"Crossing Over"
A Sermon on 2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14, by the Rev. Brian D. EllisonThe First Presbyterian Church in the City of New YorkSunday, June 30, 2013[1]
Listen here: https://www.firstpresnyc.com/media/sermons-mp3/2013/130630.mp3.Today is the last day of a month that will be remembered as a turning point, the beginning of a new part of America’s history.But for me, the month began in Idaho.The first weekend of this month, I was in Boise, Idaho, where I preached at Southminster Presbyterian Church. Now, in comparison to the First Presbyterian Church in the City of New York, Boise Southminster is, well, from the outside, not quite so grand. In fact, it is even less grand than the First Presbyterian Church in the City of Boise. Southminster is a few hundred people in a suburban neighborhood on a busy road across from a strip mall. I can not tell you who was the most significant person baptized in its font. It is not a landmark church; it’s a “normal” church, in a “normal” town.And yet, there’s something not-so-normal about Southminster. There, in a state that will probably not be approving any legal same-gender marriages any time soon, sat couples married elsewhere or not yet married but whose lives together are celebrated in that congregation and have been for years. There, teens with all kinds of stories have found family and support even when they haven’t found it at home.And there, two weeks ago, together with just a handful of other churches, dozens of people from Southminster Presbyterian Church of Boise donned their multi-colored T-shirts—the ones that say “Jesus Loves You! We Think You’re Fabulous!”[2]—and gathered with thousands of others on the steps of the Idaho State Capitol and then marched through the streets of the City of Trees, handing out water and apologizing—on behalf of Christians—for the way lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer people had been and, in Idaho, too often still are treated. They carried a banner on which past Pride participants had with Sharpies acknowledged their anger or expressed their gratitude, a plain sheet with a rainbow of writing that had become its own kind of pride flag, greeting visitors at the church door and sometimes even acting as a tablecloth beneath the bread and wine on the Lord’s Table. There, a church whose experience of the living God alive and at work in the world compelled them to go to the place where the absence of God might be by some most acutely felt, there they put words and actions to the faith of their hearts. They left their suburban sanctuary, and got to work.And now, well, here we are. It is still June 2013: The last day of a not-so-normal month.Today, the people of God stand at an auspicious time. From Idaho to the West Village, from Uganda to South Africa to Brazil, from the Supreme Court to state legislatures to county clerks’ offices across America, and yes—in every church of whatever degree of normalcy—God’s people, you and I, are confronted with progress and challenge, uncertainties met with victories, gains met with setbacks. These are months of incredible hope and promise punctuated for some with pauses for confusion or even fear.It is not just lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender people who stand here at this place of auspiciousness and uncertainty, of course—this bank of the river Jordan. It is not just progressives or Presbyterians. It’s all the prophets—those with a record of speaking and those who have not yet spoken, all those who would dare to speak God’s truth, who would seek to see God’s will done in the world. It is all those who see our world is in a critical place and want, with all our mind and heart and spirit, to see it go right. We come, all of us, to a place like this, come to a time of crisis, of decision, of action … and it is difficult to imagine a more exhilarating and excruciating place to be.The witness of the scriptures today is that it is precisely here, in such a moment, where we might just have our most intimate encounter with God.**The story we are offered in today’s reading from the Hebrew scriptures assigned for this day, of Elijah and Elisha at the river Jordan, is a curious one. It contains one of those scenes – a chariot of fire and horses of fire, a bodily ascension into heaven—that the scholars call apocalyptic and the rest of us just think of as colorful and dramatic and then don’t really know what to do with it.But I like to give myself a little more fully to this story and take it, for at least a moment, at face value, and imagine myself there as Elisha—the up-and-coming prophet who having seen the dangerous and exciting world now watches as Elijah his mentor, his protector, his inspiration is being taken from him, joyfully glorified but now also terrifyingly absent.For his part, Elijah seems a little beleaguered in this story. We might paraphrase Elijah’s quotes in this story as:“Stay here, leave me alone” (2 Kings 2:2);then “I mean it, dude, get off me” (v. 6);then “For God’s sake man, what do you want? What’s it going to take for you to be satisfied?”;and finally, after Elisha has asked for a “double share of Elijah’s spirit” (whatever that means), Elijah says, basically, “Fine. Whatever. Watch this” (v. 10).And up he goes.It’s hard to blame Elijah for being cranky—he’s old. He’s been through a lot. He’s been in the trenches. He’s known what it’s like to cry out for justice and not get much in the way of results. He’s seen people suffer. He’s offered tiny acts of relief and healing set against a backdrop of official indifference. He has scored symbolic victories while most of those who sought a new way of life have continued to struggle. Maybe some of us here have some sympathy for Elijah….But in the end I have to admit some real sympathy for Elisha, too. You develop a certain comfort with what you know. When Elisha asks to stay with Elijah, asks for Elijah’s spirit to stay in even greater measure with him, Elisha is saying he wants the comfort of the known, the security of these friends, this support group, this relatively stable equilibrium that in truth was never supposed to be permanent, rather than the uncertainty—all the hard work that would go with having the rights and responsibilities of a change-filled future.There, at that moment, when Elijah is gone, when Elisha stares into space, when the future becomes the present—then, there, is the scariest, most significant moment of all. God is powerfully present in that moment, and it culminates not with the old making a dramatic exit, but with the new quietly getting to work.For, sisters and brothers, what we see in Elisha, picking up the mantle, is that our deepest, truest spiritual experience—our closest soiree with God—is when we pass from one place to another. When we take a deep breath, expand our expectations or swallow our pride, even when we yell out for God in frustration or abandonment, strike the water and go across and do the next thing. And God goes with us.