Sermon: “Pass the Torch”

Both of today’s scripture passages remind us of how hard it can be to say good-bye to a great mentor or friend.  When everything is going well, we long for things to stay the same forever.  We kind of want to put a picture frame around our lives and hold time still at one perfect moment.  Even so, it may seems to us kind of clueless of Peter – that he would want to build permanent dwellings for these visions of Moses and Elijah that he encounters with Jesus on that Transfiguration mountaintop.  And there’s something almost comical about poor Elisha following his master Elijah all around Israel here like a little lost puppy, from Gilgal to Bethel to Jericho to the Jordan.  Each of the 3 times Elijah gives him the order to “stay,” Elisha has the same reply (2 Kings 2:2): “As the Lord lives, and as you yourself live, I will not leave you.”

But before we judge either Peter or Elisha too harshly, we need to walk a few miles in their sandals.  We need to think about how much we ourselves have loved our own mentors, those people who have taught us so much about life, and about our faith.  We need to remember how hard it can be to accept the torch when those leaders who went before us try to pass it on.  Especially when those we follow are really amazing, it’s easy to feel inadequate to carry that weight ourselves.

On this weekend’s Silver Lake Family Retreat, we began our morning devotionals by reading the beginning of the 1st chapter of The Gospel of Mark.  We started with John the Baptist calling and teaching Jesus (and sharing with his followers the ancient teachings of the great prophet Isaiah).  We moved through Jesus picking up John’s ministry after his arrest, preaching the Good News of God’s reign of love.  And we ended with Jesus calling and teaching the disciples to call and teach others by being “fishers of men.”  Then, in prayer, we gave thanks for what we had been taught by our best mentors.

Some of us remembered great workplace mentors – the people we might first think about when we hear the word “mentor” – those who teach on-the-job skills like how to make or fix something, how to adapt to changing business conditions, or how to manage and motivate people.  We expressed gratitude for our earliest mentors too:  for those great teachers and coaches, especially those who taught us subjects we most loved, and most importantly, who taught us how to learn and grow and improve and not give up when things get hard.  We thanked God for those ordinary people we have known who’ve offered us good advice like how important it is to be honest, to take pride in our work, to admit when we’re wrong, and to put back what we borrow.

We could look back and appreciate how much parents and friends and fellow church members had taught us about how to be good and loving and kind (like Jesus) – things like how to help set the table and offer hospitality or how to write little notes to people who might need cheering up or a thank-you.  We felt so blessed to have had mothers and grandmothers who could teach us everything from how to braid our hair and knit and quilt and crochet to how to do our math homework, and who would remind us to live each day of our lives to the fullest.  We were thankful for fathers who taught us things like lacrosse or gardening, how to help care for the baby, and how to wrap a really pretty Christmas present. 

We remembered how much we’d learned from just observing our parents about how to be good parents, and sometimes even better grandparents.  Often it is parents who teach what’s most important in life – things like spending quality time with family and worshipping God by going to church.  And sometimes, as Jesus said, our very BEST mentors, leading the way into the Kingdom of Heaven, are our children.  We thanked God for sending us children, who show us how to look at the world with fresh eyes, how to be brave in trying new things, and most of all, for teaching us patience – by frequently testing it!  They teach us the love of Christ by the grace they shower upon us.

So as you remember your own best teachers, can you also remember how it felt when you first thought of facing the world without them?  It’s not only hard to say good-bye, when they’re really great at what they do – as certainly both Elijah and Jesus were – it’s hard to imagine ourselves ever filling their shoes.

I will never forget the first Thanksgiving dinner I tried to cook – and host for our friends in California – the fall after John and I got married.  As any good hostess will tell you, there’s a lot more to pulling off a successful dinner party than just following the recipe directions on a piece of paper.  I can remember tearfully calling my mother on the phone when the gravy refused to thicken:  “How do you know it’s done?” I asked her.  And she laughed out loud and said, “Oh honey, I don’t know.  You just keep stirring until it thickens.  I always know mine’s done when it boils all over the back burner and starts to burn.”  Anyone else follow that gravy recipe?  Apparently, it’s been passed down in my family for generations. 

It was on Thanksgiving exactly 8 years after that, when I was expecting my daughter Lela, that I experienced the panic I can only imagine Peter felt when he heard Jesus predict his crucifixion and what Elisha must have felt when he heard Elijah was leaving him.  My mother was visiting my house in California for Thanksgiving when she wandered into the kitchen to try to help.  I was so worried because my mom was an absolutely expert homemaker – the recognized matriarch of our whole extended family (for all the cousins from Maryland to Florida) who had hosted every holiday at our house for 40 years.  But what happened next made me feel like the floor of my universe was falling away.  “I don’t know how you can do all this,” she said to me, “because I’ve never cooked a Thanksgiving dinner myself.”

I thought it was a joke at first, but after I stood and stared at her for more than a minute, I realized there was nothing there but real confusion.  I showed her my turkey and gravy recipe – the one she had hand-written out for me and put in the mail before the first Thanksgiving of my married life – and she said, “Where did you get this?  Who wrote this? Was it my mother?”  That was the day I sat down with my dad and said we could no longer deny that she was sick.  She called me herself with the official Alzheimer’s diagnosis not long after that. There was one new medication that might help, but there was really nothing more the doctors could do.  She was going to be leaving us.  She was going to start fading away, disappearing right before our eyes.

Over the next 8 years of her illness, what came as the biggest surprise to me was that I was not the only one who grieved.  Our church, too, couldn’t believe what was happening.  It turns out no one could imagine life without my mom, the “tea lady” who made the sweet Southern iced tea for every church supper, who volunteered for everything from the church nursery to Headstart to Mobile Meals, who organized all her circle luncheons, and who welcomed every single visitor who walked through the church doors as if they were a long-lost member of her family.  And, the thing was, she was the opposite of me – she was shy and ladylike.  She never spoke in public or chaired any church committee, but she was a mentor to more people than we could count.  She was a kind of “house mother” to my dad’s young adult Sunday School class, for example. 

And before anyone had heard of “open and affirming,” my mother was almost militant in her determination to extend warm hospitality to visitors she suspected might wonder if they were truly welcome.  At her funeral, it was standing room only – more than 400 people – and so many of them were new members of the church, people I’d never met.  One after another, all the gay and lesbian folk, all the people of color, and (you’ll love this!) every transplanted New England Yankee – one after another, this parade of strangers came up to tell me how she had been the face of Christ for them when they first walked through the doors of that church. 

Our new, proposed church vision statement – “Make Jesus Your Mentor:  Pray, Share, Welcome” – speaks to our need for mentors who can share with us what it means to embody Christ in our lives.  We pray that Jesus will be our mentor and, over time, will shape and change us into our very best selves.  We hope that the Holy Spirit will shine through us so that the world may see in us, as Paul wrote in 2nd Corinthians, “the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” 

It’s our turn now, as this generation of stewards of Christ’s church, to carry the light of the Holy Spirit forward with hope.  This is our call – to give of our time, talents and treasure in order to hold high the flame of faith for the world to see.  We do that with joy, because (as Paul says) we place our confidence not in our own strength but in God’s.  Paul writes, “For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake.” I see the light of Christ each day in your faces, and that gives me hope for the future.  And for that I give God thanks and praise.  Amen.