I am the trash man. In our home I’m the one who most frequently empties all the trash cans and carries it all out to the big trash can beside the house. At our old house the trash can sat hidden in a row of althea shrubs, what is sometimes called Rose of Sharon. In the summer time they are covered with beautiful blooms.
Once when I put the garbage in the can my nose went right up into one of those flowers, and I got nice and cozy with a large bumble bee sharing the same space.
But the bee didn’t even notice. I went all cross eyed as I watched him. He was digging into that bloom with a vengeance, like a dog trying to get under a fence.
And that bee was covered with pollen. Not just a good dusting, but thick cakes of yellow gold clung to every part of its body.
That bee was plumbing the depths of what God had made it to be, and a thick mantle of praise had been laid across its shoulders, heavy with thanksgiving.
The prophet Elisha is the same sort of beast. He refused to let his mentor and master, Elija, get away, to be taken up by God. He was not going to let them be separated quietly, even by God, or perhaps especially by God.
Elisha plumbed the depths of creation to see God, and in his master Elija he found the great deep of God’s presence. Elisha wasn’t going to let that intimate connection, that great treasure be taken away without a fight!
When his master asked what would be an appropriate farewell present Elisha answered back obstinately “I want twice as much spirit as you!” “I want the depths of God to go twice as deep in me as they have in you!”
Finally it took a flaming chariot, pulled by flaming horses to come between the two of them, to separate them, so Elija could finally be taken up.
Elisha cried out “Father, Father!”, as he saw him taken away…
He then picked up the fallen mantle of his master. It was thick with praise, heavy with thanksgiving. He slung it down on the river Jordan and the waters parted. Elisha then crossed to the other side, the mantle laid across his shoulders.
Over twenty years ago there was a wonderful movie called Chariots of Fire, taking its title from this story of Elisha. In the movie a Scotch Presbyterian minister competes in the Olympics as a runner.
In one of the scenes he argues with his sister who doesn’t want him to go, she wants him to go to China as a missionary. He tells her he will go to China after the Olympics, because God not only made him a minister, God made him fast, and when he runs he feels God’s pleasure. “I feel God’s pleasure.”
He was plumbing the depths of God’s pleasure and he found that to do so he had to go against the tide, the tide of his sister’s expectations, and later the tide of the Olympic committee when he refused to compete on the Sabbath day…
This mantle is not the mantle of an easy spirituality. God’s pleasure, God’s praise, God’s thanksgiving does not fit into any schedule or list of priorities or values. That mantle covers us where ever or whenever we are.
The disciples show the other side of this mantle. Elisha could split the waters of the River Jordan, but the disciples could not even row across a lake at their masters request. They could not cross to the other side, they could not plum the depths of glory because the usual wind of how things should be was too strong. They could not leave the tide of expectation behind.
They could take out the garbage, but they couldn’t see the bumble bee on their nose singing God’s praise.
They failed. And on top of that when divine help appeared, was revealed to them all they could do was scream in terror.
Mark is telling us something very important.
Our vocation as followers of Jesus is to cross over the usual expectations of life and to plum the depths of God’s Praise and Thanksgiving. Not only that but we are also called to be spectacular failures, and it is precisely in that failure that God is revealed, and Jesus meets us.
Jesus will rescue the impossible project of crossing over the world’s expectations. The project of opting to be mantled with praise and thanksgiving in a world that at best only wants to package God up and put him up for sale with all the other lifestyles available for our consumption.