**One of the people you saw in all the video clips celebrating this week on the Supreme Court steps was David Boies. He, of course, was one of the attorneys arguing against California’s Prop 8—he did that together with Ted Olson, his opponent in the Bush v. Gore case of 2000. In deciding that the lower court decision would stand, the court ensured that same-gender couples in California—including Boies and Olson’s clients—would now be free to marry. And on Friday evening, they did.[3]But just over a month ago, David Boies, stood in here—stood at that lectern in fact—at our Covenant Network regional conference and spoke about the situation that LGBTQ people are facing in America.[4] And he spoke of it not just in legal terms–but in terms of his deeply held, Christian—in fact, Presbyterian—faith. He said that the way states and the federal government withhold marriage rights and benefits from gay and lesbian people is “the last official bastion of discrimination in this country … where the government discriminates against its own citizens.” He predicted, correctly, the outcome of the cases we heard about this week, even as he bemoaned that it had taken this long. And he said state-sanctioned discrimination was a disgrace to both the law and to our Savior. For those with ears to hear there were also words of challenge not just to the nation, but to our denomination and others who continue to wrestle with how we practice marriage in our own walls, telling us that when it comes to providing full rights for all, religion ideally would lead, but necessarily must follow. When society does get ahead of the church, when it recognizes better than we do ourselves that the gospel is for all people, something has gone wrong.And so we do pause to celebrate this week. We celebrate that DOMA is dead. We celebrate that in 13 states and the District of Columbia our brothers and sisters, our parents and children, our dear friends can marry and our nation will treat them as who they really are. We give thanks to God that we can, in fact, dance in the streets and say that we are proud.But would it not be a mistake this day to let our celebration morph into self-satisfaction? Is there a danger of seeing rejoicing turn to restfulness? Might we run the risk of standing too long there at the bank of the Jordan, admiring the flaming horses and the fabulous chariot … and never pick up the mantle?For let us not forget…Thirteen states with legal marriage means 37 states do not have it. Some have been near misses, like Illinois or New Jersey. Others like Missouri or Kansas or Idaho seem a long, long way away. And while in the church, in our own denomination, LGBT people are permitted to be ordained now, in many parts of the country that seems unlikely to happen. And of course, Presbyterian ministers who officiate same-sex weddings still do so risking the discipline of the church. If we are to win hearts and minds—and sometimes votes—in order to see our whole nation and church reflect God’s love and justice for all people, we still have much work to do.And beyond LGBT issues, we all know the nation has not yet found ways to include all God’s children fully in our common life. There were many of us who had a hard time fully celebrating the Supreme Court’s work this week given the decision the day before that gutted the Voting Rights Act. We who say we are committed to justice and inclusion must recommit ourselves to making sure all of God’s children—all races and ethnicities—are protected and empowered at the voting booth and in other ways too. We can not see the crush of poverty, the uneven application of criminal justice, the appalling disparities in education and employment among races in this country and just go on in celebration. One-hundred-fifty years ago this story of Elijah and Elisha inspired slaves to sing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, comin’ for’ to carry me home.”[5] So may it inspire us, too, to “look over Jordan” and long for, to work for, that same vehicle of deliverance, that their successors in injustice may one day truly come to an assurance of freedom and peace, and that the day may come soon.You see, the dividing line—the Jordan River we all must cross—is not running on this Pride Sunday between LGBTQ on one side and straight on the other. Or between one group with problems and another. And it certainly isn’t between sinner and saint, for all would surely be on the same bank of the river then. The crossing over we are called to do—all of us—is from in here together to out there 
together. The Jordan of our lives is the threshold that so persistently separates us from Fifth Avenue and from the world. It is a line of demarcation between celebration and action, between faithful gratitude and trusting obedience. We carry with us all that happens in here, but then we cross over into the out there.The work we will do this afternoon, those who offer water to the strangers who pass by our door, is important. It is work of significance, bearing witness to a love and generosity that is much, much greater than our own. It is a symbol, and symbols matter.But this week, of all weeks, let us live lives that are more than symbolic. Let us claim the powerful presence of the God who appears at the most auspicious moment. Let us pick up the mantle with great hope but also great determination. Let us strike the water, our proud celebrations dampened neither by fear of the unknown nor by reckless ignorance about what is before us. And let us cross over. And God will go with us.May it be so. Amen.Brian Ellison is executive director of the Covenant Network of Presbyterians.
