June 23, 2013 | 4:00 p.m.

Not Quite an Ending

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

2 Kings 2:1–12

My brother called me on Monday night—five times. He called twice while I was watching the Blackhawks game with friends—I called him back with no answer—and he called three more times that I didn’t hear after I’d gone to bed with my cell phone on silent. When I woke up in the morning and saw the five missed calls with no messages, I jumped to the conclusion that something terrible had happened to our parents, who live five minutes from my brother. I called him immediately, insisting into the black hole of voicemail that he get back to me right away and leave me some kind of message. As it turned out, he did have something for us to talk about, and it had nothing to do with any kind of tragic event regarding our parents. But in the twenty minutes it took my brother to get back to me that morning, I headed to work under somewhat strange circumstances. I stared up at the “L” tracks and the skyscrapers along the Chicago River as I made my way through town, wondering had something happened to my parents, was there about to be an end to my independent existence in this magnificent city, as I would move back home to help my family. I walked by a building I pass at least a couple of times a week and noticed, as I never have before, the hostas growing in the sidewalk planter. About a week before, I’d been home and had helped my dad divide hostas in the yard. Was that the last thing we would ever do together? Until my brother called with the news that everything was OK, the whole world seemed to slow down, and so much of what was around me was unknown and full of fear.

I spent some time this week wondering about why something so insignificant as a few missed calls (most of which were “pocket-dials,” by the way) caused such a strong reaction in me, and I came up with a theory. I shared with you all last week that John Boyle, a longtime minister here at Fourth Church and one of the wisest men I ever knew, passed away this month. Last month, KC Ptomey, my divinity school mentor and the person most responsible for my entering the ordained ministry, died of aggressive liver cancer after being the picture of health only half a year earlier. About fourteen months before that, John Buchanan, the pastor of this congregation and the mentor from whom I have learned the most as a young minister, retired from Fourth Presbyterian Church. About two years before that, Bill Placher, the college professor who taught me to love the study of religion, who convinced me to go to divinity school, and who preached on the day I was ordained, died unexpectedly of a massive heart attack. Psychologists will tell you that grief has a cumulative effect; I think I’m starting to understand what that means as I find that my mentors in the faith seem to be rapidly disappearing from my life and I’m trying to figure out what that means for my life and my ministry.

Before I go any further, I feel like I should acknowledge that I have always felt especially blessed to have an abundance of great mentors in my life. I also know that is not everyone’s story. I can only say, in reference to that, that if any of you have ever come to me, as people often do, to speak about the absence of a father or a mentor or a sense of direction, I want to apologize if I ever seemed distant or unable to understand. The truth is, I’m just now discovering how very difficult it is to lose a trusted mentor or perhaps not to have had one in the first place, and I am gaining a fuller understanding of just how blessed I’ve been to have had so much good help and guidance along my own way.

I’ve told you this lengthy and self-referential story today because I can’t help but see something similar emerging in the scripture lesson about Elijah and Elisha. Elijah is the old prophet. Wise and experienced, weathered by the storms of life and strengthened by the things he has seen and suffered, he was the prophet people most looked up to in the Old Testament. In the passage we read today about the end of his life on earth, he parts the waters of the Jordan River, recalling Moses at the Red Sea, and he ascends to heaven, rising into the sky in a prefiguring of the ascension of Jesus. Elijah was a big deal, just as we look at our mentors and see a big deal.

In today’s story, we meet Elisha, the prophet who is to come after Elijah. And they both know that Elijah’s time is almost up. The last few conversations they have are exactly the kind of conversations we all have with our mentors. Elijah is making final stops at all of the most important places in Israel. “The Lord has sent me to Bethel,” says Elijah. “You stay here.” Elisha wants to come and pleads to be taken along. The same thing happens with a trip to Jericho and another one to the Jordan River. At each step along the way, people approach Elisha, saying, “You know, we heard your master is going away,” and Elisha says, “Don’t talk about it,” almost as if he is in denial about what must inevitably take place. And he keeps begging Elijah to take him along on all of those final journeys, and Elijah continues to agree but still keeps urging his young friend, “Stay here; there’s no reason for you to go with me.” It’s as if Elijah knows that no matter how many trips they take, no matter how many words of wisdom are shared, he knows that soon it will be over. And he also knows that Elisha will finally begin to learn what it really means to be a prophet only when he, Elijah, has gone.

