Staying Still and Moving On

2 Kings 2: 1-15

Psalm 23

Acts 1: 1-11

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Sometimes when a transition comes along in our life, we are tempted to hang on to things the way they are, and to wish for them to somehow be able to go back to when we loved the arrangement we were in -  we loved the way things were, the people who were in our lives; we loved the fact that our children were young; we loved the fact that our friends were close by so we could hang out with them. 

We loved the life that we had.  And even if it has moved on, often we try to stand still back in that one wonderful place, wishing that we could look around and see things as they were. 

We search for signs of that perfect time.

We search for signs of our own wholeness, the wholeness that we perceived was ours during that time.

 And this is what is happening with Elijah and Elisha, to a certain degree, in our Old Testament story today.   Elisha realizes that his mentor is going to leave him, is going to die.  Elijah is going to pass over the waters of Jordan. And Elisha doesn’t want to hasten that time; he doesn’t want to talk about it with people around him.  He certainly doesn’t want to talk about it to Elijah. 

But he journeys with him, and when the time comes, and Elijah asks him what he wants, and Elisha is told how he will receive this double blessing that he seeks,  he keeps his  eye focused on Elijah. He stays focused and centered on what matters most, but at the same time a transition is happening all around him.  The fiery chariot swings low and carries off Elijah in a blaze of glory and Elisha is left there standing on his own. 

And he can’t just stay there, he has to take the mantle and he has to use it to go and do the work that he has now been appointed to do. He has to move on. And so as much as he loved his former relationship with Elijah, and the mentoring and the teaching and the joy of that friendship, he has to go forward, and so he does.

In the Acts of the Apostles, the very beginning of it starts with the disciples in much the same situation as Elisha.  Christ has died, Christ has risen and Christ is with them for forty days.  And they can scarcely believe their joy.  They had been ready to just go back to their fishing lives after Jesus was crucified, and then Christ was with them again and all things were new.  And they had no idea where this was going to go, and then suddenly they understand from Jesus that going forward means going on without him.

And before they know it, he is raised from their sight.

And they continue to look up into the clouds for a sign of him, remembering the experience of seeing him go, remembering the feeling of him being there and just wishing  they could have back the time that was, just a moment before.

How very much we would love to stay in that place.  

We said together the words of Psalm 23.

We proclaimed that the Lord is our shepherd, that we have all that we need from God. 

And the sensation we get from the first verses of that beautiful poetic psalm is that we can lie down and be comfortable right where God leads us.

We have green pastures in which we are fed.
We have still waters from which we can drink.

(because after all, we are sheep!)

Our soul is restored. We are kept alive by God. God brings us back, causes us to repent.

But if we think about shepherds – they are always moving the sheep from place to place.  They come to a meadow and the grass is eaten by the hungry sheep, and they will have to move on to a new pasture. The predators will come and so they need to move on for safety. 

They are always on the move, so even though on a day to day basis they are provided with still waters and green pastures for their food and for their drink and for the sustenance of their lives, they keep moving. 

And The Lord goes with them, leads them, journeys along with them with both the rod and the staff for their security. 

And they walk through dark valleys, they don’t just walk through green pastures and still waters. 

We don’t either.  We walk through dark valleys until we come out the other side. We face many unknowns in our journey. But God is with us alwaysand God is always preparing the table that we need, always inviting us to join our neighbors and our enemies at the table. 

But not for us to just stay still. 

Two of my very closest friends have just moved out of state.

I have spent time at regular intervals with each one of them; for over 10 years with the one and for over 20 years with the other.  We would get together and talk about all manner of things; we would help each other celebrate the joys and walk through the dark valleys of our lives.  They have both been mentors for me; they have been thinking partners with me; they have journeyed with me through my corporate career; through my time in church and seminary; through the personal crises in my life; and I have journeyed with them through theirs as well.  

We have been good friends. 

