It's hard to let Go 

Someone asked Gail last week if her sermons were based on the lectionary readings because so often the readings seemed to speak directly to us. Well Gail does follow the lectionary readings and explains the sometimes-eerie way the reading speak to us, by comparing God’s word in Scripture to Dr. Who’s Tardis. You go in to the Tardis and into a text thinking it will be limited in scope and meaning yet, it endlessly goes on, revealing new rooms in the Tardis or new meanings within scripture. This is the mystery of God speaking to us and revealing Godself to us in the written and spoken word.

This week Gail found a very personal meaning in the Elijah, Elisha story. It seemed quite the coincidence that Elisha passes on his ministry, his mantle to a new leader. During the week Gail had the chance to speak to Rev. Deborah Yun, who will be ministering to us over the next few months. Gail wants you to know she is not claiming to have the spirit of Elijah and doesn’t want to put any pressure on Deborah to live up to the deeds of Elisha but there you go, a strange coincidence where the lectionary text speaks quite spookily to real life events.

It is hard to let go, and Gail wants you to know that it is a bittersweet thing to let go of the ministerial oversight of the Carlingford congregation. We can also see the very human emotions of having to say goodbye in play in today’s OT text. Three times in the full text, Elisha refuses to let go of Elijah, he hangs on in there until the end. However change is inevitable, and it is God’s will that is at work in this goodbye story. There is a very interesting exchange in the reading in which Elisha asks to have a double share of Elijah’s spirit. He is told that it is a very difficult thing. Again it appears to be up to Go’s will to grant such a desire. Perhaps Elisha needs to be open to such a blessing before it can be bestowed upon him. He needs to have his eyes open to God’s presence.

In today’s text we see a near perfect Elijah full of wisdom and acceptance of God’s will, but it is important not to forget the Elijah we meet last week; the Elijah hiding under a broom bush, full of negative emotions, dread, fear, worry and anxiety. Yet God finds a way, and through Elijah, Elisha, and all the prophets right throughout history, God’s light and revelation remain constant despite all circumstance. We know that this revelation culminates in the small, quite rather inconspicuous event in Bethlehem some two thousand years ago when God became flesh in our Lord Jesus Christ.

Our call to worship and opening prayer this morning both began by echoing Elisha’s first proclamation, “Where is the Lord?”. We know that our Lord is right here with us, wherever we go, wherever we are, and I hope we all can say to our Lord and Saviour, “I will follow you always, I will never let you go!” It goes without saying that he will never let us go! Our Lord is not only present but comes to live within in us through the Holy Spirit. We can only assume that today’s OT reading and its mention of Elisha’s inheritance of his master’s spirit is a mirror to today’s epistle reading, known famously as the “fruits of the Spirit”.

This beautiful passage can easily be misread, and for centuries we have interpreted it as a condemnation of the body, because of the way Paul appears to condemn the ‘flesh’. We can think or assume that all bodily passions are somehow wrong or sinful and try to separate our earthly existence from our spiritual existence. We may even think that following Christ is more about a passage to heaven to the spiritual realm instead of a pathway to transforming into our most Christlike selves right here, right now. If you need more convincing on the worth and beauty of our earthly existence think about the love of God in Jesus, a very human man, who hungered, felt thirst, enjoyed the loving bonds of relationships, felt immense sadness and grief, was tempted and betrayed. God does not look upon humans with disgust, as yukky fleshy creatures, no God has always looked upon us with love, we were created with love and deemed good and to seal the deal God became one of us. How much more reinforcement do we need to see that Christ changes us in this life as much as he does in the life to come.

So what is Paul trying to express when he describes the sins of the flesh? Our modern understanding of the human being in terms of mind, body and spirit allow us to name Pauls list of ‘desires of the flesh’ as our egos, our passions, our emotions. Now some of us may feel that we are way past going out and being licentious, playing up, fooling around and carousing and because of that we may miss or overlook the other passions; idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, and factions. Lets’ put that into modern day language so that we can identify these passions a little better; idolatry can be anything we put before God, sorcery could be as seemingly innocent as reading your horoscope every day particularly if you look to that for guidance before you have prayed to the Lord. The other emotions such as jealousy and anger are more easily identified, and you can actually feel many of them in a very physical way. Have you ever felt hot under the collar, have you ever felt that niggling feeling inside that rises up, changing our expressions, or making our hearts beat faster. The negative emotions that Paul describes can sadly be addictive, they can become habitual patterns of behaviour.

Just as the flesh is not bad, our emotions are not necessarily bad either, they are important clues to what is going on for us at any given moment. Like our bodies they just need to be controlled. In today’s gospel reading there is a perfect example of emotions getting the better of mere humans. We are told that when Jesus enters into Samaritan territory the people refuse to receive him. Imagine how the disciples felt when the townspeople reject their beloved Jesus? We cannot blame them for feeling angry, for wanting to strike back with enmity. James and John’s emotions get the better of them and they ask Jesus if he would like them to command fire to descend upon the townspeople to burn them all up. That’s not very ‘Fruits of the Spirit’ it is? Where is the love, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, gentleness, and self-control? It is no surprise that Jesus tells them off for being so full of negative un-Christlike emotions. Like Jesus disciples we cannot stop our emotions raging within us at times, it is what we do with them that counts or more crucially for us as believers it is how we let our faith and trust in Christ deal with them.

When we put our faith in Christ, Paul tells us that it is as if we have been crucified with him, by this he means we put to death the selfish self who acts on feelings, and raw emotions, instead of relying on the Spirt. The Spirit allows us to push selfish emotions down and back and out of the way where they belong. The good news is we don’t have to be the master of our emotions, yes, there are ways we can learn to tame them but in the end it is Life in the Spirit or perhaps more correctly it is the Spirit in our lives, within each of  us that makes our transformation into Christlikeness a reality.

Amen.