When the actual departure of Elijah finally takes place, after all of the buildup, it is so sudden. They are not in a well-known or marked place; they are walking along in the middle of nowhere and a chariot scoops up Elijah and carries him away into the sky. Like a heart attack or a car accident, just like that, no final words, he’s gone. It is interesting to me that, those of us who spent time in Sunday School learning the Bible probably remember this piece of Bible trivia: Question: “Who ascended into heaven riding a chariot into the sky?” Answer: “Elijah”—as if the story is all about the one who leaves. But the fact is, for us, stories about losing someone to the hands of death are not about the person who dies; they are about the ones who are left behind. None of us know what is waiting for us on the other side. To that end, it really doesn’t matter at all whether or not you buy into the miraculous nature of today’s Bible story, because whether a chariot carries you into the sky or your heart stops beating over at Northwestern, Feinberg Pavilion room 1604 bed 2, not a one of us knows what is waiting on the other side. But many of us know what it means to be left here when they are gone. Elisha was left. So the story says, “Elisha was watching, and he cried out, ‘Oh, my father, my father! Israel’s chariots and its riders!’ When he could no longer see him, Elisha took hold of his clothes and ripped them in two.” Elisha is left alone. What can he say but “My God, my God . . . why did you take him away?” And he ripped his clothes in two, because that’s what you did in their culture to show grief.

My friend and colleague Mary Ann Mckibben Dana has written about this passage, noting, “It is unclear what Elisha expected to receive from Elijah in terms of the double portion.” Do you remember that detail of the reading? At one point, “Elijah turns to his young friend Elisha and asks, ‘What do you want me to do for you before I am taken away?’ And Elisha answers, ‘Give me a double portion of your spirit.’” My hunch is that, in that strange statement, he is expressing something like, “I know that I don’t have half your intellect or experience; so please do something: pray for me that I’ll have what it takes to carry on when you’re gone.” Mary Ann continues: “What [Elisha] does receive is the awareness that whatever Elijah has taught him up to now will have to be enough; he must go on alone. What he receives is grief” (Mary Ann Mckibben Dana, Feasting on the Word, 2 Kings 2).

It hasn’t occurred to me, before, to think of grief as something that is received the way one would receive a gift, but perhaps that’s right. Perhaps the gift of grief is that in realizing that a mentor has left us, we have the chance to grow and learn and stand on our own. “How did I do on this?” and “What did you think of that?” are no longer questions on which a mentor weighs in and shows us our value; instead they become opportunities to ask how we are doing in light of our own hopes and expectations for ourselves. It is now time to ask big questions and start providing some answers of our own. What am I doing with my life? How do I feel about the choices I’m making? How do I feel about the way people will remember me when I am gone? Am I living the kind of life that I hope to have lived when it is my time to ride up in the chariot and stand before God? The chance to ask those questions not of someone else but of yourself—perhaps that is the gift of grief.

My mentor in seminary, KC Ptomey, had a way of teaching students how to preach at weddings and funerals. For weddings he assigned a fictional couple to each student. There was always an issue—an overbearing in-law, an unexpected pregnancy, etc.—and at an appointed due date during the semester, the student would come prepared with an explanation of how to approach the counseling, the wedding, and the sermon that went with it.

Funerals were different. During the semester, on a day that came as a complete surprise to the student, each person in the class received a call from KC informing them of a death and the particular circumstances around it, and the student was given a few days to prepare for the funeral, regardless of whatever else was on their plate that week, because often that is how death comes. “He said the most moving sermon was by a young woman student whom he assigned the funeral of a child who had accidentally rolled down her driveway on a tricycle and who couldn’t stop but rode into the line of traffic. KC said the preacher was crying, the class was crying, and he was crying. It was the best funeral sermon he had ever heard” (John Walton, “A Homily in Memory of KC,” 18 May 2013). Stories like that one lead me to believe that when we feel most profoundly lost and alone and unclear about what to do, it is at those times that God is holding us the closest.

Many of us learn and grow the most at the moments when we are thrown into the deep end, called to face a situation we did not see coming and for which we may not feel fully prepared. No matter who you are, life is full of those situations, and I doubt they ever go away entirely: we will spend our entire lives being surprised by new challenges, even long after we have become mentors to others. My hunch is that our wisest coaches present us with these situations intentionally because they have their own memories of feeling unprepared, ill-equipped, and alone, and they know that we, like them will rise out of our grief, pray and cry our way through challenges, and will one day realize that we now have something to pass on to the ones who follow us. It is perhaps in sharing that experience that we come to know we are not as alone as we thought we were. Amen.