And I’ve known for a few months that they were both leaving within a month of each other, and I have grieved greatly over these last few months in anticipation of their leaving. 

The idea of being left behind.  With them being gone and me being here, staying in place and knowing I can’t follow them.  Their lives take them in new directions. 

But I knew how much I was going to miss them, and I do miss them already. 

But even as they left, our relationships took on new shapes and forms.

My one friend is already back in Ann Arbor doing consulting work, driving back into town for a few days at a time, and we met for breakfast this week, just like we always did.

My other friend is living near Tulsa, Oklahoma, and as it happened I had to travel there this week for my cousin’s funeral, and so he picked me up at the airport and showed me around Tulsa and had dinner with me and we caught up with each other. 

When my one friend drove away from the restaurant the last time we had breakfast together as An Arbor locals, and as my other friend drove out of town in his rented moving truck last Friday, it had felt to me like they were gone forever.

I felt like Elisha or the apostles may have felt, each of us watching someone beloved to us leave, until we couldn’t see them anymore.

But I realized this week that it wasn’t true that I would never see them again, but that instead, somehow or other, our friendship would move on in a new way.

It’s the same way with our children as they grow and get on with their lives, isn’t it?

My children are grown and out of the house now, still establishing their life’s directions, I don’t know for sure where they will land or what lies ahead. And our relationship with each other changes as we move on together. We had a time of staying “still”, so to speak, living as family in the same place, and now we are moving on to new ways of experiencing each other.

As a church you are moving forward too.

Many things have changed over the past years, and many of you wish at various times and for various reasons that things would just stay the same. 

Certainly the people from Peace have gone through a grieving process as they have left behind the church building that they loved and that they grew up in, even as they have come to discover and appreciate the good aspects of coming into the merger. 

And the people from PC Utica have given up aspects of how they used to be, as they have moved into life as a merged church, a new church.

The people who gave birth to the second service have grieved as we set that aside this year, even as many of us have welcomed the coming together of the congregation in worship.

I think everybody struggles with the notion that this is now a new church.

And what does that mean for this church? 

It’s challenging to look at everything we do, and to say “how does this fit today?”; “what will we do this year and next year?”; “what will we keep doing because we’ve always done it?”; and “where do we need to make space for new things?”

In the New Beginnings process,they talk about the life cycle of a church having an incline and then a decline and at the very middle point they call it “the risk of recline.”

Because the temptation is there that since things have been going so well , if we can just stay where we are and hold everything in place just the way we’re doing it right now, then all will be well. 

We say to ourselves, “this is where we like it, this is what we want for the future. 

But the reality is if we try to stay in that spot, comfortably leaning back in our recliners, we are going to slide down into decline. 

And so all we can do is to begin to live into the changes that are happening around us, to accept them with grace and courage,  so that we can be part of Christ’s work in continually recreating and reforming the church, recreating its missions,  recreating its responses to the needs of the world,  participating in what Christ is doing in the community and in the world to make all things new. 

So, just like the apostles, just like Elisha, we love where we have been.  We miss what we had.  We stay still for a time, to remember, to be refreshed, … and then we move on.

My friend who moved to Tulsa wrote a reflection after he arrived, about letting go and moving on. He compared it to that piece of playground equipment that looks like a kind of horizontal overhead ladder – a set of bars where you jump up and grab the first one, then get your body swinging until you can let go with one hand and grab hold of the next rung, then let the other hand go and grab onto the rung ahead, and so on, and so on. That rhythm of letting go and moving forward does not allow you to stay put at any point.

If you are going to grab the next thing you must let go of the former things.

As sheep we will come to a place of pasture, where we can regain our strength through physical and spiritual nourishment, but we can be sure the Good Shepherd will be getting us back up before long and moving us forward, moving us on.

As we walk through our life’s journey, following the Way that is the Truth and the Life, let us keep from stalling, trusting in Christ to be the One by whom we are ultimately and completely grasped, and held onto forever more.