “Not on your life! I’m not letting you out of my sight!” But there is something a little deeper in these words. Elisha is saying that there is a living God who is in tandem with Elijah’s life, and he wants to be an intimate part of that kind of life. There is nothing he will not do to become a part of that life.

Fireworks may be coming, but nothing really happens without crossing the dirty water of the Jordan. The funny thing on the way to the Jordan is that Elijah and Elisha are no longer alone. Fifty “sons of the prophets” followed from a distance and watched them from this side of the Jordan. Maybe it was that band of fifty that were singing in the African American spiritual, “I looked over Jordan and what did I see, coming for to carry me home? A band of angels coming after me, coming for to carry me home. Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home.” Even when you are alone, someone is always watching.

What they were all watching was an odd and amazing event. At the verge of Jordan, Elijah took off his hairy mantle, his wilderness coat, wound it up and slapped the water, and the water parted to one side and the other. The two prophets walked across on dry ground, as the Exodus was reiterated. But the fifty did not dare follow.

Elijah turns to his disciple and asks what he can do for him before he is taken from him. Elisha wants to inherit a double portion of his spirit, and Elijah whistles, wow, that’s a hard one. Peterson does it better this time, “Your life repeated in mine.”

That says so directly what we all say of people we admire and want to imitate. You don’t just want to imitate, to play around the edges of the character of your model and mentor, you want to life again that person’s marvelous life. Of course, you can’t and most of the time you don’t really want to live out everything the person went through, but like Elisha you want to be a holy man just like Elijah. This is not Elijah’s wish to grant, so he tells him, if you can see it happening, then you will have the wish. If you can’t see it, nothing.

This makes for a lively conversation and the two keep walking on for a while until the famous fiery chariot and horses get in between the two guys and separate them. That must have been close and hot, but the narrator does not mention the temperature. Elijah is swept up into heaven by a whirlwind and Elisha saw it. A lot of us think about it and talk about it, but to be able to see it is an entirely different matter altogether. Elisha cried out something we haven’t been able to decipher exactly, but he was excited beyond his imagination and the right words are not usually rational in those instances. And then in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, he saw Elijah no more.

And there was no more of Elijah, except for his hairy mantle which Elisha dutifully picked up. Good thing he did - he had just rent his own clothes, split them right in two, no half-way measures for Elisha. Right away, Elisha begins to live Elijah’s life again, nearly mirror image, starting with slapping that mantle on the waters of the Jordan to see what would happen. His liturgical incantation is striking, “Where is the Lord, the God of Elijah?” as he struck the waters, a doubting, cynical question we have become used to hearing. But then it was an outrageous question.

Some think he was just checking that Elijah’s mantle still had its power to recreate the Exodus; others that he was seeing if he had the powerful life of Elijah in him. Was it the mantle or Elisha that parted the waters of the Jordan? Keep in mind that there were fifty sons of the prophets watching all of this and receiving Elisha back on their side of the river, and they knew that Elisha had received the mantle. Who knows whether they saw the chariot, but since they spent the next three days searching high and low under every rock and atop every mountain for the transported Elijah they could not see.

They could not see the fireworks, as if that alone defines one’s faith and the direction of one’s life. We’ll see fireworks tonight, but this episode is not foremost about Elijah and his chariot of fire. It’s a lot more about Elisha - and you and me - who have been blessed extraordinarily by at least one person. How do you live in the wake of someone who has infected you to the marrow of your bones? Eugene Peterson went slightly over the top when he translated Elisha’s desire to have “your life repeated in mine.” The nature of God’s creation is that you and I are unique and no amount of following precisely another person’s script can succeed. Yet, humbly this is not a bad place to begin, repeating the holiness of another person’s life. We are, of course, experts at imitating the faults of our forerunners. Just look at your children and see how very well they have mastered the things you do wrong. The sight of seeing your mirror image at work makes you want to rend your garments!

It may be Elisha’s story, but it really is his way of revealing to us about how God works. It is impossible to imitate God because all of life is contained within God and you and I can only handle a handful at best. Yet God enables you to share and infect others with that handful of life - and it might be granted that Elijah and Elisha had a fistful, probably two, of that life fully lived. Canada Day is not a bad occasion to consider how much you really want to repeat someone’s life in yours, to feel their life invigorating and inspiring you at the very least to live every moment to the fullest. That’s the closest way to imitate God’s life.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan